Moraevik

I'm not sure which forum would be best to address this long-standing issue with Skyrim, but it's become an issue for me, now, and I'm annoyed enough with it that I might consider creating a mod to fix it. But, I need some help. So, this forum. I'm sure most of you are aware that at the completion of the quest "Containment" all the residents of the College of Winterhold crawl into their own little holes and become unresponsive, having seemingly lost all hope for rescue. I'm sure that Bethesda thought this was a clever idea, but I disagree. These are mages and their very home is under attack. They would be fighting to the very end to see this situation resolved. That's how catastrophies bring people together to work on a common cause. At the very least the trainers and vendors should be more than happy to lend any aid they can to the player's character. What, for me, is now a related issue is the fact that Enthir will not function as a vendor/fence after the PC becomes Arch-Mage unless you purchase or sell to him before that point. While I'm sure this isn't his intended behavior, I'm not aware of a fix to this problem, either. I consider both of these to be serious issues, since they make no sense at all. The first is completely arbitrary and contrary to basic human nature. The second appears to simply be a programming mistake. Perhaps it's time to address them, especially since in my current play-through I'm seeing both of these problems at the same time. Yes, I know, I should have been thinking harder about it and not advancing the Thieves Guild quest-line to the point where I have to talk to Enthir while I'm still on the Mage's College quest to get the Staff of Magnus, but I guess it took this little bit of personal stupidity to light a fire under my bum and get me to actually do something about it. Chalk it up to a long hiatus from playing Skyrim and my aging brain cells not always retaining things unless I exercise that knowledge frequently. My problem is that while I could have solved both of these issues easily if this were Oblivion, it seems that Bethesda has gone out of its way to completely obfuscate how the AI functions in Skyrim. I've looked at the characters in the CK, I've tried to figure out what's going on by examining the quest, and I've even looked at the scripts and nowhere can I find just where ordinary dialog with the characters has been diverted to the "Woe is me" remarks. The problem with Enthir not vending/fencing is equally occult. I'll admit that I'm a just a bit out of my environment in this stuff, but solving problems like this is how I learned to mod in Oblivion. Maybe it's not quite that simple with Skyrim, but I'm willing to give this one a shot. I'm not even going to speculate on the Enthir-specific problem, but one would think that the unresponsiveness of all College residents is controlled by a single variable, but what is it, and what script does it involve? I'd really like to be able to do something about this, but I'm at my wit's end about where to even start, now that I've looked at everything in the CK that I think might be involved. So ... anyone care to give me some hints about what might be going on here, other than the usual "work on some tutorials" advice? I've looked at AI tutorials and so far I've found nothing that isn't just as confusing as how the AI is handled in the CK. I want to address these problems directly, without having to wade through excess baggage that doesn't have anything to do with them.

Heh ... I have the opposite problem. The game never actually gives me the necessary perk once I have the extractor. I'll bet, though, that the following command will fix your problem: player.removeperk 79af5 This should remove the offending perk and let you get on with your body looting without having to deal with the option to harvest blood, since it's the inverse of what I have to do to give myself the perk. If you're on a gaming console, though, I think your save game is permanently bugged, since you have no way to issue this command. In that case the only thing you can do is to revert to a save before Septimus gives you the extractor.

I'm sure the reason RIverwood is so popular among modders is because it's the first town you're likely to encounter right out of Helgen, assuming you don't go off and do your own thing (instead of following your guide into Riverwood like the devs want you to do). By positioning your mod in the Riverwood area you're insuring that a player will get some use out of it, almost right out of the starting gate. As for what Riverwood needs -- how about a smelter and a cooking spit? Yes, I know, you get a cooking spit after some guards set up housekeeping on the outskirts of the town, but not all of us engage the main quest right off the bat, and Camilla is more likely than not using the only other available one. And the nearest smelter is in Whiterun, and not all of us ... well, I already said it. After you've played the game fifteen or twenty times you just don't want ANYTHING tied to the Main Quest because it's likely you aren't even interested in it. An apothecary would be nice, too. The nearest alchemist is, you guessed it, in Whiterun. Riverwood is intended by the developers to merely be a "tutorial dungeon" of sorts, and a tie-in to the Main Quest. I really think you're expected to set up home in Whiterun, which is nice and all, but Breezehome is 8000 Septims, bare bones. I'd like to get settled down before I reach the point where I can afford that. Having even a little shack that you could rent from one of the residents would be nice. I know, you can take Anise's Cabin from her, but everything in there is marked as stealing if you take it and going to the basement counts as a "trespass" every time you do it. We won't even get into the thugs that a certain Hagraven sends after you if you steal even a single item out of the cabin (even if there are no witnesses). So, yes, an inexpensive shack with a player-owned bed for those players who like to get the well-rested bonus would be nice.

I had this problem right out of the box, and after updating my video drivers. I purchased my current gaming rig just so I could play Skyrim and a few other games, and Skyrim was the very first game I installed on it. So, no, at least in my case it isn't the video drives, which I keep up-to-date. The whole problem is just vexing, because it's anti-intuitive. If anything, you'd expect this to happen in third-person, since you have a wider field of view and the game has to load that many more textures and deal with that many more polygons, but, no. It happens in the much more restrictive situation of the narrowed field of view in first person. Narrowing the field of view from my preferred 90 degrees to the (I think) default 40 degrees seems to have no bearing on the issue.

This has always been the case for me, and I have no mods installed that affect ENB at all. It happened to me from the very beginning, when my only mod was the Unofficial Skyrim Patch. As you say, it seems like the game drops frames in first-person perspective, even though actual framerate remains constant. It's so irritating for me that I've started playing the game mostly in 3rd person just to avoid the micro-stuttering. Third-person runs silky-smooth for me, even in areas with a high poly and texture count. I don't remember this problem with Oblivion, and I was running it on a far less capable machine than the one I have now.

The official lore on the Falmer is that they are "blind". I don't think there's any room for speculation regarding the degree of blindness. It's like saying someone is a "little bit pregnant". Neither is there anything in the game, or in any officially-released information on the Falmer that I know of to support any hypothesis that they've developed some form of echolocation ability, save for having acute hearing. Regarding their written language, they were the "Snow Elves" before they were enslaved by the Dwemer, who took their vision from them. It's logical to assume they had a written language to go along with their spoken language. Lachdonin, I think we're aware of the ability of animals such as cetaceans and bats to navigate in complex environments. However, there's no evidence to support a theory that the Falmer have the necessary anatomical structures to accomplish this. Dolphins and their ilk have very specialized structures which enable them to focus very high frequency sounds (ultrasonic, in fact, typically in the 100-120 kHz range). The Falmer clearly do not possess these structures. Bats are a different thing, altogether, and their ability to actually "visualize" the environment in the way that cetaceans do is very limited. They can dodge objects while they're flying, which is impressive enough, but it's not believed by most researchers that they can actually form an "image" of those objects. They have neither the "imaging hardware" or the brain specialization that would be required for this. For one thing, their vocalizations are not high-enough in frequency to give the necessary wavelength to actually resolve very small or narrow objects, although they can certainly detect echos which bounce off them. Anyway, I think David and I have made a good case for a "reality breakdown" when it comes to the Falmer. I just chalk it up to the development team not fully thinking through all the ramifications of blindness. We do know that the use of light spells or torches will not give you away to Falmer, but in every other way they act fully-sighted.

Click on each of them in the console and write down the refIDs you get for them. Go to where you need them to be, then for each of them type ... prid <refID> moveto player That will get them to your location. The parts of the Main Quest that involve Esbern and Delphine are very fragile. Their AIs will stall out at the drop of a hat, or even the suggested drop of a non-existent hat. I have two batch files, named "GetEsbern" and "GetDelphine" that I can quickly run when this happens, so you can guess how many times I've had to manually move them to places where they should be, but they "forgot" what they were supposed to be doing. It's annoying as all get-out, but just about any quest that involves Esbern or Delphine is subject to random, and potentially quest-breaking AI stalls. It doesn't help that both of them are easily distracted by perceived threats (like mudcrabs a hundred yards away that have detected the player), and then they go rushing off to combat and just stand around doing nothing afterward.

I totally agree with David, here, regarding the inanity which is "blind Falmer" in this game. The game insists that the Falmer are "blind". Not "almost blind", or "partially blind", or "a little bit blind", or "a whole lot blind", but, simply, b.l.i.n.d. There's no ambiguity, there. This is an in-game fact. Another in-game fact, that is completely at odds with this one is that the Falmer act precisely like sighted persons. Now, one of my best friends, years ago, was blind. There was a very good reason that in her home every thing had its place and no place that was not supposed to have a thing ever ... EVER ... had a thing. A single out-of-place object could have spelled disaster for her. Want to up the anty a bit? She was blind from birth. She had an uncanny sense of hearing, and could "echo-locate" by making clicking sounds with a little device she carried in one hand. It still wasn't good enough to let her know about small objects that might be in the way. Now, about those presumably "blind" Falmer. I can have Sneak maxed out. I can move silently, even have shoes that muffle my sound. I don't make any discernible sound ... at all. I fire an arrow at a blind Falmer archer (now, there's an oxymoron if I ever saw one), and then step to the side. What does my opponent do? Exactly what a sighted opponent would do. He re-aims and fires his arrow in my precise direction. Ever notice how when you fire an arrow to distract your opponents that they go into this odd back and forth searching motion, trying to locate the disturbance? First of all, real people under fire don't do that. They duck for cover and, guess what? They LISTEN. Animals do that, too. I guess the developers have never been in a real fire-fight. I have. You don't go into a stupid mini-patrol sequence when there's someone shooting at you. Anyway, one more lapse of reality out of the way. My point is that the Falmer do exactly the same thing that everything else in the game does. They go back and forth as though they're looking for something. Looking. Not listening. Watch when a Falmer notices you. His head is turned directly toward you, just as a sighted person would. If he was detecting you by hearing that would not be the case. There's a reason that animals (or even a lot of people) cock their heads to one side when trying to locate a sound. At a 45 degree angle to the source of the sound you will get the most accurate bearing to that source. That's simple physics, dealing with the phase difference between sound waves reaching two audio sensors, and that's how we discern the direction of a sound with our ears, as well. Not so, Falmer. They just "look" right at us. My point? It doesn't matter that the Falmer are blind. It's not an in-game disadvantage to them. It SHOULD be, but it isn't. They might as well have 20:20 vision. Now to refute something that David said, though. I'm fair about these things. Why shouldn't the Falmer decorate things? If they were painting murals, that would be one thing, but what they're doing is sculpting tactile decorations. Most blind people are into touch in a big way. Many can discern textures that we sighted folk would swear are all the same. They can get a very accurate "image" of an object in their minds by feeling the object. Many can even, through an almost passing touching of a person's face, recognize individuals from each other.

I've had this happen before, and in various places -- not just inside Morvunskar -- and it is, indeed, the "Command Daedra" spell. Understand that NPCs don't have to abide by the same rules that are forced onto the player. Many NPCs have been tweaked in the CK to give them abilities that would seem to be out of place in the situation. Besides, you can cast a high level spell when you are, yourself, at low levels if you boost your magicka high enough through various means like potions and enchanted apparel. In addition, perks within the Conjuration skill tree allow you to make summons at half cost if you have them. I'm typically summoning Flame Atronachs when my actual skill level in magic is still at novice (based upon my available magicka and my other spells), because I like to put a point into apprentice conjuration. It's expensive, even at half cost, but its still possible. So don't assume that an NPC named "Apprentice Fire Mage", for example, is necessarily going to be a pushover with only apprentice-level abilities, relative to what you have at the same level of skill development. Note, also, that a "Conjurer" (an NPC class, and the one you're likely referring to) has four of its ten attribute points dumped into Magicka, and that there could be racial bonuses, as well. These guys are magicka machines, which is probably why they can cast higher level spells than you would think, and seem to never run out of magicka when they're throwing low-level destruction spells at you.

Good question, since the mere presence of the LOD of these "exterior" areas to Skyrim begs the question of why they're there in the first place. I've explored some of the region beyond Skyrim borders and the terrain will quickly degenerate into nonsense when you get too far away from Skyrim. Just tcl through the ground, sometime, and you'll get a preview of the kinds of things you see. Another way to see, graphically, what you will experience is to go to the place in Dragonsreach where you capture Ohdahviing and then tcl over the balcony. The entire area is its own cell even though it looks, at a cursory glance, as though you can actually see out into the tundra region surrounding Whiterun. Travel in any direction very far and you'll see the kind of terrain oddities I'm talking about. My conjecture is that it's possible, although difficult, to reach high-enough ground along the borders of Skyrim to see well into Cyrodiil and Morrowind, even though the border restrictions prevent you from actually going there. Therefore, I'd say that all that real-estate exists just as eye-candy for the determined explorer to take in if he can get to a point where he can see it. I suppose the way these could have been generated was by importing terrain from Oblivion and Morrowind and then generating LODs from that. The actual terrain wasn't placed in-game because that would have been just excess and unnecessary load on the game engine.

Yes, I was confused. I was born confused. I'll probably die confused. At least there will be parity. OK, then. Leveling in Oblivion, and not in Skyrim. I could say pretty much the same thing, though. If you use the skills that you set as primary skills, you'll level very rapidly. Oblivion has the same problem that Skyrim has. If you do all the quests you'll over-level, at least if you're playing the game the way the developers intended for you to play it. If you're leveling too slowly then you're probably not using your primary skills enough. This was, in fact, a well-known tactic among experienced Oblivion players to avoid over-leveling. When you create your character you intentionally set as primary skills those skills you expect to seldom (or even never) use. This would keep player level consistent with quest/enemy levels quite far into the game.

I can't help you with this odd problem, Slinkusss, since I've never heard of anything like you're describing. If I had to guess I'd say your save game has gotten corrupted. Now, about overwriting saves. This has been a known issue since at least Oblivion. Both quicksaves and autosaves are overwritten, and the game does not overwrite "cleanly". For some reason garbage from previous saves can accumulate in an overwritten save game. Bethesda sort of put a band-aid on this festering sore by giving us multiple autosaves with Skyrim, but this still doesn't really address the issue. All it does is delay the inevitable, which is an unstable save game that, eventually, might simply cause the game to CTD the instant you attempt to load it. Don't use autosaves. Don't use quicksaves. As soon as you revert to one of these, and then make a "hard save", you've incorporated any corruption in that autosave/quicksave into your hard save. This, in turn, will be propagated into any other hard saves after that. I think you can see how this is a downward spiral because none of the accumulated garbage ever gets cleaned out, and every single overwrite has a chance of adding more. I heartily recommend Save Hotkey ArchMod for people who are used to quicksaving. This maps the hard save onto the F11 key, so that when you hit it you'll get a separate hard save each time. It works just like a normal save, except that it bypasses the menu and the multiple keystrokes you have to use to make a save.

lemmiwinks, I prefaced my comment with "I'm not being argumentative" because this site is loaded with people who take themselves and their ideas much too personally. I've seen numerous examples in various threads where someone took offense to a perfectly innocent and valid comment about something they said. I really WAS interested to know why you chose to wait one in-game hour and your explanation didn't really explain anything. I'm sorry you took offense. Perhaps I shouldn't try to be so diplomatic in the future. I guess not everyone in the world understands the purpose of "apologetica". That out of the way, I understand, now that someone else explained your reasoning to me, why you did this, and my curiosity has been satisfied. Personally, I would never do anything like that because it makes time pass by in the game too artificially. I suppose you can explain it away by saying the spell doesn't work instantly, but takes effect over an hour's time, and that's OK, too. After all, I'm a proponent for healing spells that work over time, rather than instantly. Not everyone likes that idea, either. Everyone to each his own, as the old saying goes.

I'm not being argumentative, here, lemmiwinks. I'm just very curious why you have to wait an hour for your magicka to regenerate. As I said, it takes but a few seconds to completely regenerate your magicka, at least in the vanilla game. I've done the iron to silver to gold transmutation before, too, in mass beginning with over a hundred chunks of iron ore and never once had to wait during the whole process. I'm really curious what mod you're using that forces a one-hour magicka regeneration period. The vanilla rate is 3% of your total magicka per second, easily boosted by readily-available apparel and potions. A beginning character with no magicka regen buffs will completely regenerate his magicka in less than 34 seconds.

You're talking about Lucky Lorenz's cabin. It's located almost on a line between Hillgrund's Tomb and the Abondoned Prison, not far from the Shrine of Dibella and almost directly south of Cradlerock Crush. Go east from Valtheim Towers (which is on the road east from Whiterun), and when you finally cross the bridge just follow the river north. You'll come to a fork that goes east. Follow that, staying on the south bank, and you can't miss it. Regarding missing dragons, I can't say. I don't have Dawnguard but my first suspicions are in the direction of that DLC, since it seems to have broken so many other things in the vanilla game. You might try disabling it and see what happens.

My question is why did you wait for one-hour periods? It takes but a matter of seconds to regenerate your Magicka once it's depleted (except when you're in combat, when magicka regen is slowed down), unless you have a mod that affects magicka regen rate.

I figured as much, Georgiegril. The f12 key is the one used to take Steam-related screenshots. I don't know the details, because I avoid anything Steam whenever I can. You don't have to remap your keyboard. All you have to do is enable screenshots in your Skyrim.ini file, as has been explained, above. At that point screenshots taken with the print screen key should be funneled to your Skyrim install folder, as long as you're in-game. Other than that it should work as normal. Other than having to edit the Skyrim.ini file, there's no additional "magic" required.

All I did was to enable screenshots in my Skryim.ini, hit "Print Screen", and look in my Skyrim install folder. My screenshots wind up there and they are perfectly good .bmp files, easily viewable with any viewer which can handle that format. I don't even know how to force Skyrim to make them save as .jpg images, since I suspect using the "Print Screen" key causes the game to utilize Windows' own print screen function (which saves images as .bmp files). Perhaps the .jpg thing is when you're getting your screenshots through Steam, and I think you have to be online with Steam to do that.

Don't get your panties in a wad, Thomas. When you start a thread like this, listing your opinions on things, other people are going to respond in kind. It's called "friendly discussion". Nobody was knocking you for your concerns about the game. I'm sure we all have some. It's just that everyone's perspectives are going to be different from each other, and we were merely adding ours to the mix, as well as explaining why some of your concerns are not our concerns. If all you want is for people to agree with you in your threads, well ... this is a diverse audience you're going to have. I very much doubt that anyone on Nexus is always going to agree with you 100%, and that's perfectly OK. There's plenty of room in the world for all of us. As for not wanting "Reality", I don't think any of us actually want that. What we want is "verisimilitude". That's not the same thing. It's what the "reality mods" are all about. It's what the smithing overhaul mods are all about. It's what texture replacers and (at least in theory, although seldom in practice) what the full-body mods are all about. I think some of us simply felt that your ideas push verisimilitude a little too far into reality, especially considering that magic is an important part of this game, and you can't apply the rules of biology, physics, and chemistry to magic. And, for what it's worth, if I didn't specifically disagree with a point you made I happened to agree with it, so I suppose we're meeting about halfway. There's nothing wrong with that. With the appropriate mods I'm sure you could have just about everything in your list. That's the beauty of a game in which the developers release the tools and information needed to mod it. You don't get that with all games.

What key are you trying to use to get a screenshot, Georgiegril? If you're using a function key then that's the one tied to Steam, which would probably not work in offline mode because I think Steam wants you to download your screenshots to their blasted "cloud". There's a key on every standard keyboard that says "Print Screen", or perhaps "PrtScrn". Steam doesn't have its claws hooked into that one, and it works even on machines that don't have Steam installed. Using it from within Skyrim will deposit the screenshots in your Skyrim install folder whether you're running Steam online or offline.

That worked like a charm, Jellicent! Thanks. I have no idea how I missed that command. I still have a problem with clipping through the face, through (that's the problem with races that have elongated faces, I suppose), since this actually moves the camera, rather than just zooming in like a telephoto lens would do. I guess I'll just have to load the .bmp file into an external editor and crop out the unwanted parts of the image. tfc isn't the ideal solution for making portraits, I guess, but it's better than no solution at all. On the other hand, if anyone else knows of a better way than using the fly cam to do this, I'm still open to suggestions. Edit: My post crossed with flummox's post. Setting the fov does, indeed allow me to get the shot I wanted to get. This is sure a lot of trouble compared to how easy it was in Oblivion. Thank's flummox. I now have a complete solution, and further evidence that things that worked just fine in Oblivion have mysteriously disappeared from Skyrim.

Why all the bother with Steam? Forget Steam. You don't need it to do screenshots. Just make sure you have your ini configured to take screenshots and then hit the "Print Screen" key on your keyboard. You should see a notification in the upper left corner of your screen that the screenshot has been taken. Then look in your Skyrim install folder for your screenshots. They'll be named something like "ScreenShot2.bmp", where the number will increment for each screenshot you take. Note that "bAllowScreenshot=1" needs to be added to your Skyrim.ini file (in your user directory -- leave the ini files in the game install folder alone). Put it under the [Display] section. I'm guessing that the sections are just to organize the entries to make them easier to find but I've never tried putting one of them elsewhere. Go off the beaten path at your own risk.

I figured that "tfc", which I've never tried to use until now, would allow me to get a close-up screenshot of my character's face, but it doesn't. So ... how do I do this? I want just the head, down to the shoulders, to appear in the screenshot, but the closest I can get before I zoom into 1st person leaves me with the head to the torso. Using "tfc 1" allows me to zoom in, but with very little control. Even barely tapping the keys results in rapid and drastic POV changes. I fiddled with it for fifteen minutes and could never get the shot I wanted. Is there a not a way to smoothly scroll in and out and to move the camera around? I remember being able to this with ease in Oblivion in 3rd person, but in Skyrim we're severely curtailed in the ability to zoom in on our character for some odd reason. Use of the fly cam seems limited by it not being controllable in smooth, micro-increments.

Hmm ... Reality strikes again. I love a dose of Reality in my Fantasy, but let me address a few of the points that people have made. 1. Squinting does not make your eyesight bad. This is on the order of other old wife's tales like reading in the dark will make your eyes go bad or doing a certain, uh, "thing" will make you go blind. 2. Bathing: Regular bathing is something that is common only in cultures like our own. There are even modern, industrial cultures where people do not bathe regularly. Many of those people use various odoriferous substances to attempt to cover up their body odor. In a society where regular bathing is absent, or at least rare, adding your own aroma to that of all the people around you is not likely to give you away if you're sneaking around. The human nose acclimates to constant odors and the brain tunes them out. This may not be so for Khajiit and Argonians. Most scent predators are constantly aware of all the scents around them and do not acclimate to them. 4. Crafting: The entire crafting system of Skyrim is abstracted to make it playable. No we don't have the right tools available (although there are hammers and tongs lying about in various places). No, the ore to refined product ratio isn't realistic. Neither are the ores or products. "Ebony" is wood. Malachite is a form of copper ore. Moonstone isn't something you can smelt into ingots. Neither is quicksilver (mercury). Corundum is aluminum oxide, with trace impurities that give it various colors. Transparent red crystals are known as "rubies". Transparent orange crystals are known as "padparadscha". Other transparent versions are called "emeralds". You can't smelt it. It doesn't make "ingots", much less alloy with iron to make steel. We're not talking about Reality here. This is pure fantasy, with no basis in reality at all. 5. Bathrooms: Sure people use bathrooms. Have you noticed all those buckets lying around, especially those tucked away in nooks, even with reading material nearby? What do you want out of a Medieval society, anyway? Hot and cold running water and bidet-equipped commodes? Just my two-cents, although I fully agree that a realistic approach to gaming where magic isn't as much of an influence would make games like Skyrim much more interesting. I agree, for instance, that magic shouldn't be able to do instant healing, and that goes for potions, too. It's little tweaks to the fantasy like that which could introduce realism without breaking the whole epic fantasy atmosphere of the game. 6. Potions are part of the magic in Skyrim. Don't apply reality to them. There's no reason that quick fix potions should be unhealthy, and instant heal potions have been part of the fantasy genre almost as long as there has been a fantasy genre with potions.

That's where the game stores dead NPCs. To get out just coc to someplace else, like Riverwood, for example. The format of the command is "coc riverwood", or you can put in the name of any other cell if you wish.