Moraevik

Do you not see how these two sentences do not add up? Where are these "hundreds of thousands" of people on those three sites? They aren't there, are they? So taking the entire population and comparing it to a percentage of a small fraction of the entire population is just mathematical nonsense. The people having problems with post-1.5 patches and Dawnguard are a significant proportion of the user base. Bethesda, itself, has acknowledged that Dawnguard has some serious issues. And you're quite wrong about everyone who has problems flocking to the above sites and complaining. The vocal ones are a minority of the silent sufferers. I struggled with bugs in both Oblivion and Skyrim long before I went "public" with my issues. A lot of us just quietly sit in the shadows and do our homework, since we know our questions are likely to be answered by that vocal minority.

This is a tough one because a number of missions all have certain things that really draw me into them, so I'm going to have to list several, and I suppose I'll keep it just three. Oh, maybe this should have been in Spoilers, rather than the general discussion forum? Near the top of my list would be "Discerning the Transmundane" -- only because that's the way you get (legal) access to Blackreach, which is my favorite place in Skyrim to explore. I love "The Mind of Madness" because I think Sheogorath is one of the most entertaining characters in any game. The mission itself is somewhat of a let-down and I seldom use the Wabbajack, but I do this one just to hear him talk, again. By the way, he's voiced by the extremely talented Wes Johnson, who also does Hermaeus Mora and Emperor Titus Mede II. Anything that lets me beat up on the Thalmor: I actually enjoy doing "Missing in Action", and while I don't much enjoy being a certain NPC's puppet (which means I don't care for the Main Quest in general), I look forward to "Diplomatic Immunity" and try my best to leave no survivors behind -- at least Thalmor survivors. And, I suppose I'd have to throw in "A Daedra's Best Friend" because of the incredible voice acting by Stephen Russell (who does both Barbas and Clavicus Vile, as well as Mercer Frey in the Thieves Guild). Again, the mission, itself, is a bit of a let-down and the final reward not all that great, but it's fun just listening to those two. That was four, wasn't it? Oh well, there are three kinds of people in the world. Those who can count and those who can't.

I generally play stealth-based characters, too, but you can do that without any armor at all. There's an advantage to that. At lower levels, before you can get the perk that muffles movement in light armor, your light armor still makes noise when you move. Except for one play-through in which I played a pure tank, though, if I wear armor at all it's light and my cut-off on the armor type is leather -- mostly for esthetic reasons. I just don't like the looks of light armor that's "better" than leather, and there's really not that much difference between all the light armor types, especially if you make a career of staying out of direct combat.

As far as I know you have to meet two prerequisites after completing "The Man Who Cried Wolf" before the courier will deliver the letter. First of all you must be at least level 10. Secondly, you have to level up after "The Man Who Cried Wolf". If you've met both of these, then I'm afraid I have no clue.

Khajiit Speak - Complete Dialogue Overhaul, by mjharper, will address this issue for you.

Try "setstage DB01Objective 200" That's a "one" imbedded between a "zero" and an "oh", by the way. This should get the "Talk to Aventus Aretino" assigned objective out of your journal. As for Grelod still walking around and harassing the kids, I'm afraid there's probably nothing you can do about that, now, since you already completed the DB quest-line prematurely. It's not going to break anything, though. What you might try (save your game before you do this!) is to restart "Innocence Lost". Just type ... resetquest DB01 If this doesn't immediately give you the "Talk to Aventus Aretino" objective then type ... setstage DB01 5 This should allow you to kill Grelod normally, which will finish the "Innocence Lost" quest but be sure to do it in its proper stages. You could console your way through it (stages 20, 30, and 200), but it's not that difficult to talk to the kid and then do the deed. I'm not sure if this will wind up restarting the whole DB quest-line though, which is why the warning to save your game before you try this. If this bugs the game in any way, then just forget about the orphanage. There's really nothing you can do there, anyway. What sinnerman suggested will not work. "Innocence Lost" is already flagged as completed in your game, so you can't re-complete it and accomplish anything. You must reset a completed quest to do anything above the completion stage. Also, "player.setstage" is not, to my knowledge, a valid format for the "setstage" command. If the console accepts it, then it's redundant, anyway, since it's meaningless to flag this command for any actor.

Promiser, I think the reason that Hadvar and Ralof don't free you immediately, even though it seems logical that they would, is to prevent you from wandering around Helgen while Alduin is attacking. By keeping you absolutely helpless and unable to interact with anything the developers insure that you'll be in the right place to escape the city. With nothing else to do but follow Ralof, initially, you'll follow him. The game then channels you to the point at which you'll get the option to follow Hadvar, instead, but he still won't free you until you're inside the keep. This is just the developers attempting to make this quest "people-proof", and I don't see any other way they could have done this and still give you a good view of the destruction that Alduin was causing all around you. Anyway, on to OP's question. For a game designed to support followers I think it fails, but at least it does support them to a degree. It took modders to add good followers to Oblivion and I was sort of divided about even them. Vanilla followers can make the difference in a fight. I'm not really fond of any of them but Kharjo and Meeko and even they need some tweaking. Mostly I don't use followers because I tend to play a "sneaky type", as Alvor would say. Followers will inevitably blow your cover the instant they are detected, rather than waiting to charge into battle until you are detected. This puts them in the direct line of fire if you're using a bow or ranged spells, and then they complain when they get hit. I even had Meeko turn on me once, before I started setting him to ignore friendly fire. It will be up to modders to create good followers for Skyrim, just like they did for Oblivion. In fact, one of the best followers in ES is a creation by Emma for the game Oblivion. Vilja set the standard for followers, complete with custom scripted AI, voice acting, back-story, lots of unique dialog, and awareness of where she was and what the player was doing. I understand Emma's working to get Vilja ported over to Skyrim, and follower modding will take a turn for the better as modders start attempting to emulate her work. At the moment I think that Cerwiden, by Mujuro, is probably the best human follower for Skyrim.

Some console commands work with reference IDs. Some work with base IDs. Consult the wiki to sort this out before you attempt to use a command. For the record, "setessential" works with base IDs. The ID you get when you click on something in the console is the reference ID. To get the base ID of an actor, you need to type "help <name>", where "<name>" is the complete name of the actor. If there are two or more words, separated by spaces, in that name then you must enclose the name in double quotes ("). Once you have the BaseID, type "setessential <BaseID> 1", without the angle brackets, of course. That last character is a "one" and not an "ell".

Do you have any "de-leveling" mods installed? It could be that some of these "rebalancing" mods are causing lower level enemies to spawn at greater frequencies for you. As for Mirmulnir, his level ranges from 10 to 50. With a top of 50 and you at level 60 with uber equipment it's no wonder he didn't have much of a chance.

I think you missed the point, shadow. simbala is not getting the option to enchant it, so he obviously already knows how to enchant an item. Now, I don't have Dawnguard, but a little research (Google "skyrim amulet bats" and the first item on the list gives a description of the amulet) led me to the most probable answer. It's already enchanted. That's why you probably can't enchant it. Enchanted items cannot be further enchanted in Skyrim. You can only enchant non-enchanted items. There are a few items with special effects that are merely scripted, rather than using stock magical effects, and these can be enchanted (silver weapons are a good example). I'm not sure if the Amulet of Bats is such an item. If it is, then there is something else going on.

What bben says is good advice and is something people who play this game long enough eventually figure out, themselves. Don't rely upon autosaves or quicksaves. You might look into this mod: Save Hot Key ArchMod - for SKSE It hotkeys your save to F11, so that it's as painless as a quicksave, but creates a permanent save, instead. I typically save before and after every engagement, before fast-travel, and before making any transition from one cell to another (i.e., where you have to go through a loading door). I'll also save before doing anything at all that is risky, like picking a pocket or attempting a stealth kill against a boss. You can't be too careful, and you can always clear out older saves. There is an automatic save mod that will make permanent saves every five minutes by default, although this is configurable. Krosis. I cannot remember its name.

I'd be interested to hear what Bethesda says about this. I've noticed that this part of the main quest is buggy as all git-out, mostly with Delphine and Esbern stalling and apparently forgetting what they're supposed to be doing. In your case, though, they did what they were supposed to be doing. The dragon is a scripted event and the battle can be epic, with you, the two Blades, any companions you might have along, a dragon, and a large camp of Forsworn (don't forget the nearby Hagraven), in a battle royale. You missed a lot of fun by running away like a little girl. Seriously, putting the mirth aside, Delphine and Esbern stayed behind and fought the dragon like they were supposed to. I'm not sure how you can go about fixing this and I feel your pain. I've had similar situations where I had to dump 10+ hours of play because of bugged game saves, and it's not fun at all. It might be your only solution, though. Live and learn, I guess.

Skyrim is a game that encourages the JOT approach to character-building because it forces you into all the main quest-lines, so you have to be a mage, a thief, an assassin, and a warrior. Or so the novice player might think. In fact, Skyrim doesn't adequately support a JOT character and players who spread their perk points out too liberally will quickly discover that at moderate to high levels they become weak and non-survivable. Indeed, if you carry it too far you'll be weak and non-survivable at even low levels of play. I'm talking about the vanilla game, of course. There are a lot of mods that affect the skill trees, the magic system, the stealth system, and the combat system. Once you start installing these, all bets are off. I've played the following types of characters in over twenty play-throughs, although I'll admit that many of my play-throughs only lasted until about level 30-40, at which point the game becomes too easy without installing mods that make it harder. Unfortunately, most of these also introduce things that I don't like, so I don't use overhaul mods. tank pure thief pure mage heavy battlemage light battlemage stealth mage stealth archer What I've learned is that the game plays best, at least for me, if you super-specialize in only one or two skill trees. As an example, in playing a pure mage I'll generally go with "battle conjurer" -- that's someone who specializes in Destruction and Conjuration. Whatever I decide on a build, though, I'll always put a point into Destruction and Restoration, just to make it easier to use those novice-level destruction and healing spells. As a pure mage I'll likely build the Alteration skill tree so that I can cast the apprentice-level armor spell at half cost, as well. I think your problem is that you're spreading your points around too generously in the magic skills. If you want to be a heavy battlemage, which seems what you were trying to describe, you don't need the Illusion or Alteration trees beyond putting just one point into each, and you really don't even need that. Eschew Block and use a two-handed weapon. I did that with my tank character and was pleasantly surprised that it was the most survivable, especially at low levels, of all my builds. Don't go overboard on Smithing and Enchanting. Build these trees only as you need to in order to improve armor/weapons the game is dropping at your level, and to boost what you can find with basic, low-level enchantments. Both of these skills are notorious for causing rapid-leveling, even after the "stealth fix" to Smithing that the 1.5 patch introduced. The faster you advance without improving your actual survival skills, the weaker you become with respect to your enemies. I'll put a point in Smithing very early in the game so I can forge and improve steel weapons and armor efficiently. I may well never go beyond that. You don't need Legendary Ebony gear to survive in this game. I generally go with a maximum of Elven weapons and leather armor and do just fine. Similarly with Enchanting. Building the Enchanting tree early in the game is a total waste. Many of the enchantments you can do have their power levels set by your level in Enchanting and have little or nothing to do with the perks you buy. Get Enchantment up to about level 30-50 before you start building this tree. The best way to do this is to collect soul gems, fill them as soon as you can get a soul trap spell or weapon and then just enchant stuff. It doesn't have to be useful. You have to take care, though. This can cause very rapid leveling. Don't try to be everything at once. That's the problem you encountered with your "chaos mage tank". Specialize in your approach to conflicts and keep within those narrow parameters. Play to your strengths and avoid situations that exploit your weaknesses. If you try to be too many things at the same time, your strengths are diluted and your weaknesses are amplified.

Minor technicality. Everyone still thinks you killed it, even if you never lift a sword/bow/casting hand. I actually think this quest should require you to get 50% of the damage on the dragon AND the killing blow, but I'm not sure how one would go about making this happen. It's really annoying in a funny sort of way that my Dragonborn starts acquiring a reputation even without doing anything. I still have to laugh about one play-through where I had kept my nose ENTIRELY clean -- never even attacked anyone without being attacked first, and never provoked anyone into attacking me, and early in the game I got tagged by a DB assassin. Random game is random, but that's another topic, I guess. I think there's a mod floating around out there, somewhere, that prevents you from being the thane of more than one hold, or at least there was talk about it. This would obviously conflict with the Main Quest in which you automatically become Thane of Whiterun upon defeating Mirmulnir (or at least being there when he's defeated). It would make Whiterun the only hold for which you can become Thane, since that's an automatically-bestowed title.

Actually, gsmanners, Balgruuf doesn't make you thane until after you've defeated the dragon. My reward for getting the stone for Farengar has always been a useless piece of armor -- in the last playthrough iron armor for a character who is a monk and doesn't wear ANY armor at all, much less heavy armor. The problem with Balgruuf is that you don't have a choice about your title. There's no way to refuse it and no way to step down. There's also no real reward, except for the warm fuzzy feeling that you are now Thane of Whiterun and you can get away with one -- count 'em, one -- crime without being fined or thrown into the clink. I think that in all my play-throughs (certainly at least twenty, maybe more, since I quit keeping count at fifteen) the Axe of Whiterun was actually useful to me once -- for about three levels and then I found a better one as part of random loot. At least with the other holds you have to consciously pursue a dialog option that will lead to thaneship, if and only if you satisfy certain requirements. That's the way it should be, and I thank you for bringing up this little point, which I neglected to mention in my introductory post.

First of all, unless you use a mod that enhances werewolves, when things get out of control and you shift to beast-form you're going to die. Werewolves are seriously broken in the vanilla game. It's why I never use beast-form when I decide to do the Companions quest-line. It's better than carrying around a bunch of Cure Disease potions, but in my opinion being a werewolf is useless except for that little detail. If you're going to become a stealth mage I think you're on the right track, but I'd heartily suggest adding archery to your list of skills. You can't remain stealthy and cast spells. That means you can't use your long-distance "missle" spells and keep your cover at the same time. With a high-enough sneak you can get off multiple attacks with a bow at long range and the enemy will be clueless as to where you are. Don't bother with fully-developing the smithing tree, and stick to the "light" side of it. In the vanilla game there's not that much difference between the various grades of light armor. I usually stick with leather and use spells like "Oakskin" to further buff my armor. If you needed high-grade armor and weapons it would make sense to develop it more, but that's for a battle-mage. As a stealth-mage you're better off at keeping out of direct combat and let your summoned creatures absorb aggro for you while you stand off at a distance and rain down destruction with spells and your bow. If you decide to add archery to your repertoir then alchemy is an absolute must, and concentrate upon perks related to poisons. A strong poison, especially one that does damage over time can be the difference between life and death for the player.

People love to bash Bethesda for releasing "unfinished" games, but be reasonable. I know I'll probably take some flack for this, but as much as I get frustrated with some of the issues that are in this game, I have to say that Skyrim was probably an enormous undertaking, and it was rushed into production by their marketing branch, which insisted upon a release date of November 11, 2011 (i.e. 11-11-11). I'd guess that's at least one of the contributing factors for how shoddy it was on first release, but the company did release a series of patches to fix bugs. There are certain to be more patches to come, and don't forget the Unofficial Skyrim Patch, which I consider a must-have. As for not having higher-resolution textures with the vanilla game, remember that Skyrim was written for consoles, and not for PCs. Bethesda did release a higher resolution texture pack. I haven't bothered with it, myself, but I'm sure a lot of people use it. Now, my question to you is this. Would you rather have a prettier Skyrim or a Skyrim that actually works? The developers have limited resources to spend on game development. Personally, I'd rather have a smoothly-running, bug-free game than one with a lot of eye candy, but that's just my personal opinion.

Well, you can re-do the entire "The Horn of Jurgen Windaller" quest by using the following command: resetquest MQ105Ustengrav What you might try, instead, is to go to the inn in Riverwood and use the following two commands: prid 13485 moveto player This will move your contact to the inn and things should proceed normally from there. However, a better solution would be to go to Riverwood, anyway, and check to see if you can rent the attic room, as per your instructions. There's no way your contact should ever be in Windhelm, and it could be that you have a mod that's causing a problem with display of the quest marker, or perhaps it's just a random glitch in the game. It's possible your contact is actually at the Sleeping Giant Inn, already. If you can rent the attic room from Delphine (the innkeeper's associate), then you don't have any problem with this quest.

The Companions are infamously buggy from beginning to the end of their quest-line. In one of my play-throughs, very early in the game before I had committed any crimes at all (except for picking a few locks while getting out of Helgen), and had never even caught Rockjoint, let alone becoming a vampire, I met a small group of the Companions and they attacked me without warning or provocation. I've experienced quest-breaking bugs at every single step in the quest-line progression, and not all of them can even be fixed from the console. My prognosis ... the Companions are severely broken. My Rx ... forget the entire Companions quest-line until Bethesda gets it fixed. My prediction ... it isn't going to happen, so you'll probably have to wait until some enterprising modder figures out how to fix them. The only fix I can suggest is to roll back to a save before you went on the quest and then re-do the quest. Sadly, this is the only fix for some of the problems that are still plaguing the game. You might also want to inspect any of your mods to see if they might be affecting the Companions in any way. I can't think of any that fiddle with the factions for Jorrvaskr but I suppose it's a possibility.

I've only done the Civil War quest once and experienced no issues with the battle for Whiterun, other than a moderate drop in FPS. Because of all the extra NPCs and special effects going on, this is bound to make your game take a performance hit. As Brandy said, you're already stressing the game with your mods. Throw in the extra stress on your computer with what Bethesda added, here, and you're asking for trouble. They never intended the battle to take place under those conditions. If I were you I'd disable all your eye-candy mods for the sake of this battle, and keep in mind you'll have to do it again later on in the Civil War quest, because Whiterun isn't the only city you'll be putting under seige.

I just ran into this problem this evening for the first time. My game was running just fine before that and suddenly my last save would not load. Neither would any of my auto-saves. I don't use them, anyway, but I thought it was better than having to resort to a previous hard-save. There was no save game bloating. I checked the file sizes first thing, thinking it might be that. I finally had to revert back to a previous save, which loaded up just fine and I've not re-experienced the problem. I'm sure that at some point my game because corrupted due to a random glitch, and that the hard-save and auto-saves that wouldn't load were similarly corrupted.

And if you have no intention at all of ever joining the Thieves Guild, you can permanently get rid of Brynjolf and his strong-arm tactics. Approach the market area slowly and stop the instant he leaves his stall and starts walking toward you. Save your game! This is just in case something goes wrong. Open the console and click on him. Make sure his refID shows up (20545), or just type "prid 20545". Then type "disable". He's gone. For good (or least until you re-enable him). Note that I've tried to use the console to just disable his AI for a temporary reprieve, but for some reason this sometimes winds up disabling npc AI globally. I don't know why the game doesn't always pick up on his refID, because as far as I am aware that should work all the time, and I've been able to selectively disable individual npc AIs before -- just Brynjolf's seems buggy with respect to this.

Don't have Dawnguard and I've only done this quest once. It went without a hitch.

The console method that JupiterTheGod gave won't work. "setessential" only works with base IDs, and when you select an actor in the console what you get is the reference ID. What you have to do is to type the actor's name into the console to get the base ID. The format is: help <name> Note that if the actor's name has multiple words you need to enclose all of them in quotation marks (the double and not single quotes), and that the angle brackets are not part of the console command. You'll find the actor's base ID in whatever the game outputs to the console. Note that number and then type: setessential <baseID> 0 That's a "zero" and not a capital "oh". You don't have to include any preceeding zeros. This removes essential status. Reversing the process is as simple as ... setessential <baseID> 1 That's a "one" and not a lower case "ell". This adds essential status. This will work with any actor, including followers, animal companions, and horses.

I'm a guy. I'll post, anyway, reason being that I used to know a girl (since passed away) who was a tremendous Oblivon fan, and we talked about skimpy armors and were of a single mind on them. Here's what she would say, since it reflects my own opinions, as well. I don't like many of them, either from an esthetic or realism perspective. Real warriors wouldn't wear something like that to a battle, because the skimpy stuff couldn't possibly protect them. Simply from the standpoint of looks, neither me or my girlfriend were into "showing skin", for either male or female characters. We play(ed) games to play games. If I want porn there's plenty of that available for free, elsewhere. While both of us used nude mods in Oblivion it was because the bodies and textures were better than vanilla and made people look more like real people than like they were chiseled out of cheese and colored with finger-paint. Besides, the modders of those bodies, which is what most of the skimpy armor is designed for, don't have a clue about the positioning of nipples on the breast and the upper body parts of those armors seem designed to display these misplaced body parts, rather than to protect them. It hasn't gotten any better with Skyrim mods. I'd rather see no nips at all than to see physical deformities on all the females in the game. Frankly, I think some of the armor mods for females are just revealing enough to enhance the body mod and texture being used. Hey, I'm a guy. I like to look, alright? In fact, were it not for the fact that most of the male Jarls are so stuck up and morally-righteous, I could easily see them with harems of bodyguards in their palaces wearing such stuff. Skyrim is a fantasy game, after all, and I have to admit that such armors do belong in fantasy, even if they aren't exactly realistic or lore-friendly. And I'm with some of the other posters. If female characters have sexy armor then so should the males. There's nothing wrong with a little beefcake to go with my cheesecake. In the end, though, this is a game and what some people hate other people love. Just because a skimpy armor mod exists for whatever body mod you're using, doesn't mean you have to install it. I'm currently playing a female character. She's adequately and modestly covered from neck to heels with a robe or with vanilla leather armor. She looks good enough in either of them to keep me happy, even though I'm not displaying anything naughty, although I could if I wanted to because the mod I'm using doesn't include underwear on the body model. Is my age showing, maybe? I'm actually a bit older than Frosty.