Now that you understand how Encounter Zones, Leveled Actor Multipliers, and Leveled Lists work, I can explain what I’ve done in Arena.
#SKYRIM ENCOUNTER ZONES MOD MOD#
This point is misunderstood by many-including authors of popular Encounter Zone mods-but it is critical to understanding what an Encounter Zone mod actually does.
You can use a different mod to add new enemies to the Leveled List, but an Encounter Zone mod by itself cannot do this. This means that each enemy type has a natural ceiling for how high it can scale, and that ceiling is determined by the enemies in the game’s Leveled Lists. Changing those will change what enemies the game spawns, but it will not add new enemies to the game. The game decides which enemies to pull from the Leveled List based on the rules set in the Encounter Zone and the Leveled Actor Multipliers. The important thing to understand here is that the Leveled List stops with the Draugr Deathlord at level 40.
The Leveled List for a Draugr spawn might include a Draugr at level 1, a Restless Draugr at level 6, a Draugr Wight at level 13, a Draugr Scourge at level 21, and so on and so forth. In this context, they are lists of enemies. Leveled Lists are used for many things through the game.
For instance, the "easy" multiplier takes any enemy up to or below its chosen enemy, and the "very hard" multiplier will always pick the next enemy up from "hard," even if it has to go higher than the multiplier would normally allow.Īs its name suggests, a Leveled List is a list of entries broken down by level. In addition, some Leveled Actor Multipliers follow specific rules. The Leveled Actor Multiplier is what populates the dungeon with enemies of different levels, providing the player with a more varied experience. The boss, on the other hand, will be a level 7 Draugr Overlord, because he is flagged as a “very hard” enemy, and thus will be higher level than the rest of the dungeon. A few enemies would be level 6 Restless Draugr, because these spawns are flagged as "hard" enemies. This is because most spawns are flagged as “easy” enemies. When you walk into the dungeon, even though it’s level 6, almost every enemy would be level a 1 Draugr. In our earlier example, we said that if you entered Bleak Falls Barrow at level 2, the dungeon would be set to level 6. Without these four multipliers, dungeons would be filled with the same type of enemy. There are actually four different Leveled Actor Multipliers: one for “easy” enemies, one for “normal” enemies, one for “hard enemies,” and one for “very hard” enemies. The Leveled Actor Multiplier is a second set of rules that determine how the game will populate a dungeon. This is controlled by the Leveled Actor Multiplier. Once the game determines what level the dungeon is, it can begin populating the dungeon with enemies. And if you enter Bleak Falls Barrow at level 35, the dungeon will be set to 20. If you enter Bleak Falls Barrow at level 15, it will be set to level 15.
This means that if you enter Bleak Falls Barrow at level 2, the dungeon will be set to level 6. When you enter a dungeon for the first time, the game will dynamically set the level of the dungeon as close as it can to your level, within the range provided by the Encounter Zone. The Encounter Zone that controls Bleak Falls Barrow, for instance, has range of 6 to 20. This approach allows Arena to provide players with a more robust sense of progression while retaining the freedom and independence of an open world game.Įncounter Zones are unfortunately a bit technical, so to explain what Arena does, we need to explain how the game populates its dungeons.Īn Encounter Zone is essentially a set of rules that allow the game to determine what enemies it will populate a dungeon with. This encourages the players to make judgments about the difficulty of an encounter based on experience and intuition, rather than consulting a complex chart on a mod page. Arena is a complete overhaul of Skyrim’s encounter zones designed to increase the game’s difficulty and provide an organic sense of progression. It is designed to further the sense of progression in the game by tiering dungeons according to enemy type.