Greatly appreciated! Good work!

Vac

Thanks very much for the update. Just downloaded, and eager to try it out.

Are the leveled lists of the new dungeons based on FCOM or are they unique? I saw some adventurers in one of the dungeons, which is quite silly because they supposed to be long lost places only accessable via stones.

The mod adds some custom loot containers, partly filled with custom leveled lists and partly vanilla lists. Enemies: vanilla. If you have FCOM installed those vanilla lists & enemies are modified by the FCOM components. The adventurers are from MMM; you can prevent them spawning in the dungeons by installing MMM's No Adventurers addon.

New http://www.tesnexus.com/downloads/file.php?id=16316 available. The Ayleid Steps was first released at the end of march 2008 - version 0.9 beta, featuring no less than 4 Lost Dungeons containing 1 level each!
To celebrate the second anniversary, this edition adds 4 new Lost Dungeons: a cave/fort combo, a sewers system, a ruined chapel with several undercroft levels and an Ayleid dungeon. Total number of custom dungeons is now over 50. :blink: There are some minor bugfixes too, adressing several problems reported at the TesNexus forum.

As always, thanks for the updates and additions! And congratulations!

Vac

Congrats on the 2 year anniversary and thanks for all the updates! This has become such an extensive and amazing mod. I still need to play through the expanded questline, I'm looking forward to doing so

Kudos on the new release.

How time flies, eh?

Thanks a lot man, your mod gave me hours of fun, and I have not found all the lost dungeons yet.

2 years? Wow. Impressive, and many kudos on a fantastic mod.

I finally got the steps activated with my new character, and the first step I hit after leaving the IC was the one to a lost dungeon. Love the new textures. They make spotting those steps much easier. There were a lot of NPCs running around (Tomb Raiders, from MMM, I think) in the caves, but it seemed just like any other cave I'd seen (i.e., it looked like it had an accessible entrance), so it wasn't really immersion-breaking. I also found the tribute to Wrye (hehehe)...

One minor thing: I found an NPC named Kra'rak down there who was conscious but "unresponsive". Not sure if that was intentional or not...

Yes, those others are supposed to be dead.
I dont know a Kra'rak. Must be from an other mod. FCOM?

For you and everyone else: thanks for your ongoing support for the mod. Without it, the mod would have died after a few months. And your numerous questions, bug reports and suggestions have surely helped to improve and polish things. :woot:

Sorry, Kar'raj. He's an Argonian. I'm not sure where he's from... the FormID just popped up a leveled list number (ffxxxxxx).


Speaking of bug reports... I forgot to mention this last night. There's a bunch of ungrounded vegetation down in Carnivore Cave Dungeon, and the one area in the flooded level that has air, doesn't - if you pop up out of the water, there's apparently not enough room to actually breathe, and you're treated as still being underwater.

Don't know him, sorry. Not related to TAS.


Thanks. Found the veggies, but not that area. :stare:

Another issue:
Two users have bumped into a mod conflict in the Mapping Mayhem quest. It requires the Player to find a sequence of Stepstones within a given stretch of time. To be able to monitor this the mod has to pick a reference timescale, so the quest script memorizes the current timescale and then replaces that with the vanilla value of 30. When the Player is done, the timescale is reset to its initial value.
This reset may go completely wrong if other timescale-altering mod(s) is/are active. Solution: temporarily disable them while you're doing this quest.
The problem will be added to the 'known issues' section in the Readme.

Can you give me the quest name/state when dynamic timescale need to be disabled? If so, I can check for this in Automatic Timescale (which is also included in Real Sleep Extended), and then disable the auto timescale within this period. If I understand your mod correctly, it doesn't hurt if you sample the wrong timescale, as long as I ensure that it stays at 30 during your quest, and then takes control of it thereafter (effectively ignoring the value you memorized).

Aha! Thanks for asking, never realized that that mod might be involved. :facepalm:
Quest name is SSotAMapping. The stage is 50. There's a rather complex script going on there, at least to my standards. The player has a list of 7 tasks to do at his/her convenience... thus in theory this stage could last for days or weeks. So I would't dare ask you to stall your mod for so long. However, as soon as the Player sets out to work on a single task, this is reflected in the variable fQuestDelayTime being set to 2 instead of the default 5. And when it is reverted to 5, the timescale is reset too. You think you can work with that?
I'd appreciate it if you could find a workaround. If not, well, then it's just one of those conflicts. :huh:

Huh. Odd. Wonder what he's doing down there.


It's easier to find if you go there in game, really...

I finally found the Storage Depot, and there's an Ayleid container in there (not the normal ones - this is a new one). It has a bunch of utensils and dishes in it - Lamithiae (I'm sure I'm mangling that) - but they're all missing textures. Is this a bug, or is it from COBL and I'm just missing them? If I am, where can I find them?

Lormathia, I expect. Make sure you are using http://www.gamesas.com/index.php?/topic/1059126-relz-cobl-%2315/ and have installed all the data files for Cobl.

Vac

Edit: Could be Lattiae... Depends how you mangled it... Lattiae items are rarer and worth rather more than Lormathiae items, being kept for festivals and celebrations rather than everyday use.

Cobl's. They're in the resources folders within the Cobl Core folder. Meshes: 00 Cobl Core\Meshes\VC. Textures: \00 Cobl Core\Textures\MEO\clutter\Ayleid.

I think I found the underwater spots you were talking about. There's indeed a gap just below the ceilings, but the meshes' collisions are even a way below the actual stone surfaces. So there is some room there, but you cannot get into it far enough to breathe. Since I didn't intend to provide breathing space anyway, I'll leave it at that.

Aha. Thanks!


You're mean. (Just kidding )

Thanks for that mod. The idea is brilliant.
Still - I installed v 3.3 and still I had the same problem I had in v2.xx : I do not see how would one activate the net without the spoilers.


I don't know about later quests, but since you still update the mod please do something about those issues :tops:

Why? The book describes events of "years ago". The mages in those guilds don't know much about anything but the usual petty generic rumors, and they're no dedicated archivists either. Furthermore there is an explanation for the lack of information in the mages guild which you will find on completing the final quest by reading a certain diary. I know it sounds a bit lame but that's how it is.

Yes, but isn't that true for any other place in Cyrodiil? I remember stumbling into fort Sutch and its little quest only during my 3rd playthrough of the game - I never knew of it before! I like that. In fact the entire mod is built on this idea: there are lots and lots of things to be discovered - or not. Many of the Lost Dungeons are never found, never explored. What a player discovers is determined on the one hand by how much he/she explores the world (and what Steps they may find), and on the other hand by the randomness in the malfunctioning Stepstones themselves. Chances to find certain locations are often less than 0.1 % per teleport!
(Someone actually went so far as to try to 'find' all existing Stepstones by teleporting around continuously, listing the Steps in a huge spreadsheet. Now that is fandom. :blink: As far as I know he did not succeed; About 20 stepstones were never found, although I made sure the teleporting scripts covered them.)
This non-intrusiveness or elusiveness also applies to the main story questline. It will not be available before you have activated a certain amount of Steps. And even then you might never find out about it if you fail to notice the new "Welkynd Stones" topic that some shopkeepers suddenly have.


Why not? Why the hurry? The story dictates the pace here, not the player. I cannot explain that without giving away too many secrets. If a player approaches quests like tasks to be 'dealt with' at his convenience then this mod will frustrate him rather than fascinate him -it's just not designed for such a style of gameplay. Which is pointed out in the Readme file too.


OK, if I understand you correctly this is the main problem - getting started with the first quest, right? So what if I moved that dead MG messenger to a place where she WILL be found sooner or later? For instance beside the road near the burnt All Things Alchemical shop? You will surely pass this spot more than once, won't you?

Thanks for the feedback, I appreciate it, if only it forces me to rethink and refine the reasonings behind the mod. I may well have developed huge blind spots regarding the mod and its gameplay and story, so any input is welcomed.

What about the lake behind the Sewer Exit? It's on a direct route to the IC (and the Arcane University), and most players are going to go there to get their first Nirnroot on the way to the Market District. I know for myself, in FCOM, going into any but a few dungeons right out of the Sewers is pretty much a death sentence, so really theres no real point in even going near them. Toss a couple of dead bandits or something there along with her, voila. Or Mudcrabs, we all know everyone ran into one recently.

I must admit, I ended up looking in the spoilers.txt to find out how to start things (I was in the mid-teen levels by then, had been running around trying to figure out how to use the pads with no success).

Having a lot of fun with the mod, I've found a few of the Lost Dungeons so far, which are pretty cool. Wouldn't mind seeing some unique bosses/loot in them though.

I have to agree, that (so far, I admit I haven't played with it much as of yet) the only quibble, and it is nothing more than that, is the difficulty of coming across the starter quest 'naturally' (I too used the spoiler, which is fine by me.)
So I think it would be a good improvement to make it very easy to stumble across. If using the same method we now have; then having it placed where pretty much every player is bound to come across fairly early.

But where? Perhaps near the starter sewer exit as suggested, that is certainly early!
Or how about near a quest location, such as the early stages of the main quest?
Or simply a roadside/fort etc. that is commonly come across?

How about upstairs (outside) Fort Ash between Imperial City and Chorral? A common walk from the IC on the way to the start of the main quest, or simply between cities.

Thanks for the ideas. Positioning the messenger near any 'early quest' location, or near the Sewers exit, has the same drawback pointed out by utumno: once you have emerged there or visited the spot, chances of returning there soon are slim. Also, the pond area that Mythgaard mentions is modded by Unique Landscape's Imperial Isle. I'd rather avoid such spots. On or near a vanilla road seems to be the best option so far. But then it should be somewhere east of the Imperial City, because the messenger was travelling from Vahtacen to the Arcane University. So the roadside near the original spot might do -no UL edits there - or maybe the Cheydinhal-IC road. Looking into it.