Mod review: Carved Brink, revisited

My next playthrough post is going to be another one from Nona’s playthrough, and I am super behind on her in particular. I left off in the middle of running Carved Brink with her.

Y’all may recall that I put up a review post about that mod, as well. But here’s the thing: since I ran Carved Brink originally with Nona, I have since run it a few more times as Tuxborn has continued to develop its builds, and since I’ve been doing playtesting for Tuxborn, that by definition included re-running Carved Brink. This led me to discover some additional things about it that I’d missed the first time, and which honestly made me enjoy playing it more.

So at this point, I’m rather more kindly disposed to it than I was on the first playthrough. And I felt it was appropriate to put up an addendum to the original review.

Most of the commentary I gave in the original review still applies, and I’m not going to recap points where my opinion hasn’t changed. But I do have some additional stuff I like about Carved Brink, and which I want to note here.

Stuff I liked

Abamath Residential District

I had managed to miss, on my first playthrough of this mod, that the Abamath Residential District has a lot of stuff in it that rewards exploration. While I still feel like the narrative for Carved Brink is a mess, I want to freely grant that the Residential District’s emptied homes go a fair distance in filling in the backstory of the Snow Elves that succumbed to the plague.

Not quite as much as I’d have liked–for example, I don’t really have a good idea of how the Snow Elves got into Faceted Stones to begin with, or why they went in. “Because they were trying to avoid being wiped out by the Nords” strikes me as the obvious answer, but it would have been nice to actually find a history book or something that calls that out. Or a plaque, or a statue, or something.

But I did like that there were notes all over the place from long-dead citizens, that helped give the place more background detail and nuance. (Even if you still have to just roll with the idea of these people all leaving a boatload of conveniently placed notes for the player to find, however many countless years after they all died. Because adventure game, after all.)

And I liked the multi-level design of the place in general, as well as the huge rotating mechanism acting like a “sun” for the area in general. I wonder if these Snow Elves got that kind of idea from the Dwemer, or vice versa.

Since the place is a Residential District, it’s chock full of various houses that are similar in design to the wayshrines in the Forgotten Vale in Dawnguard. Including the part where they’re sunk down into the ground until you activate them, though in this case, it’s with a handle rather than a ghostly prelate casting a spell! Which raises an amusing question of Snow Elf customs about doors and privacy. Did these people put their houses in “down” mode to signify they’re not taking visitors? Or to secure them while they weren’t there? That had to be noisy, with houses going up and down all the time. 🤔

But more to the immediate point of a playthrough, all these houses are full of loot as well as backstory notes, so they’re worth exploring. And if you’re in need of a place to rest up, because you’re playing Survival Mode or if you need to sleep off the Death’s Grip nerf from Shades of Mortality, you’ll have a decent selection of places to do that. Other than the House of the Arcane Arts, this mod’s kinda thin on safe places to sleep. So I’d definitely recommend taking advantage of the beds in the Residential District, if you need them.

Auriel’s Forge and the Ancient Falmer armor

Auriel’s Forge is a major point of interest in the very bottom of the Residential District. And I discovered that this is the place where you can make Ancient Falmer Robes, Gloves, and Boots. This is, in fact, what you use the numerous Ancient Crystals lying around the mod for!

Once I learned about this gear, I had to try it out. And it does look pretty neat, if ornate and fancy is to your tastes:

I do actually kinda like the design, and since the character in the pic is in fact an Altmer, it’s very suitable for her. But I feel like you’d kinda have to ignore that this gear is in fact mostly white. All I can think of looking at it is how it’d get dirty AF adventuring around Skyrim. Unless you want to assume that mages have shielding spells to keep dirt off their robes!

Other crafting stations in the Residential District

The Residential District also, it turns out, includes an alchemy station and an enchanting station. Neither of these look like the vanilla Skyrim equivalents, though! So it’s a good idea to take a close look at everything in this area, so you can identify the stations properly when you find them.

Daedric shrine near Red Mountain

In one of my Tuxborn playtests, I was surprised to discover that there was a Daedric shrine in the Red Mountain area you visit, while trying to find a home for the Black Spears goblins. It’s a shrine to Sheogorath, I think?

It triggered a dremora boss for me to fight when I found it, and that in fact turned out to be the way to clear the zone. So that was a nice discovery.

I wound up marking that shrine as the place I wanted the goblins to settle in. You could argue that parking them at a shrine to Sheogorath may not be the wisest or kindest thing in the world, absolutely. But since the mod seemed to want me to park these goblins by Red Mountain, and ash spawn and other hostile critters keep running around out there, putting them somewhere with actual shelter from the elements seemed to balance that out a bit.

Also, there were interesting skeletons lying around the place, with a few bits of notes hinting at backstory. So I liked that bit, too.

Stuff I’m ambivalent about

Auriel’s Forge

You will note I cover Auriel’s Forge in two different parts of this post. And that’s because while I do like the Ancient Falmer gear set, it bugs me that Auriel’s Forge is not actually a fully functioning forge. Its purpose is to make that gear set and nothing else. So if you’re not actually interested in making it, but you want to make something else to prep for the latter stages of running this mod, you’re out of luck.

Also, if you do want to make the gear, you need not only the aforementioned Ancient Crystals, but also a bunch of moonstone and leather strips. The Corrupted items you get off of killing shades in Faceted Stones are a source of moonstone–but you can’t take advantage of that without a smelter. And there is no smelter anywhere in the Residential District.

In Tuxborn, this is less of a problem than it might be in other load orders, because we do have Legacy of the Dragonborn. And that means we have the Stash Supplies spell, so it’s very easy to get at any stock of ingots and leather you might have stored away. But you have to still have those materials stashed and ready, if you want to actually make this gear. And you won’t know that going in blind.

So I’d like Auriel’s Forge more if it were in fact a fully functioning forge. Or if it also included a smelter, at the very least.

All the various powders and paragons

Carved Brink is very generous with its powders and paragons, custom versions of potions and soul gems, respectively. You can find these things all over the place while running the mod. And I certainly can’t quibble with their usefulness.

I really do wish the mod offered at least a bit of background detail on why it chose to use powders in place of potions, and paragons in place of soul gems, though. Especially given that the Abamath Residential District explicitly has an enchanting station and an alchemy station, with notes lying around hinting at their former users! I could easily see some sort of journal talking about developing the various powders, or one talking about the research of making paragons out of soul gems, maybe if the creator was trying to extend soul gem research or something.

Even more, I wish the player could get access to make those powders! Maybe not the paragons, just because Skyrim doesn’t give the player any way of actually making soul gems. So if the paragons are an alternate version of a soul gem, I can’t quibble with not being able to make them.

But the powders would definitely fall into the category of Alchemy. And their entire idea still doesn’t really click with me, either. I don’t get the point of making them powders rather than potions, since you use them just like potions anyway. There’s nothing there besides the name of the object to distinguish them from standard Skyrim potions.

One answer that presents itself to me here is that maybe the Snow Elf alchemist that invented the powders had to come up with a way to do so without impacting the settlement’s water supply. Faceted Stones has a stunning visual design, not gonna lie, but one thing it’s lacking is obvious sources of fresh water. So I could easily see a Snow Elf alchemist inventing the powders just to give fellow citizens access to alchemical benefits, without necessarily having to involve water.

But that does also raise the question of, how did they ingest these powders? I’m imagining alchemical Pixy Sticks, now. 🤣

And again–this would have been great backstory to find in somebody’s journal lying around the place. I wish there would have been something like that!

The Magic Mirror

This is the other huge important thing you can find in the Abamath Residential District. The Magic Mirror basically gives you a free way to reset your appearance, just like you would with the Face Sculptor in Riften. (Haem Projects seems to be real big on giving the player ways to change their appearance, because there’s a way to do this in Project AHO, too.)

For the record, I don’t actually object to being handed a free way to rearrange my character look. But this is another thing I would really, really like to see explained, even if just in a journal lying around nearby, or an instruction book about how to use the thing, or what. If your mod is going to give you a big magic mirror that lets you change your entire appearance, in the middle of a dead Snow Elf settlement in a plane of Oblivion, I’m absolutely going to be asking questions about what it’s doing there. Whose magic was this? Was it a Snow Elf invention? Something they stole from the Dwemer? Some sort of Daedric artifact?

The player has no way to know, because the mod gives no explanation for it. It’s just “here, surprise Magic Mirror, have fun making yourself look completely different!”

In summary

I still have massive issues with this mod’s plot and how it goes out of its way to even mock the player a bit, for even asking questions about the plot and the surroundings and such.

But after playtesting it a couple more times for Tuxborn, I’ve decided I actually enjoy playing through it even though I think the plot is a complete mess. The loot is awfully generous.

And in Tuxborn in particular, if you run Carved Brink fairly early in the game, all those alchemical powders can be really useful. Since Tuxborn’s load order also includes the Simonrim Apothecary mod, all our standard potions have effects over time rather than immediately. But the powders all still operate on you immediately. And if you’re in the middle of a fight with something you that’s handing your ass and you need 200 points of health healed back right the fuck now, one of those Refined Powders of Health may in fact save your Dragonborn bacon.

So yeah, in a Tuxborn run, Carved Brink is worth running. I’ve gotten fond of running it right about the time I go talk to the Greybeards, since the Abandoned Grotto is roughly on the way.

I don’t know necessarily that I’d recommend including it in a non-Tuxborn Skyrim load order, just because of the major issues I have with its plot overall. I am not likely to include it in any non-Tuxborn load orders I’ll do in the future. But since Tuxborn does include it, sure why not, I’ll keep running it.

I’ve even written a full page for it on the Tuxborn wiki, so any Tuxborn players reading this, have a look at that wiki page for my tips about how to run this mod in a Tuxborn playthrough!