Editing Talk:Enchantment (section)

== Ench Amount ==

This field is unused. It's a development leftover from Daggerfall, Morrowind, and possibly Oblivion. In order to understand what this field is (or rather, used to be), it's important to understand a major difference in how player-made enchantments work pre- and post-Skyrim.

In Skyrim, you must acquire items that have predefined enchantments, and then "disenchant" them, destroying the items in order to "learn" the enchantments. Once you've learned an enchantment, you can apply that enchantment to new items, adjusting the enchantment's strength as desired in order to strike your preferred balance between power and charge (i.e. your item's "battery life"). Under the hood, the game creates a copy of the predefined Enchantment form that your character has learned, strips off all the Enchantment-side effect conditions, scales the effect magnitudes, and writes the new Enchantment form directly into your save file before then applying it to your item.

Prior to Skyrim, disenchantment didn't exist, and you couldn't "learn" enchantments as such. Rather, you learned Magic Effects (which were basically hardcoded into the game engine) by learning any spells which contained them; and then you could combine arbitrary Magic Effects to create brand-new enchantments. Under the hood, custom enchantments worked quite similarly to Skyrim: the game would create a new Enchantment form, assign your desired settings to it, and store that form in your save file.

Where this now-unused Charge field comes into the picture is how enchantments worked from a game design perspective.

From what I can dig up, in Daggerfall, the game's hardcoded base items could define a maximum magicka charge capacity, and this limited what enchantments the player could create and apply to the items: if a desired magic effect (or combination thereof) had too high a magicka cost, and a desired item had too low a charge capacity, then the player couldn't apply that enchantment to that item. Separately from this, there existed predefined enchantment items (imagine if ENCH and WEAP were smushed into one form type) which could define their available magicka charge.

The basic rules of this system continued into Morrowind. Enchantable items still define a maximum charge capacity, which limits what effects you can enchant them with. However, predefined enchantments exist as their own forms, which can be used on (potentially multiple) weapon and armor forms, and those enchantments also define a charge amount. Once an item has been given an enchantment (whether predefined or player-made), the enchantment's charge value determines the item's maximum charge. If you take an item that initially has 80 charge capacity, and give it an enchantment with 20 charge, then its capacity drops to 20: you can't use Soul Gems to recharge it to 80 and have "400% battery life." (I'm basing this paragraph on a look at OpenMW source code.)

In Skyrim, however, an item's charge is computed directly from the enchantment's Magicka cost (prior to any adjustments the player has made to the enchantment's strength). The charge value on Enchantment forms is unused. The charge value on Armor and Weapon forms determines the maximum charge of an item with a predefined enchantment. When the player creates a new enchanted item, the current and maximum charge are both stored within the data for that individual item (the former on ExtraCharge and the latter on ExtraEnchantment).

[[User:DavidJCobb|DavidJCobb]] ([[User talk:DavidJCobb|talk]]) 01:00, 9 June 2025 (EDT)