Reserved Magicka NG

Reserved Magicka NG adds a cost to wearing powerful enchantments in Skyrim: part of the player’s magicka is reserved while the equipment is worn. The balance problem came from combining Jewelry Limiter with Simply Balanced, where a character could accumulate strong enchantment bonuses. Reservation gives those bonuses a resource tradeoff.

The mod was released in 2023. Its native SKSE plugin handles equipment changes and reservation calculations, with configuration and Papyrus integration supplied by the surrounding mod. The release page provides the distribution and installation details.

Turning enchantment strength into a cost

The equipment handler considers the player’s armor items, including enchantments on the base item and enchantments stored in its extra inventory data. It calculates a magnitude contribution from the relevant effects and averages those magnitudes per item.

Effect magnitudes need a policy before they can be combined. Fortify Magicka is excluded from this calculation, while Regenerate Magicka receives a scaling factor. Other effects contribute their magnitudes. These choices define what the reservation mechanic charges for; they are part of its balance model.

A configured magicka-per-magnitude value converts that result into a reservation. Enchanting skill reduces the cost using another configurable factor, with the reduction capped at the full cost. Equipping adds an item’s contribution and unequipping subtracts it. The plugin reapplies the reservation spell after updating the aggregate, and requests that an item be unequipped when its calculated cost exceeds available magicka.

Equipment events are only part of the state

An event-driven total cannot assume it has observed the entire history of a character’s equipment. Loading a save begins with items already worn. New-game and post-load handling therefore reset the aggregate and rebuild it by walking the player’s worn inventory.

Papyrus can request that same recalculation through CalculateReserved. Both the event path and the rebuild path use the item-handling logic, keeping the magnitude calculation in one place. The rebuild is the bridge between incremental equipment changes and an existing saved state.

The plugin and the complete mod

The C++ code looks up the reservation spell and ERM configuration globals by their editor IDs. Those records are dependencies of the mechanic: compiling a DLL alone does not supply them. The release also has configuration controls and Papyrus material that belong to the complete mod distribution.

The native project derives from a CommonLibSSE sample-plugin template. That scaffolding supplies part of the logging, loading, and build setup; the custom equipment and reservation behavior is the work described here. The retained sample README and test files should not be read as tests of the reservation mechanic.

The source includes a CommonLibSSE-NG dependency update associated with VR support, but a fresh game compatibility matrix has not been reproduced. Native rebuilding also needs the CommonLibSSE/SKSE toolchain and matching mod data. Use the release page for the original package’s requirements; this overview makes no additional compatibility promise.