Mod Spotlight & Interview - The Blades Mansion

In today's Mod Spotlight we will be featuring "The Blades Mansion", a mod created by SgtFlexxx, who kindly agreed to participate in our interview as well.

This mod will give you access to a huge mansion, located at the Sky Haven Temple. The mansion has been in the possession of the Blades for generations, now that you are the Dragonborn it will be yours!

Once inside you'll find the main hall, containing a dining table, doors to various smaller rooms and a throne at the end. You will even get your own guards, walking around to protect the place. These guards are not the only people residing in your home. Besides them a few traders are at your service, who will buy and sell supplies, such as magic goods, jewellery and more.

As previously mentioned the mansion holds a number of rooms that serve a certain purpose, of which a few are shown on the image above. Crafting facilities are situated in their own room, where you can also store your crafting materials in the corresponding chests. A large bedroom is available as well, containing a bed, two big chests placed next to it and a closet. Surprisingly the closet actually serves as an entrance to a hidden cave, though there is not much to see there unfortunately.

Last but certainly not least a sizeable display room is at your disposal, here you can show off all your precious weapons and armour using the many mannequins and display cases.

Find out more about the creation process of this mod in the interview below.

What was your inspiration for creating this mod?
Well, my inspiration for the mod was just seeing all of these player created homes. One that I liked most of all was Dovahkiin Hideout.

How much time went into developing it?
I've been working on the mod every now and then. Sometimes I get stumped on what to do. I like to take a lot of suggestions from the community and I'm expecting to get everyone's suggestions (mostly) about what to put into it.

What kind of problems did you come across while working on your mod, if any?
The only problem I actually got when I was creating the mod was creating all the blades and allowing them to follow each other, but it was eventually fixed with the help of Mill3rb0y on youtube.

How was your experience working with the Creation Kit?
My experience with the Creation Kit was pretty easy and fun to see it work. I just had a few bugs in game that wouldn't show up in the creation kit.

What did you enjoy most about the creation process of your mod?
The thing I enjoyed the most was allowing the group of ranked blades to follow each other, and creating their own faction so they helped each other instead of just running away and not helping (stupid whiterun guards, lol)

Are you planning to add more features to your mod?
I'm still planning on adding much more to the mod, seeing that I created 5 floors, I have plenty of space for more things to add in, and looking for suggestions from the community.

Could you tell us about any other mods you currently have in progress?
Currently, I'm not working on any other mods right now, but I may work on some in the future.

Do you have any advice for others who would like to start modding?
If you would like to start modding, I would suggest to go to Creationkit.com for tutorials. You can also find many creation kit tutorials on youtube.com. Also, check out MILL3RB0Y's channel if you will, he helped me a lot.

 Thanks to SgtFlexxx for creating this mod and for participating in the interview.

Skyrim Getting Kinect Support

Bethesda announced today that the XBOX 360 version of Skyrim will get support for Kinect soon. The update is to be released this month and will be available for free. Kinect integration will make it possible to use voice commmands for numerous features, including dragon shouts, all menus and more. Check out the video below to see it in action!

Additionally Bethesda is also working on the first set of add-ons that will contain new quests, locations, features and more. These add-ons will be exclusive to the XBOX 360, "before it’s available anywhere else". More details regarding new content will be available later.

Original announcement on Bethesda's official blog