Wyrmstooth provides a new land to explore, full of its own stories.

Learn more about one of the largest adventure mods for Skyrim, and the process that went into its development.

With a new questline and tons of side content, there is so much to do in Wyrmstooth (PC, Xbox, Nexus). Creating all of this was no doubt and adventure itself, so we reached out to Jonx0r to talk about the mod, and how they handled such a large project.

Wyrmstooth contains a large new area, and a tremendous amount of content. Was the grand scale planned from the start?

Not really. I actually intended on just making a simple player home initially. But I was having a lot of fun with the Creation Kit so I decided to try and make something a bit larger instead.

Working alone at the time I tried to keep the scope of the main quest as reasonable as possible - something that could be feasibly completed within a year. The primary goal was to have at least 3 hours of content in the main quest that players would find challenging but also enjoyable. The decision to incorporate a large sprawling dungeon was inspired by the dungeon from the Mehrunes Razor DLC for Oblivion.

Once the first version was released, additional side quests and new locations were added. I’m currently working with the project’s composer, Leon van der Stadt, to remaster and re-record the voice acting.

Do you have a favorite character, location, and quests?

It’s hard to pick a favourite character. I think Alberthor is probably one of the most memorable NPCs players will encounter because of his absurd spell that lets the player control a draugr to find a switch on the other side of a locked gate. If players follow clues left in journals scattered around the island they may be able to find a secret hagraven that has a rather, erm, memorable request for the player.

My favourite location is probably Dead Ship Point, on the northern tip of the main island. It’s the resting place of old broken ships that have been plundered over the years by the marauders. I placed a chair there for players to stare wistfully over the ocean as the fog slowly rolls by.

Someone With Backbone is probably my favourite quest. I always go back and tweak Vulom’s combat mechanics every couple of versions to try and make him even harder to deal with.

How did you go about designing the encounters with Vulthurkrah, the primary antagonist?

When I planned the main quest, I wanted a dragon as the primary antagonist. They are sentient creatures, so I figure some of them must have actual plans of their own beyond flying around causing random acts of property damage.

I wanted the player to encounter Vulthurkrah face-to-face first and Ancient’s Ascent seemed like a great location for it. In more recent versions of Wyrmstooth, the player will be shouted down to the ground first by a Dragonborn-rend shout before the dragon goads the player into pursuing him to Wyrmstooth to do battle.

The difficulty in designing a direct encounter like this is accounting for the player’s level and the shouts they’ve already accrued. For example, it would be fairly easy for a high level Dragonborn to simply use Dragonrend to incapacitate and slay Vulthurkrah then and there.

The trap laid out by the dragon is the barrow on Wyrmstooth itself. As players approach the dragon’s lair, they’ll encounter the bodies of slain adventurers and mercenaries that were also drawn to the island that Vulthurkrah reanimates to try and overwhelm the Dragonborn.

When designing new areas, did you typically begin with the location itself, the quest(s), or something else?

I find it easier to create a new quest and write dialogue for it if the locations involved are already somewhat developed. It helps to know, for example, how long it’ll take players to get from one objective to another as that may influence what key points of a quest I may need to reiterate through dialogue.

When designing a new location, typically I start with some concept work, whether that’s some sort of a layout diagram or even just a list of key features that I think would be interesting. In the Creation Kit, I begin blocking out a new location starting with the biggest objects first.

For the design of the island, I just sculpted it by hand using the landscape edit tool and hand-placed every object rather than rely on region-based object generation. There are utilities such as TESAnnwyn that can be used to import height-maps from programs like World Machine and World Creator but I found it easier to manage the scale of the island by just using the cell border overlay and doing everything by hand in the Creation Kit instead.

Any suggestions for folks considering large projects of their own?

The scope of the project is absolutely the most important consideration.

I’ve read a lot of project pitches on various forums that seem incredibly ambitious, coming from people that don’t have many hours in the Creation Kit. Making a new lands mod with its own quest line requires an incredible amount of work and I fear a lot of these modders are going to end up burning themselves out pretty quickly with nothing to show for it.

So I would say, start small. Maybe instead of trying to create an entire continent’s worth of content at once, reduce the scope to a fraction of that and focus on crafting an engaging storyline with memorable characters as the most important thing. Then build on that accomplishment by collaborating with others.

What is your favorite part of modding?

Not navmeshing. That part is horrible.

But jokes aside, I think finally having everything come together and seeing other players interact with the storylines and the environments that I’ve spent so much time crafting is the best part of modding.

I enjoy watching people play through the mod on YouTube and Twitch. It also helps me identify potential issues and shortfalls that could be worked on in future updates.

Any mods you'd like to recommend? (Other than your own. It’s also fine to list authors instead of specific mods. I’ll provide links to any Bethesda.net and Nexus pages.)

I’d like to suggest people check out The Forgotten City (PC, Xbox, Nexus) by fellow Aussie modder Nick Pearce. Players looking for a well-written, open-ended storyline with multiple endings will definitely enjoy it. The mod author spent the past couple years re-envisioning it into its own standalone game which I think people should definitely check out as well.