Killed a dragon too soon?

[Spl1nt3rC3ll]

While exploring Solstheim I ran across Saering's Watch and killed the dragon there, absorbing it soul. Every now and then, the dead, intact dragon appears in random places. Just laying there dead, sometimes it'll drop down from the sky first. Once I reached the part of the main quest where you must save the Skaal village, I realized that I probably wasn't supposed to kill that dragon just yet. Read up on the quest and it says Miraak is supposed to appear and steal the soul. Oops. Am I screwed? I'm a bit too far into other side quests to just start from an earlier save. No other dragon has appeared on Solstheim and I've spend quite some time on the island.

 

(I was doing side quests as I encountered them on the way to the Temple. The end of the Mead hall quest leads the player to a cave within aggro distance of Saering's Watch.)

 

Edit: Realized I miss clicked and posted this to the wrong troubleshooting section. I do have Dragon Combat Overhaul installed, not sure if the dead dragon is related to that or the fact that I killed it too soon.

Edited April 28, 2014 by Spl1nt3rC3ll

[Georgiegril]

Dragons sometimes just get stuck like that. It is a glitch that appeared before any of the DLCs. The easiest solution to the current dragon is to go back and redo the dragon fight. Then be sure not to fast travel away.

Clicking on the dead dragon and typing "disable" in the console should remove it, but I am not swearing that won't have other unintended consequences.

I have noticed that this hasn't happened for me since I started using the unofficial skyrim patches, but that may be a coincidence.

Also, are you using the latest skse (1.7) with the following lines in your skse.ini? (that is in your Skyrim\data\skse folder)

[General]
ClearInvalidRegistrations=1
[Memory]
DefaultHeapInitialAllocMB=512
ScrapHeapSizeMB=256

 

Generally, if you are getting the problem with dragon fights that the dragon does not give up a soul upon death (to you or Miraak) the solution is to save the game, don't exit, but reload what you just saved. The soul script should then trigger upon the reload of the save. I don't think that is going to work for your situation now, but it may help in the future.

 

(also, if you haven't done so, run BOSS, read the log, take care of ALL the messages. TES5Edit cleaning, unrecognized mods, mods that need patches, or are outdated, everything.)