State of the 'Rim - July 2021

Hey everyone,

I wanted to update you on my progress for the last month. It’s been a few months since I wrote one of these, so sorry about that!

In June of 2021, I released Adamant 5, which was a massive overhaul of one of my most important projects. As far as I can tell, it was really well received. I’m super happy with the direction that Adamant 5 has taken things, and I’m already thinking about how I can make further improvements in 5.1 and maybe 5.2.

Within about 8 hours of releasing Adamant 5, I started working on Mysticism 2. I haven’t been able to focus my full attention on it yet, because of the family crises that I mentioned before, and because of a few summer courses that I’ve been working on. However, I’ve made good progress with the time that I had.

If you think back to the March 2021 State of the ‘Rim, you’ll remember that Alteration, Restoration, and Illusion had already finished their first pass. Destruction was close to being done with its first pass, and Conjuration hadn’t really been touched yet. I’ve already completed the second pass on Illusion, meaning that I consider Illusion to be release-ready, except for one final pass to catch errors like typos. This includes staves and scrolls for every effect.

Alteration will be my next project, and I hope to have it done by the end of the week, before the 9th, because that’s when my wife and I will be going on vacation. When I come back, I’ll tackle Restoration, Destruction, and then finally Conjuration. I don’t expect either Restoration or Destruction to take very long, though I have to admit I find it difficult to judge how long Conjuration will take. I’ll probably do something similar to what I did w/ Adamant 5, where I start to make plans for a Mysticism 2.1, as a way of pushing a few peripheral features off til “sometime later” while still getting the large majority of my goals for the update finished in time.

My current plan is to release Mysticism 2 on August 9th. That will give me several weeks left in the summer to work on my collaborative project with Pierre, which we're calling Pilgrim - A Religion Overhaul. I want to get Pilgrim released in late August or early September. However, if I feel like I’m not going to be able to hit the Mysticism release date, I might break it off early to ensure that I can release Pilgrim before the end of the summer, because I’m really, really excited about that mod, and I think it will be a great way to end the summer. 

Speaking of other mods, my friend DeltaRider and I will be releasing our alchemy overhaul later this week. This is the first of a series of collaborative releases that we’ll be doing--later projects will include our friend Hypebringer--and we’re super excited to share it with you! Skyrim has needed an interesting alchemy overhaul that respected the user’s time and load order for a while now, and I hope that you all enjoy playing with Apothecary as much as we’ve enjoyed making it!