I've never modded before, so I am proposing a Mod here (for a number of reasons which I will outline below) that would allow the player to experience SMELLS in the game for various reasons, the least of which is that this idea is too big at this time to even think about it finding its way into Skyrim by default. It is my hope someone will undertake the effort to Mod in this way to allow a new aspect of sensation to become embedded into the next generation of RPG's because the imagination is powerful. Merely the suggestion of smells is enough to add a new dimension to the game without us really having to be able to really smell them. Smell is very useful in real life for a number of reasons, first as a protective sensation, detecting dangers in the foods we are about to eat, and later as a seductive sensation, allowing us to feel attraction toward the strange, often intoxicating, smells of those who would wish to seduce us. It is used by hunters, trackers, wild animals, werewolves, vampires, and is often the first thing to take you back to a certain place should you run across that smell again even 40 years later. Therefore, I wish to spell out how it should work if someone were to add it. And I hope that if you Mod this, that you would at least give me an honorable mention in the Readme.txt file....



A SMELL MOD PROPOSAL


1. Food & Cooking
I propose every food item should have a unique smell (as in real life) to be used in Character Creation (with the Mod present at that time) to allow you set, in your character, which items you may be allergic to, or which items are your favorites.
By smelling any cooked dish (where multiple items are present) you can get a list of the items present in said food item. Say you were to get something like a "Ron's Mess" meal: (potatoes, eggs, green peppers, garlic, black pepper, cheese) ... you would get that list if you chose to "sniff" the item carefully. You would then see "garlic" and you would know, hey, my character is allergic to garlic, so if I eat this, I'll have some big problems. Of course for this idea to work, it would have to be combined with other Mods whose purpose was to add combined foods into the game (for numerous-item cooked foods such as stew, chili, casseroles, etc....)

Your character might (instead of having an allergy with garlic) just as easily have it be that "cheese" is your favorite food, and thus if you were to eat the Ron's Mess you would be so happy that you would receive some kind of a stat bonus for a few hours (maybe to Personality, or maybe to Strength, I'm not sure...)


2. Raw, Almost Cooked, Cooked, Burnt
While cooking foods (again, using a supplemental Cooking Food Mod), you would be able to determine if you are leaving the food too raw, if it has been cooked, or if it is burnt. Certain foods need to be cooked to be safe. In Oblivion, you could often just eat anything in your inventory while having no effect at all because there was no coding for raw fish or meat. Many immersive Mods came out later allow for you to cook the meat, and if you ate raw meat, it could be very damaging to you. So if we perceive the next round of Mods coming that re-introduce these abilities back into Skyrim, then I would like to have this smells Mod be able to detect the different stages of cooking. You could use the smells while you were cooking to help to tell you when it's ready. These same things could be applied toward Alchemy, helping mages produce better potions based on the state of the potion being brewed. The recipe could have the Cooking Level to which the potion should be cooked. Now as the potion brews, you would need to "sample it" often to make sure it's not becoming overcooked.


3.Freshness & Nutritional Value
The smells available to the game should be further categorized by their "Freshness" into the categories: Very Fresh, Almost Fresh, Not so Fresh, Rancid, and Moldy. The nutritional value of the food would be lowered per each drop in freshness, but the monetary value might not always drop if the seller is a thief or a con artist style shop owner. If they are an honest shop owner, the prices should reflect the reduced intrinsic value based on the fact that its age is affecting its quality. Cooking with high-quality food items should be rewarded with a much more valuable end result (as long as you don't burn it ...)


4. Hunting
Animals hunt you by smell. It's like tracks on the ground, but different. The nose is pressed to the ground to obtain the thread of the scent, which is then airborne. The animal sees a ghosted line floating in the air leading them toward their target. These smells linger a lot longer than weight-based depressions (footprints), and a lot longer than heat-based approaches, especially in the snow, where hot footprints rapidly are lost in the icy extremes. So if you had an animals "smell" capability, such as by a Perk or a magic Spell, you could track something a lot better and longer than if you relied on foot "prints" or heat-based tracking approaches. The smells could linger in the soil for for days. Perhaps the Perk or the Spell could be called "Scent of the Wild" or "Nose of the Hound" or something like that.


5. Seduction -- on Romance & Love
Guys could stink from being out in the wild too long, drawing wrinkled noses should they invade a town in need of a bath. Personality could suffer, people could feel very vehemently toward you, just because you reek like dog [censored]e and Orc vomit. If you stink too bad, such as two-week old dragon blood on your boots and the bloodied skins of 20 dead foxes over your shoulder, you might not even be ABLE to use the Converstation window at all. The window would be Inoperable (meaning you can't talk to your quest giver) until you've cleaned yourself up. You try to chat, you get a horrified grunt followed by "Take a bath, ye animal!"

Once cleaned up, the game runs like before. You can take a regular bath, or a bath in some scented oils for an additional price, that makes you smell more pleasing to a member of the opposite six. Should your missions in some require seduction, charm, or some manner of persuasion, your scent should now have some affect on the outcome. If you smell good, if you have a smell a woman particularly likes, you get a much higher Dispotion automatically. You could even ask the girl what smells she likes in the dialogue window, producing a number of possibilities: orange peels, honey, lavendar, jasmine, lime peels, scented tree bark, pine oil, etc .... and when you run a bath in this Mod (a tub appears in your room in the open space available) you can add these ingredients to your bath in order to change your default smell.

Some women might like your natural default manly stink. You can go to a bar and try your luck. Bars attract different kinds of people with different needs. Some like warriors who smell like the kill of battle. You may not need a bath to meet one of them.

Just as you have an affect on people around you by your smell, so too they upon YOU. If a woman likes you, she may have on some perfume or some fragrance from a bath, meant to entice you as she walks by. When people walk by in this Mod, a quick default text blurb pops up for about 2 seconds that tells you how they smell. If you don't want that on, you can turn it off by default. If you like it, though, it operates as just explained. If you listed certain perfumes in your Character Creation (with this Mod enabled at that time) as being seductive to you, then your disposition toward that person is changed to 100, which means you automatically get a "Seduction" quest added to your character's Journal to "Get a Kiss" ... this would either have to be added into this Mod or it would require the use of another's Mod on this subject to make this work. They would have to work together, or else it would have to be added to this Mod. So there would have to be an emote or an animation for "kissing" in order for it to work. And the quest isn't just clicking on "kiss the girl" because it's not that easy. It would require some additional seductive techniques such as "flirting" or "teasing" followed by "giving of gifts: candy, jewelry" etc... so you would need to save some money, or go perform some quests to make money, in order to entice the girl. If you managed to get the kiss one day, then your hormones shoot through the roof, giving you an endorphin rush you carry with you while you are "in love" with this girl. This means permanent stat gains to Constitution and Personality as long as you maintain the relationship. If the relationship somehow is ruined (a "break up") then you suffer not only the loss of the previous stat gains, but you are further reduced below your normal defaults due to "depression" .... which you must wait out (1 month or so in game) ... or else go find a new girlfriend to take her place.


6. Vampires & Werewolves
Vampires just replace all of the aforementioned food items with blood. When smelling food for humans, they just smell death. Freshness is now not about age, but about the "health" of the individual being drained. If they are very healthy, the blood is considered "Very Fresh" etc... for the purposes of this Mod. If the person is disease-ridden and dying, the blood is considered "Moldy" etc.... If a person ate "Garlic" recently, then the Smell list would indicate it just like so: "Garlic (Poison!)" .... to indicate the danger to the Vampire.

With Werewolves, they get the above Perk by default. Raw food items are best, like raw fish or raw meat, is the best for them to eat, so the smells are listed in reverse, with Raw being best and Cooked being worst.... In addition, while in human form, the Werewolf's human side can detect 99% of all smells from this Mod and know them by default. So a werewolf human could also be an outstanding Alchemist if they wanted to.


How It Works:
When you click on any item to examine it in your inventory or in the Shopkeeper's Inventory, in addition to the standard window that pops up, a 2nd window pops up too, with the required Smell information listed there. It should indicate the item's Freshness (Very Fresh, Almost Fresh, Not so Fresh, Rancid, and Moldy), it's Cooking State (Raw, Almost Cooked, Cooked, Burnt), and what other items might be in it by smell (the itemization of the smells)...


Smell Knowledge By Default:
Your character isn't a child, so he or she wouldn't need to smell EVERYTHING new, they would know about 60% of the smells available in the Mod. But as they go around smelling (sampling) new items, their database of smells would grow. So sometimes when the player (level 1) smells a combined food, the itemized list might not have every item listed, but instead a series of ? (question marks) where the unidentified smells are. Over time, your player could grow to become quite wise, knowing almost every smell, but that would take a little bit of work. This would be helpful in identifying why a particular potion has been poisoned and even suggest an antidote you could add to neutralize the poison so you could re-task that potion toward a more positively aligned usage. Perhaps creating a poison and neutralizing it is but the first step in creating a more powerful type of potion, and thus by knowing the ingredients of a potion by smell could become more and more useful in how you learn to overcome individual properties by counteracting them.

Thus, even Alchemy could become more and more dependant on the Smell Mod also, leading to greater immersion or complexity for those that require or appreciate that kind of subtely in their game.

So, anyway, now that you've had a chance to see it all in its full compexity, what do some of you think of it? Don't be too harsh ... I didn't recommend it for Skyrim by default, just as a Mod... you can always choose to ignore a Mod you don't like ....

Thats a big project, if you really give it the depth you want.

Well, the funny thing is, somewhere in the world, there is a development team creating a little black box they call the "Sniffer" ... I read an article about it last year. It's designed to plug into a PC and produce 1000's of unique smells. It works by metal hooks scraping pads, each with their own unique smell, and then a small fan blows the smells out toward the player so he can "smell" the place he is in. It's supposed to include most fruit and vegetable smells, but it also includes some sewer smells, some rank smells, etc... for use in dungeons, etc... I don't know if it will ever become widely accepted, and I doubt it will see market penetration within Skyrim's lifetime, so I just thought why couldn't we Mod our own, using our imagination to visualize the smells instead of actually smelling these things?

Besides, it would still take an enormous amount of work for a company to take the Sniffer and links all of its smells to their game's many smellable items. It would be insane! They would probably never do it. But there are Modders out there who like to do huge projects like this for whatever reasons: fame, noteriety, the love of Todd Howard, I don't know ... but I welcome them to use my idea and even go further if they wish. I myself can't Mod yet ... but I'm curious this time ... maybe I'll study it a bit. But I doubt seriously I could build THIS mod myself... it would take a lot of people working together to do this. It would be cool though, if someone did.

Look up Zelda Twilight Princess, there are a few scenes where youre a wolf following someone by scent. How it works is sort of a misty trail thats colored(orange and purple I think it was) with a sort of reduced visual range visual mode.

But when Im fighting a wolf in a rainstorm I dont actually want to smell wet dog.

To each their own.

that was also with the game wolfquest, when you entered sent mode everything goes black and white, but there is a trail of sent

and this mod seems way over the top, I will give you 20$ if you actually finish it

Yeh thats the one. It would be pretty cool for a werewolf/vampire to be able to detect heat and scents off of footprints and follow scent trails(idk how to do that, maybe a mark spell?). Could probably be done with just shaders.