I was making enchantments (in the CS), and realized that artifacts that have over 1k charge are like.... wow. I mean, what's the largest soul a player can get from generic creatures? 400? A golden saint is a relatively paltry 300. How on earth do some enchanters manage to get items with 600 charge? Even the Tribunal don't have souls that can compare to some of the charges on artifacts, and you'd think the Tribunal souls would be pretty darn big.

Would it be possible, via a script or MWSE, or both, to make it so that a player can take two filled soul-gems and bind them together into a larger soul? For instance, a gem with 100 + a gem with 300 = one gem with 400? Or maybe even stack 3 soul gems together (e.g. 20 + 138 + 100), or something like that. Of course, there ought to be a limit, right? Maybe only 2 or 3 can be combined, and combo-gems cannot be combined with each other.

If there is already a mod like this: please let me know!

Is there anything in the vanilla game that can hold such a huge enchantment?

Anything can hold a huge enchantment "charge", the item limitation is on the amount of charge that can be released per use (for non-constant effects). The bigger the initial "charge" the more uses you get. That's why the enchant info on UESP says don't waste Vivec/Almalexia souls on CE, you want them as big "charges" on massive per-use items (like Ebony Staff for weapons damage, exquisite clothing for other effects, etc.) to allow more frequent use.

@ Alaisiagae - re our PM convo, I already found these discrepancies A LOT when looking through the enchanted weapon lists. For some reason different weapons in the same "family" (eg. the Shardslayer/Viperslayer/Flameslayer groups) often have different enchant numbers. So you might have one with 300/30 (300 "charge", 30 per use, for 10 uses) and the next listed with 500/50. The effective number of uses is the same, so there's no in-game difference, but the initial charge is impossible under game rules. It's another of the things that need normalising badly in those awfully screwed-up lists...

The unique weapons aren't any better. http://www.uesp.net/wiki/Morrowind:Unique_Weapons - the Black Hands Dagger has a 2550 enchant "charge" (they obviously calculated the 255 per-use cost somehow and multiplied it by the number of charges they wanted, without thinking through the consequences) and Trebonius' Staff has 6500, just so it can get 100 65-point charges. :rolleyes:

I suppose in the spirit of fantasy we could suppose that the original enchanters had access to supreme non-game unique souls better than gods'... I'd just as soon slash a zero off the "charge" numbers and get still very effective weapons. I use the Black Hands Dagger as my short blade weapon of preference, and what I notice is that the huge enchant value means that it recovers charge apparently slowly at the standard trickle rate. But rather than having ten uses per full charge, I'd be fairly happy with one or two charges that I have to hoard carefully, since one hit wth that kills most things, if it needed to be normalised down to a "standard" soul size. That sort of magicka cutback is broadly compatible wth the balance changes hrnchamd is making in the MCP too (4 second cooldown between per-use items).

I'd be more inclined to either beef up soul values on creatures, or completely overhaul the magicka costs for spells (e.g. "burden" cost should be reduced a lot, since it is a one-trick pony spell, like "light"). I actually have tentative new values in the enchantment lookup tab, some of which are related to other values via an equation (such as fire shield cost proportional to resist fire cost and fire damage cost modified by a constant). I'd also reduce the cost for rally, demoralize, frenzy, etc. because not only do they require a magnitude but also a duration (whereas you can get restore HP for 1s to be effective, command creature x points for 1s is useless). Given that rally, frenzy, and demoralize aren't especially useful with vanilla NPC/creature AI (read: suicidal aggression; frenzy is a bit redundant). By reducing magicka cost, the charge cost is also reduced to more realistic values.

But, I wanted to see if there was this soul-gem combining mechanism that could be used. I haven't played a spellcaster character, so I don't have a very good sense of magicka costs (other than for enchanted items), and the usefulness of all spells, so I'm hesitant to mod the spell costs, nevermind the fact that several mods already do such a thing.

The other option would be to just nerf all the fun enchantments so that they are in-line with what can realistically be attained if a player created the item in-game. Personally, I was pondering beefing up the soul values for the lesser daedra, and possibly 6th house units (since they are linked to Dagoth and thus linked to the Heart of Lorkhan, a huge well of power). But, I really am loathe to start mucking about with the magic side of gameplay mechanics given my limited experience with that aspect of the game. And because it would require a lot of in-game testing, which I don't quite have the time for.

I think you should be able to beef up the souls of some of the creatures.
http://www.uesp.net/wiki/Bloodmoon:Hircine%27s_Aspect_of_Strength Common: 100
http://www.uesp.net/wiki/Bloodmoon:The_Udyrfrykte Grand: 250
http://www.uesp.net/wiki/Bloodmoon:Draugr_Lord_Aesliip Grand: 200

Not to mention that all we have in Vvardenfel is the Golden Saints and Ash Vampires...It's really lame, I think. Give the unique baddies better souls.

I'd be happy to make a little mod that did something like that. I'd also consider beefing up Vivec and Almalexia's souls, as well as Dagoth Ur's - and the named Ash Vampires, if need be. What should be the absolute top value? 2000? 10,000? Since I'm not trying to tweak anything else in the game, I want to make sure that any new values I create are within the bounds of reason of the vanilla soul values and enchanting system.

I also noticed on the UESP that the Ogrim Titan soul has a smaller value than the Ogrim soul. Is this something the MPP addresses, or should I try to fix it? Are there any other discrepancies (i.e. a powerful creature with a small soul value, or a weak creature with a large soul value)?

I'm still interested in the soul-gem-combo idea I discussed in the OP. Does anyone know if the mechanic I proposed is within the realm of possibility with scripts and/or MWSE?

My initial response is "yes of course we can do that." However, after a bit more reflecting, I'm really not sure. The issue is that there isn't a setting on the gem itself which says what the value of the soul inside is....or at least not one that we can see or manipulate. So far as I know, it just uses the value for the creature inside. So there are essentially two limitations: finding out what the value of the soul you have is, and creating a gem that contains a soul with a larger value.

I think that we can work around these to a degree. We could use MWSE to compare the names of the soulgems to find out what is inside. Of course it would then be necessary to hard-code the values in the script, which means it would not be very mod friendly. Of course we could come up with some "lore" that says only the souls of specific daedra can be combined or something.

That still leaves us with the problem of not having creatures with large enough soul values. Simple to fix really though, just make some dummy creatures that are named something like "Combined Scamp Souls 2x" and give them double the value of a scamp. Depending on how many creatures would be "eligible" for their souls to be combined, it would take a LOT of dummy creatures to get all of the possible combinations.

So, those two concerns aside, it's a fun idea!

Without MWSE, the game wouldn't be able to tell the difference between a 'Lesser Soul Gem (Rat)' and a 'Lesser Soul Gem (Cliff Racer)'?
I'm asking because I like the dummy creature approach. If it's limited to combining two Soulgems containing the same creature, the number of dummies would be reasonable. It would still require numerous patches to support creature related mods though. But still, so much fun potential!

-urge to learn scripting rising-

Well, we can do it without MWSE.

if ( Player->HasSoulGem, "atronach_storm" > 1 )

It would require just as much hard coding as the MWSE method actually. So this might not require MWSE at all. We would have to determine the exact mechanics of it though. Using MWSE, we could check through the player's inventory and then display a menu that has a list of all gems that can be combined. Otherwise, it might be a bit more difficult. Perhaps have a container or something that you have to put the soul gems in, like a Horadric Cube or something. Then use HasSoulGem on the container, and run the script.

Golden Saint has a soulf of 400 actually Soul of 400 is also in Ascended Sleepers and Dahrk Mezalf. Draugrs, Winged Twilights and Liches have 300, Spriggans 350, Dagoth dudes have 300 but some may differ from 360 to 280, 'cept Dagoth Ur that has 0.
Alma has soul of 1500 and Vivec of 1000.


Tho I think that's how it should be, once with enough gold and/or skill enchantments become too powerful anyway, by what set of stuff enchanted by souls of 400 can do, it's really unneeded to search for a stronger soul.

Interesting. The whole time I was thinking of something similar to the http://i55.tinypic.com/33de0pu.jpg of the http://planetelderscrolls.gamespy.com/View.php?view=Mods.Detail&id=1045 by Locklear93, but if MWSE can be used to only display the available fusions, that would be much more convenient for the player.

Edit: About the process efficiency, how does it sounds if combining two Soulgems of 300 gives a resulting Soulgem of 450?


That's true. But only as far as Vanilla Morrowind goes. When faced against a group of level 60 assassins or a level 90 Elder Dragon, I think I'll need all the power I can get. :chaos:

I never understood why the named Dagoths and the Ash Vampires (in particular) have less valuable souls than "generic" Ascended Sleepers. That seems just wrong. As was mentioned above, their power comes from the Heart of Lorkhan, a deep and close well - although that rather begs the question of what happens to the strength of those souls when the well is destroyed... :tongue: (But since Vivec/Amalexia also drank from that particular well and their souls aren't affected in-game by the destruction, maybe it's best not to think about that.) If there are any ideal changes to the enchantment mechanics, those values should definitely be considered.

If there is a method to imbue multiple souls into a single enchantment, it ought to be findable/achievable only after a very significant and difficult quest, I suggest - ie. not available to any normal enchanter, a "lost" secret. Who might still have that secret (Dwemer/Dagoth/Telvanni/other) would be a very interesting question...

EDIT: I'm not the best person to suggest game mechanics perhaps, but would it be possible to rejig or add a spell for this? Say you have Azura's Star - that's an obvious reusable soul-combining device, since the amount of soul it can hold is unlimited. If you then cast soultrap or this rejgged spell on another filled soultrap gem with Azura's Star in your inventory, it could add the value (or a proportion) to the soul in the Star (and destroy the original). If you assign the soul values to value "bands" then you could have a few combined results, without getting too precise about the combinations (while eliminating combining cliff-racer souls, for instance!). Using Azura's Star also has the advantage that it's unique in-game, so you couldn't ever have more than one "combination" or high-value soul in your possession. The trick would be finding the combination spell to use with the Star.

I like the idea of using Azura's Star for it...it's more motivation to get it.

So would it be best to entirely destroy the smaller gem, or just empty it out?

While this is interesting, I think it may violate the Souly Exclusion Principle. Look at it this way, if you look at souls as socks and soul gems as drawers, you can only have one sock per drawer. Trying to put two socks in one drawer means one will be repelled and fly out.

Indeed though, this sounds like a job for a mod to redo the soul values for different NPCs. I also wouldnt think that combining souls would be straight addition either; you need slightly higher values while combining. Interestingly, this sounds like it could have much more promise to it then just combining soul gems, such as using them for spells and such.

If making Azura's star much more potent and varied in powers I think it'd be well to make it harder to obtain, or maybe not necessary harder, but more unique then "go there and there and kill these".

I learned how soul capacity is handled. It's the value of the soul gem (in gold) multiplied by a game setting (vanilla value is "3.0000") that gives the max soul size a gem can hold.

Yesterday (or was it the day before?) I went and decided to retex the models with the soul gem colors. Example: greater soul gem color applied to Petty Gem mesh, Common Gem mesh, and Grand Gem mesh. Common texture applied to Petty, Greater, and Grand meshes. Required some UV tweaking, but they look pretty good. My thought was that maybe it is both shape and material (color) that determines capacity. I didn't use the lesser soulgem mesh because it has a rather obvious seam on one side, and it looks very similar to the petty mesh.

So, something like this, in order of lesser capacity to greater:
petty texture, petty mesh
petty texture, common mesh
petty texture, greater mesh
petty texture, grand mesh
lesser texture, lesser mesh
lesser texture, common mesh
... etc.
Or it could be more interwoven/some overlap, i.e.
petty texture, petty mesh
petty texture, common mesh
petty texture, greater mesh
lesser textures, lesser mesh
petty texture, grand mesh
lesser texture, common mesh
... etc.

The permutations add 3 gem models per category (petty, lesser, common, greater, grand). If anyone is interested in them, I can make icons and release them as a resource.

@Tarius: what about what was suggested in a previous post: limit the combination to souls that came from the same creature (i.e. two rat souls, not a rat and an alit soul).

I think the idea about using Azura's Star is pretty cool, it definitely makes it a much more valuable and useful item. :nod:

I was just commenting on how when combining souls, the values shouldnt just be linear addition. I have no opinion on limiting which souls are compatable.

While I am all for lore, even the devs have shown us it can be creatively adapted and twisted. I did that very thing to get around Arkay's Blessing (but not Arkay's Law mind you) in Blasphemous Revenants.

So what does lore say about soul gems and the use of souls? Off the top of my head I know it's a result of mysticism. Are there lore limitations to what souls can be trapped? Limitations to how they can be used, besides their "value?" Is there anything that we ought to take into account?

You can maybe tell this is a topic that I've often enjoyed playing with. I've had fun with soul gems in both BR and Magicka Metamorphica, which allows you to convert other objects into soul gems.

Alaisiagae: that would be fantastic. I've got the modding itch, and need a small scripting project to get me going. :hehe:

Why not have a Hunger and a Dremora Lord combined into a special soul gem?


I think it would be wrong if Azura's Star was destroyed instead I suggest to create an unique soul gem like the one the player had to collect in the http://www.uesp.net/wiki/Oblivion:Confront_the_King in Oblivion.
It could be a Greater Soul Gem on top of the Grand Soul Gem to create a Giant Soul Gem and to have a similar shape of the Colossal Black Soul Gem there is in Oblivion.

@Fliggerty: I'll upload them today.

As for lore:
http://www.imperial-library.info/content/oblivion-souls-black-and-white
http://www.imperial-library.info/content/oblivion-liminal-bridges makes a small mention of soul gems (morpholiths)
http://www.imperial-library.info/content/guide-psijic-order scroll down for the "Mysticism" article
http://www.imperial-library.info/content/soul-cairn in Battlespire. Use your browser's "find text" feature and type in "gem." For more info, look over http://www.imperial-library.info/content/soul-cairn-and-soul-gems-first-post post's replies.