SPAWN mod for Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion

One fine day, you decide you've had enough of women, crappy face textures and annoying fans, and make plans to do some honest dungeon crawling. A couple of days later, you find yourself at the entrance of Hame. On entering, you spot a battered journal on a step in the stairwell. You take a look at its entries - One particularly intrigues you.

Day 174: Killed a behemoth of a Lich back at Hame. It was a tough fight but I got to kill the creature. Only wish I got something better than ectoplasm out of it! The damned thing didn't even yield its staff.The rest of the loot isn't better off either. Then again, I didn't expect anything more for most of the place was empty. The only saving grace was the sparse bandit population. I can only hope I get a good price for the loot. This place better be filled with vampires the next time I visit.

You read on ...

Day 175: Blast! As empty as a hermit's address book. And I was told that Tamriel had enough vermin to fill every nook and cranny you may find.

Day 176: I'm going to kill the scum that said it. Mouthing off like that ...

You flip through the following pages, for they have similar entries (with the swearing increasing progressively). Then you end up with the following entries:

Day 212: Finally some progress ! I am starting to hear familiar noises from within the ruin. I believe it's time I gave that overrated ghost a visit.

Day 213'ish: By Sithis' floppily doppilies ! It gave me a healing potion ...

Enough ! , you say. You swiftly exit Oblivion, start Wrye Bash and activate SPAWN.esp ...

I sincerely hope you haven't experienced such pain and suffering in your game.

In any case, Simple Place-centric Augmentative respaWNs ( or SPAWN ) aims to improve Oblivion's respawn mechanism. As the name suggests, it allows place-centric respawn times for cells of different types. So, aylied ruins and forts can have different respawn times. And the best part is that the mod is completely independent of the global respawn time. SPAWN, therefore, ensures compatibility with mods that change it ( like Less Predictable Respawn ).

SPAWN tracks the cells the player visits and their corresponding "Last Visit Time". After leaving a particular cell, SPAWN records the time and tags it with a respawn timestamp. The list of visited cells is evaluated in intervals; when time passed since the player's last visit is calculated for each cell and compared with the cell's respawn timestamp. If time passed exceeds the timestamp, the cell is reset. Respawn timestamps are calculated randomly when the PC leaves a cell. The range of the timestamp can be defined in the SPAWN INI file. The different cell types that are supported:

• Caves

• Oblivion Caves
• SI Root Caves

• Mines
• Forts
• Aylied Ruins
• Sewers
• Castles
• Oblivion Citadels
• Houses
• Cellars / Basements
• Villages / Settlements
• Towns
• Forests
• Player Owned Cells

SPAWN optionally allows one time visits to cells, meaning revisiting cells will not reset their last visit/respawn timestamps. This feature is particularly useful when it comes to player-owned houses. Without this feature, gardens do not respawn unless the player stays away from the house for the whole duration of the global respawn time - This may be a nuisance if you frequent your place for supplies.

Cells can have custom respawn times as well ! If you are a mod maker and wish to use a particular respawn time range for one of your cells, all you need to do is place a persistent activator in it. The activator's script should then have the following variables defined and initialized in it:

• sSPAWNRespawnTimeMin
• sSPAWNRespawnTimeMax

Values should be similar to those declared in the INI file. If set up properly, SPAWN will automatically use the custom values and generate a respawn time within its range. A custom respawn time overrides any locally defined ones. The priority would therefore be:

Currently, the mod only works with interior cells. Handling for exterior cells requires new functions from OBSE; which will hopefully be added in OBSE v18.