JD's Gaming Blog: The Important Pieces of Paper - Skyrim, I return much more quietly, Part 2

Here we are the second and final post of my recent epic second journey through of Skyrim and man o man it seemed even more epic this second time I reckon. But anyway let's continue

One thing my brother and I do love about this game is the armor sets as we think they look pretty damn cool when your character is fully decked out in them, Since I have now started the Stormcloak mission chain I decided to make myself a set of Glass Armor and two ebony swords as impressive as wielding the Dawnbringer and the Nightingale blade are they just don't do as much damage as ebony weapons

Ebony Weapons I used, the one on the right is the dagger, the sword is one of the oddest designs in the game I reckon

With the Glass Armor I made two sets, one for display the other to wear when I'm out fighting with the Stormcloaks. I recently started the questline which involves a lot of running into castles and forts and actively engaging the empire in full on combat, so suffice to say my Nightingale armor which is built for the theif playstyle, wouldn't cut it as the glass armor has a much higher armor setting. As you could probably guess "Glass" Armor isn't actually made of glass which would be pretty silly now wouldn't it? It's made of Malachite which apparently as well as Ebony, is the blood of a god which is explained in this interesting story and shows why Glass and Ebony armor are one of the strongest in the game.

"When the Divines learned that in order to create Mundus they had to sacrifice their physical forms and almost all of their power, becoming effectively dead or weakened, a lot of them rebelled against Shor and tore out his heart. Akatosh and his strongest lieutenant, Trinimac, assaulted him head on and tore out his heart. When the heart was plummeting towards the seas off the east coast of Tamriel, it dropped its divine blood across the face of the young continent. Since Lorkhan is an inherently split personality, he bled two colors - Ebony and Malachite. The Ebony ore is used to create Ebony equipment and Daedric, and the Malachite makes Glass. Most of these materials are mined from Morrowind, on the island of Vvardenfell that grew up around where the Heart of Shor landed. A lot of it fell across Skyrim on the way down. The reason Glass and Ebony are so damned strong is because they're godsblood."


My Glass armor set, sort of pales in comparison to what the rest of the Stormcloaks wear doesn't it?

You'll notice that I'm still wearing my Krosis, Dragon Priest mask even when it's actually lower armor and has a bonus to Lockpicking, Archery and Alchemy in which two I won't use in a battle situation as I have wasted a lot of arrows trying to hit moving targets as well as hit Imperials and not Stormcloaks and Alchemy I don't even do.I wear it because it looks freakin cool and I don't care if it's lower armor, I like being this faceless guy as no-one addresses me by name anyway,

"Got it from a Dragon Priest, yeh that's right though this armor, I made it myself."

Speaking of the Dragonpriest Masks I wanted to see if I could find a mod that changes the colours and/or the hoods so I could possibly find match it with my armor sets and also to see if I was able to obtain a mask which I could enchant myself, and I certainly found a good mod for that. Psychosteve's DragonPriest Masks provides different textures and colour schemes for the original 10 masks as well as a plethora of new styled masks with Mage style head coverings and well as the same new masks with the classic hood that the originals have, everyone of which are craftable and I can say look pretty cool..I also found this, which was also pretty cool but quite silly.

When browsing through the masks I decided to try a few on, and unfortunately to create them you needed a fairly random collection of items of which I really didn't have the patience to get as I really weanted to see how the different masks looked on my character so this resulted in a lot of console commanding in all the obscure resources that I didn't have in order to find out what various masks looked with my two different armor sets. I soon found that the maks from the mod with custom headcoverings were positioned different and thus I had parts of my face including my quite long elf-nose as well as my cheekbones sticking out through the masks, so unfortunately I could not use any of the custom headcovering masks.

"Sosjot" by Psychosteve looks very cool with the Nightingale armor but unfortunately if you take a closer look (click on picture) you can see my nose and cheeks portruding.

Furthermore I had kind of forgotten that the new masks were also seperated into heavy/lightcategories and some of the best looking ones were heavy armor that I could no use lest I lose my perks of wearing full light armor.

Here are another two, "Ikendov" and "Ved classic" style, both are great looking but unfortunately their both heavy armor so I can't use them anyway.

For my glass armor set I made the "Draal" mask with the classic hood obviously as I think it goes pretty well with my glass armor. I decided to keep the Krosis for my Nightingale armor as though the new texture isn't as dark as I'd like the mask has bth a 20% bonus to Lockpicking and Archery and I couldn't put both of those enchants on if I used another mask unless I had the final enchanting perk of course but since that's at 100 I don't think that'll be happening anytime soon.

"Draal classic" and the newly textured Krosis mask

I am proud to say I have succcessfully upgraded Skyrim to the 1.7 patch without any hassle and was able to install both the SkyUI mod and the Skyrim Script Extender (skse) that it requires, also you actually have to load the game with the script extender in order for it to work which only causes a small loading problem at the start which isn't too much trouble. SkyUI is pretty good possibly even better then the QD Inventory mod that I was using before, as you can see it sorts things via symbols and has a function down the bottom where you can switch between your inventory and the merchants instead of scrolling all the way across.

(skyUI pic)

Well I've finally got the Daedric perk and can create my Daedric weapons, which I did after travelling across the world a couple of times and a visit to the Gloombound Mine I finally had enough Daedra hearts, Ebony ingots and Grand Soul Gems for creating, upgrading and enchanting them. Speaking of enchanting in case you didn't know the better the Soul gem you use for the enchant the better result and length of time the enchant lasts for (untill you refill it) of course so basically since I've got quite a large pool of money which is usual towards the end of my questing (120.000 gold at one point I think) I've ben purchasing Grand Soul gems where I can. Anyway I had used the sword and warhammer previously and the whole set looks pretty fearsome, the one-handed sword especially.

The Daedric Weapons

*Runs out of house* "Aaaargh! Rrrrgh! made new weapons! must spill blood!"

You'll notice in the last screenshot that I'm actually in Solitude near my Proudspire Manor house, this is because some reason when I'm doing my blacksmithing on my Asteria flying ship the framerate coitnues to drop (as is usual on the deck of the ship) and sometimes freezes the game forcing me to re-open it, I'm not sure why this is but I decided to move all of my blacksmithing material inc gems to my basement in Proudspire manor which of course still is the edited version, the one I'm using is Proudspire Manor Refurbished - ENG/GER by Ghaunador and has a compelte 'smithy' and other amenities with the possible exception of chopping block which was kind of annoying but I found one in Solitude anyway.

Basements, giving you high FPS since 1999


Seriously the wood's there now just get rid of yet another mannequin and place a damn chopping block. Sometimes I wish I had the patience use the Creation Kit.

Oh yes and another word of advice now I think of it, don't use console commands to get yourself another Blades Sword which I because I hadn't gone far enough into the main questline to get to the Temple of the Blades (where more could be found) but for some reason it mucked up my save and I had to revert to an older one. The blades swords aren't as good as the Daedric ones anyway but I just though having two katanas would be pretty cool, I might try again once I can get two of them legitimately but I'll make sure I do some saving beforehand. I was just looking up Daedric artifacts and was most interested in using th Ebony Blade when I make my warrior again to get my katana fix for that character, but probably will just use this mod as I don't like the idea of the enchant that the blade has.

The Ebony Blade, nordic samurai style yo

Stop everything! I've found another house, yes another house the Asteria magnificent as it was is unfortunately gone as I couldn't really work with a house where I couldn't use all the amenities without fear of the game freezing. I also wanted something a bit more huntery this time in which I did try Ranger Ridge by Eldiabs previosuly but it unfortunately wasn't supported anymore So after a quick search and some testing my new house is the Riverside Lodge with Sauna by Lupus.Yes a sauna complete with a changing room too no less, my brother thought this was absolutley ridiculous but I like it. Many of the chests inside have an auto-sorting option where it has an interface which removes only certain items from yuor inventory for example ore/ingots which is very useful. Also the house is quite interesting as there's this book sitting near the entrance which allows you to customise the basement i.e. you have 3 options

A room of 3 mannequins and weapon racks with a normal looking hallway with a bookshelf

A "library" style room with a desk and lots of bookshelves and am "armory" style hallways with 6 mannequins and weapon plaques

A full armory with 10 mannequins and many weapon racks and plaques

Full view of house, notice the gazebo thing sitting a bit too close to the raging river for my tastes

Multi-level design

Now thats a full smithy if I ever saw one, minus the chopping block of course but thankfully thats just outside.

I chose the library/armory option for the basement, the mannequins and weapon plaques are on the other side and yes all those books I did collect myself.

The "Spa" and Sauna House

The Sauna room, I like the greybeard statue being there like some sort of "Lord of the Sauna"

I'm pretty much on the home stretch now I'm finishing off the Dark Brotherhood and about halfway through the Stormcloaks.I've also done a bit more of the main storyline where you go through the back entrance to the main Blades hideout in Skyrim and I actually went outside into what could possibly be the main entrance of the Blades Hideout though it's on top of a plateau of a sheer cliff so it's possible the Blades could have actually rode Dragons at one point to be able get up there.

"Dramatic music" nice shot of my glass armor with Mask

I got into quite the fight recently when I was travelling to an Imperial outpost in the Reach all of a sudden a dragon attacked (an elder dragon no less) so I decided to just keep running to the war meetup and deal with him with my stormcloak buddies. Though it didn't technically work that way as as soon as I got to where they were waiting they automatically ran forward ansd the imperials started attacking so I had to cut down the imperials while dodging dragon breath then finally down the dragon himself. It was no mean feat and I wish I'd gotten it on fraps though I did manage to get this awesome shot of the dragon combusting.

Dragons: Even the way their bodies decay is awesome

I've got my +30 Archery helm on so I thought I'd take a picture of me actually wearing a full set of armor for once

I'll add in here that I had another dragon attack while I was attacking an Imperial base, this time I just tried to kill the Dragon first instead of running in which worked alot better though I think it did still some some imperials.

Well I am now at the pinnacle of armorness yes I have finally made my Dragonscale armor which looks totally badass of course.Got everything upgraded and enchanted fine though I realised that in order to get a light armor enchant I needed to use one of my custom Dragon Priest Masks as they had every enchant availiable enabled on them. So I decided to use the Kinbok Classic mask because it was the right colour and went really well with the Dragonscale. I also made a Dragonscale Helmet and enchanted it with an Archery bonus so I could use it with my :"dragon killing" extreme archery dragonscale gauntlets.

Me in the Kinbok mask and Dragonscale Armor with Shadowmere who is from the Dark Brotherhood Questline

Now I have downloaded the Dawnguard expansion though I just wanted to keep things vanilla at that point. So the only way I was going to get to have any Dragonbone weapons was to hit the Nexus and see what mods were out there, and I found a pretty good one though I noticed another was also pretty cool. Here's a comparison looking at the three main ones I found.

The official Dragonbone Weapons by Bethesda availiable in Dawnguard I especially like the warhammer which seems to be just a dragon's femur with a handle.

Dragon Bone Weapons Complete by KTA creations, I found the warhammer kind of odd lol

Wulfharths Dragonbone Weapons by Ashking Wulfharth, this is the set I'm using atm as you probably guessed I can't get enough of the katana-style sword

Well I'm almost finished goddamn this is taking forever I've just got the Dark Brotherhood, Stormcloak and Main story questline to go and I'm powering through it, I'm almost not even bothering with stealth anymore as with my Dragonscale armor and weapons I'm pretty damn powerful even with light armor. I can't block while wielding two swords but I find I can dodge pretty well and being able to do two attacks instead of just one works better, plus I've enchanted one of my katana's with lifestealing so I get some health back anyway.

Blackreach, The supposed location of the Dwemer capital city

Yep that's what an Elder Scroll looks like people, it's pretty trippy to look at too

Well it's finito, goddamn that took awhile 216 in game days and 46 levels to be exact throughout most of the final bits I just forwent sneaking/stealth killing altogether and just ran around slicing the crap out of things with dual swords. I was pretty damn overpowered having 100 smithing skill and being able to craft a full set of legendary Dragonscale armor compelte with Enchantments, only got up to about 66 for enchanting but thats pretty good I guess, plus the same with the Wullfharths Dragonbone Weapons mod which were pretty damn powerful too.

The second half of the Thieves Guild storyline got pretty interesting and pretty spectacular towards the end Possibly the most entertaining of the Thieves, Guild and Companions, I can't talk for the Mages Guild as I haven't done it. I also finished off the Stormcloaks questline which was the same as normal but while doing this my brother informed me of the below "meeting"

The Season Unending quest with the meeting of the power players of Skyrim.

Apparently this quest is called Season Unending and becomes part of the main questline if the Dragonborne reaches the part of the story where they have to capture a dragon in Dragonsreach but have not completed "The Battle of Whiterun" for either side i.e. so Jarl Balgruff will say to the Dragionborne that he can't help you trap the dragon unless a ceasefire is called, which results in this quest. I think I might do it next time as it I do enjoy the politics (contrary to the person who made the movie) and it looks quite fun. Also doing this quest is the only way of doing the Blades quest to kill (or not kill) Paathurnax and be abel to recruit blades members.

Finishing off the main questline went smoothly, I found during the final battles up the mountain to the Sovnguarde portal were very heard to use stealth so I basically just used dual swords to slash enemies to peices while dodging arrows also poison, shouts and the Sanguine Rose did help.I killed good ol Alduin with relatively no trouble at all and that was that. Was relatively easy being level 46 and having full Dragonbone armor and weapons. I must admit I really enjoyed stealthing aroundand doing things the quiet way.

In saying that I will definately be back kicking ass again with a 2H Warrior with a new PC and a HD overhaul, oooh yeh, don't think I could ever go 1-hand and shield, too boring though I think I'll have to go a stuck-up imperial this time around too see that side of the story as well as make sure I do the Season Unending quest. My brother thinks the imperials are the 'good guys' though I beg to differ. I leave you now with some pictures of the near-end to the end.