Yesterday I finally decided to start my first Skyrim playthrough. As expected, I immediately got side-tracked modding...

It was intended as a simple primary needs (hunger/thirst/sleep) mod for personal use that fits my particular vision of what such a mod should do.
I've implemented it far enough so its good enough for me personally, but after trying it out for a few hours I quite like it and I figured, why not ask if anyone is interested in releasing it (unfortunately, I won't because I already have too many other projects).
Otherwise, I will just keep it for personal use.

Anyway, I'll explain what I did so far.

Essentially, at first my goals were:
1. Keep the mechanics as simple as possible.
2. Focus on immersion and seamless integration.
Oh, I didn't want to spend more than 1-2 days on it so I could keep playing

The reason why I picked these goals is that based on my experience from both using and creating primary needs mods in other games (in particular FO3 and FONV), if I had to name the one thing that added most to game for me, it was the sound effects, like a grumbling stomach or yawning. I don't really care much for complex models or micromanaging stats.

I don't want to make the game harder by adding primary needs, but more immersive. I also just want a plausible use for food and beds. They are there, but mostly pointless.

With that in mind, I made several design decisions:

• No numerical feedback, i.e. no percentage or pseudo value that tells you how hungry you are. Instead, I want to explore other feedback mechanisms.
• Suffering penalties will be the exception, and there shouldn't be more than 2 or 3 states. The reason for this is that if proper feedback is given, the player will usually not let things escalate until they actually suffer from starvation. Example FONV: Even though the game had like 5 hunger stages, I only ever got past stage 1, and only because the game didn't tell me in time. Skyrim has plenty of food everywhere, not starving shouldn't really be a challenge.
• The model should enable you to follow a plausible schedule. This goes hand in hand with the the lack of numerical feedback. Things should rather be based on game hours. Sleep ~8 hours a day and you won't be sleepy. Eat ~3 meals a day. The metric you get for food is for how long it satisfies your hunger. So you eat 2 apples (1+1), bread (2), cheese (2), you won't be hungry for the next 6 hours.

So much for the plan! Here's what I implemented so far:

A simple system tracking hunger, thirst and fatigue (aka sleep). Every game hour an internal counter increases.
Once it crosses a warning threshold, you will periodically receive sound feedback.
After it crosses a level 1 penalty threshold, you will receive a penalty (a combination of reduced health/stamina/magicka regen for all penalties), and after it crosses a level 2 penalty threshold, there's a more severe penalty.
Example hunger:

I think this system is still relatively simple, but good enough to model a plausible daily schedule.

The sound feedback interval decreases as you get more hungry. Feedback for hunger is a grumbling stomach, for thirst a dry throat (coughing), for sleep yawing. I used the sounds from Project Nevada (Fonv mod), which in turn used the sounds from FWE (fo3 mod).

Because the sound feedback alone might be missed occasionally, and I didn't want to make it too frequent, I also added a small HUD indicator.
Here are a couple of screenshots that show it in action: http://imgur.com/a/FYMVz (bottom right corner)
Between the warn and level 1 penalty threshold, a small icon will fade in. After level 1, it turns yellowish, after level 2, it turns red.

To detect eating, I just added effects to the existing food items, since there aren't that many. Sleeping is detected as well.
I haven't implemented thirst reduction yet, so thirst is disabled.



Remaining issues:
- There might still be a few bugs here and there.
- Thirst. For hunger and sleep, there's already content in the game, but for water sources one would have to create a new infrastructure. This is further complicated by the fact, that there is basically water everywhere. This makes thirst almost so trivial one could consider leaving it out completely.
- The penalties are pretty uninspired.
- Maybe there's a more elegant/compatible way to integrate the effects for food.
- MCM to support customization.

Currently, SKSE is required, because I'm using ActiveMagicEffect.GetDuration() and mod events for the status icons.
The status icons require SkyUI because of the HUD widget framework. But this is optional (otherwise it'll be sound feedback only. Maybe some fallback would be a good idea).


Basically, I'm offering anyone who is interested to take the mod as it is now and do whatever they want with it. I think it would be good to stick to my general idea of focusing on the immersion, since there are already other, more sophisticated primary needs mods that have the simulation aspects covered.
One might also just salvage it for the status icon widget, since there is no other needs mod that does that yet. But I won't add percentage bars

PM me for the files. I will probably upload them publicly somewhere later.