Ars Metallica - Smithing Enhancement

The crafting system is one of Skyrim's better features, but for thieves and archers, there's not much use for the system. Light armor is dead easy to come by in already finished forms, but arrows can sometimes be scarce in the types you may want. Lockpicks have been known to be somewhat scarce too, yet are relatively basic to construct.

Ars Metallica aims to fill in some of the basic issues I had with the crafting system by doing the following:

• Allow archers to forge their own arrows out of the various ore materials, wood, and feathers. Indirectly making it somewhat useful to chop wood too.
  
• Allow thieves to make their own lockpicks out of iron or steel.
  
• Provide skill advancement for the use of the smelter to melt down ore. After all, that's as important as knowing how to shape it once refined.
  
• Provide skill advancement for the use of the tanning rack to make leather. That's far more important in my mind than the skill advances from using the leather to make stuff.
  
• Provide for a small amount of skill advancement from mining the ore itself out of ore veins.
  
• Provide the ability to melt down existing pieces of armor and some clutter items into ingots so that you can then use those ingots to make missing pieces of a set if you want.
  
• Allow members of factions to forge equipment appropriate to their guild. Thieves can make guild armor. Assassins can make Brotherhood armor. Legionnaires can make Imperial armor, and so on.

Downloads

http://skyrim.nexusmods.com/downloads/file.php?id=16084
http://tesalliance.org/forums/index.php?/files/file/1217-ars-metallica-smithing-enhancement/
http://www.tesvskyrim.com/skyrim-content-19-ars-metallica--smithing-enhancement
http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=39916590

Installation Requirements

Official Skyrim patch 1.5.26 or greater.

Installation - Wrye Bash BAIN

Drop the archive into your Skyrim Mods\Bash Installers folder, then install as usual.
Make sure the mod is active in the Wrye Bash mods tab.

Installation - Steam Workshop

Subscribe to the mod via the Workshop page, then use the Skyrim launcher to allow it to download and install.
Make sure it's active in the Data Files menu.

Installation - Nexus Mod Manager

Use the "Download with Manager" button on the Ars Metallica page at Skyrim Nexus. The installer should take care of things from there.
Then simply make sure NMM has the mod activated.

Installation - Manual

Drop the Ars Metallica.esp and Ars Metallica.bsa files into your Data folder.
Activate the mod using whatever management tool suits you.

Uninstall

Remove the files from the Data folder. Steam users need to be sure they unsubscribe first.

Known Issues

Silver swords and greatswords can be forged but they show up under the MISC category in the UI. This appears to be hardcoded behavior that can't be changed.

Compatibility

Any mod which alters the base smelter object or the base tanning rack object is incompatible.

Any mod which alters the recipes for the vanilla ingot formulas will be incompatible.

Any mod adding items to chickens, or altering pheasants, will be incompatible without Wrye Bash.

Sounds very good, thanks!

I thought the chickens thing was a joke, but i assume that's for feathers?
I take it this doesn't affect perks? just recipes/skill exp.

Hey Arthmoor, looks like you've made another nice mod

A few ideas/suggestions:

1.) Is it possible to construct Ebony or dragon bone lockpicks? Imagine a stronger lockpick item which basically gives you a fortify lockpicking effect when you use these expensive to forge but more durable lockpicks. The fortify would simply simulate a lockpick which doesn't break so easily.
2.) I wonder if you could modify some animals to leave a hide that should. Like goats should always leave a hide but they only do occasionally. Seems like there are others too that don't leave hides but I can't remember. Horkers, mammoths, etc.
3.) How about a constructable torch made from firewood and those old linens you find in dungeons?

I like these features a lot. I'm planning to play a new thief/archer and it sounds like these changes might be right up that character's alley.

I didn't see it mentioned here, but did you alter the rate at which Smithing levels? Now I can't speak for anyone else, but I felt that Smithing leveled way too fast in vanilla. And since you're adding new ways to level Smithing I'm guessing it would probably be a good idea for me to combine your mod with a mod that slows it down a bit.

At any rate, congratulations on your new mod!

Thanks, Arth!

Sounds great. I love, love the idea of being able to melt existing armor down. However, I'm using Complete Crafting Overhaul so I'm guessing these will conflict?

So this will be incompatible with these mods?

http://skyrim.nexusmods.com/downloads/file.php?id=13116

http://skyrim.nexusmods.com/downloads/file.php?id=1020

Cool. I'm going to be giving this a shot shortly. One thing that drives me nuts from the vanilla game is how easy it is to cheese smithing - just spamming Iron Daggers/Leather stuff gets you skill ups like crazy. Do you have any plans to address those kind of issues in this mod?

Yep, they're one source of feathers. Hopefully you won't always need to kill a bunch of chickens either since the feathers have been tagged as vendor items too.

Correct. Doesn't affect perks, just recipes and making the smelter and tanning rack contribute to smithing skill.

Not sure if that's even possible, but not a bad idea.

I'm pretty sure I've always seen goat hide on dead goats, deer hides on dead deer etc. Not sure about mammoths. Either way thought that's beyond what I want to do with this mod anyway. The chicken and pheasant feathers were out of necessity since the other sources are so much harder to come by.

Certainly doable.

Patch 1.5 slows things down quite a bit on its own, which was part of the motivating factor behind opening up the smelter and tanning racks to contribute to skill. If it ends up too fast, yes, you'll want to use something alongside to slow down the advancement rate. Elys' Uncapper offers ways to adjust that, among other things.

If those make changes to the requirements for what you can make a vanilla ingot out of, yes. They don't mention touching the smelters and tanning racks so I don't know about that part.

Nope, no plans. Patch 1.5 took care of the cheese factor and annoyed me to no end when my orc couldn't advance the skill the way everyone kept saying was possible.

I don't think adding the smelters and tanning racks to the skill is particularly unbalancing the way things are now. It's still not possible to spam advance from 0 to 60 with iron stuff, which is what I understood people were doing.

Didn't patch 1.5 do away with that?

EDIT: Ninja'd

Shows how much I pay attention. Thanks for the clarification. Great mod as always, Arthmoor.

Sounds really good Arthmoor, I'll DL it later and give it a spin. Been really wanting a mod that allows me to break things back down. I know there was that other mod "Meltdown" or something, but i heard there were some bad bugs with it.

Any chance of being able to salvage some of the leather or leather strips that went into items?

Swinging back this way a sec.

I previously commented that torches were doable. That was before I actually tried. They're not doable. Light sources don't show up on the smithing menu at all. They don't have keyword slots either so there's no way to force the issue.

Leather and furs are one-way consumables. They're not subject to saluaging. Besides, the game doesn't allow for multiple products of a single smithing operation. So you'd end up having to give up the ingot to get at the leathers instead, and that would mean having to create a whole new set of recipes to allow it. So I think it's probably going to have to be good enough that you get back some ingots from salvage jobs.

What about crafting a scripted misc item that automatically replaces itself with a real torch in the container/actor it's added to?

Not sure if helpful, but Chesko's Frostfall has torches craftable, sort of. You get a power with "survival skills" that brings up a menu with items to craft such as torches, tents etc. Considering the fact that it's actually crafted, but not via the smithing menu obviously, I suppose there might be a possible way. Could always check in with him atleast and see how he did it.

See, this is why this community is so great. A couple of approaches to the problem presented, and some fresh caffeine in me, and there you go

Auto-swapping a fake torch item for the real thing should do the job nicely.

So I see you found some cool modding projects to work on while Bethesda takes their sweet time with the Navmesh bug.

Great mod, Arthmoor! I especially like being able to recycle found armor and junk that I would otherwise get a few gold pieces if sold to vendors. Are you going to make it possible to retrieve Daedra hearts from Daedric armor? I saw that on another mod and thought it was odd and unrealistic to say the least. Seems like the heart would be irretrievably destroyed by the process of forging the armor. Of course we are talking realism in a fantasy game here.

I also like being able to craft specific types of arrows, although I get tons of steel and Ancient nordic trash arrows just from looting "All" from time to time. It would be a nice option to be able to smelt arrow(head)s down to get an ingot for every, I dunno, say 20 arrows or so or whatever the quantity is that you use for crafting them.

You already can smelt arrows down to get ingots back from the arrowheads. Smelting metal requires whichever metal perk you'd need to forge those items with.

Yep, that's how I solved it. However, I also had to duplicate the base torch .NIF and rename it, and point the fake miscellaneous item at this new mesh. Otherwise, when the script added the torch to the player's inventory, it would result in http://www.gamesas.com/topic/1362075-gamegetplayeradditemtorch01-causes-erratic-behavior-solved/page__fromsearch__1.

Mod looks great, maybe one of these days I'll actually have time to play the game and try it! Tracking it on Nexus for now.

Huh. Odd. I'm not having those problems. But I think I'll er on the side of caution and do the mesh rename on the fake torches anyway since that model does still show up in the crafting menu.

FWIW, this is the script I have attached to the fakes:

Scriptname ARTH_ES_FakeTorchScript extends ObjectReference  {Looks stupid, yes? Smithing can't do light sources. So a hackish workaround was necessary.}Light Property Torch01  Auto  MiscObject Property FakeTorch AutoEvent OnContainerChanged( ObjectReference akNewContainer, ObjectReference akOldContainer )    Utility.Wait(0.25)    Game.GetPlayer().RemoveItem( FakeTorch, 10, absilent = true )    Game.GetPlayer().AddItem( Torch01, 10, absilent = true )EndEvent

Since I add them in batches of 10, this works flawlessly.

Yep, that'll do it.

Version 1.0.1

* Added ingredient and animal part keywords to the chicken and pheasant feathers to hopefully make them easier to acquire.
* Added recipe for making Companion Wolf Armor. Requires the Advanced Armors perk.
* Added recipe for making Thieves Guildmaster Armor. Requires improved versions of the regular Thieves Guild Armor and the Advanced Armors perk.
* Added keywords to the two new feather types to get them to show up in more shops as items for sale.
* Added a recipe to make torches out of firewood and linen wraps.

Really great idea!

How about jewelry meltdown for their gems? A couple of those smelting mods had that feature. Would be helpful for early game pickpocketing/thievery when you can't fence stolen goods. Didn't see anything about this, so I apologize if it has been done/dismissed!