Continuing Magic - Keep your spells going

Maintain your spells by sacrificing a portion of your maximum mana. Based on NineInchNall's Invested Magic, but with reduced script usage and some bug fixes.

One of the biggest complaints about Skyrim's magic system is that most spells don't last more than a minute or two. This makes using spells like Mage Armor or everything in the Conjuration school unnecessarily cumbersome. This mod solves this problem by making spells permanent - but using them reduces your maximum mana.

For example, you can permanently summon a Flame Atronach, but doing so will reduce your Magicka by 80 points. If you have the Apprentice Conjuration privilege, this fee is reduced to 40 points. If the atronach is killed in combat, or you dispel it yourself, your Magicka points will be returned to you.

This system works for almost all summoning spells (including Dawnguard and Dragonborn spells), with the exception of spells that are already permanent summons, such as Dead Thrall.

Other schools have spells like flips. So if you cast a spell like Candlelight, it will reduce your mana by 15 points (or 7 points for a newbie). It will remain active until you cast the spell again, which will remove it and return your magic points.

At this point, you're probably wondering: "Why would you do this when the investment magic already exists?" (If you're not familiar with NineInchNall's excellent mod, you can see the oldrim version here). I do this for several reasons.

• There is no SSE version available. A port by someone else has been posted on , but some important features have been removed, such as useless changes to the new magic system. It also introduced new bugs, such as some Conjuration spells that relied on the Alteration perk for some reason.

• While the original Invested Magic was a well-made mod, it did have a few bugs that significantly threw off my game balance as a heavy Magic user. Most notably, if your spell is dispelled in an unusual way, it may not return your magic correctly. For example, in some cases when a summon dies or is stolen by an enemy (a rare event), you may not be able to get your magic back. A more common mistake is that Mage Armor spells (Oakflesh, Ironflesh, etc.) will sometimes take more Magicka than you put into them. This bug left me with over 120 Magicka points after playing for about 20 hours.

Fixing these bugs requires that the script handling your Magicka investment be able to respond correctly to every situation that could cause your spell to be dispelled. I originally wanted to rewrite the script in Invested Magicka to do this, but that proved to be too difficult. Therefore, I used another method of handling Magicka investments that does not directly change your maximum Magicka. As a bonus, this method greatly reduces the script loading of this mod to the game. The trade-off is that it takes me a long time to complete each spell. I'll give a thorough technical description of the differences between these mods below.

Technical Note:

Spoiler: Show

I also made some adjustments to unrelated functionality of the original Invested Magicka mod. These changes are listed below.

• Invest Magic: "Stability increases stagger resistance [when mage armor spells are active] and prevents your magic armor spells from being cast when you run out of magic."

My mod only adds stagger resistance, because when you run out of magicka, the script can't remove already active spells (it will still prevent you from casting spells if you don't have magicka).

• Put in Magicka: "Summoner increases the number of creatures you can control."

My mod does not extend the casting range of Con Jiuration spells like Invested Magicka, so the original function of the Summoner perk (increased distance from which summons can be cast) is still useful. You can still use the Twin Souls perk to get more than one summon.

• Invest in Magicka: “Dark Souls actually does what it says it does. (Beth screwed this one up.)”

My mod also contains a fix. However, I co …