4661

I love the music in Skyrim. It seems to take a page from the FO3/New Vegas style, but pairs that with a lush, analog, orchestral/choral sound. I prefer it to Oblivion’s tunes by… a lot.

4662

It runs now I’ve copied back my modified inis. I guess it didn’t originally because the Ugrids setting would have been set back to the default which I think breaks savegame compatibility.

Paul - I had the LAA tweak and have not done anything to it. Or do you think the patch has turned this off?

4663

Play a Zynga game before loading Skyrim?

4664

Since it replaces the EXE, yes.

4665

This. I realized last night that probably 30 or 40 pounds of what I’m currently carrying around are actually potions. But everytime I think about storing or selling them, I end up unwilling to part with them in case the next adventure is the one where I’ll need that potion of lockpicking or some magicka recharge even though I almost never cast spells.

As noted, they are worth it for the pack mule alone. But I’ve had good luck with the three melee oriented ones I’ve tried so far. If you give them good gear they can really help out, particularly when you are facing multiple enemies.

sex/gender spoiler

Actually, you can marry either gender in this game and there is a very long list of potential marriage partners. But like the companions, the whole thing is very shallow/simplistic in comparison to Bioware. Which is not necessarily a bad thing, IMHO.

4666

Quick question, since you’re running a system about the same as mine (though I’m on XP, E6850 dual core, 3gb RAM, GeForce GTX 460), do you get intermittent pauses during the game? About 3-5 seconds, usually compounded when running quickly through the outside world?

4667

Ok call me a noob but CAN you give gear to your companion or just weapons? I do upgrade my little Lydia’s weapons whenever I can, and I assume she chooses the one with the best stats if she is carrying others for me?

BUT I have never seen an option to upgrade her armor…can I do that?

4668

Yup, just give her armor and if it’s better she’ll wear it.

Here’s my companion in a shiny new suit of orcish armor:

4669

Just give it to her. She’ll wear it if it’s better.

You can give them anything you want, just talk to her and tell her you want to trade or whatever the option is.

4670

Yes, you can give her new armor.

Unfortunately, companions only look at the base stats of things when determining if it’s “better.” Lydia will choose a 34 Armor Steel Shield over a 31 Armor Elven Shield of 40% Frost Resist. Likewise, even if a fire enchant turns a sword from 18 damage into 28 damage per hit, she’ll go with a 20 damage axe instead.

Also, I gave her a necklace of +20% sneaking, and it seems to work. She’ll also wear a ring.

I tried to cheat the system by removing all items from her inventory, forcing her to be naked and perhaps use exactly what I give her, but NPCs seem to have a hard-coded base set of items that they will always use if their inventory changes… this is probably to make it impossible to just get rid of someone’s inventory via pickpocketing.

4671

Hey wait a minute, you can do that?!? Is that a spell or a perk? If it’s a perk I presume it’s a fairly advanced one and I don’t have perks to spare on magic (on my whack-a-mole character)

4672

It’s actually a fairly easy apprentice level spell.

4673

It’s an alteration spell: Transmute. Turns iron into silver and silver into gold. (And it will always do silver into gold first if there’s any silver to transmute, so you can’t have more than one silver ore on you at a time. No silver ingots.)

4674

Excellent. Does it work with any material? Could this be the end of my fruitless search for ebony ore/ingots?

edit: okay, nevermind

4675

And it’s absolutely retarded because you have to physically drop that silver if you wanted to use that to make something.

Then again, if you’re just leveling smithing, might as well do it on gold jewelery.

4676

As others have mentioned, that patch didn’t do anything to my ini files but it makes the LAA patch useless. That patch must have been what was preventing random CTDs on my system, as the game is unstable as hell now.

For the first time ever, I hate Steam.

4677

just don’t run it from steam and run tesv.exe directly.

4678

Yep, same here. I’d be wealthy if I didn’t just click five times whenever I can.

4679

can’t you repatch with LAA?

4680

Nope. That’s what causes the problems. When you apply the LAA patch to the new exe the game won’t even launch.