Kjeld went bonkers

[RedRavyn]

After killing Sahloknir during "A Blade in the Dark", I walked back to Kynesgrove and Kjeld started attacking me. Nothing I did could stop this. I tried yielding and he refused to acknowledge it. I even attempted a variety of console commands: "Disable" followed by "Enable", "Kill" followed by "Resurrect", "Reset AI", "Stopcombat", and even "Recycleactor", and nothing worked. I finally just had to leave him dead in order to get some peace and quiet while doing other things around the town.

 

This has never happened to me, before, and the only odd thing that happened this time is that when I approached Kynesgrove a bear attacked and killed Iddra. Since she's the innkeeper I really had no option but to resurrect her. There shouldn't even be a bear in Kynesgrove in the first place, as far as I know, so there's something very glitchy going on, here.

 

Note that I did NOT follow Delphine into Kynesgrove from Riverwood. I had a few other things I wanted to accomplish before that, but I've done this before and nothing odd happened.

 

Has anyone had a similar experience, and, if so, does anyone know how to fix this situation?

[Georgiegril]

Is there any chance you accidentally struck a guard or villager with your weapon/spell? This would make the other NPCs in the other area hostile. I would either go back to a saved game before the dragon battle or try the guard fix--- fast travel somewhere far way, wait 3 days and then go back. You may have a bounty of you did hit someone, but they should not be hostile.

[RedRavyn]

Thanks for the advice, Georgiegril, but no ... none of those conditions applied. I had done nothing at all within Kynesgrove prior to walking in, and there were no guards in the area of the dragon burial mound (except the already dead ones that are spawned there). I could only fix the issue by going back to a save very early in my game before there were even dragons (except for Alduin) -- basically all the way back to my early explorations around Riverwood and Whiterun, before I even engaged the main quest. And, I had never been to Kynesgrove before that.

 

I had already cleared my bounty for both Whiterun and Falkreath, but I found that I could revert to a save before I ever got those bounties and the problem was still there.

 

The odd thing is that in trying to find out what the problem was, I found other places where random NPCs would go berserk on me as soon as I showed up in town, and yet others wouldn't, even in saves before I ever visited Kynesgrove. This is obviously an example of a glitch in the game that happens for no reason at all and that only emerges much later on. I've experienced these before in Skyrim, even with no mods installed, so I know it's a failing of the game, itself.

 

My fix for this was to scrap the game and start over, again, because there was just too much weirdness going on. I find it interesting, for instance, that this problem was associated with the "Karthwasten bug", in which the people in that town would constantly cry out in pain and shift into "battle dialog" as though they were being attacked, even though they, otherwise, went about their normal daily business. I've only seen this one other time -- another aborted game, because that was just too immersion-breaking for me and I'm not at all convinced that it's not indicative of a more far-reaching problem.

[Georgiegril]

Sooo painful to have to restart like that! Hope your fresh game stays that way!

[RedRavyn]

Well, I'm in the low teens on playthroughs. Fully half of those games were scrapped because of bugs, and most of the rest because the game becomes un-challenging at higher levels without the use of mods that do some things I don't like. The current playthrough hasn't saddled me with any quest-breaking or immersion-breaking bugs, yet -- at least none that I can't attribute to a mod I'm using that's a WIP and still has a few rough edges to sand down.

 

The vanilla game is pretty stable -- much more so than Oblivion was, even after the last patch was released for it. A lot of problems can be traced directly to mod conflicts, but there are still a whole ton of bugs in the vanilla game that are lurking in the shadows, waiting for just the right set of circumstances to trigger them.

 

It's one of the things we have to put up with when we're hooked on games which the developer puts out in essentially beta-test form for public consumption as "finished products". I'll give credit where it's due, though. Bethesda does seem to be working overtime to fix a lot of the bugs. The problem is that they tend to release patches prematurely, before THOSE are fully checked out by their own testers, and therefore tend to break things that were already working. I figure that in another five or six months it will be safe for me to put Steam back online to upgrade my Skyrim. I've got the game frozen at 1.14 and it's going to stay there until I know things are stable.

 

Oh, well ... I rather prefer the lower-level play, anyway. It's much more fun and challenging than later on when I have better toys than any of my opponents can get. Heck, I'm already four-shotting mammoths with the new (non-enchanted) Ebony bow I just made. I'm seriously thinking about sticking it back in a crate and taking out my old, trusty Supple Ancient Nord Bow that has been my constant companion since fairly early in this new playthrough.

[shadowfx78]

if you want a challenge RedRavyn check out the Lorecraft line of mods they are wonderful

[RedRavyn]

Thanks, shadowfx, and I'll look into them, but out of all the minor and major overhaul mods I've investigated for both Oblivion and Skyrim, so far, I've found none at all that didn't have certain features that were deal-breakers for me. This is especially true of "balancing" mods that attempt to increase the challenge of the game.

 

The whole concept of "balance" is a pretty subjective thing, after all, and I'll admit that my idea of "balance" is that 99.99% of the people in the world are ordinary, normal folks, even if they're thrust into situations that require them to be heroic. 99.99% of the "toys" in the world are ordinary, as well. I really don't want a game where bandits that, in the early game have fur armor and iron weapons are wearing glass armor and wielding ebony weapons later on. I don't even want ME to be doing that. Sadly, games like these are designed with people in mind who tend to want better and better and more and more or they can't be satisfied.