Weekly Update (12/1/2017) -- Food Overhaul & Finishing Hunterborn

Hello my loves, and thanks for stopping by!

I spent this week finishing up the Hunterborn integration, which was  infinitely easier thanks to SrGatonegro's Ultimate Skyrim Hunterborn Patch, DrMonops' Hunterborn SkyTEST Patch, and UnmeiX's Requiem Survival Experience megapatch. 

Without these resources, integrating Hunterborn would've taken significantly more time -- and it already took quite a lot of time to begin with. ;)

I'm tremendously excited for all the new features and gameplay options Hunterborn brings to the table. I've spoken at length about some of these features in previous posts, so today I'd like to focus on an area I feel is particularly improved: Food.

The usefulness of Food is perhaps one of Skyrim's biggest shortcomings. I think Bethesda wanted food to be important -- there's a million food items and a cooking subsystem to boot -- but cooked recipes are barely more useful than simple ingredients, which are pretty useless themselves.

Requiem tries to address this by adding powerful buffs to certain foods, but since there are only a handful of recipes with these buffs, the problem persists. Most ingredients are useless, and only a few are worth grabbing.

I tried to address this problem myself with iNeed, which makes food an important part of staying alive, but even with that addition, Food as a system still lacks a certain panache. It's functional, but not fun.

This is where Hunterborn comes in. HB introduces many new cooking recipes alongside its new foods and animal parts, which I felt was a perfect opportunity to address the Food problem once and for all.

These recipes are fairly useless by default -- they are balanced for vanilla, after all -- but with the help of the mods I listed above, I've overhauled the food systems for the entire game.

Here's a quick list explaining how food will work in Ultimate Skyrim 4.0:

• There is now a huge variety of recipes with useful character bonuses, all visible at a cookpot. Most of these recipes are geared towards stamina management, but many of them confer other bonuses as well.
• These recipes utilize a wide range of ingredients, including animal meats, herbs, spices, and more. Put simply: if an item might be used for cooking IRL, you can probably use it in a recipe -- and that recipe will probably confer a useful bonus.
• iNeed divides its foods into three satiation categories: Light, Medium, and Heavy. To encourage cooking, almost all cooked foods have at least Medium satiation, with many falling into the Heavy category as well. (Exceptions include small baked items like Tarts, etc.)
• Most raw foods have Light or Medium satiation, but there are far more raw foods to consume. Can't forget about our lovely beast races, after all.

Here's a quick list explaining compatibility edits between various mod systems:

• All SkyTEST creatures now operate using Hunterborn mechanics. You can find all of HB's proprietary items on SkyTEST creatures, including hunting tokens, meats, ingredients, and other animal parts. SkyTEST meats can also be frozen, just like HB/vanilla meats, and I've added many useful recipes for SkyTEST ingredients.
• All Hunterborn recipes and foods have been fully integrated with other mods, including iNeed, Frostfall, Campfire, and more.
• Inns will have much greater food variety, since these new foods have been properly distributed among appropriate Leveled Lists. 
• Many Hunterborn descriptions/effects/spells/etc. have been re-written to better fit Ultimate Skyrim's writing and copy philosophies. (No one will care about this as much as me, but I spent a lot of time on this, so I wanted to mention it. :D)
• Many other small edits for compatibility, etc.

That about wraps it up for this week, I'd say! Hopefully you guys are as excited about these changes as I am, and I'll see you next week with more progress.

All of my love, as always,
BB