What's with the jaw-dropping follower speed bug?

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SPOILER INFO
This article discusses a bug in Skyrim. No spoilers.
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One of the constant major irritations in Skyrim is the absurdly inadequate running speed of your followers. While the idea is that your followers are supposed to follow you, the reality is that at least 80% of cases when you're attacked while traveling outdoors, you have to have to face the enemies alone because there's no sign of your followers far and wide.

It's a long time since I gave up trying to solve that bug and just used a spell provided by EFF that summons your followers to you instantly. (Of course, you can just as well use prid and moveto player, but that's much more tedious when you have multiple followers.)

In my current game, though, I'm using the mod Nausicaa-S Tweaker which enables the player (among other things) to permanently change a follower's speed. (Target her and press F2, then go to the MCM.) I tried it on Lydia first and was shocked to find out that her default speed was 56%. I raised it to 115%, just to try what would happen. From then on, whenever I stopped, Lydia was by my side in a few real-time seconds.

I was more than baffled. Where had that 56% come from? Is it possible that the Skyrim app really set her speed at 56% of the player character's speed?

Well, I did a new search to find out if anything has been discovered about this immersion-killing bug in the meantime.

There are questions about it in forums such as this where one user says:

Is there a mod that lets your follower keep up with you?
I'm sick of followers being left behind with every step I take. [---] [I]f you try to run away normally, they will be miles behind.

There seems to be no proper solution. However, I happened to discover there is an SSE mod titled NPC's Run and Walk at Your Pace.

The existence of such a mod proves that the follower running speed has indeed been programmed incorrectly, and not even corrected in SSE!!

(There's also a classical Skyrim mod Followers Stay Close, but I'm not sure what it does.)

No wonder my followers couldn't keep up with me. Bethesda never gave them a chance.

How can Bethesda game developers be so epically mean? They can't fail to realize that a follower whose running speed is 56 units can't run along with the player character whose running speed is 100 units. Nobody in the world can be that stupid. Which proves they did it on purpose.

I therefore ask: why do Bethesda game developers deliberately ruin traveling with a follower for all those millions of Skyrim players, make them wonder why it's happening, possibly asking questions on forums, potentially wasting many hours on trying to find a solution, when it would have cost nothing for the Bethesda bastards to just write a number close to 100 instead of 56 in their program code? Why?? What could have possibly been the motivation of those loathsome scumbags for screwing followers up like this?

Deflorator's game, 24–29 Frostfall (Amber Creek – Docks – Amber Creek)

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SPOILER INFO
This unfinished story follows closely my actions in an actual game, so it's inevitably a spoiler.
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previous chapter






The author has chosen to remove the text of this unfinished game report, because he is no longer happy with it.

That's Secunda, the smaller of Nirn's two moons.

next chapter

How to make the Falskaar morons move their tardy asses

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SPOILER INFO
This article discusses a bug in the mod Falskaar but, I daresay, doesn't reveal enough to qualify even as a mild spoiler.
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One of the most irritating bugs in Falskaar (not seen in any other mod, as I have to point out, so it's indeed legitimate to call it a Falskaar bug) is the reluctance of quest leaders to move. You're supposed to follow them, but they stand still and won't go anywhere. Most infuriatingly, when you try to talk to them, hoping to find out what their fucking problem is, they say something like "come on, follow me, we have no time to waste," and yet they just refuse to move. Livid with rage, I ran into them with no result, ran forward in the direction I presumed we were supposed to go and back to them with no result, searched the Web for help with no result. How I hated Alexander Velicky in those moments!

Only in my current game did I find out what to do about it:
1. Activate the stubborn mule in the console
2. Run forward (or anywhere if you're not sure where it is you're supposed to go)
3. Enter the command
moveto player

That somehow wakes the bastard up from his hypnotic slumber and makes him remember that he has a job to do.

If he gets alzheimerish again, just repeat the process.

This worked like charm with Arnand. With the jarl of Borvald, it also worked until we got to the door of Catacombs. I couldn't get him to enter, so I had to go alone and simply move the quest forward with setstage.

Still, the above method should greatly diminish your frustration with crappy programming in Falskaar.

A simple remedy against stutter

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SPOILER INFO
This article doesn't contain any spoilers.
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IN FEW WORDS:

You can get rid of stutter by relaunching Skyrim.



IN MANY WORDS:

Stutter means that whenever you move your player character or your view, the image changes slowly and jerkily.

It's a major problem in the Skyrim game.

Stutter is more frequent in locations that require much memory, such as Windhelm harbor or the Solitud inn. Especially if you go to such places when your current playing session has lasted a couple of hours or more, you may find that whenever you move the mouse to look in another direction, the view on your screen changes only after a delay of a half-second or more, or when you ask a vendor what he's got on sale, you might have to wait ten seconds before the trade screen opens. When you are used to it almost always occurring in major towns, it can impede your joy of playing quite severely.

Unfortunately, there's no help to be had in forums, only sneering smartasses telling you to think before you install a mod that overstrains the memory, and well-meaning morons telling you to install one or another memory managing tool, as well as make sure you do everything that's written in the Holy Scripture (a.k.a. the S.T.E.P. guide). And after you have installed their miracle tools and see that nothing has gotten better, those wiseguys have nothing more to say, short of suggesting you get a faster computer. (I had bought a really powerful new computer shortly before I began to play Skyrim, so computer speed was certainly not the problem.)

I spent countless hours with the above, yet stutter remained a serious problem.

Then I quite accidentally found something that actually helps against stutter.

In fact, it's the only thing I've ever seen that helps against stutter.

So, here goes:
1. Save your game
2. Exit to desktop
3. Relaunch the Skyrim app
4. Load your most recent savegame

Sure, it takes some time for the app to start, but it's more than worth it. Do you know what a delight it is to be able to move around quickly and smoothly in Windhelm harbor, looking left and right without any difficulty, as if you were in the middle of a wide empty plain? It's totally possible and easy with the above method. All you lose is a little time you can actually benefit from by standing up and stretching your limbs and such.

How to get your sex partners' size right

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SPOILER INFO
This article doesn't contain any spoilers.
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People's height (tallness) is implemented very badly in Skyrim. In vanilla game, all grown-ups seem to be of exactly the same height which is, of course, unrealistic. If you use one or another mod that makes NPCs' height varied, you can occasionally notice them getting taller and smaller right in front of your eyes, which means the Skyrim app isn't actually designed to work properly with tallness-adjusting mods.

One game situation when character height can become a problem is sex. SexLab MCM has an option to make or not to make the participants' heights equal. Unfortunately, the option is incorrectly programmed. No matter if it's switched on or off, SexLab always changes the participants' heights to vanilla. It is somewhat annoying when you are used to seeing a man and a woman in their actual size in regular game situations, but as soon as they get naked and start having sex, the woman suddenly grows as tall as the man.

It's a great pity it took me so long to find a remedy. Activate the partner in the console and type
setscale 1

You can see how she is immediately resized to the height she actually has in the game.

The problem is that she is resized back to vanilla the moment you adjust her position, so you'd better move your player character instead.

Also, the partner's size is, unfortunately, reset in the start of every new sex phase, so you'll have to open the console, press Up  and Enter  to correct her size again, and close the console for the animation to continue. But the increased realism is totally worth the trouble.






return to the table of contents

What to do when you can't move

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SPOILER INFO
This article doesn't contain any spoilers.
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I have noticed three types of glitches which break your game because they make it permanently impossible for your player character to move around.


1. Unescapable location

There are at least two places, one near Windhelm and one near Morthal, where uncautious rock-climbing can result in your jumping down into a space between rocks so high that it's physically impossible to climb out again. You can move back and forth all you want, but you're doomed to remain in those few square meters for the rest of your life.

It can also happen (albeit rarely) that after sex you find yourself in a space between, say, a bed and a wall. You can turn in every direction, but you can't move away from that space.

This is obviously an abnormal and unrealistic situation which is not your fault.

In order to correct it, open the console. Make sure there is nothing written on the right side. If necessary, click the right mouse button until the right side of the console is blank. Then enter the command
tcl
This is is short for "toggle collisions".
Close the console.

Note that now you can float in the air and move through solid objects. Use this opportunity to move until you are hovering a meter or two above open ground or floor. Open the console and enter the command tcl  again. After you've closed the console, you will fall down (safely unless you had flown into crazy heights) and can continue to play normally.


2. Movement controls non-functional

Sometimes the WASD  keys have no effect. You are not stuck anywhere, you should be able to move, but for some strange reason nothing happens when you press the movement keys. Like, in my most recent game, I was at Helgen, kneeling on that chopping block and the dragon arrived and everything was in turmoil and they shouted me to get up and run away, but I couldn't – the movement keys weren't working.

Should that happen, open the console and enter the command
epc
This is short for "enable player controls".
Close the console.

Now you can move like normally.


3. On your knees and can't get up

As far as I can tell, this only happens if you have "Player as victim" enabled in SexLab Defeat , and automatic health renegeration disabled. (Meaning, most of you will never see this.)

The glitch occurs, I presume, because your health is below the sexual assault threshold, but your allies haven't yet been defeated, so you'll just have to sit and wait. However, it's illogical for you to remain stuck in that state. If there is no further assault, you ought to be able to heal yourself with a potion or a spell. Unfortunately, you can neither access your inventory nor do magic while on your knees. Evidently the author of Defeat  assumed that once you're on your knees, you either get raped, after which you can get up again, or your health regenerates and you can get up again and resume fighting. He didn't consider the special case where the player uses a mod that disables automatic health regeneration.

If this happens to you, enter the console commands
player.getav HealRate
player.getav HealRateMult
player.getav CombatHealthRegenMult
and remember or write down the values returned.

Then type something like
player.setav HealRate 1
player.setav HealRateMult 100
player.setav CombatHealthRegenMult 2
Close the console.

Now your health should begin to regenerate. If it's too fast or too slow, you can adjust the above parameters. Your overall health regeneration will be proportional to the product of the three, so it doesn't matter which one you change, as long you you make sure that none of them equals 0.

Keep in mind that these parameters are stored in your savegame, so after regaining your ability to move, you might want to change them back to what they were.


3a. Follower on her knees and can't get up

Should your follower be stuck on her knees after combat, even though at full health, use the shout Unrelenting Force  on her.

If you don't have the shout yet, enter the console commands
player.teachword 13e22
player.modav dragonsouls 1
Close the console. Press Tab to enter your Magic inventory. Go to the dragonshouts section. Use the dragonsoul to activate the shout. Then you can use it.

It's impossible to remove the shout, but that's not a problem. When you are later given the shout the regular way, it won't break anything. It won't be listed twice in your Magic  inventory. You will still have the first word of the shout, activated. After you get your first dragonsoul, you can just keep it for future use. It's a compensation to you for the game having screwed up your follower and left you worried she might be broken beyond repair.

General rehearsal game, hours 22..25

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SPOILER INFO
This story follows closely my actions in an actual game, so it's inevitably a spoiler.
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previous part


Because of those unnatural cheekbone spikes I told you about, I decided to create a new character from scratch – then I would be able to choose which one of the two I liked better.
When creating my current character, I had just played around, moving every slider back and forth and leaving it where I liked it most. This time, I was very cautious. I started with the default Breton and adjusted only the sliders that I was specifically unhappy with. I kept playing close attention to the cheekbones, making sure there were no spikes.
At one point I suddenly realized I had created a woman who looked like Vladimir Putin:

Evidently this was not my day. I admitted failure and reverted to my current character.

I decided to go to Morpork after all, albeit through Karthwasten which seemed to be more or less on my path. They seemed to be having some kind of a troubleconcerning the mines, but I ignored it. I merely spent the night at the inn and stole some stuff from houses, in order to test my new lock difficulty setting. I was a little wary about lock sweet spots reduced 10 times from their vanilla values, but I found it was perfectly all right.

Stenvar and I killed a couple of forns on the road. It was reasonably challenging, but not really dangerous.

The city of Morpork was completely screwed. Almost no one would talk to me. Abut half of the traders wouldn't sell to me, although it was obviously business hours. Neither the jarl nor the steward were there. Even that fanatic crusader who is supposed to hang around outside Abandoned House wasn't there. Can it be the work of the mod New Markarth Adventures  ? At any rate, it doesn't seem to be doing anything useful. I haven't been able to see anything that it influences, apart from those added market stalls. Not a slightest sign of anything like a new adventure. So I'll switch that mod off in my main game.
We spent the night at the inn. In the morning, I hired another follower from the same. More precisely, I had woken up in the middle of the night. Having hired that sellsword, I thought I would do some nighttime city exploration. To my dismay, the inn door was locked!! I had to wait for fucking 6 hours to get out of the goddamned inn without being arrested for lockpicking.
A Web search failed to turn out any hint as to the possible cause of all that nonsense. Whatever. I'll turn New Markarth Adventures  off like I said I would, and should Morpork be still buggy, I'll just put up with it. It's a crap city anyway and if I never go back there after my first visit, I won't miss anything.

This is what rain looks like on river surface.

I headed for Falkert with my boys. As I mentioned to you briefly, I had decided I will pay my bounty, lose some stolen stuff if it can't be avoided, and use the last hours of this test game to explore Falkreath Hold.

Along the way, we paid a brief visit to Granite Halls, spent a night in Northkeep and arrived in Falkert in the early morning hours. We had a couple of nice battles during the trip. Without my two followers, I would have probably gotten killed.

I don't think we'll stay in Falkert. Maybe I'll do some crafting, though. Then we'll head southwest.

Oh... to my utter surprise, my 15-septim bounty had disappeared. The guards I talked to showed no interest in arresting me. Weird.



next part

Bug solved: two female voices during orgasm

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SPOILER INFO
This article doesn't contain any spoilers.
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You may notice that sometimes your female partner moans with two different voices during sex. (I mean, they may be done by the same real-world woman, but they are mixed so that it sounds clearly unnatural .) It happens only during the orgasm stage and not very often.

I asked about it in a forum, but all I got was a few witty but useless comments.

For my current game, I happened to study female sex voices more closely and stumbled upon a solution to this mildly annoying bug.

Maybe you have noticed, and maybe you haven't, that MCM > SexLab > Voices & SFX  gives you the choice between 8 female voice styles. You can enable or disable each one of them for female NPCs, and you can choose one for your player character if she's female.

One of the 8 styles – Stimulated (Female)  is the one that is faulty. Apparently someone got carried away while mixing it. If you are annoyed by the two voices bug, all you have to do is to disable Stimulated (Female). The remaining 7 female voice styles don't have that bug.

Pity the author bungled it up like that, as it's a nice voice otherwise.

Mystery solved at last: why smithing potions don't work?

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SPOILER INFO
No spoilers. This article explains a game feature that might easily be perceived as a bug.
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People keep asking in forum posts why the potions which are supposed to increase your ability to make smithing improvements fail to do so. Every time, a smartass or two replies with the suggestion that the OP make sure the potion's duration hasn't ran out, and when the OP insists he had made sure it hadn't, there are no more replies.

In my previous game, I saw that smithing potions did work. When I consumed one and opened one of the smithing appliances, I saw how I could do a lot more than before. And after a while, those additional opportunities disappeared because the potion's duration period was over. That's exactly what one would expect to happen.

However, in my subsequent test games, I saw that smithing potions had no effect at all, even with the Smithing skill at 100.

Not finding any help on the Web, I kept experimenting. Eventually I succeeded in finding the solution.

As you probably know already, the developers of Skyrim are either arithmetical idiots or pathological liars. For example, when a perk description says it increases something by 60%, it actually increases it only by 14% (from 140 to 160).

Something similar applies to potion descriptions. You are told that a smithing potion increases all smithing improvements by, say, 20%. How is it then possible that without that potion you can improve a weapon by 10 points, and with the potion you can also improve it only by 10 points? That is because they fail to tell you that the 20% improvement is not calculated as 20% of 10, but as 20% of something completely different.

I can imagine how an employee of Bethesda who makes 6000$ a month is being told by his boss that he'll get a 20% raise. To his disappointment, the employee receives only 6400$ the next month, instead of the expected 7200$. When he goes to the bookkeeper pointing out that they have probably made a mistake, the bookkeeper says: "Why, 400$ is precisely 20% of the minimal wage (2000$)." And when the employee still looks dumbfound, the bookkeeper says: "Don't tell me you expected 20% of your current salary," and her colleagues who overhear it burst out laughing.

To cut the long story short, you need Smithing perks. Without them, even the most potent smithing potions will be useless. With appropriate perks, they suddenly begin to take effect. The math behind it, precisely described on one of the Skyrim help websites, is so perverse that I won't bother you with details.



[originally published 2017-02-28]

Do quest items weigh?

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SPOILER INFO
No spoilers. This article explains a minor bug that, judging by forum articles, is creating a lot of confusion.
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You have surely noticed how one or another item you carry in your inventory is not listed when you go to trading mode (meaning, you can't sell it), and when you try to drop it, you are informed you can't because it's a quest item.

Now, it's a good thing the game prevents you from mistakenly losing your valuable quest items, but what about the ones belonging to quests you are not interested in completing? Weight is a huge problem in Skyrim. One can't afford to just permanently carry dead weight.

Now, I eventually found that the console command removeitem  fixes that problem (help on syntax is easy to find online), but while looking for it, it was hard to miss several forum discussions that went like:
"Quest items don't weigh, you stupid moron."
"Of course they weigh, you fucking prick!"
or
"Although your inventory shows as if quest items have a weight, in reality they don't weigh anything lol."
"Tell that to my weight limit, smartass!"

The thing is: there are two kinds of quest items. It's most unfortunate that it isn't clearly explained anywhere.

When you are told to find a specific item, such as Roggi's Ancestral Shield , it's called a unique quest item.
Unique quest items really don't weigh anything. Your inventory suggests they do, but actually their weight is 0. You can verify that. Next time before you pick up a unique quest item, open your inventory and note your total weight. Then pick the quest item up. You will see that your total weight has remained the same.

When you are told to find a certain number of certain items, such as 10 Dwemer Cogs , those are called generic quest items.
Generic quest items do weigh all right, but they can also be sold and dropped.

So the game bug that makes the inventory lie to you that unique quest items weigh is merely confusing you. It's not actually screwing you with dead weight. You can rest assured that when you aren't allowed to drop an item, it isn't adding to your weight either.



[originally published 2017-02-08]

The Leather weight error strangely overlooked

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SPOILER INFO
Hardly a spoiler. This article discusses an illogicality in the game which is so obviously a mistake that it doesn't even deserve to be called a bug.
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You have surely noticed that when you convert animal pelts to leather with the tanning rack, your overall weight increases. This means that leather weighs more than the pelts it's being made of. It doesn't make sense, does it?

In order to understand what is going on, let us look at the figures first.

As you can see here:
1 pound of hide can be transformed into 1 (1 Goat Hide to 0.5 Leather) to 4 (2 Fox Pelts to 2 Leather) pounds of leather.
1 unit of Leather (weighing 2 lbs) can be transformed into 4 units of Leather Strips (weighing 4 x 0.1 lbs).

So, hide-to-leather weight conversion ratio is 100–400%, leather-to strips weight conversion ratio is 20%. In simpler words, when you process hide into leather, it gets up to 4 times heavier, and when you cut leather into strips, it gets 5 times lighter.

Now, can you tell me by which laws of physics or magic can hide get four times heavier when processed into leather and then losing all that added substance again when processed into leather strips? I can't. Rather, when you look at the figures above, it is impossible to not get the impression that someone at Bethesda simply set the weight of Leather accidentally at 2 lbs when it should have been 0.4 or 0.5 lbs. I mean, if a student of yours had written a program with such conversion ratios, you would have automatically assumed he had made a mistake and pointed it out to him, wouldn't you? After all, Leather's weight of 0.5 lbs would put everything in its place: 1 pound to 0.25..1 pounds when converting hide into leather and 1 pound to 0.8 pounds when converting leather into strips.
(Actually, the most logical weight of Leather would be 0.447, but the Inventory screen won't display more than 1 decimal point. Whether 0.5 would be more logical than 0.4, or vice versa, is for you to decide.)

This is not even a real bug. At some point in the game developing process, someone just wrote down a wrong number. Can happen to anybody. What is mind-boggling is that this blatantly obvious human error hasn't been corrected in any of the updates or patches and that the authors of the UESP wiki act like such implausible hide-to-leather matter gain and subsequent implausible leather-to-strips waste ratio are perfectly normal. I understand that Skyrim is a magical world, but there is a difference between magic and nonsense.

What to do, then?

Firstly, there is the mod Less Annoying Items that sets the weight of Leather to 0.5, along with changing a dozen more parameters, such as increasing the screamingly inadequate duration of blacksmith potions.

Secondly, there is a mod specifically meant to fix the Leather weight. Unfortunately it decreases it to 1 which is still twice as much as it should be.

Thirdly, there is a smithing overhaul mod which (along with many other changes) tries to solve the contradiction by increasing the weight of the pelts. That does, however, not account for the waste of 80% of the material when creating Leather Strips. What's worse, weight management is cumbersome enough already. The last thing I need is the weight of pelts increased, realistic as it may be. When realism kills the game's enjoyability, it's no longer good.

Fourthly, if you have a mod that has a record for Leather (such as SEO), you can use TES5Edit to manually change the weight of Leather to 0.5 (or 0.4 if that suits you'd better). This is the simplest method and it's the one I use.



[originally published 2017-02-27]

How to fix broken main quest

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SPOILER INFO
I will describe a main quest bug and a fix for it. In order to do so, I will have to reveal some surprising information about something you might be greatly intrigued by in the early stage of your game. I am sure you don't want it spoiled for you. This means you shouldn't read this article unless the main quest in your game is actually broken.
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*************************************
WHAT'S THE BUG?
*************************************
The bug I am talking about here can occur when the quest "A Cornered Rat" tells you to talk to a man behind a closed door, but he keeps telling you to go away, thus making it impossible for you to proceed with the main quest.


*************************************
BACKGROUND (just in case you are interested)
*************************************
Unsurprisingly, Esbern is uncommunivative when you just happen to find his room without doing that Delphine job first. That is only to be expected. However, even after I had done the prerequisite quests and was actually told to go to that location and talk to Esbern, he was still defensive and unfriendly. I just couldn't discuss what I was supposed to discuss with him. I even tried to move the quest forward stage by stage with the console. It didn't help.

I searched for information and found out that this bug occurs when you kill a certain person in the Ratway inn before talking to Esbern. There was no way of knowing that that person mustn't get killed, and indeed I still have no idea what the connection between him and the main quest could possibly be (even though I am sure it's been written about somewhere). What's important at this point is that forum articles suggested that the death of that person would render the main quest irreparably broken.

Of course I tried to resurrect that person. It didn't change anything. As I had killed him dozens of hours ago, returning to an earlier save was out of the question. So I just accepted that the main quest would be impossible for me to complete, and continued to find other things to do.

Much later did I accidentally read another article about that very bug, and there were a number of console commands suggested, that might help one get around the bug after all. So I went to that door in my game once again and tried those suggestions one after another.

It worked. I was indeed able to repair the main quest. The death of that thief had not broken the main quest beyond repair after all.


*************************************
HOW TO FIX THE BUG
*************************************
There are two solutions between which you can choose:

A. Enter the console command
setstage MQ203 5
This teleported me to a large cave. Also there were Esbern (still telling me off in no uncertain terms) and Delphine who had become my temporary follower. Apparently the game had jumped into the quest "Alduin's Wall" (that'll be the human-language name of MQ203), skipping the Riverwood part.

B. Enter the console command
CompleteQuest MQ202
You will be told that the quest “A Cornered Rat” has been completed, but there is no next quest and Esbern still won't communicate with you. Don't be discouraged. Just go to the Riverwood inn. Stand near Delphine and enter the commands
prid 19dfd
moveto player
When I did that, Esbern was teleported to us, he and Delphine began a conversation and soon the quest “Alduin's Wall” started as normal. Even Esbern talked to me without hostility.

I prefer the second solution, but they both seem to result in essentially the same.



[originally published 2018-04-01]