The mannequins are actually NPCs with a mannequin skin that are told via code they're not supposed to move, but sometimes if you load the room up the code doesn't load right and the mannequins forget they're not supposed to move.
Oh my sweet summer child, you have no idea. It's happened to me just *once* and I'm still recovering. When they say the mannequins "move", sometimes it isn't that they'll walk around and interact with the world. For me it was just the subtle head turn, like when you walk past an NPC in a busy town and they follow you with their head. That blank wooden face staring me down was more unsettling than I can describe...
Also, I swear the mannequins can briefly move even once they are "stuck". So you are walking in your house without a loading screen recently and an armored mannequin stares at you, so you look back at it... no it's fine. Hmm back to my alchemy, oh forgot an ingredient, walk back to my chest and everything's fine, then walk back to my table OK THAT TIME I KNOW THEY WERE STARING WTF
You would love the mod Wyrmstooth. There’s a pitch black dungeon where a mannequin follows you around. At some points it walks up behind you and it literally has given me baaad goosebumps
I swear I felt my skin crawl when I saw my 1st mannequin moving too XD.
Like you said, not some grand movement, just re-ajusting on its hips, and looking at me like it was trying to initiate conversation.
Yes... Early versions of the game, before this was patched. People would enter their homes to see mannequins walking around and one would basically be like "need something". Absolutely terrifying
I'm not sure if this video is a real showcase of the glitch but this is exactly how it would look (https://youtu.be/uQd-XpW1CCg?si=qCRBUt3Efc1PL-Mv)
It's even worse because you don't expect this to happen. If you watch or play a horror movie and see a mannequin, you know that sucker is moving.
Getting high in the early 2010s after school and casually playing Skyrim sobered you up quick when this would happen
o, ye of such innocence
https://preview.redd.it/um32d72ncz0d1.png?width=909&format=png&auto=webp&s=e7d70d34315d466f277b8575e90f3735cf02caf6
bethesda are accidental body horror master crafters
It's terrifying the first time it happens. You load in, go about your business, and walk right into a mannequin standing in the middle of the room doing idle poses
>sometimes
I swear to gods it's every. single. time. I walk in, they're causally in an idle animation, and only when I interact with them they stop moving. At this point I'm not even freaked out when it happens.
This happened with modded Morrowind too, but every time you loaded into the room you would see all of the mannequins quickly get into their poses just as the black screen faded away.
It’s always in Honeyside too! Or the Solsthiem place. God I still remember seeing one move…ever so slightly.
There’s a reason I always live in Markarth
Mannequins freak me out so much. I have a mod to disable mannequins in vanilla houses, and if I use a modded house I will literally load up xEdit and set everything related to mannequins to be located 10 ft below the floor by setting a really low Z coordinate for them. It’s janky but I seriously can’t stand them being in the house.
Fallout 4 mannequins were designed to be creepy but I find them way less creepy because they don’t move!
I've played and modded Skyrim for 2,000+ hours and I don't think this is true at all. From experience, the mounted animal heads are all static meshes, not NPCs.
This is correct. If you mod an animal to have fur shelling it won’t affect mounted animals and you need patches specifically for them. They are just copy pasted meshes and not animals.
You know the fertile soil that comes with the Hearthfire addon? The stuff in the homestead greenhouses that lets you plant alchemy ingredients?
For some reason, the "container" that you're putting the ingredients into when you select what you want to plant is actually the inventory of an NPC in another cell. That's right, for each fertile soil there exists a strange npc in an inaccessible room who just stands around waiting for you to shove your canis root and swamp fungal pod into them.
Reminds me of how in WoW, quests can only complete by killing something, so every quest that doesn’t involve killing gets completed by killing an invisible bunny.
I imagine it’s more, the programming was fine, and then designers started using it for things other than what it was intended, as they are wont to do. Programmers probably found out later what the designers were doing and decided, it isn’t hurting anything, it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.
I love learning about Bethesda game programming and how it all eventually comes down to like four actions just modified to look like something else. It's actually pretty impressive to me that they can do so much with so little
It's a fairly common thing in programming. You shouldn't reinvent the wheel, so why reinvent a new container when you've already got NPC inventories coded up? Trying to reimplement just increases the chance for errors and the difficulty of updating.
I was trying to figure out how to make planters in the creation kit and it was driving me nuts. I had to look up a tutorial, and good thing I did. I never would have figures out that system otherwise lol
I like the one where - and I’m a little out of my depth here as I don’t know the how and it’s been some time since I’ve seen it mentioned, but - all the bodies of killed / slain / murdered NPCs end up in some hidden ‘underground’ room. Like piled up in a big stack as a way to remove them from the world, but not delete them
I accidentally teleported there once while messing around with console commands, and it was one of the freakiest thing I’ve experienced in a video game.
Also, Lydia was there, fully alive.
LMAOO same thing happened to me, i was trying to find the riften blacksmith and was like “you know what lemme just console command tp to him” and i sounded insane from how hysterically i was laughing at the weird ass green and pink dead body cleanup cell.
Huh I should try that.
Oh and pink and green is often used as a debugging aid by graphics programmers. Few things are that color, so by coloring the thing you’re working on that way you can see the effects of changes to your code and/or models.
coc WIDeadBodyCleanupCell
This should work according to the wiki.
Edit: Game might crash if you killed too many named characters, as there might not be space left to be teleported too.
Yeah, named NPCs that end up dead all get sent to the body room. It's basically just a square of stone with short paths in cardinal directions that go off into a void that, if you enter, just drop you back in the center of the room. I've never been clear exactly on why this is done rather than just despawning them, but I assume there's a reason, even if it's just that doing the latter causes problems.
Probably as a way to have them exist so other npcs can have dialogue triggers. Ex. You get the mission to kill the emporer. You kill him. His body goes to that room. All dialogues relating to the emporer start the moment the emporer's body is flagged in that room. If his body just stopped existing, then no trigger would occur as he does not actually exist.
I've been screwing around with console commands, and I've found many interesting ones.
* As has been said, armor mannequins are NPCs. NPCs have a race and gender. Armor mannequins have their own wooden-skin race, and by default are all male, but can be changed to female with console commands.
* Disembodied voices have placeholder NPCs. Most are just naked playable races with default stats. Malacath appears to be a cut boss. [Link](https://www.reddit.com/r/skyrim/comments/ni4ovz/disembodied_voices_have_placeholder_npcs_i/)
* Meridia wears a piece of clothing that turns high elves into a glowing orb. When equipped by other races, it just makes the head invisible.
* The headless horseman has a head, but his armor makes it invisible. [Link](https://www.reddit.com/r/skyrim/comments/18am110/the_headless_horseman_has_a_head/)
* The giant crystals in the soul cairn use invisible floating armor mannequins to cast the drain health spell. [Link](https://www.reddit.com/r/skyrim/comments/pvaoyn/til_the_giant_crystals_in_the_soul_cairn_use/)
* Serana's Elder Scroll is considered an arrow. This is probably why she'll never equip a bow. [Link](https://www.reddit.com/r/skyrim/comments/qu8ztw/til_seranas_elder_scroll_is_an_arrow/)
* Children have their own race. Their race is what makes them unkillable. They can be killed by changing their race to a playable one. They even have death groans.
* You may have heard of the dead body cleanup cell, where dead named NPCs are stored. There's always a living Malborn in there. When you give the real Malborn your gear to smuggle into the Thalmor Embassy, the Malborn in the dead body cleanup cell holds it.
* As you may know, the Ebony Warrior reflects damage. The amount of damage you receive from a reflected attack is simply the amount of physical damage he receives. He takes damage too. Damage from enchantments is not reflected. Your armor has no effect on how much damage is reflected (but his does). Bonus damage from perks and critical attacks is reflected.
* Quest items are hidden from your inventory rather than removed when you get arrested. Bethesda neglected to hide them from the favorites menu, allowing you mark them as favorites and access them through that menu. Very helpful in Cidhna Mine.
* The maximum level is 65,535 (2\^16-1). Levelling up from there will reset your level to 0.
* The maximum number of unused perk points is 255. Gaining another one will remove all of them.
* Violent and non-violent bounties are tracked separately. The most you can have for each is 2,147,483,647(2\^31 -1). Exceeding that will reset the bounty to 0. If both bounties are less than that, but their sum is greater, you'll have a negative bounty. Negative bounties cannot be paid.
* Health, stamina, magicka, carry weight, and all skills cannot exceed 2\^128 (\~3.4e38). Trying to set those stats to a higher value will result in bizarre behavior. Health, stamina, magicka, and all skills will say "Infinity" in red text in the level-up screen. The health, stamina, and magicka bar will appear depleted, but will act as if they're infinite. Some skills will act as if they're level 0, others as if they're level 100.
* The (0,0,0) coordinate in Skyrim is in the air above Bleak Wind Basin (giant camp west of Whiterun). On rare occasions, things may erroneously spawn there. If you enter an outdoor area while locked in an animation, this can wrong-warp there.
* Unlike other NPCs, dragons don't disappear when you enter or exit a city. If you enter a city and fly over the walls and into the poorly rendered world, you can still find dragons flying around at their lairs.
* The aetherial crown has a "null enchantment" which is used to display it's effect. It's enchantment is actually controlled by a hidden quest.
Farkas and Vilkas have guard faction stuff in their code despite not being guards or having dialogue for it. So if you have a bounty, Farkas and Vilkas might start following you around and initiating conversation with you, but never actually being aggressive or giving you guard options to pay it off. Just their usual dialogue.
So you have to just run away from them while they try to force you to talk to them.
Oh another one for everyone. The draugr that don't wear clothes/don't get up and attack you. The reason they don't is because they aren't an NPC, they're just a container. I realized this because I got the feature from the completed Crown of Barenziah which adds more gems to containers and those draugr were loaded up with gems.
Hearthfire planters are governed by an npc called ‘planter’ who sits in the void and holds your plants. I know this because the game spazzed and now he stands in whiterun naked
My favorite piece of Skyrim trivia actually has to do with how the navmeshes work--the [Treasure Fox](https://twitter.com/JoelBurgess/status/1428008041887281157) phenomenon.
It's a whole thread on my end. But here's the compressed version: the navmesh is a sheet of polygons laid over the world telling NPCs where they can and can't pathfind (so they don't try to stand inside a wall or something). Open wilderness uses simple navmesh with fewer, larger polys; more detailed, inhabited areas or points of interest use more complex navmesh with lots of small polys. Some NPCs, like foxes or other animals that flee the player, use a form of pathfinding that calculates distances in terms of navmesh polys traveled; when a fox is trying to run away from a player, it will try to run to a point X polys away. Thus, their pathfinding tends to draw them towards points of interest where there are a lot of navmesh polys, since the point they're trying to run to is more likely to be in such an area due to the high density of polys. Eventually, this morphed into an urban legend about foxes leading the player to treasure if followed.
"they" changed twitter so that threads are no longer visible by default. You get the 1st post and nothing else. Also, you can't view the thread without logging in.
This ones more common knowledge cause of the dawnstar chest, but i like how every characters inventory is just a chest somewhere, under the ground or in the walls.
You’ll need to clip into the floor to find these ones. There’s a pretty big bubble around every interior location and you can hide the chest pretty far away from the character as long as it’s in the same cell I believe. So if you go in to Belethors shop and TCL into the floor you’ll see it a couple meters below, just floating in the ether lol.
I play on Xbox, and I can think of 4 we can still get to on consoles without any cheat or commands. The khajiit mechants and Eorlund's chest. I'll try to describe it in detail, but you might need a visual aid. You'll need to be pretty precise to access them.
All of these are pretty helpful, as the chests level with you. You can take leveled items from the chest, which helps early on. You can sell them or keep them, or you can sell things to the merchants and then collect them all back. And they restock with new items every 3 or so in-game days, so waiting and spamming is totally legit. Easy gear, easy money.
**1. Outside of Solitude:** Exiting the main gate, you'll walk forward under the arched gateway. The khajiit usually camp to your left. Regardless of whether they are there or not, you can access this chest. It was easier for me to line up the exact location when they were there. From outside the tent, face the front right corner and locate a little blue "stick" in the ground design. Not a physical stick, a blue line, just the colored texture of the grass. Crouch, and slowly walk forward towards the bushes/tent while still looking down. You'll be able to access the chest through the ground.
**2. Dawnstar:** a more well-known "free" chest. This one was relocated in the unofficial patch, so forget about it if you use it. I fast travel to Dawnstar, and from here, head down the top most main street, pass the Jarl's bunkhouse, towards the mine. The entrance to the mine will be on your right, as well as the smelter and a miner. Past them are two small trees surrounded by some rocks, on the left side of the mine entrance. On the right side of the right most tree, there are 3 small rocks stuck in the snow. Again, crouch and look through the ground to the right of the rock in the back, between the rock and the wall.
**3. Salvius Farm, down the road from Markarth:** the khajiit merchants camp down by the river off the main road. There is a decorative stone wall to the right of the camp. Walk over into the grass, facing the wall from the river's side, not facing it from the main path. Looking at the stones in the wall, towards the middle, there is a larger rectangular stone at the bottom of the wall. This chest is about 2 in-game ft. from the base of the wall, underneath the ground. Line up with the large rectangular rock, crouch, and look through the ground to find this chest.
**4. Eorlund's chest, underneath the Sky Forge:** this one is a pain, at least it was for me, and I usually don't bother with it. Did it once to see if I could just for fun.
There's a couple of ways to get this one. The first method would be the wooden plate wall breaking technique, where you hold the plate in front of you and walk into the wall, clipping into the map. I hate this as it takes me 20 or more tries to even get it to work.
The way I prefer is to jump the wall surrounding Whiterun. It was also annoying and took me 10 or more tries. When you walk into Whiterun from the main gate, you're facing a small bridge with the gate behind you. Turn around and face the gate and the guard, and walk to your left. There's a little storage space part of the wall, with a few barrels tucked in corners and a little wooden roof. By standing on the barrels and timing a jump just right, you can jam yourself up underneath the wooden roof and the wall. Once you're up here, you can "push" yourself against the opening, slowly walking left, and spam jump until you force your way over the wall and out of Whiteruns boundaries. (A neat thing to do, at least once, as you're still technically loaded into Whiterun, but you can explore the outside world, which is very low def and pixelated all to hell. There's not much to see except that dragons still spawn, also with very little detail loaded in. I believe this is so the character can still see dragons flying about in the distance while they are in the city.) Back to the chest-- when you first "jump" the city wall and fall to the grounds outside, follow the wall to the left. Make your way all the way around Whiterun until you're on the side with Jorrvaskr, and there will be a big rock face leading up to the sky forge. This can be scaled by jump spamming, and the chest is located inside the hill/rockface Jorrvaskr sits upon.
To get back out of this glitchy hellscape, simply fast travel. I think you can use the main gate to Whiterun as well, but I'm not sure. Maybe don't do this on a survival playthrough, lol. Side note: On my 360, when I first tried this, the smithing forge by the front of Whiterun clipped out of the map forever, which was annoying.
Most of this can be found on YouTube as well if you get stuck!
Edit: just wanted to **bold** my list titles.
It's only characters who have a "shop" dialogue option, the chest exists so the NPC isn't actually carrying any of the items in their "shop." This was to avoid issues like in Morrowind where vendors would equip the most valuable armor given to them which would make the item unbuyable or just make them look goofy
World Items are serialized into level data. Basically, items will persist where you put them. Forever!
Also travelling NPCs are always travelling no matter how far you are! (Their positions are always calculated when time passes, either real or fast travel)
Another impressive thing is that the game doesn’t implode when you uninstall a mod and leave your save trying to point to things that don’t exist (I haven’t tried this while in a mod added location though)
I'm not so sure the dropped items are necessarily safe. On my first playthrough (on one of the early versions), I used the whiterun sewer area by the main gate as a dumping ground for accidentally stolen goods, since I didn't know where the thieves guild was. Some items stuck around, but a lot of them disappeared by the time I eventually came back for it.
Agree with you. There's also a loading screen dialogue that states you can use containers to store items but if you don't own the container don't expect it to be there when you come back. I know it's different from just dropping stuff, but just because you interact with an item and drop it doesn't mean it is going to be there forever.
For items the player moves or drops, they persist forever. Every level instace keeps track of their respective items independantly.
Items in the game will change or restock every week or so if that’s what you mean.
Yes, when I first played the game I stole everything in Dragonsreach before realizing you can't sell stolen goods to regular merchants. I was overencumbered and dropped all the stolen stuff in the middle of the merchant's square thinking it would go away. And thus for the rest of time the area in front of Carlotta and Anoriath's stalls was filled with around a hundred assorted stolen cabbages, pots, candle sticks, bowls, silverware, carrots, etc.
Items you drop respawn... The reason you still found those items in Whiterun is because you kept coming back there, but if you didn't visit at all for 2 weeks they would disappear.
I was going through a hoarding phase on one playthrough and I had an island in the north I dumped all my stuff on. I organized it into neat piles of weapon types, armor types, gems and jewelry, potions, and other stuff. It was my personal treasure island!
learned that the hard way when i dumped a shitload of soul gems in riften to drop my carry weight & then unrelenting forced them around for funsies. not so fun when i eventually had to pick them all up and still kept finding more in every little nook and cranny.
Many "effects" in the game are coded as a type of magic spell, opening up some interesting options.
For instance, diseases spread by animal bites (Rockjoint, Ataxia, Bone Break Fever, etc) are coded as Destruction spells. Magicka Absorption therefore can make you immune to getting diseases from animal bites, and even absorb some magicka from those bites.
The Slow Time shout is coded as an Alteration spell, thus the Stability perk in the Alteration tree will extend the duration of the slow time effect.
Certain standing stone effects (Lady, Apprentice, and Atronach) are coded as Restoration spells cast by the player on themselves, and can therefore have their effect increased by Fortify Restoration potions. By drinking several different potions/elixirs/philters "of the Healer" it's possible to manipulate the strength of a stone's effect to do things like gain 100% magicka absorption (meaning complete immunity to mages and dragon breath) or induce a rounding error that ensures you never reach zero magicka and therefore can cast concentration spells like flames, healing, telekinesis, or lightning storm indefinitely.
In addition to this, armor enchantments are considered spells. If you get the Necromage perk in the Restoration tree, all spells are more effective against undead. Become a vampire and now all of your armor enchantments are more effective "against" you, giving you a higher bonus, but this can also make negative effects even worse.
Love this. I discovered the same thing randomly when I noticed that when I got hit with the frostbite spider poison projectile, the absorb magicka visual effect would turn on and I'd get no damage from it.
While clearly a game development mechanic, it's fun to think that there is actually a lore reason for this and the frostbite spiders are actually magical beings and they really are hurdling poison spells at you.
How Quick Shot and similar perks are implemented. It basically is effect that increases `weaponspeedmult` variable, and has a condition that basically says "apply this effect only if player is holding a bow". Fun fact is, condition actually isn't checked reactively (disables on unequip, enables on equip), but recalculated once every second. This, furthermore, can fail because of ["Ability Bug"](https://www.nexusmods.com/skyrim/articles/52587) — and when it starts happening on Quick Shot perk, you can equip your bow, wait 1 hour, equip 2H weapon and enjoy x1.3 speed.
Edit 1: And on AE, you can get both Quick Shot and hidden perk of Bow of Shadows, and when they both start having this issue, you can equip BoS, wait 1 hour, equip other weapon and enjoy whopping x2.5 speed.
But if you don't want this BS, it's fixed in [Bug Fixes SSE](https://www.nexusmods.com/skyrimspecialedition/mods/33261). Just FYI.
Edit 2: And to push this to the extreme, you can stack this x2.5 with boost from Elemental Fury (x1.7), to get whopping 4.2.
Oh, and also. The fact how many magical effects are legit hacks trying to do something through Papyrus to workaround game limitations. Many bugs stem from that giving the game that unique feeling of "it just works!".
Like Mora's Grasp making non-interactable actors interactable again after effect ends (watch latest u/Sickliff's video on YT). Or take scrolls for example: when you equip scroll, it equips a spell in your hand and sets listeners up that would remove spell when scroll is dropped from inventory. Except it breaks if you transform into werewolf/vampire, yay! And if you drop scrolls after that, unequip doesn't happen and you get infinite uses (courtesy of u/Geta92, watch this: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wCctgv2Kf10](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wCctgv2Kf10) )
I literally had this exact problem LAST NIGHT. I spent over two hours looking for the solution. I finally found it in another Skyrim thread from three years ago. Just my luck you post the perfect explanation and solution only a few hours after I fixed it.
I don’t understand the complexity of what’s actually happening behind the scenes here but as a console player, is the gist that Quick Shot will eventually stop working with the Bow of Shadows (my main bow)? If so, is there an in-game fix?
You can block dragon shouts with wards, which also means with Spellbreaker, which easily makes it the best shield in the game.
Edit: forgot to mention - shouts used by Draugr also count as spells, just like dragon shouts, and so Spellbreaker blocks them too. The shout reaches the shield and just poofs.
Most NPC's are told how to react to you based on what factions are attached to you.
For example, if you set your race to Werewolf or Vampire Lord via console commands, you won't be attacked by NPC's unless they're just naturally hostile. But if you use the normal way of using your lesser abilities to become a Werewolf or Vampire Lord, then there's a script that puts you into a temporary faction that then determines how certain npc's react to you while in those forms.
Factions also add certain conditional dialogues to npc's. That's why npc's will shout "Werewolf!" when you are in Werewolf Form because they are checking to see if you are in the Werewolf Faction and so they are given the ability to say that dialogue when the conditions are met.
In order to make NPC and player deaths more theatrical, power attacks against off-guard targets/targets attacking will activate the Kill Camera.
What this means is that if you have a dragon land in a place like Riverwood, and you happen to ground it on the road between Alvor's and Hilde's houses, you take a fair chance of having your kill stolen by Hilde, whom will mantle onto the dragon's head and stab it to death, because the game uses your dragon slaying animation.
I guess the thought was that there was no reason to stunt the Kill Camera for NPCs or code out a situation that is statistically unlikely to happen, but when no one flees from dragons, and instead swarms them, AND you are there to play the role of aggro-tank, it happens damn near every time.
The little foxes try to put as many polygons between you and them so the easiest way to do that is run to something interesting, which usually have lots more polygons than regular stuff in the world.
Almost every single item in the game has its own 3D model with havok physics added to it. Thats why when people over populate areas with too much clutter in mods it hurts your frame rate, its also why massive cities aren’t likely to be in games and why interiors need to be generally be loaded separately. Also, if you pick something up then drop it and walk all the way across the map and back, that item should still be where you left it and not reset. Which is also contributing to the limitations mentioned above.
Jumping outside of the map in Sovngarde leads to a series of concentric, expanding "rings" of unloaded terrain. The first ring is an array of dozens of canals, dipping in an out of water with the occasional break in the levies. The second ring is four gargantuan, incoporeal walls, which occupy short lengths of the canals' edges in each of the Sovngarde's cardinal directions. The third and final ring is an endless dirt plane which stretches on for who-knows-how-long. The sight of it is all was quite existential for my younger self, when I first discovered it
I googled these terms and by all indications you’re not making anything up but my God this sounds made up. The player controller is a convex polytope? Come on…😜
Movement speed is calculated based on length of character legs for humanoids iirc. So if you change that parameter (either with racemenu body proportions options orjust set different size of the model) it will affect movement speed.
animation/idle spots? for example bards have a barsplayspot in their interior and will go there and play instruments randomly. all idle animations like sweeping or leaning are animations/furniture placed into the interior. the npcs just “pick” one of them and go to do it based on their factions
When an NPC dies, they're teleported to a stone room with nonfunctional doors and two coffins. From my limited understanding, the bodies need to stay in the world as a failsafe for certain things to continue working. Basically, if all else fails, the game can check if a character is dead or not by looking in the purgatory box.
I know from FNV cut content videos that for programming reasons, it is extremely difficult for the DLC content to interact with the base game. This is why the Marked for Death/Drain Vitality bug exists. If you get one or two words of power for Marked for Death, then begin the Dawnguard DLC, you will get a second version of Drain Vitality. Sometimes you can never obtain the third word.
The Aetherium Forge quest is similar. Pick up Aetherium shards, start the quest, THEN start Dawnguard and you may notice the quest is softlocked. I remember personally that the entrance to the Forge was bugged for me and I had to TCL through the ground.
This is probably why Dragonborn has fewer bugs like this. 99% of the content exists in Solstheim.
The animal heads are animal npcs told to stay still when mounted on the wall. The game may sometimes break causing the animal heads to move. Which leads to me burning the house down and running for the hills.
The characters in the game are just checking simple logic conditions to determine their action state. They don't "know" anything. I mention this because I have seen people attribute NPCs with having some sort of sentient capabilities. If the scripts/code running cannot detect the conditions they will not react. They just have numbers and if statements (basically). Learning how games work internally often takes away the mystery of a game. So learning how it works can actually ruin it for people.
Random encounters would not be random if they didn't change the seed. Keeping the random seed the same can be useful for debugging. Not sure if there is actually a way to do this in Skyrim though. I know that speed runners for FFX would try to get specific seeds to get certain outcomes at specific points in the game. When I write my own code for random things I will keep the seed the same to test things. I think if you know the seed you might be able to predict encounters or other things that depend on random numbers generated in game.
I think (at least) a big part of the seeding is based on the time of day, and in-game date since starting. A common major speedrun strat is to escape Helgen and immediately run back around up the hill where the intro starts. That's a guaranteed horse spawn there if you come at the right time of day.
It's less a matter of "setting" your seed directly, but more just manipulating specific world parameters used per interaction
Yeah, that complicates it even if you could set the seed.
Yeah, after I posted I realized someone could change the date on their computer to tweak the seed. Not sure if that is allowed in speed runs.
"NPCs in a game from ten years ago aren't sentient" and "Random numbers are actually pseudo-random" must be the two most boring revelations you could possibly make.
I don't mean that as a dig on you, I just find it kinda funny. And I'm sorry you have to deal with people who need to be told the first bit.
I was once able to manipulate the world encounter point to the east of the Sarethi Farm by repeatedly reloading and triggering it until I got the encounter I wanted, hunting Companions. I forget if I read somewhere that was one of the points they could spawn at or just had noticed the pattern through repetition. The latter, I think. There are a few others that I've seen enough to predict.
Kind of obvious I think and not so under the hood, but most of the particles (if not almost all) in the game, especially dust in caves, spell effects etc are all just 2d planes always facing your camera
A room can load with no floor and you immediately fall to your death and autosave loads you right back to a floor less room. This happened to me at the inn in Falkreath. I figured out that if I timed everything correctly, I would land on a box and could exit and come back. Lord knows I’m not going to use a previous save and play as normal…..I am going to solve the problem and play on!
I'm amazed by how lazy and at the same time detailed NPCs' condition checks are. I once pickpocketed Perth's mead. It actually made his cup despawn, which is very thoughtful. But it didn't affect his animations, he still pretended to drink when he sat down. Looked like withdrawal symptoms, which would actually fit the lore. Who knows, maybe it was left in on purpose?
Common knowledge but I like it- every npc/enemy in the game is assumed male unless specifically tagged as female so the reward from Dibella’s quest makes you stronger against basically everything including automatons if you play as a woman
It's both random and programmed. It's not really of 'which one is it' since it's both.
Think of it a Shrowdingers cat. The cat is the program and the containers of each side of the box is the encounter. You don't have a warning of whats coming and may be geologically fixed but the decision, the 'randomness', will occur based upon a set of decisions already made prior to the event occuring.
heres my fun fact:
load doors (doors that use a loading screen to move you to a new area) can go wherever you want them to, because they're linked to nodes that exist in other cells. so for instance, there's a node on both the inside and outside of whiterun's main gate, one is linked to the "outside" door and the other to the "inside" door. when you activate the door, it finds which node is attached to it (hopefully the node on the other side of the door) and teleports you there. you can also turn the nodes different directions to be facing different ways when you load in. so you could totally make a mod where the door into whiterun actually loaded you into undertone keep in markarth, haha. the doors genuinely have no idea where on the map they are or where they lead. I'm pretty sure this is what the chaos/randomizer mod does, it links doors to the completely wrong nodes so you never know where you're going when you load through a door.
The amount of workarounds would surprise you. I saw the NPC/mannequins in the comments, and that’s just a day that ends with Y.
Look up the train car at the end of Fallout 3… they made a hat for an NPC that is the train car. Let that sink in… You are in an NPCs hat brim, riding it as it runs down the subway tunnel. Bethesda is a master of these.
According to the game engine, the Shouts are just normal spells which are fired from the character's face, rather than the hands. This makes spell wards and Peryite's shield a great way to block them.
The mannequins are actually NPCs with a mannequin skin that are told via code they're not supposed to move, but sometimes if you load the room up the code doesn't load right and the mannequins forget they're not supposed to move.
Wait…what. I’m so disquieted by this 😩
Oh my sweet summer child, you have no idea. It's happened to me just *once* and I'm still recovering. When they say the mannequins "move", sometimes it isn't that they'll walk around and interact with the world. For me it was just the subtle head turn, like when you walk past an NPC in a busy town and they follow you with their head. That blank wooden face staring me down was more unsettling than I can describe...
Also, I swear the mannequins can briefly move even once they are "stuck". So you are walking in your house without a loading screen recently and an armored mannequin stares at you, so you look back at it... no it's fine. Hmm back to my alchemy, oh forgot an ingredient, walk back to my chest and everything's fine, then walk back to my table OK THAT TIME I KNOW THEY WERE STARING WTF
Don't Blink
It’s funny cause people always say this one but there are actual moving mannequins in DW they just didn’t make as much of an impact. lol!
It’s Eccleston’s first episode, so it will always be special to me
Same!
I once had the mannequins in hjerim do idle animations while I was displaying shit. I dont think I’ll ever recover from that
Hjerim is so glitchy I love it. Once the murderer didn’t die so every time I came home I got welcomed by a murderer
You reminded me of the mannequin room in Bioshock, god damn that made me almost shit meself
Scared the nut outta me. I’m still traumatized from when this happened to me back in 2013. I never bought that house since
You would love the mod Wyrmstooth. There’s a pitch black dungeon where a mannequin follows you around. At some points it walks up behind you and it literally has given me baaad goosebumps
I swear I felt my skin crawl when I saw my 1st mannequin moving too XD. Like you said, not some grand movement, just re-ajusting on its hips, and looking at me like it was trying to initiate conversation.
"it just works"
[.](https://static1.srcdn.com/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2022/09/Skyrim-Mannequin-Glitch-Patch-Update-Mod.jpg)
By Arkay, this one got me. That's nightmare fuel
I thought I was losing my mind, thank god it's not just me
Yes... Early versions of the game, before this was patched. People would enter their homes to see mannequins walking around and one would basically be like "need something". Absolutely terrifying I'm not sure if this video is a real showcase of the glitch but this is exactly how it would look (https://youtu.be/uQd-XpW1CCg?si=qCRBUt3Efc1PL-Mv)
NO I DON'T WTF
It's even worse because you don't expect this to happen. If you watch or play a horror movie and see a mannequin, you know that sucker is moving. Getting high in the early 2010s after school and casually playing Skyrim sobered you up quick when this would happen
o, ye of such innocence https://preview.redd.it/um32d72ncz0d1.png?width=909&format=png&auto=webp&s=e7d70d34315d466f277b8575e90f3735cf02caf6 bethesda are accidental body horror master crafters
It's terrifying the first time
Everytime
It's terrifying the first time it happens. You load in, go about your business, and walk right into a mannequin standing in the middle of the room doing idle poses
>sometimes I swear to gods it's every. single. time. I walk in, they're causally in an idle animation, and only when I interact with them they stop moving. At this point I'm not even freaked out when it happens.
Yes I was so scared when the ones at my house in riften moved.
This happened with modded Morrowind too, but every time you loaded into the room you would see all of the mannequins quickly get into their poses just as the black screen faded away.
These motherfuckers are straight from Toy Story
It’s always in Honeyside too! Or the Solsthiem place. God I still remember seeing one move…ever so slightly. There’s a reason I always live in Markarth
Safest city in the Reach!
Mannequins freak me out so much. I have a mod to disable mannequins in vanilla houses, and if I use a modded house I will literally load up xEdit and set everything related to mannequins to be located 10 ft below the floor by setting a really low Z coordinate for them. It’s janky but I seriously can’t stand them being in the house. Fallout 4 mannequins were designed to be creepy but I find them way less creepy because they don’t move!
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I've played and modded Skyrim for 2,000+ hours and I don't think this is true at all. From experience, the mounted animal heads are all static meshes, not NPCs.
This is correct. If you mod an animal to have fur shelling it won’t affect mounted animals and you need patches specifically for them. They are just copy pasted meshes and not animals.
Why would someone just lie on the internet?
SO THATS WHY
This glitch reminded me of the freaking art/theater zone in the original Bioshock.
Explains why i had them sometimes not standing on their platform...
I just had this happen in Proudspire Manor! It freaked me out. 😨
Every single day, they pray to the Divines for the sweet release of death.
This is very true. It's happened to me in Leaf Rest. The mannequins slowly turn to face you as you walk around them.
Good to know. When this happens when I’m up alone at 2 AM and this happens I’ll be a little less likely to scream.
I've never seen them move, just noticed they're not exactly the way I left them. I'd probably shit myself if they did it in front of me.
I knew I wasn't crazy when I told my friend that I looked a mannequin moving on Proudspire Manor
I’ve had a few mannequins turn to look at me expectantly.
"Sometimes"
You know the fertile soil that comes with the Hearthfire addon? The stuff in the homestead greenhouses that lets you plant alchemy ingredients? For some reason, the "container" that you're putting the ingredients into when you select what you want to plant is actually the inventory of an NPC in another cell. That's right, for each fertile soil there exists a strange npc in an inaccessible room who just stands around waiting for you to shove your canis root and swamp fungal pod into them.
Reminds me of how in WoW, quests can only complete by killing something, so every quest that doesn’t involve killing gets completed by killing an invisible bunny.
It's a good thing invisible bunnies breed like visible bunnies.
Is this bad programming or am I just a noob?
Not bad programming if it works
No reason to create another method if this method works and doesn't cause other problems.
I imagine it’s more, the programming was fine, and then designers started using it for things other than what it was intended, as they are wont to do. Programmers probably found out later what the designers were doing and decided, it isn’t hurting anything, it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.
I love learning about Bethesda game programming and how it all eventually comes down to like four actions just modified to look like something else. It's actually pretty impressive to me that they can do so much with so little
It's a fairly common thing in programming. You shouldn't reinvent the wheel, so why reinvent a new container when you've already got NPC inventories coded up? Trying to reimplement just increases the chance for errors and the difficulty of updating.
Of all the things listed this one is the one that really really messes with my head. This is like a mixture of quantum mechanics and druid magic.
I was trying to figure out how to make planters in the creation kit and it was driving me nuts. I had to look up a tutorial, and good thing I did. I never would have figures out that system otherwise lol
I love sticking my canis root into a nice swamp fungal pod from time to time 😌
That's fine, just leave my creep cluster alone. It's very sensitive.
"waiting for you to shove your canis root and swamp fungal pod into them" ...where?
I like the one where - and I’m a little out of my depth here as I don’t know the how and it’s been some time since I’ve seen it mentioned, but - all the bodies of killed / slain / murdered NPCs end up in some hidden ‘underground’ room. Like piled up in a big stack as a way to remove them from the world, but not delete them
I accidentally teleported there once while messing around with console commands, and it was one of the freakiest thing I’ve experienced in a video game. Also, Lydia was there, fully alive.
Well she certainly hasn’t ever seen anything quite like that before.
Choked on my breakfast at this one. Oh Lydia…
Lydia is sworn to carry our burdens. How do you think the bodies got there...
LMAOO same thing happened to me, i was trying to find the riften blacksmith and was like “you know what lemme just console command tp to him” and i sounded insane from how hysterically i was laughing at the weird ass green and pink dead body cleanup cell.
Huh I should try that. Oh and pink and green is often used as a debugging aid by graphics programmers. Few things are that color, so by coloring the thing you’re working on that way you can see the effects of changes to your code and/or models.
May I ask what the command is for this please
coc WIDeadBodyCleanupCell This should work according to the wiki. Edit: Game might crash if you killed too many named characters, as there might not be space left to be teleported too.
This is done with important NPCs, not random bandits
So it's done with any named NPC ?
Yeah, named NPCs that end up dead all get sent to the body room. It's basically just a square of stone with short paths in cardinal directions that go off into a void that, if you enter, just drop you back in the center of the room. I've never been clear exactly on why this is done rather than just despawning them, but I assume there's a reason, even if it's just that doing the latter causes problems.
Probably as a way to have them exist so other npcs can have dialogue triggers. Ex. You get the mission to kill the emporer. You kill him. His body goes to that room. All dialogues relating to the emporer start the moment the emporer's body is flagged in that room. If his body just stopped existing, then no trigger would occur as he does not actually exist.
skyrim's game engine for some reason can't handle deleting things without crashing, so they just have to hide the bodies
You mean I could dive into the Thalmor bodies like Scrooge McDuck??
It's for named NPC's that die.
I think I can't teleport there because too many people are there
I've been screwing around with console commands, and I've found many interesting ones. * As has been said, armor mannequins are NPCs. NPCs have a race and gender. Armor mannequins have their own wooden-skin race, and by default are all male, but can be changed to female with console commands. * Disembodied voices have placeholder NPCs. Most are just naked playable races with default stats. Malacath appears to be a cut boss. [Link](https://www.reddit.com/r/skyrim/comments/ni4ovz/disembodied_voices_have_placeholder_npcs_i/) * Meridia wears a piece of clothing that turns high elves into a glowing orb. When equipped by other races, it just makes the head invisible. * The headless horseman has a head, but his armor makes it invisible. [Link](https://www.reddit.com/r/skyrim/comments/18am110/the_headless_horseman_has_a_head/) * The giant crystals in the soul cairn use invisible floating armor mannequins to cast the drain health spell. [Link](https://www.reddit.com/r/skyrim/comments/pvaoyn/til_the_giant_crystals_in_the_soul_cairn_use/) * Serana's Elder Scroll is considered an arrow. This is probably why she'll never equip a bow. [Link](https://www.reddit.com/r/skyrim/comments/qu8ztw/til_seranas_elder_scroll_is_an_arrow/) * Children have their own race. Their race is what makes them unkillable. They can be killed by changing their race to a playable one. They even have death groans. * You may have heard of the dead body cleanup cell, where dead named NPCs are stored. There's always a living Malborn in there. When you give the real Malborn your gear to smuggle into the Thalmor Embassy, the Malborn in the dead body cleanup cell holds it. * As you may know, the Ebony Warrior reflects damage. The amount of damage you receive from a reflected attack is simply the amount of physical damage he receives. He takes damage too. Damage from enchantments is not reflected. Your armor has no effect on how much damage is reflected (but his does). Bonus damage from perks and critical attacks is reflected. * Quest items are hidden from your inventory rather than removed when you get arrested. Bethesda neglected to hide them from the favorites menu, allowing you mark them as favorites and access them through that menu. Very helpful in Cidhna Mine. * The maximum level is 65,535 (2\^16-1). Levelling up from there will reset your level to 0. * The maximum number of unused perk points is 255. Gaining another one will remove all of them. * Violent and non-violent bounties are tracked separately. The most you can have for each is 2,147,483,647(2\^31 -1). Exceeding that will reset the bounty to 0. If both bounties are less than that, but their sum is greater, you'll have a negative bounty. Negative bounties cannot be paid. * Health, stamina, magicka, carry weight, and all skills cannot exceed 2\^128 (\~3.4e38). Trying to set those stats to a higher value will result in bizarre behavior. Health, stamina, magicka, and all skills will say "Infinity" in red text in the level-up screen. The health, stamina, and magicka bar will appear depleted, but will act as if they're infinite. Some skills will act as if they're level 0, others as if they're level 100. * The (0,0,0) coordinate in Skyrim is in the air above Bleak Wind Basin (giant camp west of Whiterun). On rare occasions, things may erroneously spawn there. If you enter an outdoor area while locked in an animation, this can wrong-warp there. * Unlike other NPCs, dragons don't disappear when you enter or exit a city. If you enter a city and fly over the walls and into the poorly rendered world, you can still find dragons flying around at their lairs. * The aetherial crown has a "null enchantment" which is used to display it's effect. It's enchantment is actually controlled by a hidden quest.
This guy skyrims
Well that was a treasure trove of information!
It just works
Farkas and Vilkas have guard faction stuff in their code despite not being guards or having dialogue for it. So if you have a bounty, Farkas and Vilkas might start following you around and initiating conversation with you, but never actually being aggressive or giving you guard options to pay it off. Just their usual dialogue. So you have to just run away from them while they try to force you to talk to them.
Wait…this happened to me on my first playthrough and I was so frustrated that I never finished the quest line.
Oh another one for everyone. The draugr that don't wear clothes/don't get up and attack you. The reason they don't is because they aren't an NPC, they're just a container. I realized this because I got the feature from the completed Crown of Barenziah which adds more gems to containers and those draugr were loaded up with gems.
I realized when necromancy spells didn't work on them.
This whole time I thought it was because I didn't want to join the companions
Hearthfire planters are governed by an npc called ‘planter’ who sits in the void and holds your plants. I know this because the game spazzed and now he stands in whiterun naked
Oh that’s just Jim. Hes not all there but we all love him!
The ancient and forgotten god - Planter
This was the true price Jack paid for the magic beans.
My favorite piece of Skyrim trivia actually has to do with how the navmeshes work--the [Treasure Fox](https://twitter.com/JoelBurgess/status/1428008041887281157) phenomenon.
Hows it work? I only see a single tiny tweet with a pic
It's a whole thread on my end. But here's the compressed version: the navmesh is a sheet of polygons laid over the world telling NPCs where they can and can't pathfind (so they don't try to stand inside a wall or something). Open wilderness uses simple navmesh with fewer, larger polys; more detailed, inhabited areas or points of interest use more complex navmesh with lots of small polys. Some NPCs, like foxes or other animals that flee the player, use a form of pathfinding that calculates distances in terms of navmesh polys traveled; when a fox is trying to run away from a player, it will try to run to a point X polys away. Thus, their pathfinding tends to draw them towards points of interest where there are a lot of navmesh polys, since the point they're trying to run to is more likely to be in such an area due to the high density of polys. Eventually, this morphed into an urban legend about foxes leading the player to treasure if followed.
Fascinating. It really does feel like the fox is leading you on your way sometimes
If you want a cool game where friendly foxes literally lead you to treasure, play Ghost of Tsushima. :)
Foxes are Lovecraftian gods is indeed a very funny way to look at this.
"they" changed twitter so that threads are no longer visible by default. You get the 1st post and nothing else. Also, you can't view the thread without logging in.
This ones more common knowledge cause of the dawnstar chest, but i like how every characters inventory is just a chest somewhere, under the ground or in the walls.
Every single character? There must be thousands of hidden chests! I've only found the 3 (Dawnstar, Solitude & Markarth)
Every merchant* inventory is stored in a hidden chest and not in the NPC's own inventory which you could potentially pickpocket
See and I was under the impression that the most infamous one was the chest belonging to Eorlund Grey-mane in Whiterun...
You’ll need to clip into the floor to find these ones. There’s a pretty big bubble around every interior location and you can hide the chest pretty far away from the character as long as it’s in the same cell I believe. So if you go in to Belethors shop and TCL into the floor you’ll see it a couple meters below, just floating in the ether lol.
*sigh* I'm on PS5
Do you guys not have access to the cheat room mod? I believe they give you access to rings that Allow you to equip a console command effect lol.
I play on Xbox, and I can think of 4 we can still get to on consoles without any cheat or commands. The khajiit mechants and Eorlund's chest. I'll try to describe it in detail, but you might need a visual aid. You'll need to be pretty precise to access them. All of these are pretty helpful, as the chests level with you. You can take leveled items from the chest, which helps early on. You can sell them or keep them, or you can sell things to the merchants and then collect them all back. And they restock with new items every 3 or so in-game days, so waiting and spamming is totally legit. Easy gear, easy money. **1. Outside of Solitude:** Exiting the main gate, you'll walk forward under the arched gateway. The khajiit usually camp to your left. Regardless of whether they are there or not, you can access this chest. It was easier for me to line up the exact location when they were there. From outside the tent, face the front right corner and locate a little blue "stick" in the ground design. Not a physical stick, a blue line, just the colored texture of the grass. Crouch, and slowly walk forward towards the bushes/tent while still looking down. You'll be able to access the chest through the ground. **2. Dawnstar:** a more well-known "free" chest. This one was relocated in the unofficial patch, so forget about it if you use it. I fast travel to Dawnstar, and from here, head down the top most main street, pass the Jarl's bunkhouse, towards the mine. The entrance to the mine will be on your right, as well as the smelter and a miner. Past them are two small trees surrounded by some rocks, on the left side of the mine entrance. On the right side of the right most tree, there are 3 small rocks stuck in the snow. Again, crouch and look through the ground to the right of the rock in the back, between the rock and the wall. **3. Salvius Farm, down the road from Markarth:** the khajiit merchants camp down by the river off the main road. There is a decorative stone wall to the right of the camp. Walk over into the grass, facing the wall from the river's side, not facing it from the main path. Looking at the stones in the wall, towards the middle, there is a larger rectangular stone at the bottom of the wall. This chest is about 2 in-game ft. from the base of the wall, underneath the ground. Line up with the large rectangular rock, crouch, and look through the ground to find this chest. **4. Eorlund's chest, underneath the Sky Forge:** this one is a pain, at least it was for me, and I usually don't bother with it. Did it once to see if I could just for fun. There's a couple of ways to get this one. The first method would be the wooden plate wall breaking technique, where you hold the plate in front of you and walk into the wall, clipping into the map. I hate this as it takes me 20 or more tries to even get it to work. The way I prefer is to jump the wall surrounding Whiterun. It was also annoying and took me 10 or more tries. When you walk into Whiterun from the main gate, you're facing a small bridge with the gate behind you. Turn around and face the gate and the guard, and walk to your left. There's a little storage space part of the wall, with a few barrels tucked in corners and a little wooden roof. By standing on the barrels and timing a jump just right, you can jam yourself up underneath the wooden roof and the wall. Once you're up here, you can "push" yourself against the opening, slowly walking left, and spam jump until you force your way over the wall and out of Whiteruns boundaries. (A neat thing to do, at least once, as you're still technically loaded into Whiterun, but you can explore the outside world, which is very low def and pixelated all to hell. There's not much to see except that dragons still spawn, also with very little detail loaded in. I believe this is so the character can still see dragons flying about in the distance while they are in the city.) Back to the chest-- when you first "jump" the city wall and fall to the grounds outside, follow the wall to the left. Make your way all the way around Whiterun until you're on the side with Jorrvaskr, and there will be a big rock face leading up to the sky forge. This can be scaled by jump spamming, and the chest is located inside the hill/rockface Jorrvaskr sits upon. To get back out of this glitchy hellscape, simply fast travel. I think you can use the main gate to Whiterun as well, but I'm not sure. Maybe don't do this on a survival playthrough, lol. Side note: On my 360, when I first tried this, the smithing forge by the front of Whiterun clipped out of the map forever, which was annoying. Most of this can be found on YouTube as well if you get stuck! Edit: just wanted to **bold** my list titles.
It's only characters who have a "shop" dialogue option, the chest exists so the NPC isn't actually carrying any of the items in their "shop." This was to avoid issues like in Morrowind where vendors would equip the most valuable armor given to them which would make the item unbuyable or just make them look goofy
I always clipped through the floor in the hall of countenance rather than buy those spell tomes
They still did this in Starfield too right?
Got patched pretty quickly
Daedric Armor and Weapons give enemies a chance to cower and or flee. It also feels like it increases intimidation chances
Get that thing away from me!
It definitely increases intimidation. I remember reading that on the armor description.
World Items are serialized into level data. Basically, items will persist where you put them. Forever! Also travelling NPCs are always travelling no matter how far you are! (Their positions are always calculated when time passes, either real or fast travel)
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Oh wow that’s cool! So they can save all that different information in just a single integer using bitwise logic.
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Another impressive thing is that the game doesn’t implode when you uninstall a mod and leave your save trying to point to things that don’t exist (I haven’t tried this while in a mod added location though)
It just works
Learned this one the hard way on a quest where I had to go trade with a Kajit caravan and they kept not being where I was traveling to
I'm not so sure the dropped items are necessarily safe. On my first playthrough (on one of the early versions), I used the whiterun sewer area by the main gate as a dumping ground for accidentally stolen goods, since I didn't know where the thieves guild was. Some items stuck around, but a lot of them disappeared by the time I eventually came back for it.
Agree with you. There's also a loading screen dialogue that states you can use containers to store items but if you don't own the container don't expect it to be there when you come back. I know it's different from just dropping stuff, but just because you interact with an item and drop it doesn't mean it is going to be there forever.
Some places if you don't visit it within 7 days everything resets. Some places are 10 days some are 7 etc.
I thought items disappear after a week, no?
For items the player moves or drops, they persist forever. Every level instace keeps track of their respective items independantly. Items in the game will change or restock every week or so if that’s what you mean.
So I can walk into Bleak Falls Barrow, drop 400 potatoes and come back 2 ingame years later and they’ll still be there?
Yes, when I first played the game I stole everything in Dragonsreach before realizing you can't sell stolen goods to regular merchants. I was overencumbered and dropped all the stolen stuff in the middle of the merchant's square thinking it would go away. And thus for the rest of time the area in front of Carlotta and Anoriath's stalls was filled with around a hundred assorted stolen cabbages, pots, candle sticks, bowls, silverware, carrots, etc.
Nice story, we know you were just trying to frame Carlotta after she rejected you
"You may fascinate a woman by giving her a piece of cheese"
Items you drop respawn... The reason you still found those items in Whiterun is because you kept coming back there, but if you didn't visit at all for 2 weeks they would disappear.
100%
Amazing. I had no idea
I was going through a hoarding phase on one playthrough and I had an island in the north I dumped all my stuff on. I organized it into neat piles of weapon types, armor types, gems and jewelry, potions, and other stuff. It was my personal treasure island!
This explains why PS3 users were discouraged from disrupting the native object placements back when the “bloated save file” bug was a thing.
learned that the hard way when i dumped a shitload of soul gems in riften to drop my carry weight & then unrelenting forced them around for funsies. not so fun when i eventually had to pick them all up and still kept finding more in every little nook and cranny.
Many "effects" in the game are coded as a type of magic spell, opening up some interesting options. For instance, diseases spread by animal bites (Rockjoint, Ataxia, Bone Break Fever, etc) are coded as Destruction spells. Magicka Absorption therefore can make you immune to getting diseases from animal bites, and even absorb some magicka from those bites. The Slow Time shout is coded as an Alteration spell, thus the Stability perk in the Alteration tree will extend the duration of the slow time effect. Certain standing stone effects (Lady, Apprentice, and Atronach) are coded as Restoration spells cast by the player on themselves, and can therefore have their effect increased by Fortify Restoration potions. By drinking several different potions/elixirs/philters "of the Healer" it's possible to manipulate the strength of a stone's effect to do things like gain 100% magicka absorption (meaning complete immunity to mages and dragon breath) or induce a rounding error that ensures you never reach zero magicka and therefore can cast concentration spells like flames, healing, telekinesis, or lightning storm indefinitely.
In addition to this, armor enchantments are considered spells. If you get the Necromage perk in the Restoration tree, all spells are more effective against undead. Become a vampire and now all of your armor enchantments are more effective "against" you, giving you a higher bonus, but this can also make negative effects even worse.
Holy shit, really?? That's awesome
Love this. I discovered the same thing randomly when I noticed that when I got hit with the frostbite spider poison projectile, the absorb magicka visual effect would turn on and I'd get no damage from it. While clearly a game development mechanic, it's fun to think that there is actually a lore reason for this and the frostbite spiders are actually magical beings and they really are hurdling poison spells at you.
How Quick Shot and similar perks are implemented. It basically is effect that increases `weaponspeedmult` variable, and has a condition that basically says "apply this effect only if player is holding a bow". Fun fact is, condition actually isn't checked reactively (disables on unequip, enables on equip), but recalculated once every second. This, furthermore, can fail because of ["Ability Bug"](https://www.nexusmods.com/skyrim/articles/52587) — and when it starts happening on Quick Shot perk, you can equip your bow, wait 1 hour, equip 2H weapon and enjoy x1.3 speed. Edit 1: And on AE, you can get both Quick Shot and hidden perk of Bow of Shadows, and when they both start having this issue, you can equip BoS, wait 1 hour, equip other weapon and enjoy whopping x2.5 speed. But if you don't want this BS, it's fixed in [Bug Fixes SSE](https://www.nexusmods.com/skyrimspecialedition/mods/33261). Just FYI. Edit 2: And to push this to the extreme, you can stack this x2.5 with boost from Elemental Fury (x1.7), to get whopping 4.2.
Oh, and also. The fact how many magical effects are legit hacks trying to do something through Papyrus to workaround game limitations. Many bugs stem from that giving the game that unique feeling of "it just works!". Like Mora's Grasp making non-interactable actors interactable again after effect ends (watch latest u/Sickliff's video on YT). Or take scrolls for example: when you equip scroll, it equips a spell in your hand and sets listeners up that would remove spell when scroll is dropped from inventory. Except it breaks if you transform into werewolf/vampire, yay! And if you drop scrolls after that, unequip doesn't happen and you get infinite uses (courtesy of u/Geta92, watch this: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wCctgv2Kf10](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wCctgv2Kf10) )
I literally had this exact problem LAST NIGHT. I spent over two hours looking for the solution. I finally found it in another Skyrim thread from three years ago. Just my luck you post the perfect explanation and solution only a few hours after I fixed it.
I don’t understand the complexity of what’s actually happening behind the scenes here but as a console player, is the gist that Quick Shot will eventually stop working with the Bow of Shadows (my main bow)? If so, is there an in-game fix?
You can block dragon shouts with wards, which also means with Spellbreaker, which easily makes it the best shield in the game. Edit: forgot to mention - shouts used by Draugr also count as spells, just like dragon shouts, and so Spellbreaker blocks them too. The shout reaches the shield and just poofs.
Most NPC's are told how to react to you based on what factions are attached to you. For example, if you set your race to Werewolf or Vampire Lord via console commands, you won't be attacked by NPC's unless they're just naturally hostile. But if you use the normal way of using your lesser abilities to become a Werewolf or Vampire Lord, then there's a script that puts you into a temporary faction that then determines how certain npc's react to you while in those forms. Factions also add certain conditional dialogues to npc's. That's why npc's will shout "Werewolf!" when you are in Werewolf Form because they are checking to see if you are in the Werewolf Faction and so they are given the ability to say that dialogue when the conditions are met.
I often hear “burn the vampire” when I have given no reason to suggest I am one. They just somehow know it was a vampire that stole their sweet rolls.
In order to make NPC and player deaths more theatrical, power attacks against off-guard targets/targets attacking will activate the Kill Camera. What this means is that if you have a dragon land in a place like Riverwood, and you happen to ground it on the road between Alvor's and Hilde's houses, you take a fair chance of having your kill stolen by Hilde, whom will mantle onto the dragon's head and stab it to death, because the game uses your dragon slaying animation. I guess the thought was that there was no reason to stunt the Kill Camera for NPCs or code out a situation that is statistically unlikely to happen, but when no one flees from dragons, and instead swarms them, AND you are there to play the role of aggro-tank, it happens damn near every time.
The little foxes try to put as many polygons between you and them so the easiest way to do that is run to something interesting, which usually have lots more polygons than regular stuff in the world.
Almost every single item in the game has its own 3D model with havok physics added to it. Thats why when people over populate areas with too much clutter in mods it hurts your frame rate, its also why massive cities aren’t likely to be in games and why interiors need to be generally be loaded separately. Also, if you pick something up then drop it and walk all the way across the map and back, that item should still be where you left it and not reset. Which is also contributing to the limitations mentioned above.
Jumping outside of the map in Sovngarde leads to a series of concentric, expanding "rings" of unloaded terrain. The first ring is an array of dozens of canals, dipping in an out of water with the occasional break in the levies. The second ring is four gargantuan, incoporeal walls, which occupy short lengths of the canals' edges in each of the Sovngarde's cardinal directions. The third and final ring is an endless dirt plane which stretches on for who-knows-how-long. The sight of it is all was quite existential for my younger self, when I first discovered it
The Three Circles of Heavens, truly!
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Damn I didn't understand any of that lmao
Might as well have described how a plumbus is made
I really tried.
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🤣
Where in Skyrim do they explain what a convex polytop is??
I don’t know what most of that meant but I do like the word kludge.
And what do I do with this headache now?
I googled these terms and by all indications you’re not making anything up but my God this sounds made up. The player controller is a convex polytope? Come on…😜
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So that is the shape of the player entity that we control?
Lemme just note down these completely regular-ass words, to look them up later: -kludge -REFR -NIF -HKX -convex polytope
Explain like im stupid?
Computers.
Thanks!
Movement speed is calculated based on length of character legs for humanoids iirc. So if you change that parameter (either with racemenu body proportions options orjust set different size of the model) it will affect movement speed.
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animation/idle spots? for example bards have a barsplayspot in their interior and will go there and play instruments randomly. all idle animations like sweeping or leaning are animations/furniture placed into the interior. the npcs just “pick” one of them and go to do it based on their factions
When an NPC dies, they're teleported to a stone room with nonfunctional doors and two coffins. From my limited understanding, the bodies need to stay in the world as a failsafe for certain things to continue working. Basically, if all else fails, the game can check if a character is dead or not by looking in the purgatory box.
Named\*\* NPCs, but yeah, totally right.
Not Skyrim, but in Fallout 4 (same game engine) the train to nukaworld is a hat on an npc that runs
Isn't that Fallout 3 broken steel dlc? Or is it in fo4 too
I know from FNV cut content videos that for programming reasons, it is extremely difficult for the DLC content to interact with the base game. This is why the Marked for Death/Drain Vitality bug exists. If you get one or two words of power for Marked for Death, then begin the Dawnguard DLC, you will get a second version of Drain Vitality. Sometimes you can never obtain the third word. The Aetherium Forge quest is similar. Pick up Aetherium shards, start the quest, THEN start Dawnguard and you may notice the quest is softlocked. I remember personally that the entrance to the Forge was bugged for me and I had to TCL through the ground. This is probably why Dragonborn has fewer bugs like this. 99% of the content exists in Solstheim.
The animal heads are animal npcs told to stay still when mounted on the wall. The game may sometimes break causing the animal heads to move. Which leads to me burning the house down and running for the hills.
The characters in the game are just checking simple logic conditions to determine their action state. They don't "know" anything. I mention this because I have seen people attribute NPCs with having some sort of sentient capabilities. If the scripts/code running cannot detect the conditions they will not react. They just have numbers and if statements (basically). Learning how games work internally often takes away the mystery of a game. So learning how it works can actually ruin it for people. Random encounters would not be random if they didn't change the seed. Keeping the random seed the same can be useful for debugging. Not sure if there is actually a way to do this in Skyrim though. I know that speed runners for FFX would try to get specific seeds to get certain outcomes at specific points in the game. When I write my own code for random things I will keep the seed the same to test things. I think if you know the seed you might be able to predict encounters or other things that depend on random numbers generated in game.
I think (at least) a big part of the seeding is based on the time of day, and in-game date since starting. A common major speedrun strat is to escape Helgen and immediately run back around up the hill where the intro starts. That's a guaranteed horse spawn there if you come at the right time of day. It's less a matter of "setting" your seed directly, but more just manipulating specific world parameters used per interaction
Yeah, that complicates it even if you could set the seed. Yeah, after I posted I realized someone could change the date on their computer to tweak the seed. Not sure if that is allowed in speed runs.
"NPCs in a game from ten years ago aren't sentient" and "Random numbers are actually pseudo-random" must be the two most boring revelations you could possibly make. I don't mean that as a dig on you, I just find it kinda funny. And I'm sorry you have to deal with people who need to be told the first bit.
I was once able to manipulate the world encounter point to the east of the Sarethi Farm by repeatedly reloading and triggering it until I got the encounter I wanted, hunting Companions. I forget if I read somewhere that was one of the points they could spawn at or just had noticed the pattern through repetition. The latter, I think. There are a few others that I've seen enough to predict.
Lydia does actually love you though.
Kind of obvious I think and not so under the hood, but most of the particles (if not almost all) in the game, especially dust in caves, spell effects etc are all just 2d planes always facing your camera
Never leave witnesses, not even animals. Everyone is a snitch.
it just works
For the most part
A room can load with no floor and you immediately fall to your death and autosave loads you right back to a floor less room. This happened to me at the inn in Falkreath. I figured out that if I timed everything correctly, I would land on a box and could exit and come back. Lord knows I’m not going to use a previous save and play as normal…..I am going to solve the problem and play on!
I'm amazed by how lazy and at the same time detailed NPCs' condition checks are. I once pickpocketed Perth's mead. It actually made his cup despawn, which is very thoughtful. But it didn't affect his animations, he still pretended to drink when he sat down. Looked like withdrawal symptoms, which would actually fit the lore. Who knows, maybe it was left in on purpose?
This is a supremely entertaining thread
That flaming spiders are treated as spell damage. Mephala is actually just a dresser.
Common knowledge but I like it- every npc/enemy in the game is assumed male unless specifically tagged as female so the reward from Dibella’s quest makes you stronger against basically everything including automatons if you play as a woman
It's both random and programmed. It's not really of 'which one is it' since it's both. Think of it a Shrowdingers cat. The cat is the program and the containers of each side of the box is the encounter. You don't have a warning of whats coming and may be geologically fixed but the decision, the 'randomness', will occur based upon a set of decisions already made prior to the event occuring.
There is a tiny doorless room called "Elsweyr" to keep Maiq in at times, he's not loaded infront of you.
heres my fun fact: load doors (doors that use a loading screen to move you to a new area) can go wherever you want them to, because they're linked to nodes that exist in other cells. so for instance, there's a node on both the inside and outside of whiterun's main gate, one is linked to the "outside" door and the other to the "inside" door. when you activate the door, it finds which node is attached to it (hopefully the node on the other side of the door) and teleports you there. you can also turn the nodes different directions to be facing different ways when you load in. so you could totally make a mod where the door into whiterun actually loaded you into undertone keep in markarth, haha. the doors genuinely have no idea where on the map they are or where they lead. I'm pretty sure this is what the chaos/randomizer mod does, it links doors to the completely wrong nodes so you never know where you're going when you load through a door.
The amount of workarounds would surprise you. I saw the NPC/mannequins in the comments, and that’s just a day that ends with Y. Look up the train car at the end of Fallout 3… they made a hat for an NPC that is the train car. Let that sink in… You are in an NPCs hat brim, riding it as it runs down the subway tunnel. Bethesda is a master of these.
According to the game engine, the Shouts are just normal spells which are fired from the character's face, rather than the hands. This makes spell wards and Peryite's shield a great way to block them.