How to make an unleveling mod?

[Nord85]

Lately I've been looking for some mod to unlevel loot and merchant inventories. However, there seem to be only bad choices. Scaling Stopper is so old that it won't play nice with the newest versions of mods like Immersive Armors. Skyrim Unleashed seems fine in other respects, but its item plugin makes some changes I don't really like plus won't support any item mods. As for ERSO, it seems not so much remove the loot scaling but replace it with a zone-based variant. Requiem and Skyre won't do, either, since I want just the item changes, not a total overhaul.

What I'm after is unleveled loot, distributed so that maybe 50-60% of the stuff would be lvl 1-12, 15% 13-18, 10% 19-24 and so on up to some 2% for highest-level items. Basically, something like Oblivion Unleveled but with a more rarity for good stuff instead of total randomness. So, how exactly could I go about in creating a mod like this? Do I have to change every single relevant list from the ItemLeveled menu, or are there some "super-lists" that change stuff in whole groups? For tweaking the rarity, it looks like that "Chance for none to appear" or something like that is the parametre I should change. Is this so? I'll be grateful to anyone who could give me the info needed to get me started, so that I can figure the rest out myself.

[Deandra]

The only way it would work correctly is if you tweak every leveled list that actually levels items (since many "leveled lists" don't change at higher levels). There are lists that aggregate things found in other lists, but you'd still have to check an enormous amount of lists. Not technically difficult at all, but very tedious. If you're good at programming, it might be faster to write a tool to generate the changes you want... maybe.

[Nord85]

I see. Well, in that case it might be better to check if I could simply edit Skyrim Unleashed's lists to remove those features I don't like. That might be faster. Unfortunately I can't program at all, so writing a tool to speed the job up is out of question. Also, I have to check somewhere what lists affect containers and merchants, since NPC loot is rather fine as it is.

Could you also enlighten me about the rarity thing? I think that e.g. setting a weapon type's Chance None to 98 means that it appears only 2% of the time. So I would have to check all item types and tweak that value in all, so that combined they add up to 100 to ensure some weapon or another always appears in a relevant container type. Is this correct?

[Seht]

Have you ever heard of Morrowloot 4E Edition? As far as I know it unlevels every list in the game and doesn't come with the original Morrowloot's odd crafting choices so it may be an option.

[Deandra]

Could you also enlighten me about the rarity thing? I think that e.g. setting a weapon type's Chance None to 98 means that it appears only 2% of the time. So I would have to check all item types and tweak that value in all, so that combined they add up to 100 to ensure some weapon or another always appears in a relevant container type. Is this correct?

No, not quite. The probabilities would combine geometrically rather than additively.

You probably don't want to mess with that %. It's usually used for things like containers that can have multiple items appear, but when you usually just want a smaller number of options showing up. Since those rates don't change as you level, de-leveling everything shouldn't make any difference.

[Nord85]

Have you ever heard of Morrowloot 4E Edition? As far as I know it unlevels every list in the game and doesn't come with the original Morrowloot's odd crafting choices so it may be an option.

Well, the problem with that is that it completely removes random dwemer or better quality gear from loot, or at least the description says so. I, on the contrary, would like a small chance to find something very good in random loot at every level, while the bulk of the loot would be mediocre throughout the game. The same goes for merchant inventories. Basically it would be like Oblivion Unleveled (for instance, I found an ebony shortsword in the Kvatch gate with a lvl 4 character), but so that high-level items would be more scarce. That's because I prefer randomness in loot over static placement, if forced to choose.

No, not quite. The probabilities would combine geometrically rather than additively.

You probably don't want to mess with that %. It's usually used for things like containers that can have multiple items appear, but when you usually just want a smaller number of options showing up. Since those rates don't change as you level, de-leveling everything shouldn't make any difference.

Okay. It seems I have to find a good written tutorial about this stuff. That might serve me well anyway; this far the only mod I've made for Skyrim is one that makes Alchemy leveling a bit faster, and that was child's play compared to this. Also, it now seems best that I take a good look at unleveler plug-ins in the CK. Tweaking one of those is at this stage a better option than bungling around by my own. Thanks for input, guys!

EDIT: I took a look at Skyrim Unleashed's leveled lists and recognized that even editing the mod is wholly beyond my capabilities. So I decided to just bear with the aspects I don't like and made a bashed patch to include armor and weapon mods I use (I can only hope I did that correctly). Hopefully this is a workable solution. Next I'm going to create a new character and test it out.