Remove (custom) spells from character

Question

One's magic book can get awfully busy if one buys all available spells and/or make your own. Can one remove spells that have become unwanted for one reason or another? I'm particularly interested in removing unwanted custom spells.

Answer 1

Deleting spells is not possible in vanilla game, however, there are mods and console commands to allow this.

First, here is a mod that will allow you to delete spells (custom spells included) with delete key.

http://oblivion.nexusmods.com/mods/23069

If you do not wish to use mods, you need to use console tools.

To enable the console, make sure the bAllowConsole is set to 1 in your oblivion.ini file. The console can then be accessed in-game by toggling the 'tilde key' (the actual key can be ~, º, ¬, |,^, \, §, etc.. depending on your keyboard layout), found near the "1" key on most keyboards. The console prompt will appear in the lower left-hand corner of your screen. You can scroll the console output using the "Page Up" and "Page Down" keys. The console is not case sensitive: entering any of "tdt" or "TDT" or "TdT" will toggle the debugging text.

Note: Removing the spells as described below will remove them from your list of spells, but you can not create new spells with names similar to those you have removed (you will still get the error message A spell with this name already exists). If you create a spell and realize you made an error, you can not remove it and create a correct one with the same name.

For default ingame spells use command: player.removespell [Form ID]

For example, to remove the spell Calming Touch, which has Form ID 000A97CA, you must write this in the console: player.removespell 000A97CA

You will then get a confirmation message saying "Spell 'Calming Touch' removed from "

Note: You should not remove the default player healing spell (aka DefaultPlayerSpell, aka "Heal Minor Wounds") -- this spell is treated specially by the game as the fall-back spell after the player casts a scroll based spell. If you don't like the spell, then use TESCS (The Elder Scrolls Construction Set) to redefine it to do something innocuous -- e.g., turn it into a lesser power which raises your mercantile by one point for one second.

For full list of Spell IDs, see this page:

http://www.uesp.net/wiki/Oblivion:Spells

Removing custom spells works just the same way, but finding the Form ID is a bit trickier.

1. Create a custom save in-game by using the console command "save savename 1", where savename can be anything you like.
2. Go to your savegame directory (My Documents\My Games\Oblivion\Saves) and look for savename.ess.txt
3. In this text file, search for "SPELs", you should be able to find your custom spell in a section that looks like this:
   SPELs:
   FF00470B 108 00000000 0 Custom Spell -
   FF00470D 103 00000000 0 Unwanted Custom Spell -
   (...)
4. Now you have the Form ID. Back in the game, the console command "player.removespell FF00470D" will delete "Unwanted Custom Spell".

For versions of Oblivion not using the latest patch, try using this method:

1. Go to your Oblivion installation directory (by default C:\Program Files\Bethesda Softworks\Oblivion) and locate the file LevelUpData_1.txt. This contains information about your characters' statistics when you level up.
2. Open it in Wordpad, not in Notepad.
3. The thing we are looking for here are the spells, which can be found far right. Locate your character, pick the appropriate level and scroll right. Now you will see all of the spells, powers etc. you had when you reached that level. The Form ID can be found in a parentheses after the spell name.
4. If you want to remove some spells you have created your current level (the level you are playing), it has not yet been recorded in this text file. Go back to your game, save it, and type advlevel in the console to force a level-up. Now open the text file again, and you'll find the spells (with their Form ID) at the latest level. Go back to the game, load the save before you leveled (unless you want to cheat) and remove the spells.

Source(s):

• http://www.uesp.net/wiki/Oblivion:Console
• http://www.uesp.net/wiki/Oblivion:Spells

Answer 2

The mod I use to to hide/delete spells is Clean Spellbook. It also allows you to manage your spells.

With proceeding play time more and more spells are added to the spellbook, but not depending on whether you have use for them or not and there's no way to get rid of them. At worst the spell book is that clogged with spells you have trouble finding your preferred ones.

That's where this plugin steps in: It adds a spellbook to the game that sorts your spells by school. Also you can make your character 'forget' one single spell, all spells belonging to a certain category or even all spells in the player's spellbook. These forgotten spells won't be deleted. They are stored (you might say 'written down in the spellbook') and can be restored at any time. They are marked with a '(Hidden)' in the line after their name.

_{Side note: There seems to be a later version of the Clean Spellbook mod here (v2.0.3), compared to the one in the planetoblivion.de page I linked above. Putting this as a sidenote, as I have only tried the planetoblivion.de version (v1.3.0) and not v2.0.3.}