Hi, I am a newcomer to Oblivion and my character seems to be doing an awful lot of alchemy. Roaming the fields and woods is good fun (at least at level one, where my character still is)

However, I feel frustrated that so much of the time, when I try to harvest an ingredient I come up with nothing. This is especially frustrating with those harder to come by ingredients.

I've noticed that hand sycthes are popular with the people of Cyrodiil. At least judging from the clutter containers. Heck, I could have probably filled in Lake Rumare with hand scythes, if I had bothered to collect them all.

I don't think that equipping a hand scythe will increase the chance of successfully harvesting ingredients.... at least not in the vanilla game. So I am wondering if anyone here is aware of a mod which does that?

No, nothing like that. For one thing, you can't "equip" a hand scythe, it's just clutter in your inventory. In vanilla, the chance of collecting an ingredient is hard capped in the Construction Set for each ingredient. If I remember, some of them are capped at 85% and some at 50% chance. Some might even be lower.There are mods that give you 100% harvest chance (try googling that phrase). You can see this for yourself, and change the chances to whatever you like, in the construction set under World Objects -> Flora -> Plants. Click on each ingredient to see the "Ingredient Production" chances

However, if you like collecting ingredients, you should really get Harvest [Flora]. http://tes.nexusmods.com/downloads/file.php?id=2037.

If you're comfortable opening a mod in the construction set, you can modify Harvest Flora's scripts. For example, I tied mine to my alchemy skill (so I get near 100% chance on some ingredients at master alchemy level, but about 25% at novice level), then give myself a bonus to harvest if I have a silver dagger equipped. (Lore-wise, silver daggers are supposed to help alchemists somehow). But you could just as easily set some arbitrary chance. If you really wanted to tie a boost to whether you have a hand scythe in your inventory, you could do that too, but I think the scripting is more intensive and you'd need to use obse to do if efficiently.

The original Harvest Flora script looks like this:

Mine looks roughly like this:

Anyway sorry that's probably not what you wanted to hear. But good luck anyway.

You could do what I do . I use Wrye bash to tweak the harvest chance and use this mod to simplify the gathering of plants: http://tes.nexusmods.com/downloads/file.php?id=14259 .

If you have a hand scythe in your inventory the effective range of the spell increases.

One thing about the bash tweak though, it also affects Nirnroot so you could fail harvesting them if your chance is set lower than 100%.

Dreamed1, wow! If I can get enough courage to open up the Construction Set, the script you provided sounds exactly like what I wanted in a mod. I was thinking hand scythe might have been more "in the spirt of things" but if silver dagger is consistent with the lore, that is what I will use. Heck, it has the added bonus of having a weapon in hand if I need it.

The harvested appearance of the plants is another plus. This should be fun! Thank you so much!

Poddmeister', I've downloaded the mod you recommeneded, too. I don't think I will use it right away because I kind of enjoy the harvesting aspect and don't want to rely on a spell However, later in the game if I get tired of that or the woods become too unsafe, I will strongly consider using the spells in that mod. Besides, I am tickled by the notion of casting the high level spell and then having several angry critters home in on me. It might be fun trying to avoid them or see if they will go after one another.

(I just saw two Legion Foresters fighting each other in an archery duel, apparently over a wolf carcass. Very odd)