I'm looking for a way to keep souls of lesser quality from filling gems of higher quality. i.e., if all I have are Petty and Grand Soul Gems, I don't want a common soul to fill up my Grand Soul Gem. Basically:

Petty souls -> Can only be trapped in Petty Soul Gems
Lesser souls -> Can only be trapped in Lesser Soul Gems
Common souls -> Can only be trapped in Common Soul Gems
....
etc.

I did some searching through mods and in this forum, but really didn't find any such mod. There are a couple mods that let you discharge a soul gem, and that would party fix my problem, but it appears from comments that those mods don't always work 100%.

So does such a mod exist? COULD such a mod be created? I made a few mods for Morrowind, but haven't yet gotten my feet wet with Oblivion modding...

That's a good idea. One reason I'm using Bag of Holding is to put Grand Soul Gems in it so they aren't wasted by mistake on a rat or something. I'd use such a mod.

Me too. I find it rather irritating when some minor soul ends up in one of my Grand Soul Gems. I am using one of those mods that allow you to empty them though, and I find it works well enough.

This is a good idea and more than likely possible to do, I hope someone takes notice and makes it.

So there IS some interest in this idea. Does anyone have any working knowledge regarding how easy/difficult this might be to implement?

Should be the same solution as NPC souls in Azura's Star, and nobody's done that yet either. AFAIK, it's hard-coded in the game engine where you can't get at it to override.

I usually just carry Azura's and unload it into the weapon I'm using as soon as it captures anything. Regular soul gems are just loot to sell.

It's been a veeeeeery long time since I did any scripting, but couldn't you just have a script run whenever you soul trap a creature that searches your inventory for matching soul gems and moves any higher level ones to a temporary container (preventing them from being filled)?

Well, this certainly isn't impossible, and that's for a very simple reason: if souls can be taken out of soul gems with mods, you can also iterate over all soul gems at certain times (e.g. when entering the inventory) and check if there are any "non-matching" souls, if so, empty that gem.

Don't look at me though, I haven't even got Oblivion installed at the moment.

That's an interesting solution that could certainly work, but it does present some other issues. If I'm carrying a single Grand Soul Gem and two monsters attack - one a Grand soul and one some lesser soul - and I kill the lesser monster first, which is quite likely, I'd have to open up my inventory to "free" the enclosed soul so that I could correctly capture the Grand soul.

I do like Curate's idea of temporarily "hiding" the larger soul gems when a smaller soul is trapped...

My nick is godhugh, not "Curate" . That's the second time that's happened in the last week and those are the only two times in the 4 years I've been around.

Ha! My bad. I'm new here - won't happen again!

Seems simple enough, hope someone makes this

A mod like this is much harder to make than it sounds, because the filling of soulgems is hardcoded in the engine and not controlled by settings or scripts. So the solution is to immediately remove the filled soulgem and replace it by an empty one - which again is very difficult since even with OBSE there is no command to remove exactly the right one if you have one filled and some empty of the same type.

I know, because this problem is very similar to the problem I encountered when I created the soulgem repricing feature in Enhanced Economy. In EE, a soulgem you fill gets immediately replaced by a pre-filled one of the same type/level, thereby making the price of the soulgem change according to how you fill it. I found a solution, but not a simple one. However, it would be very simple to enhance that part of EE a little bit to work as requested in this thread. It's not really within EE's scope though.

Wouldn't it svck not to be able to capture souls and recharge you weapon when you only have high quality soulgems and low level souls though. The game uses the lowest quality gem a soul can fit in by default anyhow, so it would seem logical to me that if you are casting soul trap it is because you need to recharge a weapon or you want to enchant an item.

I get the issue, but to me it just sounds easier to install a bag mod and put away gems you want to save. Creatures are all static level even in vanilla oblivion,except for the rare quest speciifc creatures so it's not like you shouldn't be able to tell what soul you are getting either.

Well, that depends on how you play the game. Seldom using enchanted weapons and using Enchantment Restore Over Time at that, I'm only out for Grand Souls anyway, so it would save me the bother of having to watch out for Grand Soul Gems being wasted on lesser souls. And if playing like you say, you wouldn't have to use the mod.

Yeah i know, i am not trying to stop anyone from making such a mod, just figured i would point out some side effects i thought of. It's a good idea and i am sure it will do wonders for some players. It is a caution versus integrating it into mods like enhanced economy though. Would be best as a stand alone mod.

I agree that it makes sense to make it a stand-alone mod, but as said above, it will be quite difficult to make, and will essentially require a (more or less) copy of what's already in Enhanced Economy. Moreover, the method requires a script added to all empty soulgems, and if this is done in a normal, active mod, it will easily conflict with other mods that changes other aspects of soulgems. EE handles this by defining the script in EE's main file, and then just adding the script to soulgems in a separate esp that is to be imported and deactivated in WB. Making it a separate mod would not only conflict directly with EE, but also easier conflict with other mods unless using two mods where one is imported/deactivated like EE does.

But of course, if I add this to EE, I will make it optional. I have also earlier considered a completely new, related feature: To allow multiple souls to be captured in the same soulgem. E.g. that if you have one Grand soulgem and capture a petty soul, you can still capture all but grand souls, and if you now capture another petty soul, the soulgem will contain petty+petty= lesser soul - or something like that...

TheNiceOne - That would be awesome if you decided to include an option like this in EE. I have been looking at adding EE to my set of installed mods, and this would certainly give me another reason to do so.

I definitely agree that you would want to keep it as optional, since as you said this is a bit outside the scope of EE. But, if the only options are basically either to re-create what you've already done in EE or include it as an option in EE, I certainly hope you have the time and desire to add it to EE.

Question regarding the multiple souls idea you mentioned: if I kept adding lesser souls to a Grand Soul Gem, would your intent be that eventually it would contain a "grand" level soul? If so, even if you had a lesser soul in a grand gem, could you then capture a grand soul to "top off" the Grand Soul Gem and thus it would contain a grand level soul? If that is how you envision it, it's an interesting idea that basically does what I'm looking for: provide a means to maximize soul gem usage.

I might have a simpler alternative way to do it, it will work no worries, but its different way of doing it and your going to need plenty of cash

TheNiceOne if you are going ahead with a plugin for EE, do keep going with it, dont let me deter you in any way, cause mine is just thinking outside of the box, no tricky stuff and hard to explain without giving it away but yours may be far better then what im doing. Maybe by the weekend i might have it ready and add it in the Oblivion gate spell mod, plus having a couple of blank Staffs that you can enchant to what ever you like

The fact that one grand soul gem can be wasted by a petty soul and then not be filled more has bothered me, so a solution to this has been in the back of my mind since I started working on the soulgem repricing option for EE. And I know how to make it work, I just need the time to do it

Yes, the idea was that Petty is worh 1, Lesser 2, Common 3, Greater 4 and Grand 5, and that for instance two Petty + one Common would count as 1+1+3 = 5 = a Grand soul. Not completely accurate, and maybe it would make it too easy to get grand souls in grand gems, but would streamline the gameplay.

I envisioned that a Grand soulgem with a lesser soul (2 of 5) would only have room for a common (3) soul or less, but if I made it, it would be easy enough to make it an option that the Grand soulgem would be completely filled (with the remainder lost) by a greater or grand soul as well.


Good luck. Alternatives are always good, and if I add something like the above to EE, it will be completely optional, and therefore something that can be turned off for players prefering your way of doing it.

I would suggest making the values a bit more exponential. something like Petty 1, Lesser 4, Common 9, Greater 16, Grand 25. that would solve the problem of just killing 5 mudcrabs for a grand soul. If done this way you would probably need the "topping off" option for a soul with greater value than needed to complete the gem.

Something like this struck me as well, so I agree that if I add this feature (still only at the idea stage), the requirements should be something like what you suggests.


Btw, the initial request of this thread (that soulgems can only be trapped in matching quality gems only) was very simple to add to EE's soulgem feature, so I have done that (for the next release). It only required a total of 17 new lines added to one script (and a new setting variable added to the main script).

The new setting, soulGemVaste, should be set to anything from 0 to 4, and is the amount of vasted space you allow in a soulgem.

Set it to 0, and no vaste is allowed (like the initial request). Set it to 1, and you allow Petty souls in Lesser soulgems, but not in Common or higher, and you allow Greater and Grand souls (but not Common or lower) in a Grand soulgem, etc. Setting it to 3 will allow everything except a Petty soul in a Grand soulgem, and setting it to 4 or higher will allow anything (e.g. disable this feature).

Good to see that it's been done, have a cookie :cookie:
And I have to say I like theniceone's idea of them being kinda like a "soul bucket" that can use multiple souls to fill, seems like a more natural way to implement it but theres nothing wrong with having options

Awesome. I will be watching for the next release.

I only started playing Oblivion about a month ago, so I know I'm late to the party - but it is amazing to see how much support and enthusiasm there still is for it. Of course, you only have to play for an hour or two to understand why... Thanks again.

A simpler solution might be to just add a shop mod where gems could be traded\sold\bought or "topped off" -- for example you take several grand souls with lesser souls trapped in them and the merchant for a small fee empties them to a single or multiple Grand soul gems and returns the appropriate number of emptied gems back to you along with a single filled gem .