The problem with Skyrim is that it’s all too permanent. Your swords, your armour, your sweetrolls, they all just hang around forever until you drop them, sell them off, or eat them (not the swords and armour; don’t eat your swords and armour). It’s a plastic-fantastic world where nothing ever ends, and buddy, I’ve had just about enough of it.
Thank goodness, then, that an enterprising modder named RavenKZP has created the Simple Spoilage series of mods, which subject all the spoilable goods in your inventory to the horrible, horrible passage of time. The modder divides each spoilage system by item type, so you have Simple Food Spoilage System, Simple Ingredient Spoilage System, and Simple Carcass Spoilage System, which collectively work to ruin basically anything you can ingest (after a suitable period of time).
It’s honestly pretty impressive, and targeted at people doing survival runs of the game. As you can probably guess, it means any food you leave out and about or in your inventory will eventually turn old and gross, gaining a patina of mould that renders it either utterly inedible or strangely appealing depending on whether or not it’s some kind of Italian cheese.
I rather like it as an idea. It is, after all, rather baffling that Skyrim has apparently pumped everything edible inside its borders with enough preservatives to prompt a Morgan Spurlock (remember Morgan Spurlock?) documentary. Raven is just looking out for the health of the Nords.
Of course, adding entropy to Skyrim is easier said than done. If you want to play with these mods yourself, you’ll first need to install a few prerequisites you can find on each mod’s page. Once you’ve got them all loaded up, though, you can make life even harder for yourself by installing Base Object Swapper and Container Item Distributor, which will make it much, much less likely for you to find unspoiled food in Skyrim’s myriad dungeons. After all, the corpses in there are rotted, so why not the grub?
