Opened up a Skyrim mod to see what it really did and found something weird

I finally dug into that "realistic damage" mod I've been using for 3 years and it was just a single line of code changing one number by 0.5 the whole time. Has anyone else ever felt ripped off after seeing how simple a mod actually is?

2 comments

2 Comments

margaretf4016d ago

I read somewhere that some of the most popular mods are just tiny tweaks like that, it's wild. Three years of thinking it was doing some complex damage overhaul when it was basically a small math fix. Kinda makes you wonder how many other mods are just smoke and mirrors like that.

sarahsullivan16d ago

Well, isn't that the thing about modding though? Not really "smoke and mirrors" so much as people overselling the complexity behind a fix. Like that one combat mod that was huge for a while, "Wildcat" or whatever, turned out to be mostly just adjusting a few multipliers and stagger values. The real work is in understanding what tiny numbers actually matter to make the game feel different. A lot of the popular overhauls are just a guy who spent a weekend reading the CK wiki and changing 0.5 to 0.3 in a damage formula. Makes you appreciate the ones that actually add new mechanics or scripts, but even those are just cleverly built on the same old engine quirks.