hello eveyone!
I already posted something like this but now I know a lot more, so this new post:
I was wondering if the arrows you shoot and miss stay there for ever, or go away eventually.
So I went to riverwood and started shooting arrows at a wooden object, I noticed that after a few arrows the first ones dissapeared!
No problem I thought, but then I shot some at riverwood, went back to helgen, shot some more until they started to dissapear in helgen and then I
went back to riverwood, where all the arrows were still there. Then I went back to helgen, waited for way over 30 days there, and then went into a dungeon, waited for over 30 days there as well, and went back to riverwood, the damn arrows were still ALL there. I really need to know how to 'cleanse' skyrim of my arrows I shot all over the place.
can someone please help me?
thanks a lot in advance,
a fellow skyrim player

Silly kid, arrows are for bandits, not for the ground......oh, and knees too.

Damn your really determined about this. Im pretty sure all arrows stay where they are. In riften, there are arrows everywhere due to guards shooting down thieves in the streets. That happened 20 or so levels ago and the arrows are still there.

You can always pick them up. Besides, if you shoot an arrow at a wolf and miss, if you can't find it after you kill the wolf, you're probably never going to find it again. Also: free steel arrow

If it bugs you that much then what you need to do is find out the exact number of arrows you can fire in a cell before they start despawning. Then whenever you have to use a bow you keep track of the number of times you miss. Once the fight or whatever is over you can just fire your bow at the ground or something until you've made all the arrows you've lost track of despawn.

I shot a bunch of arrows at the wooden posts at the Blacksmith in Whiterun on my first character. They stayed there for the nearly 300 hours I played that character. Funny thing was that after a certain time I could not pull them out. They were there but I could no longer interact with them. I have also noticed that by the time I hit the upper 40's on both of my characters load times start to increase dramatically. On my 300 hour character loads can often take over a minute. And that's every load, entering or exiting buildings, caves, cities or just loading after dying. It's not the key bug either. This has happened on both my characters. The game engine definitely starts to have trouble keeping up with all the various changes to the game world or something. On my third character now. I'm curious to see if the same thing happens again. I am playing on the 360 though. It already has much longer load times than the PC judging by the videos I've watched.

Um, stop wasting arrows shooting them into non-living objects. Then you won't have any problems with unsightly arrow buildup, as they'll disappear when the corpses they're stuck into disappear.

Tourists.

isn't there some way to 'reset' the world I can hardly believe that isn't possible at all?

bump!

Dont the cells reset after a certain period of time? if not im going to have a lot of bodies everywhere.

Corpses (and now ash piles thanks to 1.4) are supposed to clean-up, and mostly do. However, there's definitely an issue with weapons (and shields) not cleaning up if seperated from the enemy, or PC -- this includes arrows. All of this litter has to be continually tracked by the game and, presumably, adds to save game file bloating. Those of us trying to avoid the issues that seem to arise from this bloat (frequent crashing/freezing problems, longer load times), try to clean up this litter along the way. Yes, that means having to play janitor.

I still have my old habits from Morrowind : Close doors behind me, leave all junk in corpses and not on the floor... etc.
Save-file bloat was so bad back on XBox Morrowind it used to lead to the game crashing or the save-files becoming corrupt.... so...

Ok, so I've mostly given up on the whole door thing, since that is more trouble than ever before.... BUT as a general rule I don't drop any crap on the ground itself. All junk goes in corpses.

There was a lot of discussion on the PS3 forum a couple of months ago because of all the trouble that platform had running Skyrim. Arrows and ash piles were identified as potential contributors to the problem because they NEVER go away, regardless of how many times the cell resets.

Of course, you can collect arrows if you can find them, there is nothing you can do about ash piles.

However, that was before patch 1.3 or 1.4, so I do not know if either of those fixes the problem.

Did they really fix ash piles with 1.4? That's good news.

Arrows can be found in the middle of nowhere, sometimes stuck perfectly vertical in the ground. Outside of Riften have I found arrows that stuck in the middle of the air.

I wish I could tell my follower to pick up and collect all arrows nearby.

I always take what ever weapon they drop and put it back on em or in a container that I don't own just to clear the place up. And by doing so I have noticed a difference in load times from when I would leave it and forget about it.

Yes, mostly. Though ash piles from named npcs still have a habit of staying around, but thankfully those are relatively rare.

Good! Now I can take that disintigrate perk I have been holding off on and start raising some zombies!

Yep, I've seen them too -- sometimes in areas I've only been near but not actually to. If random AI has, e.g., a hunter in your outdoor cell/zone, maybe over the ridge or across the river, and they miss a few shots while chasing a deer, those arrows will stay in the environment (as well as yours and enemy arrows, of course) -- permanently, as far as I can tell. Over time, as the cell cycles thru new loads, some of these arrows/weapons will do that defy-physics thing (I've no idea why), and some will eventually deny you the ability to interact with them (i.e., pick them up).

This non-cleanup behavior and the nirnroot-glow stacking are prime suspects for why games get increasingly prone to freezing/crashing issues. This is why I play janitor and monitor for nirnroot glows and, so far, after 400+ hours on my character (knock on wood), I still only see the occassional, relatively rare, freeze or crash. Either that or my tidiness is purely coincidental to me being lucky. {shrug]

LOL ...

Shock and thrall, my friend, shock and thrall.

I thought i was the only one tho in some places with 4 + doors and 5 npcs (fighters guild in oblivion .-.) it got rather challenging shutting all doors before leaving

So about the arrows, isn't there a way we could let bethesda know about it so they dissapear along with the corpses after cell reset? or are they already planning on doing that?
really bugs me :/

I assume they know as it's been discussed numerous times in the 360 (and probably PS) forum. When and if they plan/hope to fix it, though, I have no idea.

Actually, if you go back later, the arrows are usually sticking straight up out of the ground, making it much easier to collect them. I'd like to know why I can't pull out that arrow that's plainly in the wolf's tail...

I've often wondered, if I go around and pick up all the junk laying around, would the game run smoother since it didn't have to try and load the junk all the time. It's a partial reason I don't decorate houses.