Hello. I've been trying to figure out the answer by lurking but I couldn't find anything related.

I sometimes get into rather messy arrow fights with bandits, and thus have a lot of arrows fired by myself and bandits lying around the world. At some point, there would be thousands of these if I don't clean up after, which may or may not lead to save game bloating. But picking all of these up is difficult since fired arrows are hard to see.

Does Skyrim clean up shot arrows and dead bandit weapons after a certain amount of time? The bodies have long disappeared at some places, but the weapons still remain.

Thanks!

Past games using this engine did clean up... but I can't help notice they DO NOT vanish in skyrim. I've come across arrows shot in obscure locations I havn't visitted in months. i can't help but cringe every time i see a hunter zoom past spraying arrows at a deer

Nope and Ash piles or any other pile doesnt clean up ever (unless you use commands to force the game to clean up).

EDIT: And anything that you drop won't also automatically clean up.

I see. So, this will inevitably lead to save game bloating.

Is there anything we can do?

Most cells are flagged to reset after a month, compared to the 3 days it was in Oblivion. Why they increased the timer so much, no idea. Cell reset times should be modifiable through... well, mods, however. Same with Ash Piles, would just need to flag them as something that shouldn't persist. Just gotta wait for the kit to be out / someone to do it with the tools currently available / Bethesda to change it themselves after they are done with the bugs.

Should check out the mods section and inquire there.

There is something wrong with the the cleanup scripts for sure. Further, this is/can become a real problem for console players because we can't use mods/scripts to force the game to clean up.

I really think somehting like 2 -3 in game days is all that is necessary with respawns being on longer timers. Thsi way if we rampage across the countryside we can go back to town, sell our stuff, rest fro a couple days and know that all those arrows, bodies, weapons, ash piles are deleted and the world is not necessarily becoming bloated and threatening the safety of our save files.

I've had them go both ways, with no apparent rhyme or reason.

The civil war battles seemed to be the only constant for A)Not cleaning up arrows. B)All the arrows ended up standing straight up, tip down in the ground for some bizarre reason.

Ash piles have been properly cleaning up since 1.3 though.

I had this bug once where an arrow was stuck right in the middle of my head through the whole entire game. I mean right in the middle of the forehead. I thought ok I'll take off the armor and wow its sticking right in my head.

Most cells reset after some time (inns even more frequent than the often quoted 1 month period) but, for some reason, arrows and ash piles don't disappear. Maybe the script is buggy.

I also noticed that artifact items that can be sold or stashed somewhere don't disappear during the cleanup process. For example, I sold the Staff of Melka to the merchant in Whiterun early in the game and he still carries it despite his inventory being reset every day or so.

Hmmm.
So, I guess we'll have to wait until the toolset comes out. Unless they decide to be sneaky with a little patch. Thanks!

Arrows does dissapear, but only when there are enough arrows in the world. You can have arrows all around the world during months but once the max number of arrows is surpassed the first generated one is deleted. In my game the max number of arrows is 15, but it could be tied to another game setting, so it could be 7, 20 or 250 in another game, not sure.

To ensure weapons are deleted, put the ones from people killed fighting in their inventories (when an NPC didn't had time to be on guard before being killed, the weapons that NPC carry will be deleted, despite them being aparently dropped).

Another problem is even after a cell is flagged for cleanup, it doesn't clean up until you go there.

You can avoid bloat by loading dropped weapons and arrows on corpses. They will disappear and take the items in their inventories with them.

I remember the first S.T.A.L.K.E.R. having a similar problem where it was beneficial to load dropped items on corpses to avoid performance problems. Also i remeber that in order to avoid overencumbrance, some people loaded their stuff on corpses and dragged them to along so they could still fight unhindered