a bug with feather? : IV

» Tue Dec 13, 2011 6:13 am

I'm using the following mods/DLC:

Shivering Isles
Unofficial Patch (with the vampire aging and citadel door fix)
Unofficial Shivering Isles Patch
SPAM OBSE version (with the restore Spec and fav options)
Soul Gem Salvation
Spell Delete and Item Remove

with that also being my load order. I haven't had a problem with any of them before, but I'm finding that my feather spells are suddenly not working properly. My base carry weight is 225, and I have a base ring of feather (+25, I think). If I cast Ease Burden or my custom Feather spell, my carry weight only goes up to 270. Even if I try to stack them both, it doesn't pass 270. This just started happening now. Can anyone explain this? Thanks.

» Mon Dec 12, 2011 8:33 pm

The application of Feather in this game is misleading. What it makes you think it does is increase your carrying capacity.

What it ACTUALLY does is remove weight from your current encumbrance. The game just displays this change as an increase to maximum carrying capacity, when it should instead be lowering your current encumbrance.

In order to make the best use of Feather, you need to be carrying a fair amount of gear. The spell effect that actually does increase your carry capacity is Fortify Strength.

» Mon Dec 12, 2011 5:44 pm

This is actually a bug in the magic system. Feather works by lowering your current Encumbrance stat, in exactly the same way that "Drain" effects lower your other stats. When the game first applies such an effect, it "adjusts" the magnitude to make sure that the overall value of the stat is not negative. This means that when you cast a spell (or drink a potion / equip an item) with a Feather effect, it's final magnitude cannot be any larger than your current encumbrance. I'm not sure why Bethesda wrote the game this way - I suppose it makes sense for a lot of the other stats.

You can work around it when creating custom spells by including a 1 second Burden effect with the same magnitude as the Feather effect. The Burden effect will always be applied first, and it acts to circumvent the "no negative values" check. Once it wears off, the Feather effect will have the full intended magnitude.