Arthmoor's Villages

Cyrodiil is a fairly expansive province, and is said to have a number of small villages and towns. Unfortunately what we actually got failed to live up to the descriptions. This is my collection of mods which aims to correct this problem by building several villages scattered throughout Cyrodiil in various pockets of unused space. Each one has its own unique set of inhabitants and its own special charm. Some have quests, others may not. Wherever possible, all of my villages mods will attempt to fit in with their surroundings and blend into the lore of the areas they're in. There's even some story elements which cross over between villages, though there are no direct quests that span more than one village. Hopefully there will be a little something for everyone to enjoy while filling in those empty roads of Cyrodiil with some life.

Current released villages: Faregyl Village, Vergayun, Feldscar, Molapi, and Frostcrag Village
Works in progress: Reedstand, Urasek, Sutch Village

Downloads for Faregyl Village: http://www.tesnexus.com/downloads/file.php?id=21562 http://tesalliance.org/forums/index.php?/files/file/50-faregyl-village/ http://planetelderscrolls.gamespy.com/View.php?view=OblivionMods.Detail&id=5229 http://www.confrerie-des-traducteurs.fr/site/mods/cyrodiil/villes_et_villages/faregyl.php
Downloads for Vergayun: http://www.tesnexus.com/downloads/file.php?id=26643 http://tesalliance.org/forums/index.php?/files/file/112-vergayun/ http://planetelderscrolls.gamespy.com/View.php?view=OblivionMods.Detail&id=5826 http://www.confrerie-des-traducteurs.fr/site/mods/cyrodiil/villes_et_villages/vergayun.php
Downloads for Feldscar: http://tesalliance.org/forums/index.php?/files/file/244-feldscar/ http://www.moddb.com/mods/feldscar/downloads/feldscar http://www.tesnexus.com/downloads/file.php?id=30000 http://www.confrerie-des-traducteurs.fr/oblivion/mods/cyrodiil/villes_et_villages/feldscar.php
Downloads for Molapi: http://www.tesnexus.com/downloads/file.php?id=33462 http://tesalliance.org/forums/index.php?/files/file/567-molapi/
Downloads for Frostcrag Village: http://www.tesnexus.com/downloads/file.php?id=37655 http://tesalliance.org/forums/index.php?/files/file/828-frostcrag-village/

Faregyl Village

Feeding the empire, one roast chicken... or pork chop... or rabbit steak at a time! Cyrodiil demands MEAT!

Ever notice how there's no real farming presence in Cyrodiil? Except for some really small isolated places, there's perhaps one major operation going on outside of Skingrad. And they make wine. Wine is great and all, but where do folks get the meat? I mean the good meat. Chicken, pork, rabbit. We have plenty of mutton, but, well, mutton can only go so far before it gets old. There's also a noticeable lack of traditional crops being grown anywhere on any kind of meaningful level. So I got bored while thinking about this and decided it was time to do something about it!

I searched high and low and found only a small number of farming mods. The usual. Sheep, sheep, sheep, and oh, more sheep. Wonderful. Got the mutton sources covered now. So I'm attempting to fill in some of the gaps. There were a number of other good farming mods but they all landed in locations that were less than ideal, at least for my game. The UL team has someone working on a grand implementation out by Anvil, so I figured on letting them take care of that. So why Faregyl? What's so special about this place? Nothing really. When I scouted for locations it wasn't used by anything I could find. So I figured it was as good a place as any to stick some small farming operations.

This mod adds a pig farm, chicken farm, rabbit farm, some traditional crops, and a local smithy to the Faregyl area. Instead of an isolated sleepy old inn, now there's a useful farming village to help sustain the population. Each farm is owned by an NPC who has a work schedule and a normal eat/sleep schedule. Don't try and mooch off the stuff though. Killing the livestock or stealing the crops is going to make someone angry if they catch you! There's also a local smithy who will repair gear and sell mundane supplies and equipment. He's got an ox to pull his cart, but the ox is mean. Don't mess with him. There's also two local legionaries who patrol the area to help keep the peace. And of course, the abandoned gold mine. Something the locals are reluctant to talk about....

Requires http://obse.silverlock.org/ or higher.
Has built-in support for Oblivion XP.

Vergayun

It's the small fishing village with the funny name!

As I was poking around in the CS, scouting locations for something to fill a hole, I took notice of a dock next to Fort Variela. I wondered if perhaps it was the footprint of something Bethesda simply left out. So I went looking for lore maps to see if anything at all was indicated there. One such map exists, and was marked with the word "Vergayun" right about where the dock is. As it turns out, an old discussion in the lore forum had taken notice of this before and concluded the name was actually added by an overzealous fan of Redguard when they extended the map for it to cover part of Cyrodiil. Well, lore correct or not, the name stuck.

Imagine my surprise when checking my load order also turned up nothing touching the two cells I wanted to use. With a name, and the site being clear, the fishing village of Vergayun is born. It consists of an inn, a farmhouse, 2 small houses on the shore, and a larger building which is being used as a warehouse. The dock area has also been cleaned up a bit to remove the broken junk that was laying around.

The inhabitants earn their living by fishing for slaughterfish, trapping mudcrabs, and harvesting clams. These are then turned into a delicious clam chowder, mudcrab stew, and slaughterfish surprise. Nobody is really sure exactly what the surprise is, and the innkeeper isn't talking!

Feldscar

A small Nordic village in the lower Jerall Mountains, north of the Frostcrag area. Black Rock Inn serves as the primary means of local support, while trade in hides and leather goods made in the local shop serve as their ties to the rest of Cyrodiil. They live a reasonably isolated life but welcome visitors from far away places. Some well known people have passed through on their way through the back country, as Feldscar is one of the few places to escape the biting cold of the mountains.

NOTE: In order to access some parts of this mod's content, you must disable your border regions. The best and most compatible way to do so is to open your Oblivion.ini file, usually found in My Documents\My Games\Oblivion, find the line in there called bBorderRegionsEnabled and change the value following it from a 1 to a 0. You may have already had to do this for another mod. It is strongly NOT recommended to use so-called border disabling ESP mods because they cause compatibility problems. Wrye Bash also has an ini tweaks menu which handles changing the correct value.

Molapi

Molapi is a small village built on the island just north of the city of Leyawiin. There you will find a small group of Argonians and Khajiit who are making the best of poor living conditions and oppression from the nearby city. Tensions are high, and there is an uneasy peace which is not being helped by the city watchman assigned to patrol the area.

The name Molapi was actually plucked from an unofficial map of the area that had been created by a community member, which listed the Niben River as the River Molapi - supposedly deriving from old Elsweyr maps. http://www.imperial-library.info/content/elsweyr-map-0: You'll have to enlarge the view to see it.

There is a quest included, which will only trigger some time after you've spoken to the village residents. Just visit once in awhile and it will start, unless the local city watch guard has been killed before the timer runs out. Be careful with your decisions during the quest - it has multiple outcomes and not all of them may be considered favorable to you.

Frostcrag Village

High in the Jerall Mountains lies the impressive Frostcrag Spire. A magical wonder which you have apparently inherited from a long lost relative. As you arrive to claim your inheritance, you soon discover that there is a small village at the foot of the Spire which your unknown benefactor has failed to mention at all.

Frostcrag Village is a small Nordic settlement that sits in the shadow of Frostcrag Spire and serves as the homes for those who became the Spire's caretakers. It is a fairly simple place, with a tavern and homes for the residents to live in. Yet despite its simplicity, there are things to do here, so talk to the folks. Especially the tavern keeper, who as usual has loose lips about any and all who live there.

Requires the official Frostcrag Spire DLC.
Requires http://obse.silverlock.org/ or higher.
Has built-in support for Oblivion XP.

Install Instructions

Each village mod is BAIN friendly, and therefore they all share common installation procedure. It is highly recommended that BAIN be used to manage the installation and removal of all of my village mods as I have a common resources pool that I draw from when creating them. Utilities such as OBMM are not capable of properly managing these kinds of overlaps. For this reason, OBMM is *NOT* recommended and I will not provide support for OMOD packaging with these mods.

BAIN installation is a simple matter of putting each mod into your "Bash Installers" folder, normally found in Bethesda Softworks\Oblivion Mods. Once there, just right click on each and select install. BAIN will manage the rest and keep track of any resource conflicts.

If you prefer manual installation, you can simply unpack each archive directly into your Data folder. I've taken steps to ensure resources used with these villages are stored in a logical folder structure, for example:

Data\Meshes\Arthmoor\Feldscar would contain all of the meshes for Feldscar. Similar structure exists in the Textures folder as well.

Do be aware that doing manual installs will likely prompt for overwrite permission, you should allow this, and you need to be double careful about removing any shared files that other mods might still need.

Compatibility Information

As many are aware, I make great effort to maintain compatibility with as many mods as possible, but issues will still come up from time to time. Some can be solved by load order, others cannot. All known issues will be listed here. If you know of something that hasn't been covered, please report it with as much detail as possible.

Faregyl, Vergayun, and Molapi must all load after New Roads & Bridges in order to maintain compatibility with that mod. As a bonus, NRB4 will also activate extra road signs for those mods which have them.

Faregyl requires a patch for compatibility with Elsweyr Anequina, which is available on Faregyl's download page.

Feldscar requires a patch for comatibility with UL:Snowdale. The patch is available here: http://www.tesnexus.com/downloads/file.php?id=13834

Vergayun is incompatible with the new Midland mod. Both villages occupy the same space. This will not be patched. You will need to choose one or the other.

Frostcrag Village is compatible as-is with UL:Snowdale. It is not however compatible with Frostcrag Reborn and no patch is planned to address this.

This was a great idea...ala UL.

I agree, great idea.
And now an excellent source for finding those new ones as they come out.

Wow, Arthmoor, this is really great! We were just talking about this on that village thread the other day - I never realized you were already ahead of the game!

So they're completely compatible with UL, I'm guessing, except for the small patch required for Snowdale? And this is in addition to the farms and settlements added by UL already? Wow, bring on the farms, then! I have to say, I thought all the extra farms and stuff would make the game feel too settled, but since it's mostly along the roads and stuff it really feels about right, like the heart of an Empire. Besides, with all the new landmasses, we've still got wilderness galore!

I'm glad you combined them, now I remember seeing at least a couple of those names before, but I guess it didn't catch my attention. Great idea on Vergayun, isn't that where Cyrus was from in Redguard or something like that?

Thank you Sir, may I have another!?!

Only the thread management is combined, everything else is still entirely separate.

They're all UL compatble, with only Feldscar needing a patch. I try rather hard to avoid stepping on UL area, but Snowdale didn't come along until after Feldscar was well into its construction and I wasn't going to give up my spot.

I wouldn't know if Vergayun was used in Redguard, I never played it. I just found it on an unofficial lore map and it fit the general location I was eyeing that day in the CS

Maybe you can talk the management of UL into adding Feldscar into Snowdale...thereby saving 2 mod spots....Feldscar and a patch.

Silly, Arthmoor is UL management!

Lol, as much as that would be useful, it's not happening. Management has spoken

Thank you very much for continuing to add life and diversity to Cyrodiil.

Your village mods are of course beautifully made, but to my mind what really sets them apart is the thought you have given to the reasons for the villages to be there in the first place, and how they support their continuing existence, farming at Faregyll, fishing at Vergayun, fur trading at Feldscar, and now perhaps refugees from Leyawiin. I wish Beth had given a little of your care and attention to the small settlements.

You mention that you have other similar projects in the pipeline. In a recent thread (which I now can't find), someone was asking about expansion mods for the small settlements. The conclusion was that the 'best' one threw up incompatibilites with too many other mods because it wasn't modular. Have you thought of applying some Arthmoor magic to some of the more neglected settlements yourself? Two that immediately spring to mind are Blancenmarch and Brindle home. Brindle Home has the makings of a horse breeding centre, not sure about Blankenmarch, maybe something to do with its proximity to Blackmarsh.

Finally, on a completely unrelated note, I love how Faregyll, with the right mods added, changes from a dead end backwater to a vibrant village sitting on a cross roads right in the middle of everything. The mods being, your Faregyl mod, New Roads and Bridges, and Elseweyr.

There are too few brand new, quality villages out there. So three more on the way is very exciting! I keep meaning to get your villages on ORE. :facepalm:

Great to hear that there will be more. Looking forward to them!

edit: Huh, and I've yet to try Molapi, even. DLing right now...

Thanks for the new thread.
I have three of your villages installed, except Molapi (I hope to try it the next days).
In Feldstar I asked the traveller about Landmarks and he marked Sedor in my Map but it was active! (is this intended or just a side omission?).

I obviously did a good job of blending that guy in, because he's actually part of the travel services mod. Yes, the landmarks thing is intentional.

I love villages. Thanks for this.

Another great addition by Arthmoor. Thanks for the mod!

A quick question, how far west does the Faregyl mod edit? I've noticed a few farms just north of the Elsweyr border, but these are some ways away from the village itself. I also use the Shadow Ranger mod and am noticing a couple of minor land tears around there.

Faregyl goes up on to the hill just past the fork in the road next to the mine.

I think the farms you're talking about belong to C&C Blackwood Company.

And to add to that, how some of the quests in these mods integrate to some degree to 'vanilla' quests as well. Another way in which these mods are made to fit so naturally into the game and game-world.
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I knew who he was. But yeah he does fit in beautifully there.

I'm always looking for nice mods to spruce up Cyrodiil that integrate well into the game and give me fun stuff to explore while I'm out travelling. The best mods are the ones that fit seamlessly into the game that make you forget it's part of a mod and actually feels like part of the game world, and I can say that about your mods. These are some quality villages that'll definitely be going into my next game once I get around to starting a serious character (so far I've just been running around with a modtest char to make sure everything is glued together properly). I also love New Roads and Bridges.

Arthmoor - there is a compatibility patch for Villages v1.1 and UL - is that patch required even if I use only 1 village mod, say Molapi?

I also wanted to request if you could mention the need for compatibility patches in the gamesas forums thread and TesNexus description of each village, and a link for each patch download on tesnexus. Last I know, the following patches are needed:
Feldscar -Snowdale patch. (already linked)
Faregyl - 2 patches for UL and Anequina (I forget the names at the mo)
Villages 1.1 - UL?

Could you confirm this, and add the links?

Villages v1.1 isn't mine. That belongs to another modder and was later taken over by the DC team. Villages1.1 does have a patch for Cheydinhal Falls listed on the UL patch page at Nexus.

For my collection: Faregyl doesn't need any UL patches, and neither does Molapi. The only village that does is Feldscar, which I already linked.

Thanks for clarifying. Love your mods!! Hopefully they interview you soon for BethBlog!! :goodjob:

Arthmoor, I think you have placed three Legion Watchman at "Two Decker Camp". For OOO users this camp is near another camp "Arctic Wolves Clan Camp" (north of Dragonclaw Rock). Everytime I'm starting a new game (I started at least three times in the last week) I find Vyka a Female Boss from Arctic Wolves Camp fighting the three Legionaries and every time she end killing them (Note she is scripted to be essential by OOO until she detect the player). Just a side note.
Village considered: Feldstar.

Nothing I can do about that. Apparently someone figured that NPC needs to wander the entire northern frontier so there's no way to patch around it.

The legion guys are already offset 15 levels above the player, but I can't do anything about the decision to also make the roving NPC an essential, which effectively makes her a juggernaut to anything that moves up there.

She's only essential until the player encounters her. This is because one of Adonnay's mods puts something high level in the vicinity (I forget what), which had the habit of killing her. Apparently, people didn't like getting the "you've killed Vyka" message when they hadn't encountered her.

I'll have a look and see if something can't be done faction-wise.

EDIT: I've had a quick look. Vyka is in BanditFaction, the legionaries are in the various ImperialLegion factions. Therefore they fight. Seems perfectly reasonable. :wink_smile: The main reason they are likely to end up fighting is that Vyka is specifically instructed to travel to Two-Decker Camp at certain times on certain days, rather than simply wandering aimlessly. And she's supposed to be a juggernaut - she is one of the bosses of the Skyrim Bandit Clan added by OOO. Although perhaps we can stop her from going to Two-Decker Camp. Let me ask the rest of the team.

Eloise

PS. The Ice Queen/Ice Warrior mod also puts a rather powerful NPC in the vicinity of Two Decker Camp, I believe. Edit: She's actually slap bang in the middle of the camp. Fun times if you wander up there when Vyka's also in the vicinity... :whistling:

Yes, but apparently Vyka also wanders to other parts of the area. Two Decker Camp isn't of critical importance to Feldscar and even if the guards die they'll respawn later. It's far more dangerous when she wanders over near the village itself, because nobody there is set to respawn and killing the inhabitants off would break a whole bunch of quest related stuff.

There's also material in the same general area from Verona House, but I don't think any of those NPCs end up outside where she could kill them.

I thought I'd picked a relatively safe place too