Last Seed was a planned needs, wellness, and disease survival mod for Skyrim. It is no longer in development.

Original overview:

On the surface, Last Seed presents a streamlined, intuitive primary needs system. Each need is coupled tightly with a primary attribute. Hunger influences, and is influenced by, health and combat actions; thirst, by stamina and acts of exertion; and fatigue, by acts of concentration and spellcasting. This system (optionally) extends out to your entire traveling party (up to 3 companions). By keeping your followers fed and well-rested, they’ll stay in fighting shape. The Provisions container, accessed from your inventory, acts as a central pool of resources that you and your entire group can draw from, avoiding tedious micromanagement of each party member’s inventories. And it’s easy to keep track of your own needs as the system presents you with notifications, sound and visual effects, and on-screen meters (all of which can be toggled on or off independently).

Your needs contribute to maintaining a central attribute at the core of Last Seed: Vitality. Vitality is a measure of your overall wellness. Unlike Frostfall’s Exposure, Vitality can’t be increased or decreased quickly. You’ll need to take care of yourself over days and weeks, or suffer the consequences of compromised health. If your Vitality becomes low enough, you can begin suffering health damage and die. If you also use Frostfall, high Exposure can also decrease your Vitality over time.

Last Seed also introduces an entirely new disease system unlike any other in Skyrim before it. Instead of being told exactly which disease you have in your Active Effects, you will be presented with a list of symptoms instead. Through this new system, you will learn to identify illnesses and how to cure them (or, at least manage the symptoms) using herbs, ingredients, and alchemical concoctions. Only when you have “learned” a disease by curing or studying it will its name will appear in your Active Effects.  There will be dozens of symptoms and many possible combinations of them, which lends this new system to depth, discovery, and experimentation.

Eating spoiled food, drinking water from questionable sources in dungeons deep, lack of sleep, and exposure to diseased enemies can all lead to various illnesses. Low Vitality leaves you at increased risk of disease and illness. These systems all feed off of each other, sometimes in unexpected ways; low Vitality might lead to an illness that makes it difficult to keep your food down, which would lead to increased hunger, which would impact your Vitality even more, and so on.

Speaking of spoiled food: Last Seed will feature a comprehensive food spoilage and preservation system. You’ll need to cook or salt the meat you hunt quickly, or risk it turning foul by the day’s end. Different types of food will spoil at different rates, and feature different methods to preserve them. In general, preserved foods will weigh much, much more than unpreserved foods (and, optionally, standard food has been reweighted across the board to be heavier). You will need to balance how much food you want to keep fresh for your journey with how much you’re willing to carry. This system isn’t just text; Last Seed features brand-new spoiled food textures of nearly all vanilla food items courtesy of FadingSignal, author of A Closer Look and True Storms. Rotten apples never looked better!

Last Seed was developed in close collaboration with Kryptopyr, author of Complete Alchemy and Cooking Overhaul, in order to ensure maximum compatibility. Last Seed is designed to work extremely well with CACO, much like Frostfall and Wet and Cold. Last Seed and CACO will both share the Retort to concoct medicines for various diseases, for example.

Last Seed will require Campfire, giving you everything you need out of the box to survive in the wilderness; tents to sleep in, a fire and pot to cook with, backpacks to carry your gear, and more. Last Seed will also add the Provisioning skill tree to the Campfire Skill System, giving you a unique advancement path to harden your stomach, get a better night’s sleep when camping outdoors, improve your resistance to disease, improve your cooking, and more. You can also elect to use any other favorite camping mod along-side Last Seed and Campfire as well, if you like.

Much effort has been put into making sure that Last Seed requires almost no compatibility patches, and that compatibility can be ensured by each mod from the main plug-in. For developers, Last Seed will provide SeedUtil, an easy-to-use API in order to add compatibility support for your new food mod, or manipulate the player’s primary needs from your own mod. Injected keywords will also be provided for you to add to your food items to ensure codeless support.

However, you don’t have to be a developer to add support for your favorite food mod; any food that Last Seed doesn’t recognize will result in a prompt, so that any player can select how much hunger or thirst each food restores, what kind of food it is, and how fast it spoils.

Finally, Last Seed will use the Settings Profile system used by Campfire and Frostfall, saving all of your settings (including your mod-added food configurations) to a profile that’s loaded for you automatically when you load a save, or even start a new game.

Last Seed is preceded by many excellent primary needs mods, including Realistic Needs and Diseases, iNeed, and ZF Primary Needs, all of whom have the benefit of years of development and iteration. Last Seed won’t have feature parity with these mods right out of the gate; software projects grow and change, like living things. Last Seed will be supported diligently and will be adjusted based on feedback along the way until it fulfills the vision described here and contains all of the features that were originally intended.

I hope you enjoy this new chapter in survival gameplay when it becomes available.

— Chesko