Fortify Fix

[hard haven]

for fortify health, magicka and fatigue
https://www.patreon.com/posts/128356718

[tame star]

here's a snippet from the part of vflex that calculates dynamic stats, in case you're interested

I'm way to tired to rip it into a standalone right now, but wanted to share it in case it serves as inspiration >.>

the actual formulas are not important, the part where it makes fortify affect max instead of current stats is what matters

when using it things like Fortify Health constant effect items are actually usable

you'll still lose the stats upon unequipping, but taking the belt as an example, so long as you have it equipped your max HP goes up by 20 along your current, meaning you can actually benefit from it by healing instead of having to do convoluted unequip/reequip cycles

similarly for Magicka you could fortify your MP with items or spells and then recover back to the fortified value via potions or resting

oh and for this kinda thing to work you have to force it every frame

getting the engine to stop doing horrible things to your current values whenever your attributes got fortified took me a lot of trial and error

[hard haven]

how did you save the changes you did in your save file?

i dont wanna use onload and onsave because they get lost when the mod was uninstalled at some point

and the playersection is cross-save

[tame star]

it recalculates it whenever anything changes
I used on save and on load but that's...
1: something I wanna get rid of, or recombombulate along proper versioning
2: not necessary for the dynamic stat changes if they were to live as a standalone

I'm 99% sure you can get away with probing all the stats via engine calls and a neat temporary table, and just ignore saving completely

so long as you don't forget what your stats were the previous frame or two, it should be ok

[hard haven]

well a user could use the mod, buff himself some max health, save and uninstall the mod

[tame star]

you do need some degree of memory to force your way past engine shenanigans, but again not a semi-permanent table
the semi permanent table is there cause vflex is a character leveling mod

[tame star]

oh that

[hard haven]

then the max health change would be persistent and couldnt be reverted even if the mod is reinstalled some day

[tame star]

not an issue in my books?
doing that seems well within "bad saving practices"

you generally wouldn't wanna save in such conditions if you're uninstalling that kinda mod.. just in general

[hard haven]

i mean i could show 4 warnings when the feature is enabled i guess

[tame star]

you do have a point tho, it's not 100% safe from user error

fun fact: you can also exploit fortify int + fortify magicka for infinite current magicka

if my memory doesn't fail me, that can be done on vanilla but not on vflex

[hard haven]

how?

[tame star]

in other words that prevents the exploit

[tame star]

it's to do with how the game scales your current values proportional to your max

or the other way around? it's a mess

[hard haven]

yeah with attribute changes (relative)

and fortify values are fixed

[tame star]

by overcapping your MP with fortify and then increasing your max via int, then undoing it in a specific order, you can increase the amount you've overcapped by

it can be repeated for exponential growth

and if you have access to xINT (mantle of woe lol) it's exponentially worse xD

I remember that bug cause I spent hours trying to solve it before having an epiphany and realising it was not my mod but vanilla behaviour

I then proceeded to spend more hours till I beat it into submission

[hard haven]

hmm

[tame star]

my point is at some point one has to accept that vanilla is about as safe as many a mod

[hard haven]

is this mwse?

[tame star]

you can do horrible things to your stats given a bit of luck and/or clever thinking, and in my opinion it's just how Morrowind do, mods or not

[tame star]

OpenMW

[hard haven]

yeah idk if people wanna abuse to get infinite mana and go such lengths, i dont feel like i need to fix that

[tame star]

yup

[hard haven]

i mean that vflex mod

[tame star]

took me more hours than I'd like to admit to realise that

[hard haven]

where/what is that even?

[tame star]

it's not public

gimme a sec

[hard haven]

ah i see

[tame star]

it's on another thread

started it a while ago, went on to make and upload SUS and GRM, and now that I'm finally getting back to it I ran into your mod and thought hey maybe they could get some use out of my code

[hard haven]

idk how ncgd works but we aggree that a mod should only add and subtract its own values right? 😄

[tame star]

wrote the thing 2 months ago and I already hate reading through it

[tame star]

you mean as in not screwing with other mods?

[hard haven]

yea

[hard haven]

yeah i can relate

[tame star]

ye aside from addons that should be a nono

[hard haven]

so many self-created functions and tables, can't really make sense of it

[tame star]

don't worry I can't either 🥹

gimme 15 minutes, I'm a bit more awake now

[hard haven]

i wonder if my mods are so hard to read to others as every other mod i've seen

[tame star]

I'll try to sanitise it a bit so it's more human readable

[hard haven]

idk if i even need that

i'm kinda almost done with it

[tame star]

probably?
code is a lot more personal than it seems at 1st sight

[hard haven]

just trying to figure out how to save the values

[tame star]

Nice!

Did you manage to actually stop the engine from killing you?

I gave up on that due to that 1 issue

[hard haven]

why would the engine kill me?

its kinda behaving right now 😄

maybe the fatigue calculation could be sassy

or magicka

but health?

nah

[tame star]

if your HP drops below 0 by vanilla mechanics, you're ded
engine doesn't really care what you do to your stats, it does it's thing before your code happens and if HP goes below 0 during that there's no coming back.. or well, there wasn't last time I checked

now I'm curious as to how you're managing it

[hard haven]

yeah thats why my mod is removing the magic effects instead of waiting for the game to do it

[tame star]

oh that's smart

[hard haven]

when dispelling spells or when the duration is <0.2s

[tame star]

why didn't I think of that lmao
clean solution, as clean as it gets

[hard haven]

but i just noticed how the game is sassy with the max fatigue, maybe i'll just disable that feature for that

probably still works fine for the current value

[tame star]

be wary of dealing with max anything on vanilla dynamic math

[hard haven]

yeah but i think health is not affected

[tame star]

again, exponential growth or your stats getting vortexed into oblivion

[hard haven]

and lets be honest, health is the most important one

you can fortify the other values with attributes

[tame star]

Yup, HP is easy cause the engine only updates max values on levelup

speaking of, do check a levelup or two just in case

[hard haven]

and probably only relative

yeah maybe i should check that

[tame star]

it can discombombulate your current values

I ran into it, and ended up fixing it by just tackling MP which was the worst

whatever works for MP works for everything else

[hard haven]

nvm

[tame star]

xD

[hard haven]

hmm

monitoring fatigue and magicka and all stats sounds like a nightmare

[tame star]

it is

it's an exercise in stubornness

[hard haven]

lol yeah

[tame star]

whomever is the most stubborn wins, and the engine is no slouch

[hard haven]

thanks for the warning, i'm probably not gonna attempt that

fortify fatigue and magicka for increasing the base value is kinda pointless anyway

[tame star]

you're welcome!
if you ever do, hit me up, I can probably spend 30 minutes to save you 4 hours

[tame star]

except for enchantments and spells, but overall yeah not nearly as important

[hard haven]

nah you can usually just enchant strength and intelligence

if you dont use the hardcore mode mod

[tame star]

going back to hortatorbelt, it's mildly ironic that a main quest item was done so dirty

it's a sad 20 points even when it works, and on vanilla it's just a scam xD

[tame star]

yup

oh another thing the dynamic thingy I posted does is dynamically update your HP realtime

[hard haven]

another way to do it would be monitoring active restore effects and apply them yourself

[tame star]

it's NCGD's HP formula on steroids, kinda

[hard haven]

but then i'd need to rewrite my hud mod and make a new magicka regeneration mod

[tame star]

not the featurecreep

that thing is the reason vflex isn't up and probably won't be for a good couple months to come

avoid it like the plage

[hard haven]

lol

openmw 0.50 will probably feature spell de-hardcoding very early

but.... who knows if that will actually fix anything xD

[tame star]

unless they do dynamic stat dehardcoding, then no >.>

the issues are right in the stat calculation code itself

it's not the magic effects, it's the stat changes that get the math drunk

still, dehardcoded spells are a godsend for a lot of mods

looks at 160 custom spells for custom stat effects

could probably delete that with 8 for loops and dynamic spells

[hard haven]

i already made magicka cost reduction for my mbsp mod

so theres already a lot possible

[tame star]

wait is that mod yours?

the legend!

[hard haven]

i made a fork

[tame star]

hmmm

[hard haven]

managed to nail down the exact frame where the spell starts casting to 1-3 frames

so its possible to apply the refund before casting

xD

[tame star]

huh

animation keys?

[hard haven]

yeah

[tame star]

I used that for SUS

[hard haven]

animation keys for knowing when the player is not casting

[tame star]

albeit SUS does it after the cast key

[hard haven]

• stagger/silence check, and when the "use" key switches from false to true

[tame star]

that sounds like a lit of checking ._.

[hard haven]

yeah its hacky

otherwise hook the skill exp event and apply the code of your spell then

so idk, not sure if i'm gonna be impressed by the spell dehardcoding 😄

[tame star]

I used that one function

listen for spellcast, then do thing

the rest happens on the skill use handler yes

[hard haven]

yeah i did the same to store the spell

with "self start"

[tame star]

huh didn't realise that one was spell specific 👀

[hard haven]

groupname is spellcast

and key is self start or touch start etc

and -stop

[tame star]

aah

I was missing this yes

it was present, just in the habitual obscured way of cursed greyness mastertables

why do I do that to my code

[hard haven]

procedural programming wherever possible

but idk, i'm self-taught.. so ...

[tame star]

same here

pretty sure I'll move away from putting all my data on it's own file
that function would make more sense if SPELL_ANIMATION_KEYS was declared right above it

[hard haven]

maybe the crazy use of functions is good for large projects, possible with multiple devs

ah okay

[tame star]

it's good when you start getting lorge

[hard haven]

idk didnt see your entire code

[tame star]

personally whenever I get past 500 lines something has to give

I know I know, baby steps

[hard haven]

but some people split their mods into 20 functions

on 500 lines

[tame star]

is that a lot or a little?

[hard haven]

way too much

i'll usually do 3-5 functions maybe

[tame star]

sweats profusely

[hard haven]

either when i'm using something in multiple places or when the name is really self-explainatory

yeah idk maybe i'm doing it wrong

[tame star]

notice the low indentation? yeah it's all functions everywhere

[hard haven]

but i personally can't be bothered to read other people's code if its split up like that

[tame star]

tbf call me convinced
reading through that abomination was pain

and I remember what it does

so imagine if I didn't

[hard haven]

            dbg("fortify "..remStat.." ran out, +"..remMagnitude.." "..remStat)
            dynamic[remStat](self).current = math.max(1+remMagnitude,math.min(
                dynamic[remStat](self).base +remMagnitude,
                dynamic[remStat](self).current + remMagnitude * math.min(1, remDuration / 60 * playerSection:get("percentagePerMinute") / 100)
            ))
            Actor.activeSpells(self):remove(remId)
            bonuses[remStat] = bonuses[remStat] - remMagnitude
        else
            dbg("fortify "..remStat.." ran out, +"..remMagnitude.." "..remStat)
            dynamic[remStat](self).current = math.max(1+remMagnitude,math.min(
                dynamic[remStat](self).base + bonuses[remStat],
                dynamic[remStat](self).current + remMagnitude * math.min(1, remDuration / 60 * playerSection:get("percentagePerMinute") / 100)
            ))
            Actor.activeSpells(self):remove(remId)
            bonuses[remStat] = bonuses[remStat] - remMagnitude
        end```

there's one line different

but before i get a headache and turn this into a function and make it un-readable i'll just have most the code there twice

i can probably simplify some lines later

[tame star]

well that's not too bad
from a completely newb pov, abstracting there seems a 50/50 at best

[hard haven]

but i'll never make a "setstat(stat, min, min2)" function xD

ye its one line within a math.min thats different

not worth a seperate function

[tame star]

here's an example of what I'd consider ok use of functions

[hard haven]

and 3 lines that i have dublicate (due to development forth and backs)

are you sure this is openmw?

[tame star]

yes

[hard haven]

holy shit

[tame star]

it's on the nexus, you can run it on 0.49

Skill Uses Scaled

that's the scaler for all 3 armor skills

[hard haven]

why mui.getsetting() instead of playerSection:get()

[tame star]

there's a bunch of others for ~20 of the 27 skills

[tame star]

because that mod runs a lot of storage sections

I'm not sure it's actually necessary, I ended up doing that from following the examples and adding a bunch of settings groups

it has a lot of settings

[hard haven]

technically you just need one for each settings section plus one global and one player

[tame star]

then I need like 8 of them

abstracting meant future me doesn't really need to care about the specific names

[hard haven]

i think you can just get a reference to a table in one of your sections

[tame star]

I can have all the sections and treat them like a single monolith via getsetting

[hard haven]

not sure if its saved without saving explicitely

[tame star]

I think it wasn't? I ended up having it save kinda janky

[hard haven]

with each settings section i meant the global settings and the player settings

[tame star]

it's global and saves on you saving the game

as in, so long as you save on any save it's set for all saves

I'll be honest, settings are not my forte

sections still confuzzle me

[hard haven]

relatable

[tame star]

There's an example of magicka being deleted vvia fortify int and max MP on vanilla

1: raise INT
2: raise MP, overcapping
3: INT wears off, proportional scaling eats off a good chunk of the fortified MP
4: fortify MP wears off, deducting it's original amount despite a portion of it having been deleted in step 3

reversing the order of Fortify MP and Fortify INT results in the inverse

[hard haven]

yeah but its probably just something that really affects you if you actively exploit it

[tame star]

as INT amplifies the fortify effect

[tame star]

yup, just wanted to show you how it looks in practice

once you get how it works, it's arguably on the level of daisychaining potions, if done correctly
you could replicate it with 2 enchanted amulets, or with spells and a few restore potions

[hard haven]

i guess im gonna share that with my atronach sign friend

so he doesnt have to abuse his summoned creatures to regenerate magicka anymore

[tame star]

it doesn't look that impressive on that character, but remember, it's exponential :D

oh yeah it works with drain strats ._.

as it turns out, draining your INT down and then fortifying is a lot more effective

it multiplies the cap when int bounces back proportional to the current/max ratio

so 50/10 > 180/130

[hard haven]

hmm

maybe my mod even fixes that

because fortify would also buff the max value

[tame star]

ideally you'd want to drain down to 1 int

then stonks

[hard haven]

but i dont think i wanna apply it to fatigue and magicka

damn

now i see why you needed me xD

but if we're being real, is there any setup where a player might accidentally repeatedly run into this situation?

if he/she makes a spell with fortify int and fortify magicka?

or the other way around?

[tame star]

On vflex it doesn't happen, at least not ever in favour of the player
most comboes just return to base, and the ones that don't only vortex current MP into the void

and if I remember right, vortex is limited to reducing INT to 0 or having both fort/drain INT and Fort/drain MP on the same spell

[tame star]

basically yes

that's how I ran into it during testing

made a generic "fortify all kinds of magicka" testing spell, and hell broke loose

imo if you can get it so the effects work fine when triggered on separate spells, then it's good enough

adding a flavourful warning saying "don't put them in the same spell" is a lot better than "don't be affected by both at the same time"

the proverbial bug surface is a lot smaller if it's restricted to both on one spell

[hard haven]

actually you could put fortify int 100 twice on the same spell

which is the only thing you'd actually do if int is more effective than fortify magicka

[tame star]

I think that should cause no issues though? so long as no overcap is involved, stuff doesn't go wild

I mean, good chance your MP will get voided if current < max, but that's not game breaking

it's just a bit annoying

[tame star]

yup

[hard haven]

huh

i just tested it and it reduced my max int from 300 to 252

nvm i had increased my magicka via console before

the game really does what it wants xD

[tame star]

welcome to the rodeo!

I'll do a Nova Drift run, then come back for my own round

I'll be making the level UI box today

wish me luck, I'll need it ._.

[hard haven]

good luck 😄

[hard haven]

ended up with a fat warning not to uninstall the mod with the setting enabled...
found out that reloadlua triggers the onSave event

not doing fatigue and magicka though

[tame star]

Nice!

And yep onSave and onLoad are all funny with reloadlua
probably a plus when bughunting honestly
ideally you'd want reloadlua to be as close to restarting the game as humanly possible

[verbal remnant]

@hard haven Just an idea... Since I "discovered" that Fortify Health works completely different as a Spell Ability here: #1427867749870473287 message

You think Fortify Health used as an Spell Ability might solve the issue if you could get around writing a script that could handle the effect dynamically?

I just tested it with NCG running as well and it is not having any conflict. As NCG respect stat buffs that comes as an ability.

[gleaming pagoda]

lingenveneth

I've tinkered a bit with how I would prefer the sleep buff/debuffs to be. I think I like this combo I've come up with. Just sharing it here for anyone to criticize:

• All the Drain Attribute effects are completely negated by casting Restore Attribute or visiting a Temple Shrine/Cult Altar (Drain/Damage Attribute is only applied once).

• So I replaced Drain Agility with a Blind effect, which does mostly the same thing insofar as combat goes.
• Also added Sound to give a matching debuff for Magic classes. The sound effect is a problem however. So might have to skip this unless getting a sound effect replacer.

• Since I use NCG Fortify Endurance is not doing anything to give a little HP boost.

• Replaced Fortify Attributes with Fortify Health & Fortify Max Magicka
  (Fortify Health actually fortifies Maximum Health as an Ability lmao)

• Replaced Drain Fatigue with a negative Restore Fatigue.

• Regarding Drain Personality... I don't know a replacement. I thought about if setting a negative Charm on yourself would somehow give negative disposition to NPCs around you... but I doubt that works

Numbers I'm just testing with now (completely guesstimated but I think they are reasonable):

 - Fortify Health 12 pts
 - Fortify Max Magicka 0.4x
Rested
 - Fortify Health 6 pts
 - Fortify Max Magicka 0.2x
Awake
 - Fortify Health 3 pts
 - Fortify Max Magicka 0.1x
Drowsy
 - Restore Fatigue -1 pts
Tired
 - Restore Fatigue -2 pts
 - Sound 5 pts
 - Blind 5 pts
Exhausted
 - Restore Fatigue -3 pts
 - Sound 10 pts
 - Blind 10 pts```

Linked by @​lingenveneth from #Sun's Dusk: Needs & Survival · Jan 11, 2026, 1:52 AM

[verbal remnant]

I'll test if Fortify Fatigue works the same way...