The Elder Scrolls: It's the IX Divines, you milk-drinkers

[Landis963]

Having a blast with my board and axe/bow light armored nord , but I really can't decide between the empire and the stirmcloaks.
I hate the racism f the latter but also hate the boot licking of the former (Bloody Thalmor )

Ah, the great dilemma of Skyrim. Empire or Stormcloaks? Choosing both is difficult and doesn't get you anything good, choosing neither is impossible. And the bloody Thalmor are freaking everywhere causing a big mess.

[DomaDoma]

Lacking an in-game way to have Haymitch Abernathy slap everyone upside their fool heads, just pick a side, win quickly, and don't kill when you don't have to.

(Man, I was kicking myself when I realized that I totally could have used the Voice of the Emperor and actually reasoned with those first few Stormcloaks back at Helgen. I seriously was looking around for an option.)

[Winter_Wolf]

After a frustrating weekend of trying to get to Karthspire only to see my graphics card collapse mid-way through the Forsworn battle, time after time... I'm sadly giving up on my attempt at a heavy-armour-wearing sorceror. It's weird, it looks very much like a hardware crash, but it always happens at approximately the same point, which means it's behaving like a software bug.

I've already restarted twice from earlier saves to get through previous issues, but this is the last straw. It takes so damn' long to get to this point, I don't have the heart to start over.

Next character is back to light armour. I can't be having with all this extra encumbrance.

How hard are you pushing your graphics card? Also do you have any mods that might be iffy? I have a lowly 610m and I can manage Karthspire no sweat, then again I keep my graphics pretty low (and only have a native resolution of 1360x768 anyway). Any unofficial patches? I recall USKP 2.0.something would crash the game EVERY TIME you tried to enter Labyrinthian and I had to command console "coc" inside the bloody dungeon to get around it.

[veti]

How hard are you pushing your graphics card? Also do you have any mods that might be iffy? I have a lowly 610m and I can manage Karthspire no sweat, then again I keep my graphics pretty low (and only have a native resolution of 1360x768 anyway). Any unofficial patches? I recall USKP 2.0.something would crash the game EVERY TIME you tried to enter Labyrinthian and I had to command console "coc" inside the bloody dungeon to get around it.

I've been through the whole game, including Karthspire, without anything like this before. Nothing in my hardware has changed since then, but it's all that bit older now.

It may be down to installing/messing with my mod configuration mid-game. If that's all it is I'll be relieved. But honestly, I think there is a hardware issue here, and I may not be able to play the game comfortably any more until I upgrade my machine.

[Avilan the Grey]

I've been through the whole game, including Karthspire, without anything like this before. Nothing in my hardware has changed since then, but it's all that bit older now.

It may be down to installing/messing with my mod configuration mid-game. If that's all it is I'll be relieved. But honestly, I think there is a hardware issue here, and I may not be able to play the game comfortably any more until I upgrade my machine.

I have had this bug ONCE, a long time ago.
If it's the same bug, it's not the battle, or the enemies, it's a specific spot in the environment that is bugged. I fixed it by playing with save games (I don't remember what I did exactly, but I think I had to load a save several saves "back"). The game simply corrupted itself at some point.

[Eldan]

Yeah, I think it's a savegame issue, if it's the bug I'm thinking off. I've had it in several Bethesda games (The Fallouts, Oblivion, Skyrim). You load a save, play for a while and at a specific point, usually a few minutes later, the game freezes, then crashes?

You need to restore an earlier save. It's the only thing I've found to help.

In general, I've found it helps to always keep several savegames around. Two or three, at least. Keep one around that's about an hour old at all times.

[veti]

I have had this bug ONCE, a long time ago.
If it's the same bug, it's not the battle, or the enemies, it's a specific spot in the environment that is bugged. I fixed it by playing with save games (I don't remember what I did exactly, but I think I had to load a save several saves "back"). The game simply corrupted itself at some point.

Unfortunately, there are a whole lot of crash bugs of various types. The last one I had with this character was one where I'd be quietly jogging down the road when, as I entered a certain cell - boom, without warning, desktop. No matter how I entered the cell, same thing. I tried coming from different directions, fast travelling, even taking the carriage - always the same. Now that was a corrupted save, I went back about a level's worth of saves to escape that.

This one is completely different. It's not about where I get to, it happens in different places and often when I'm not moving. Suddenly the picture seems to convert itself to 256 colour depth, and the computer freezes entirely - won't respond to anything but the power switch.

[Eldan]

Okay, that one I've never seen.

[Calemyr]

Awesome. If you don't mind me asking what questlines are you planning to pursue?

My primary goal is to get through episode 4 of the Maids 2: Deception mod (and Helgen Reborn - I've never taken that one past unlocking the tower). So far, I've only gotten episode 1 done.

Outside of that, I've already finished the Soul Cairn, then went to become a werewolf (because dogs are better than bats).

For the most part, I'm trying to play Baccano as a man who still thinks like a Thalmor even though he now resents them. He is fascinated by exotic magic, including his own talent for shouting and the spells of the Forgotten Magic Redone mod, and usually acts out of curiosity and necessity rather than altruism. That said, he finds traditional vampires (the ones that revel in decay and gore) to be disgusting, so he told Harkon off but considers Serana to be a kindred spirit - the only sane member of a faction they have grown increasingly disenfranchised with and have chosen to fight their own kin.

Being made guardian of Kasia Pinder is making softening his edges, though. He certainly hadn't been looking for an adoptive daughter, especially not a human one. He'd just been on his way to Riften to look for work and stumbled into the whole mess. For some reason he couldn't refuse when asked to look after her - again feeling sympathy for a lost soul stripped of her home as a consequence of someone else's insanity. What a family they've become: an exiled Thalmor, a renegade vampire freed from a millennia-long stasis, the last daughter of a 200 year old blood war, and Lydia - an ambitious young soldier who thought becoming the housecarl of a dragon slayer would lead her to glory and is finding, but is getting increasingly sarcastic about being used as a glorified mule.

Politically, his affiliation will be tricky. He is very much an opponent of the Thalmor now (partly out of spite and partly because life with his human companions is corroding the mindset he was brought up with), and feels that the Empire is a more credible threat to them than individual provinces.

The main quest lines I plan to put him through:
The Main Quest - This whole return of dragons/eating dragon souls/rewriting reality via words (which is fundamentally different from magic)... Fascinating...
Mages' College - Ancano assumes a fellow Thalmor will be on his side. Last year, he would have been right.
Companions - Originally an attempt to enlist dumb muscle to help with dragon slaying. Being a werewolf, however, is... invigorating.
Civil War - After getting attacked by other Thalmor, he decides to get his by tipping the balance of this war and ending it fast in favor of the Empire.
Dawnguard - At first, the concept of vampires is fascinating. Later he has so many reasons to kill Harkon it gets hard to pick just one.
Dragonborn - An attempted assassination and a grudge match with the first Dragonborn? How could he pass that up?

Mod Quest Lines:
Helgen Reborn - Helgen burned because the Dragonborn was there. It takes a long time for him to feel guilty about that, but eventually he decides to help rebuild it.
Maids 2 - A random escort-slash-fedex job ends up with Baccano in charge of a teenage girl. A girl who is more of a trouble magnet than he is.

Meta Quest:
A New Order - Over the course of his many adventures, Baccano will amass a very large list of assets and allies, but also a troubling understanding that the world really seems to be falling apart at the seams. To make matters worse, all the factions he is aware of are either too myopic to do anything about it or they are part of the problem. He will expand his little lakeside cabin into a full fledged stronghold and gather a group of like-minded individuals - a new circle of Blades (ironically led by a former Thalmor agent), tasked with a job exactly the opposite of the one Baccano was raised to embrace: to solve problems, remove threats, and piece-by-piece try to a shattered world. In other words, to stop trying to get to paradise and just knuckle down and make it here.

The only problem I have is that I am frankly beginning to hate Skyrim's engine. It frequently slows down to single digit frame rates until I alt-tab out (when I return I'm suddenly back to ~60 again). I have a pretty good computer (it is a beast compared to what was available when Skyrim first came out), and it doesn't seem to matter what mods I use - the performance is always either 60 fps or 5, using a lot of mods just seems to make it happen marginally faster. All the remedies I have found for it are short-term fixes, requiring me to do so quite often and it's getting really old.

I can't be having with all this extra encumbrance.

Thank you. It's amazing how a perceived reference to Esmerelda Weatherwax can brighten a dreary monday morning.

[DomaDoma]

That is by far the best game-compatible character concept I've heard yet. Cheers.

[Winter_Wolf]

This one is completely different. It's not about where I get to, it happens in different places and often when I'm not moving. Suddenly the picture seems to convert itself to 256 colour depth, and the computer freezes entirely - won't respond to anything but the power switch.

Yeah, did you order your new graphics card yet? That kind of issue is *never* good. Although if it's only happening on Skyrim then you've got a really fun puzzle, hey? Last time I had spontaneous graphics issues my card melted. Melted.

@ Eldan: two or three saves? I'm feeling worried if I don't have at least a dozen. Per character. I admit I've had a few incidents with Skyrim destroying hours of gaming, though. Once Twice I had to do a complete clean re-install of the game, DLC, and slowly adding mods back in. Turns out I'm not going to bother with sorting mods again, ever. At least now I'm at the sweet spot where I get consistent fps at a playable (for me) rate and good stability. The only place left to go now is a new computer with sufficient cooling and a proper graphics card.

[veti]

The only problem I have is that I am frankly beginning to hate Skyrim's engine. It frequently slows down to single digit frame rates until I alt-tab out (when I return I'm suddenly back to ~60 again). I have a pretty good computer (it is a beast compared to what was available when Skyrim first came out), and it doesn't seem to matter what mods I use - the performance is always either 60 fps or 5, using a lot of mods just seems to make it happen marginally faster. All the remedies I have found for it are short-term fixes, requiring me to do so quite often and it's getting really old.

That's curious. Even with my graphics card occasionally crashing, I've never experienced framerate issues with Skyrim, either with or without mods. (Unlike Oblivion, which - on the same machine - slows to a crawl every time a deer runs past.) And my machine is 8-9 years old.

Has it always happened, or was there ever a time when the game ran smoothly, e.g. before you installed any mods at all? Does the slowdown seem to be related to anything happening in-game?

[NineThePuma]

~Snip~

Man, you make me wish I had more indepth character concepts. Its been a long time since I sat back and really... tried to play a character for the sake of playing a character. I usually make -builds- rather than -characters- and I think it kinda shows in my playthroughs; I hit a certain point where I've played enough and I'm just done. Might need to look into a more character oriented play through. Not sure how I would wanna do that though.

[DomaDoma]

I have not even begun to learn my lesson from jumping the gun with Skyrim, because I already have a character concept in mind for the next game. Nutshell description: his mother (or grandmother if need be) went through the Sack of the Imperial City and just accumulated hatred and grudges from there. He's basically left Cyrodiil in order to get away from her. So, he's vowed never to initiate violence or do anything for the sake of vengeance. Also, he specializes in enchantments to get out of conflict - Calm, Fear, Charm, maybe Rally - because who's going to suspect the Redguard of that sort of shenanigan? (Probably a lot of people in Hammerfell, but that was the original rationale, okay?) Also, he's the direct descendant of Gogan and Maelona, who as per the dictates of cliche found real love in their fake marriage. I have a strange amount of headcanon involving those two, ranging from "almost certainly going to come up in my character's arc" to "directly contradicts official canon" - really, I should probably excise the Gogan and Maelona thing if I don't want a giant JOSS ME sign on my back.

[Gaelbert]

So my Nexus Mod Manager hasn't been opening for the last few days. I click the icon, it won't launch, I try to download mods, it won't launch either. I've monkeyed around with compatibility settings, run as admin, to no avail. This happened once before, I solved it by reinstalling but that hasn't worked this time. I've also looked online but found no answers. Anyone have help?

I want to play through Morrowind and Oblivion, but the last time I tried the graphics in Oblivion bored me to tears. I got through the tutorial, got outside, and then quickly grew bored with the endless fields of blurry grass. Once I get NMM up and running I'm going to try some graphic mods to help out with that. (I stopped playing Morrowind last time, not because of graphics, but because my character, immediately after getting out of the prison cell, clipped into a table and got stuck.) Mod recommendations for Morrowind (graphical and otherwise) would be nice as well, as I haven't found a solid list of "most needed" Morrowind mods yet.

I read recently that the Night to Remember quest in Skyrim was originally supposed to be part of Fallout New Vegas, where you drink with Cass, then end up marrying her and the King sings about it. I haven't found a source for that, but it seems like it would make more sense in NV than Skyrim.

[Gwyn chan 'r Gwyll]

Morrowind Mods:

Sound and Graphics Overhaul. Once you get this you won't need any other graphics mods. It also gives you options of what exterior styles you want for different areas, so you can mix and match redone trees to your tastes.

Tamriel Rebuilt adds a lot of mainland Morrowind.

[veti]

Morrowind Mods:

Sound and Graphics Overhaul. Once you get this you won't need any other graphics mods. It also gives you options of what exterior styles you want for different areas, so you can mix and match redone trees to your tastes.

So, I tried to download Sound & Graphics Overhaul.

1.7 Gigabytes? That's... twice the disc footprint of the whole of the original game. Uncompressed.

Okay, granted, there's presumably a lot of high-volume files (graphics, go figure), but still... There has to be something more - practical out there, for those of us for whom this download is projected to take several days.

I remember downloading a whole pile of mods for Morrowind back in the day that came nowhere near even contemplating being in the same order of magnitude as this - admittedly, beautifully-screenshotted - thing.

[Gwyn chan 'r Gwyll]

Well you can go through the whole deal of trying to download all the different texture mods separately and only get the ones you want but the size is around in line with the really major mods for other games. And if you download them separately they may not go together as well.

[Cheesegear]

So apparently I've hit a glitch where a dead dragon spawns near me whenever I enter an area and ragdolls around, and, when I do get around to killing an actual Dragon, I can't absorb its soul. Anyone else have this glitch? Is there a mod anyone can link to to fix it?

[Avilan the Grey]

So apparently I've hit a glitch where a dead dragon spawns near me whenever I enter an area and ragdolls around, and, when I do get around to killing an actual Dragon, I can't absorb its soul. Anyone else have this glitch? Is there a mod anyone can link to to fix it?

This is two different problems at once, not one bug.

First one is a bug, obviously.

The second one is supposed to work like that (or rather it wasn't enough of a problem for Bethesda to fix): If you have already killed a dragon in a cell, and not enough time has passed (for the cell to regenerate monsters naturally), you can still get, say a bounty on a dragon there. But if you kill that dragon, you don't get a soul from it. Unfortunately it seems the first bug above triggers this phenomenon wherever you go.

I don't know how to fix this; I have never heard of the first bug (I have only heard about (and experienced) getting dragon SKELETONS falling from the sky, and that stops by itself after awhile and since that dragon is "dead correctly" it doesn't block new dragon souls).

[Cheesegear]

Unfortunately it seems the first bug above triggers this phenomenon wherever you go.

Apparently if a dead dragon spawns, it counts as the dead dragon for the cell. No soul for you! The solution is easy! Just reload to a save where the glitch hasn't happened yet!
I know it's an open-world RPG, but I just don't have a million saves because it's not like I expect a glitch to ruin my game. My last save is whether or not to kill Barbas, and that was like 20 levels ago.

I have three permanent saves;
Right at the start, between getting off the wagon and going into character creator.
Get the Ring or Hide of Hircine.
Kill or don't kill Barbas.

The rest is Auto- and Quick-Saves.

[Anxe]

You could aways add the souls using the console. Not sure how to do that, but it at least gets around your character getting what they deserve for killing dragons.

[Winter_Wolf]

You could aways add the souls using the console. Not sure how to do that, but it at least gets around your character getting what they deserve for killing dragons.

In the console (~ on a US keyboard) player.modav dragonsouls x where x is the number you wish to add. Subtraction is easy, just add a - before the number. Always use modav and never setav when fiddling with dragon souls.

I make a lot of bat files to deal with the amount of console command stuff I do. Like say if you like the hearthfire homesteads but detest the running back and forth to find bits and parts. It was fun the first time.

I once had the dead dragon spawn inside the Windhelm cell and ragdoll around at the main gates for a while. Right as my character was walking out of Candlehearth Hall inn. I explored the dragon, found it was completely void of interactivity, and turned him around and had him buy a few rounds of mead. 'Cause when a dead dragon falls from the sky and lands inside a city, it's just gonna be one of those days. It actually didn't do anything else to my game other than that one incident, but it wasn't in an outdoor world cell so probably that helped me out.

[veti]

Apparently if a dead dragon spawns, it counts as the dead dragon for the cell. No soul for you! The solution is easy! Just reload to a save where the glitch hasn't happened yet!
I know it's an open-world RPG, but I just don't have a million saves because it's not like I expect a glitch to ruin my game. My last save is whether or not to kill Barbas, and that was like 20 levels ago.

... you don't expect a glitch to ruin your game? Wow. I feel dangerously exposed if I don't have at least one permanent save within the past day, and another from the previous stages of each major questline before that. Currently I think I have about 100 of the things, and that's after paring down to what I consider the bare minimum per character.

Incidentally, a mildly entertaining trick I only discovered very recently for when you have a spare dragon skeleton lying around - have you tried animating it?

[Avilan the Grey]

I am a savespammer, in all games (except Sims, for some reason) but I have almost never had a problem with Bethesda. Everyone says the quicksave gets corrupted (as in unloadable) eventually but I hit F5 both in Oblivion, FO3 / NV and Skyrim about every 15 seconds (no exaggeration!) and I have never experienced that. I rely almost exclusively on Auto- and Quicksaves except when exiting the game.

Also, at least in Skyrim, there is more than one Autosave. It backs up the last... two, I think?

[NeoVid]

Keeping several different autosaves is a great feature that more games should use.

Anyway, I'm making good progress, but I have one minor question about my otherwise excellent follower, Lydia: Why does she keep using her default bow instead of any of the epic bows I've put in her inventory? She's equipped every other bit of uber gear I've given her, so it's getting on my nerves.

[Avilan the Grey]

Keeping several different autosaves is a great feature that more games should use.

Anyway, I'm making good progress, but I have one minor question about my otherwise excellent follower, Lydia: Why does she keep using her default bow instead of any of the epic bows I've put in her inventory? She's equipped every other bit of uber gear I've given her, so it's getting on my nerves.

A follower uses whatever gives the best base damage / protection*. So if she prefers her default bow, there is something... odd going on. Do you have any mods that levels up her equipment or somesuch?

*Meaning they usually refuse to use say the Lucky Dagger, because the base damage is a steel dagger.

[NeoVid]

There's definitely something strange happening with this... I gave her an ebony bow, which she actually started using. So I added a fire damage enchantment to it and gave it back to her. She hasn't used it since. Arg.

[NineThePuma]

Followers are VERY finicky about their ranged equipment, ESPECIALLY THE BOW. There is a very common issue where followers will REFUSE to change away from their default bow, even with a better bow in inventory. It's a well known issue.

I suggest that you console the default bow out of inventory; that should fix the issue.

[Gaelbert]

I am a savespammer, in all games (except Sims, for some reason) but I have almost never had a problem with Bethesda. Everyone says the quicksave gets corrupted (as in unloadable) eventually but I hit F5 both in Oblivion, FO3 / NV and Skyrim about every 15 seconds (no exaggeration!) and I have never experienced that. I rely almost exclusively on Auto- and Quicksaves except when exiting the game.

Also, at least in Skyrim, there is more than one Autosave. It backs up the last... two, I think?

I quicksave obsessively too, and I just reached 1500 regular saves. Haven't had corruption or load time problems with either.