Frostfall 3 Primer for Current and Former Players

If you are a current or former Frostfall 2.6 player, first off… welcome back! I’m very glad that you’re thinking about giving Frostfall 3 a try.

Frostfall 3 has been reworked to be much more straightforward, fun, and immersive. Of course, that means a lot has changed. This page is a list of the important changes that have occurred between 2.x and 3. Some of the features mentioned below are part of Campfire, the stand-alone camping mod that is the new foundation of Frostfall 3.

System
  • Requirements: Frostfall 3.0 requires SKSE 1.7.3+, SkyUI 4.1+ and Campfire in order to function. Make sure you have these!
  • Frostfall now runs much, much faster. If you had problems running Frostfall in the past, you should have a much better experience with the new version. It should also be less impactful to the performance of other mods.
  • As a general rule, !!!do not use old patches for Frostfall with Frostfall 3.0!!! unless the author specifically notes that the patch is for Frostfall 3.0 and greater. If you do so, your game may crash on start-up!
What’s New
  • An optional Frostfall SkyUI Add-On will allow you to see the Warmth and Coverage provided by every piece of gear.
  • The exposure system has been reworked to include anĀ exposure limit. Now, a rainshower might make you chilly or freezing, but won’t kill you. The Pale and mountains are still just as deadly. The limit is designated by a thin white indicator on your exposure meter.
  • A new stand-alone perk system was introduced to provide a progression arc for your character to last an entire playthrough. See the Camping and Endurance pages.
  • Tents can now catch on fire and be destroyed.
  • All of your configuration settings for Campfire and Frostfall are now saved in Settings Profiles. These are saved to a file and persist across saves, loads, characters, and new games. You can configure your settings once, and use them everywhere, and your settings are loaded for you automatically when you start a game. Campfire and Frostfall have 10 Settings Profile slots each.
  • A new ability, Survival Skill: Instincts, can help you find creatures and important items in the environment.
Things That Were Changed
  • Rescue is now the default setting when you reach maximum exposure. You’ll never know where you’ll end up; you might get picked up and dragged to a nearby inn, or you might be carted halfway across Skyrim. This feature was introduced in earlier versions of Frostfall. In my experience, this is a much more fun and exciting alternative to simply dying from exposure. If you still want to die when reaching max exposure, just enable that setting.
  • The way campfires are built has changed significantly. See the Building Campfires page.
  • Exposure Protection and Exposure Resistance have been combined into a single attribute, Warmth. Nearly all worn gear grants some Warmth.
  • A new attribute, Coverage, determines how quickly you get wet in the rain. Nearly all worn gear grants some Coverage.
  • Cloaks, instead of providing an exposure resistance and rain protection benefit, now provide Warmth and Coverage instead, like all other gear.
  • Being wet now makes you more resistant to fire, but weaker to shock damage.
  • Getting hit with a flame spell will now reduce your exposure, down to a limit. It will also completely dry you off.
  • Getting hit with a frost spell will now increase your exposure, up to a limit.
Things That Were Removed
  • Dense Stones were removed. You can create things like Stone Arrows and Hatchets from just wood components.
  • Inspect Equipment was removed. The new “Armor and Clothing” MCM page serves as the new way to alter the Warmth and Coverage of any of your gear.
  • Your woodcutter’s axe will no longer break.
  • The “Axe Required to Fast Travel” option was removed.
  • The perks offered by the SkyRe Wayfarer Frostfall plug-in have been folded into Frostfall 3’s own Endurance skill tree. Do not use the SkyRe Wayfarer Plug-in for Frostfall when playing with Frostfall 3. SkyRe itself continues to be compatible.
  • High exposure will no longer prevent you from searching for wood.
  • Vampires now have a new “Supernatural” setting where vampires are no longer immune to exposure, and instead have a passive +100 Warmth bonus. You can still select “Immortal”, which is the classic immune behavior.
  • “Presets” (Lite, Classic, Hardcore) were removed. The default settings should appeal to a very wide number of players, and everything can still be configured to your liking. Settings Profiles store away your favorite settings seamlessly.
  • You can no longer harvest firewood using Survival Skill: Harvest Wood. You can harvest branches and deadwood instead, which are functionally equivalent. Firewood can now only be obtained using a chopping block.

For a more exhaustive list of changes, see the Campfire Change Log and Frostfall Change Log, respectively.

I hope you find these changes lead to a more rewarding and streamlined gameplay experience. Have fun!