This topic explains what Sovngarde Tools is, its planned features, and a rough development roadmap.

Overview

Most community-created, open-source modding tools have little to no, or worse, inaccurate documentation. Rightly so, as writing docs is time-consuming maintenance burden for time- and resource-starved tool developers working solo or in small teams. It also makes sense that someone learning different mod tools more seriously would be able to use one, complete doc repository as a reference and guide to using said tools.

Unfortunately, that is not the case today. Most documentation, if it even exists, sprawls several websites, forums, years-old reddit posts, and more. Many tools’ documentation call out the use of the other tools used for modding. This interconnection between modding tools cannot be ignored. Centralizing some of the most sacred institutional knowledge spread throughout the modding community would benefit everyone.

This disjointed user experience, raises the barrier of entry to an already complex ecosystem. This problem can only be solved by the community, and I want to help start solving this problem by writing some docs!

Enter Sovngarde Tools.

The purpose of the Sovngarde Tools website (sovngarde.tools) covers three specific pain points of the modding community.:

1. Improve the mod-user experience through complete, consolidated documentation of community-created modding tools. The goal is not about teaching how to mod, but rather, how to use modding tools efficiently and effectively.
2. Provide mod-tool-developers a place to onboard their tools’ documentation. Ideally, with little to no technical writing experience through automated prose linting and contributor guidance.
3. Provide mod-authors a way to deflect tools issues from their mod pages/forums/posts. Providing mod authors a central location to point their audience for tool-related issues will help them be able to focus on issues with their mods instead of troubleshooting why a tool won’t work or how to use it. Over time, this will also help modders learn to come to the tools docs site instead of asking mod authors for tooling advice or help.

Resources that cater to absolute beginners in the modding ecosystem are plentiful, and therefore will not be the focus for this site. However, links to those resources will be furnished throughout the site. Sovngarde Tools will be the place where modders come to really start getting comfortable with the modding tools at their disposal and start learning more deeply about the interoperability between the games they mod and the tools they use to do so.

This docs site will try its best to be game agnostic (despite the title being directly tied to Skyrim) but still opinionated in an unbiased and inclusive way. Game-specific features, limitations, and otherwise for each tool will be documented. I’m aiming for completeness and not being right.

The implementation and maintenance of this site, however, may be difficult by myself. I’m pretty passionate about writing documentation and modding, so this is a good combination to keep me motivated and able to push through unseen obstacles and struggles. I believe, that with the community’s help, we can document (at least) the most prominent and important modding tools available—starting with xEdit. See the Overview section in the xEdit Doc Plan for more reasoning behind this decision.

Tenets

Sovngarde Tools will follow these tenets (unless you know better ones):

1. Only community-created projects will be documented on this site (preferably open source). Those big companies that require you to pay for their software can hire or contract a tech writer :p
2. Community contributions are welcome but must follow formatting and style rules for consistency.
3. Try to be game agnostic, of course calling out any special cases where necessary.
4. Be inclusive to all audiences, regardless of physical or cognitive function or modding and gaming skill levels.