It is basically a very lightweight mod that will increase the Pickpocket cap as you gain in Pickpocket skill. Now if you don’t understand what the Pickpocket cap is, I will be talking about it later on, but for now I just want to focus on what the mod actually does. You will start the game with a new character like Khajiit names and Nightborne names with the cap being 90% as it is in the vanilla game, but as you gain Pickpocket skill, that cap will slowly rise.
So for example: I currently have Pickpocket 30 and if I look at his – oh, I’ve already… Excuse me. “Hello, have I robbed you?” No. Okay.As you can see, there is a 92% chance of robbing her of various items. That is because the cap is now 92%. But with a Pickpocket skill of 46, my cap is 93%, it’s gone up by 1%. And it really is that simple. You will start off at 90% as a cap, when you get to 20 skill in Pickpocket, that will go to 91%, 30 skill 92%, 40 skill 93%, and so on.
Those are the default values and it goes all the way up to 99% at a skill of 100. If you are using a skill uncapper, you will get 100% at 110 skill. It just continues like that. Obviously there is no cap over 100%, it’s completely pointless. As you can see, there is an MCM and it allows you to configure the mod, there it is – Artful Dodger. It will tell you the current Pickpocket cap that you have, but it also allows you to change what the cap will be at the extreme ranges.
The default is at 0, you will have a cap of 89%. Now pretty much every character starts off with some Pickpocket skill around about 15, so the effective cap when you start will be 90%. And as you can see I’ve got this set so that at 100 skill, it’s 99%. I can actually change this, and make it 100%, if you want to become a master thief, totally and utterly undetectable, once you get to 100 skill. You can also change the 0 level. If I bump that to 94%, this will probably mean at the start you’ll have a cap of about 95% and it will slowly increase to 100% as you progress.
You can also go the other way, if you want, you could have a hardcore playthrough, and have a cap of 50% when you start the game. This would mean no matter what you’re stealing, even if it’s quite low value, there’s a good chance you’re going to get caught. You could change this to say 95%, so eventually you’ll be pretty good. It really is completely up to you. And yes, you can actually decide that you want the cap to be a very specific number for the entire playthrough if you want.
Let’s just say you’ve decided you want 98%, you can change it as you saw there, the maximum adjusted accordingly and you will have a cap of 98%. And that will of course not change. Now you do not need SkyUI to use this mod, only to change the default value. So if you’re happy with a cap from 90% to 99%, you don’t need the MCM, but you will need SKSE64, the mod does require it. Of course this means this mod will not be making its way to console. I’m sorry about that.
Oh and this is a very lightweight mod, I mean really lightweight. It only activates when you gain in Pickpocket skill or when you change something in the MCM and even then, it’s a very, very quick command that just updates the cap. This should have no effect on your game’s performance whatsoever. Now if you’re wondering why I made this mod instead of just using one of the mods that changes the cap to whatever I wanted it to be it’s because I quite like the idea of a cap and I quite like the idea of it being reasonably low when you’re a novice thief.
I like the idea that no matter how careful you are, how much time you spend picking only the smallest and least valuable items, there is still a chance when you’re a beginner, that you will get caught, a reasonable chance. And that means you’re gonna spend a little time running away from guards and doing the usual things that are fun for a thief playthrough. But it does mean that as you progress and become a master thief and get 100 Pickpocket skill, you’re not constantly getting caught when you’re just taking a few coins or a key from some unsuspecting mark.
Because let’s face it, by the time you get to 100 skill, you have full enchanted gear that increases your chances of pickpocket, you have all of the perks, you really expect to be able to walk through a market like this and just pick pockets at will and as long as you’re not trying to steal someone’s ebony underpants, you’ll probably succeed. Whereas in the vanilla game.. Well, if you do that to ten people, law of averages says that you will probably get caught and thus you are not going to feel like a master thief.
And so that’s it. It’s a way to feel like I’m getting better, keep the risk as a beginner and get the feeling of being a master thief later on. Oh and one other thing, this mod does not touch the calculation for success in any other way. If you try to steal a very valuable item, it will still be difficult, if you steal cheap items, it will be just as easy or as difficult as it was before. All this mod does, is raise that arbitrary cap, that hard cap that you previously could not go past. Anyway, that is pretty much all there is to it
