SCS introduce additional creatures/items in the Improved X components which came way too late to apply gameplay rule tweaks.

[Graion Dilach]

In most of the cases, SCS comes after tweakmods (with the sole exclusion being aTweaks, which also violates this mindset with it's PnP mob components but those can be installed early).

This leads to inconsistent gameplay, because other content mods might need to go over these resources as part of the standardized rule components (EET_Tweaks's creature XP tweaks, kitmods relying on op319 updating item useability in the EEs).

A solution would be to introduce an explicit component to install all these "improved" items/creatures early without the dependency of component 5900 and then allow install orders to split SCS to ensure everything gets updated consistently by the time 5900 is installed.

Another option would be taht instead of copying static files to override, SCS would try to dynamically create the resources, but I think the first one would be more reliable.

Note that BuTcHeRy already does this split for SCS compatibility now in 8.0.0.

Edited July 19, 2022 by Graion Dilach

[DavidW]

Excluding the IWD spell system, SCS creates very few creatures and items from whole cloth - maybe a dozen .cre files (mostly dragons and kobolds) and only two items that I can think of (the yellow dragon scale armor and Anadramatis's amulet). I think it's overkill to rearrange the architecture of the whole mod to do that, something that would be a lot of work, inevitably lead to bugs, and make the component presentation order less intuitive and logical for people not using SCS as part of a huge megamod.

I'm amenable to specific checks if there are particular issues here, e.g. I don't mind cloning XP values from existing creatures, and I will probably move towards building the yellow dragon scale armor from an existing resource rather than copying it in direct. But I don't think I'm willing to make these systematic architecture changes.

[Graion Dilach]

The DSotSC component also throws in the Nome Stikka (dw#kob01.itm) and the Poisoned arrows (dw#kob02.itm), FYI.

[DavidW]

Good point. (That component has a large fraction of the copied items, which reflects its ancient heritage as borrowed from Dark Side of the Sword Coast.)