If you notice my above post, I do my best to pick nirnroots along the way (as well as pick up stray arrows and cleanup enemy weapons), but they still manage to stack on me sometimes. Once in awhile I still discover one I was unaware of in an area; and most of these, ironically, I find simply because their glow stack has gotten so large.

Since Whiterun is my character's home, that city is my hub and the area I spend the most time in. Precisely because I travel there a lot, I don't hunt nirnroots every trip there; if I did, the game would've become a chore instead of fun a long time ago. I go on a nirnroot expedition every third or fourth trip there, usually during the evening or nightime, and use the glowstacks to help me quickly find them.

For me, it's about finding the balance between the game being a chore vs. enjoyable. As it is, I've already diverted from how I'd like to play the game quite a bit so, e.g., I'm not OCD enough to make a map of all the nirnroot locations and run around Skyrim picking them constantly. As I stated before, I don't know what the threshold is where the extra glows begin to slug down the game to the point of freezes/crashes, whether it's more an additive between numerous glowstacks in an area and/or whether a single, *super* stack is enough to burn that bridge.

I'm approaching 500 hrs. on my playthru and my save file is 12mb. "Knock on wood", so far my freeze and crash issues have been minimal. Otoh, I wonder how many of those hours were spent cleaning up the world vs. just playing the way I'd like?

Edit: And keep in mind that there's sort of two seperate issues involving the stacks. The first is that each glow in a stack acts like a persistent object and, therefore, has to be included in the save file. Thus, every glow for every nirnroot is being loaded/saved everytime you load/save. Second is the visual, graphical hit to the system as it has to calculate how to layer those stacks and present them when it's actually necessary to draw the nirnroot.

"if a tree falls in the woods, and no ones there to hear it, does it makes a sound?"

Just because you can't physically see the nimroot doesn't mean it hasn't been added into the scene. visual distances that you can see are a full 360 degrees around your character, not just your current line of sight. see that dragon flying waaaay off in the distance? yeah that one? your nimroot can be spawning in at that distance as well. While the tree's and grass don't show, the nimroot may still be being added in. From past experience with games like this, how things are typically added in via order is:

1) npc's
2) removable items (i.e. nimroot, books, weapons, etc)
3) visual prettiness (walls, houses, tree's, grass, bushes, water, etc).

hense the dragon comment above.

so while you may not see any 'trees off in the distance' this doesn't mean that its outside of the draw distance. like stated above, when the glow stacking starts accuring - each glow stack is added to the save. each time the area is reloaded once the stacking occurs, that glow is added to the save.

My personal experience with the glow stacking is:

• The nimroot has to fall within the draw distance.
  
• If the nimroot is left unchecked, the glow stack will become atomic, virtually making a whiteout area.
  
• if the nimroot is picked, the glowstack decays.
  
• if the nimroot regrows for you (it isn't on my current, but is on the older characters) if you continue to pick the nimroots you can keep the glowstack in check to keep it from becoming atomic.

From what I've read however, from various posts in here, everyone's experience with the nimroot glow stack has been different, some have it, some don't, but once its there, it wont ever go away. You can keep it in check, but you can never get 100% rid of it.

In my experience, the Nirnroots don't have to fall within the draw distance. I've seen the glowstack problem happening with plants that I literally hadn't been nearby ever since the the first and only time I saw them, like weeks or months before realizing there's an issue.

If the Nirnroot is unchecked, yes the glow stack will get ridiculous. If it's picked, the glow will get duplicated at a slower pace for sure. However, if I pick up one of the really bright ones, there's no change in the brightness, and the plant regrows in a matter of days anyway.



This is very true. I really would like to see some kind of statement about this and other famous bugs. There's a handful of issues that are constantly and repeatedly being brought up in these forums, yet they remain ignored in successive game updates. I'm tired of guessing what may be happening in the backstage, how hard to fix things may or may not be, whether they are aware or not of certain issues and of what modders have been working on... At this point it's just a matter of politeness and care for their customers, even respect, to just come out and say what the heck is going on.

hrmm if thats the cases guess my save got lucky, I only pick up nirnroot I see/hear, I never clean up (unless its valuable)

I should travel to the farm just to be sure an see if its brighter than it should be.

My game is getting worse and worse with every play and it is getting to the point where I dont even play anymore

Did not get on at all this past weekend - I hate spending half my time diverting where I am going to pick up stupid ninroots

true, very true. I am now again addicted to RDR because I do not have to worry about these sort of things.

Okay, I see where you're coming from now and you may be right. I suppose the only question then is what the game determines draw distance per adding a glow to the stack (obviously it's much larger than when the game cues the nirnroot soundfile). I mean, I can sort of see half the country from the throat of the world, does that mean ....

And the "decay" observation definitely matches what I see as it's not a *pick -> glow immediately disappears* if there's more than a couple/few glows in the stack. From a player's standpoint, in trying to keep the problem pruned, this can be frustrating as an existant glow doesn't necessarily mean there's a respawned nirnroot there.

As far as nirnroot not respawning for your current character, that's interesting. Others have complained about plants/enemies not respawning for them in their game, but in the case of nirnroot specifically, I still wonder whether the developers meant for them to respawn or not. I don't remember them regrowing in Oblivion, and even though I haven't done any nirnroot quests, reportedly the in-game dialogue there suggests that it shouldn't be regrowing in the wild either. If there was some miscommunication or misunderstanding in development regarding this (e.g. between those doing the animations vs. those doing scripts involving spawns), that might, at least partially, explain this bug.

when your on top of the throat of the world the draw distance is treated abit differently... sorta like if you were to go outside the walls of whiterun using the glitch to get out and wander the landscape. The very far objects are low poly representations when your on top of the throat of the world, think of it as a stage 1 and stage 2 draw distance, stage 1 objects are those that fall into the normal draw distance that you experience when running about on the land below. stage 2 draw distance is where the low poly representations come into play, while within the stage 1 area, the nimroot glow takes place, along with water effects, and what not, in the stage 2 area particle effects aren't drawn in except those that are forced (i.e. the floggy clouds). Stage 1 draw distance is the normal objects, and they are displayed in medium and high quality. Stage 2 show the lesser versions, which are low quality objects, but they are drawn at such a distance, they could be sprites and you wouldn't be able to tell the difference. hope that wasn't too confusing...

and yes, the nimroot and glow gets added to the scene long before you hear the sound of it.

usually if you pick a nimroot on its first encounter, the glow thats added to the scene will completely disappear, occasionally i've noticed that a single glow gets left behind, as if there were two sitting there instead of 1, for example, your first trip to whiterun, and the nimroot just past the honeybrew meadery, sometimes when you pick that one on its first encounter there's two glow stacks there already, but on going into whiterun, and coming back out, that second glow stack usually vanishes (if you didn't just walk in the gate and back out).

There are several books about the nimroot that talk about the changes that happened and how it was almost drove into extinction. But if its meant to regrow or not, I couldn't say, it seems that the books try to point to the nimroot changing to adapt to its changing environment..

I usually see the glow completely vanish when picking first-time encountered nirnroots. Wasn't aware of pre-stacked glows, but this would be interesting to test. Once they reach super-stacked degrees of brightness, I can't even tell any difference anymore after picking them. It's like a blazing star fell to earth, the glow visible from a mile away.

no patch fix for atomic nirnroot yet. 1.5 update notes were posted.

Quite a fair distance beyond pathetic. Unless you include the addition of kill animations, which I guess evens things out.

This would be the number one bug I would like to see fixed. I havn't been cleaning up every nirnroot I encounter on my level 60 character and I'm betting that's the reason I'm beening punished with spikes and in worst case scenario, crashes. Since I enjoy roleplaying I don't really want to restart him...

Any dlc will probably be impossible on him if they don't fix the nirnroot bug.

But I guess this would be the incentive to get me into buying a new pc. Despite I really don't like the whole tech stuff.

Thanks for the draw-distance explanation, it was very helpful. It's sort of how I figured it worked conceptually, but you obviously have a more intimate understanding.

Using your above example, though, still leaves me a little confused as to the relationship between draw distance and additive glow objects being added. If in a new game and a first trip to Whiterun there's already two glow objects, how close had you come to Whiterun prior to that? Riverwood? Bleak Falls Barrow? I guess what I'm trying to grasp is how large is the Stage-1 draw distance?


Yeah, that's what I remember from Oblivion (between the books and quest there). It's purely speculative, but it'd be interesting to hear what Bethesda's intentions were/are regarding its respawning since there seems to be conflicting, or at least confusing, in-game info about it.

well, there's probably several variables that cause it to occur (two glows at first incounter), like the nirnroot came into the draw distance and then you backtracked a little, then it came back into draw distance. Once leaving riverwood I usually hop in the river and take it almost all the way to whiterun, then cut across the fields to the stables in a strait line (unless i see the giant fight and i join in) rather then following the road that approaches, weaves away then doubles back. when your on a mountain side i.e. like the mountain that takes you to the golden claw, everything that falls into the draw distance on that mountains backside is being added as well, so if thats putting you close enough to the draw distance for a nirnroot, it'll be added. The actual distance may be reliant on the system its being played on. As people are experiencing different draw distances ranges in the game, some have really good far draw distances, others have shallow draw distances, still even with that going on, the game itself is trying to shove all the pickups in prior to adding the scenery.

I dont remember all the books in oblivion, i collected a ton of them though, I even went as far as to close all the 'secondary' oblivion gates prior to finishing the main mission (main mission was abit short i remember that). Grabbed all the addon packs for it as well and did them. anyhow the only reason that I started reading the books about the nirnroot in skyrim was because Drunklastnight and Liberance perked my interest in why the nirnroot were growing back for them and not me. I believe i have 3 books on the nirnroot right now (without looking) not sure if there are more that might explain more details.

So what you're saying is that "it depends" ... gee, thanks.

I'd figured the draw distance was dynamic, but I didn't realize it was *that* dynamic. It makes sense though. It seemed like my dd decreased after 1.4, but it's just as likely that the hrs. on my playthru had grown enough at that point that my game was dynamically reducing dd to accomodate more persistent objects (glows, uncleaned weapons and arrows that I'd missed, etc.).

I've been noticing some really bright nirnroots. Even areas i've harvested still have the bright auras where the nirnroots should be.

How bad is this bug?

Will it corrupt saves eventually?

Is it Skyrims equivalent to Oblivions A-Bomb bug?

Two things:
1) Once the glows start stacking on a particular nirnroot, oftentimes only one of the glows disappears when you harvest it and the rest "decay" over a period of time.
2) Since nirnroots respawn (for most people, most of the time), stacks will rebuild accordingly.


"It depends," is the best answer we can give. Once the bug hits a game it'll usually escalate. How fast it escalates depends upon a person's playstyle (e.g., pinballing around the map via fast travel generally means stacks get added faster and unnoticed) and how diligent they are at harvesting them.


Well, I suppose it depends upon your definition of "corrupt". Every individual glow is essentially a persistent object that the game has to keep track of, which means every glow (other than the first?) in every stack is part of your save file. This is one of the prime suspects (as well as arrows and enemy weapons not properly cleaning up) for save files seeming to "bloat" once an 'x' number of hours of play are reached (again, 'x' depends upon the bug existing as well as playstyle, etc.).

Once save files hit 16-20mb, freezes/crashes and inaccesible areas appear to become much, much more common.


I really, really hope not -- at least in the sense that they never fixed the A-Bomb. As far as the bug eventually breaking a game though (for those who get infected, so to speak), it does, unfortunately, share similarities with the A-Bomb.

where it depends on the draw distance is the amount of data that it has to load and track for a particular area, the more data within the area, the more likely that the draw distance will 'shrink' to compensate for the amount of stuff that it has to add. the simplest way that i can describe this is .... draw a circle on a piece of paper and put a dot in the middle. then from the dot put a outward spiral till you reach the edge of the circle. The dot represents your character, the circle the main draw distance, the outward spiral represents how the data is added.. the more data that is added closer to the character, the shorter the outter distance is limited. Its also limited by the size of ones save file, as it loads the data per area from the save into the memory, visible or not. as a person moves across the world, the circle stays centered on the character, however everything the spiral added moves with the world, things that were added in that fall outside the draw distance are removed, and the new things that fall within the draw distance are added (is where lag can be added as a factor in moving / running across the land depending on the amount of stuff in the world area / draw area).

I'm still debating this, i think the numbers abit higher then 16mb, I am managing however to keep my characters down around 12mb tops, have one at 14mb. Unattended nirnroot areas are causing minor lag in some of my characters but generally only on first load. However I've been keeping most of them from getting the 'atomic' effect *knock on wood* the worst one is like a bright porch light for me thus far.

Thanks for the description. Funnily enough, the dot/circle is exactly how I'd conceptualized it working.


I just gave a broad range for the file size because, well, everyone I've seen report the (suspected) associated problems seemed to fall in that range. Although, 18mb+ certainly seems more common.

At 500'ish hrs and Lvl. 49, I've managed to, so far, keep mine down to 12mb and avoid the reported problems. It's a bit of hassle having to play janitor and "weed puller" though. There's still a number of areas I haven't discovered, but I've probably traveled (draw-distance wise) through 70-80% of the map. Just yesterday I traveled through an area I'd never been and found two nirns with only the single glow and one with several (the closest to Whiterun) -- that last one was an interesting "show piece" per our discussions about dd.