Locational Damage Rebirth

Released circa 2012, Locational Damage introduced a missing feature to TES V Skyrim: positional-dependent damage and effects. Skyrim has no native support for hitboxes. The mod uses trigonometric calculations to determine what portion of an enemy's body was hit.

The idea is great and the need is there. The mod is rich in features. What it lacks is stability over time. The mod is reported to malfunction in the presence of script pressure and eventually it becomes unusable with substantial script 'latency'. Locational Damage has since made many community lists for long-term danger to a Skyrim playthrough:

Locational Damage - Rating: One (1)

Last version checked: 2.2

While an interesting concept the implementation of this mod is quite problematic and uses a great deal of resources. The scripts that detect the location of each attack and then apply the effects are insanely long and intensive for the game to process and because of the way it applies this script will be trying to process very often in combat. This results in a high script latency building up in your game which can have negative effects on stability all around, and because of the high impact of the scripts in combat could be a primary contributor to any stack dumps occurring in players game while in combat even in a vanilla game, not to mention a primary slow down of the scripting engine.

There is a distinct possibility that Skyrim Remastered will impact Papyrus in some capacity, and thus potentially impact the best way to add locational damage to Skyrim. Ideally, the onHit event is updated to include the body part of a model that was hit. However, even if no changes are made to the relevant events, it's still possible to make this mod stable. Thanks to 3rd party tools enabled by SKSE that have since appeared after the release of this mod, Locational Damage can be fixed without compromising the most important and innovative features. I am excited to say that this mod is almost repaired- please check back in a couple weeks for a beta of a working version that does not mess up your game.