IHarvest

Chasing butterflies, diving into rivers, peering through leaves, poring over every tree stump and inch of cave wall, finding the fungi among us... there are some things I look forward to starting a new game on, but carefully grinding alchemical ingredients is definitely not one of them. no longer!

Chasing butterflies, diving into rivers, peering through leaves, poring over every tree stump and inch of cave wall, finding the fungi among us... there are some things I look forward to starting a new game, but meticulously grinding alchemical ingredients is definitely not one of them.

I looked at existing solutions to this problem and I found that none of them were satisfactory on a functional or technical level. It's been a few years since I last decided to turn on Good Angel, and I've gathered hundreds of hours of FO4 experience since then, so I'll put some of that experience into creating a better Magic Harvest model.

For this purpose - 1500 papyri and many hours later spent on CK - I present IHarvest.

• Usage -

This mod adds a spell "harvest".

In order to get this spell, you must find a spellbook. I hand-placed around 20 of these places around Skyrim and Solstheim, where alchemists live (especially living, past tense), witches or hagarvin dwellings, etc. You shouldn't have too much trouble finding a copy.

To use this spell, obviously, just cast it. It scans its surroundings to see what's available to harvest, then emits some magical getters to fetch items for you. You don't really need to know anything else, or read the rest of the description other than what you want - this mod is designed to "just work™".

Still watching? The rest is tl;dr, but more power to you.

As your Alchemy and Alteration skills level up, the range and "flash" rate of your spells will increase, and dual-casting a spell will further increase range and "flash" rate. I don't recommend casting the hands separately as the engine treats it as a single cast for some reason, but you can do that if you want.

The mod will automatically collect TREE and FLOR records for any production ingredients, as well as loose ingredients, as well as most script activators for production ingredients.

The mod will never be stolen, meaning it will ignore any object marked as "owned" even if the ingredients are not considered stolen due to relationships. It won't search the container as that's not in the spirit of the mod.

The magic cost of this spell is very modest since I didn't want to limit its usage to mage characters.

You can adjust how much Alteration experiences spell bonuses in the mod's MCM menu. I think the default value is reasonable.

• How does this work -

There are a few other mods out there that do similar things, so you might be thinking "why is this better?" Well, if you're curious, here's a big technical info dump:

Spoiler: Show

Aside from the technical aspects, this mod also has Getter Critters, which I think are really cool to look at.

• compatibility -

You probably don't need to know this, but I've documented it here in case you want to know.

The mod is .esl because the .esl format works best for mods. If you want or need to, you can change the file extension to .esp and it will work, but I don't see any reason.

You don't have to worry about load order, where your load order is high (the .esls is loaded naturally anyway) it should be fine.

This applies to any mod that adds new harvestable ingredients. If you do find some mods that don't work, please leave a comment and I'll consider adding compatibility.

Technically, this spell isn't player-centered; or, in other words, if you had some way to get NPCs to cast the spell, it might be useful to them. I'm not sure how to do this, but if you want to experiment, then please be my guest.

• Vanilla Fix -

During the development of the mod, I discovered some base game issues that affected the functionality of my own mod. While I could leave these unchanged and add some special handling to fix them, …