Effect Item

Spells, Enchantments, Potions, and Scrolls all have an Effects List, which is made up of a series of Effect Items. Double click an entry in the Effects List to open the selected Effect Item and edit its details.

Effect Item Dialog

The Effect Item Form consists of:

• Casting Type and Delivery are determined by the parent object's settings. These restrict the type of Magic Effect you can select.
• Effect: The Effect Item's Magic Effect.
• Magnitude: When applicable, the 'strength' of the effect.
• Area: When applicable, the radius of the effect in feet.
• Duration: When applicable, the duration of the effect. Duration is never applied to Constant Effects.
  • Based on these values and the properties of the Magic Effect, the other values in this section will be automatically calculated.
• Conditions: The effect will only function if these conditions are true. The conditions are run on the target of the effect, so Subject is the the target of the effect and Target is the actor who brought this effect on someone. Note that excessive conditions can cause performance issues.

Notes

• If a spell has an Area, then it will never affect the caster, and it will always affect nearby actors within the area. This occurs even if the Delivery type is Self, as in that case, the spell is an AoE centered on the caster rather than a spell applied to the caster.
• Conditions are not acted upon until they are all checked. If a magic effect's conditions return false, the effect will not be deactivated until all other effects from the same spell have been checked.
  • Consider a spell whose first magic effect applies a perk to the subject by way of Perk to Apply, and whose second magic effect tests for that very perk. When conditions are checked, if the first magic effect's conditions fail, it will be queued to deactivate, but it will still be active (and the perk will therefore still be applied) when the second magic effect's conditions are checked next. Once all effects in the spell are checked, the first effect will then deactivate, and its perk will be removed.
• If a magic effect is active for a long enough time, it will stop updating both its conditions and its elapsed time. Among other things, this means that it is impossible to make a long-lasting temporary effect on the order of multiple days: due to this bug, the elapsed time will stop updating before the duration is reached, making the effect endless outside of specific circumstances.
• There appears to be an effective limit of 15 Effect Items to an Effects List. If more than 15 effects are attached to a single spell, enchantment, potion, or scroll, the 16th effect onwards may fail to apply regardless of whatever conditions for its application return true.

When conditions are checked

There are three main rules for when conditions are checked:

• The conditions defined on a Magic Effect are checked when the game attempts to (re)apply the Magic Effect. If these conditions pass, then an Active Effect is applied.
• The conditions defined on an Effect Item (i.e. on a Spell) are checked once when an Active Effect is successfully applied, and then at one-second intervals while the Active Effect's elapsed time is advancing. The result of the last Effect Item condition check will determine whether the Active Effect is, um, active. (An inactive Active Effect still exists and will be detected by HasMagicEffect and friends, but won't do anything.)
• Reapplying an already-active Magic Effect resets the existing Active Effect's elapsed time (effectively restarting the effect's timer), but doesn't appear to reset other state (e.g. visual effects). The game relies on the elapsed time to know when to re-check the Effect Item conditions, so if the elapsed time is being reset very frequently, then the Effect Item conditions won't be re-checked.

Spells and effects that use the "Concentration" delivery type behave differently, but mainly just as a consequence of that third bullet point. When a Concentration/Aimed spell's projectile hits a target, the projectile will attempt to (re)apply the Magic Effect. If a bunch of individual flame projectiles are repeatedly hitting a target and applying their effect, then the Active Effect's elapsed time will never advance, preventing the Effect Item conditions from applying. The result is that the Magic Effect conditions are re-run with each hit; the Effect Item conditions only run on the first time the Magic Effect conditions match, and then they won't run again until the Magic Effect conditions no longer match; at that point, the Effect Item conditions will be checked every second until the effect's duration expires.

Concentration/Aimed spells that are cast by a Cloak-archetype Active Effect will behave similarly. The main difference is the rate at which the Concentration effect is (potentially) (re)applied: the fDefaultRelaunchInterval game setting defaults to 0.25 seconds, so typical projectiles will strike a target roughly four times per second, while the [General]fCloakEffectUpdateInterval INI setting in Skyrim.ini defaults to 0.5 seconds, so a Cloak effect will auto-cast its spell on nearby actors twice per second. If the rate is faster than the fActiveEffectConditionUpdateInterval game setting, then Effect Item conditions will be deferred for as long as the Magic Effect is being reapplied to the target.

Concentration/Self spells and effects seem to behave as though the caster were always being hit, and additionally seem to be treated as always having a zero duration; so these spells and effects are only active while the spell is being cast.

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