I admit it. I enjoy crafting in games. I like taking the bits and pieces within a game and finding ways to put them together to make new bits and pieces.

The Elder Scroll series has teased me with "what could be" a great crafting system. Skyrim's system has been my favorite overall, to date, even with its lack of spellcrafting, lackluster Alchemy, and limited enchanting. But it brought in Armor and Weapon crafting.

What got me thinking about this was my latest visit through Dawnguard and my adventures in "The Forgotten Vale." I recall my first trip there when I met the Vale's animal inhabitants (Deer and Sabrecats). When I looked at their skins, I could hardly wait to get back to my Lakeview Manor home and see what these new skins could create. I was sorely disappointed. Think about it, though.How cool would it be to craft a set of leather armor using the vale anminal's skins? Instead of drab brown for ALL the leather armor you create, you now have one that is black with green spots (deer) or struipes (sabrecats)?

Or having white leather armors from snow bears, ice foxes, and ices wolves? Netch leather would give an interesting combo of blue and pink looking armor. Fox leather could give a red or ornge tint to leather armor. Wolf leather would be brown or black, depending upon on the color of the wolf's fur. A player's crafted Dragon armor (and weapons) could vary depending upon the "level of the Dragon." A regular Dragon would be the usual gray, an Elder Dragon would have an orange tint to it.

Then I got to thinking about weapons. What if you added some ground up Blue Mountain Flower to give your steel a blue tint? Or Red Mountain Flowers and Purple Mountain Flowers for red and purple tints, respectively? How about grinding up some pearl to give you blade a pearlescent sheen to it? Cool, right?

Then I started thinking "modular." There are different parts to the things one crafts. A simple boot has a sole, uppers, and lining, possibly a cuff at the top. You could now mix and match the varying skins to create the different pieces. Even a dagger has a hilt and a blade.

Ahhh... perchance to dream...

PS: I do realize that the leather used is the inside of the animal's skin, not the furry outside, but still

All true and many other things, mine would be an Elder Scrolls that runs without bugs or glitches on any platform

And I thought I was asking alot!

I've used a crafting mod with Morrowind for years, which allows everything from making your own armor and weapons to creating common clutter items, furniture, and alcoholic beverages. I also enjoyed the crafting extensions to the one popular overhaul mod for Oblivion, far more so than the rest of the mod, although it was much more basic and limited in scope than what the Morrowind mods made possible. The simplistic and guaranteed success of "combine items A and B to make C" in FO3 really didn't thrill me. Somehow, I don't think I'd enjoy the implementation in SR.

Cool! May I ask what Morrowind Mod that is?

Skyrim is pretty much the same as FO3 regarding "combine A and B to make C." The only time I've failed is when I mix 2 ingredients that do not have similar properties in Alchemy. I've never failed an enchanting or smithing attempt in Skyrim.

I had similar thoughts when I saw the Vale Sabercats. It was kind of dissapointing when I couldn't even put one in my Trophy room, much less make a camoflage spotted leather armor. I loved games like Arcanum where you could collect all sorts of junk in the world, combine it to make components, and then combine the components to make weapons or armor. It would be great to take a Flawless Sapphire, gold ingot and silver ingot and craft it into a basic sword to make a fancy sword with a jeweled pommel and gold and silver filigree on the blade. Same thing with the cooking in Hearthfire, you could take a lot of ingredients and combine them into semi-usefull food. I hope Bethesda continues along these lines, because I find it much more interesting than wandering around killing wolves and bandits.

Two mods to choose from for MW:
Morrowind Crafting (MC) - extremely versatile, can make most of the standard armor pieces and weapons in the game, can make candles that light, furniture including beds you can sleep in and storage chests that you can "install" to store your stuff in, bottles, plates, clothing, arrows, even brew alcoholic beverages at high skill levels. Problem is, the difficulty curve is really nasty at the low end, so you won't be able to do much useful without a few in-game weeks or months of regular use of the skills. Read the notes and item lists for each skill or tool, to see what you can do at your level of skill, otherwise you'll fail 100 times out of 100 and not know why. High end stuff will take a long time to achieve, and being able to forge Daedric equipment literally requires stat boosting as well as maximum skills. You also have to buy wood from vendors, not cut it yourself, which was done to avoid deforesting the whole island. Conveniently, ore is found in MINES, what a concept! It's anything but "spoilerish", and you feel like you've earned every last item you make. Not a shortcut for the powergamer. I use it in almost every game, and even did an expansion to add crafting material sources on the mainland for TR users, but that's now obsolete with the newer TR releases.

Complete Morrowind (Full, or individual modules) (CMF) - a much simplified crafting system. Still has failure rates, but with enough tries you can generally produce expensive objects which will unbalance the game, if your character doesn't injure him or herself with the failures ("you stab yourself with the sewing needle and do 37 damage"). Wood can be cut (if you don't miss and hurt yourself), and is not renewable, so you could in theory strip the whole island bare of wood in a year or so. Ore is mined from rocks lying around the landscape, never in mines (First item on your agenda should be to make your own mining picks, because they FREQUENTLY break, PERMANENTLY, and are HARD to replace). It has a few "spoilers", even in addition to being able to create 1000+ Septim apparatus from 5 Septims worth of routine junk at low level: you can melt some items down into more metal ingots than it takes to make another, so you could theoretically turn one iron dagger into a whole arsenal by melting it down and reforging it enough times, as long as you don't fail and lose your materials (or kill yourself in the process). It's an amusing enough mod to consider, especially if you don't intend to seriously "work" at crafting.