This is the only house I've been unable to get, the quest will never start, I've entered Windhelm at night several times, no essential npc has died, searched the hall of the dead, not a single windhelm citizen has died, the first scripted victim is still alive as is viola, wtf

We really need console commands for consoles, if they release such an unstable game at least give us the ability to deal w/ it w/out giving up on it

you should be able to buy the house after youve finished the civil war questline, but you wont be able to upgrade it until youve done 'blood on the ice' (this quest *should* be fixed in 1.4)

thanks, not much hope here, on another character who finished the CW the stewart would keep saying it's unavailable due to unpleasantness

I like the idea of attaching quests to the houses, just wish they all functioned like the quest related to proudspire in solitude, easy to initiate, one minor glitch but easy and repeateable, Riften's is unstable since wujeeta can die forcing you to join the legion to get honeyside, then Hjerim is the worst, guess if I make another character I'll try and start this immediately

The murder happens on your 6th visit.

i dont know where you got that from. on my last character it was on my first visit that the quest started.

Yah.... All I did on my current "explorer" Khajiit was walk into the market to get Wylandriah's whatever from her satchel under the stairs in The White Phial (and pick up Nurelion's quest incidentally). As I left the store, I got the starter dialog from a guard standing there.... weird.

Annoyingly, on the only character I wanted to get Hjerim for, Blood on the Ice refused to trigger. And I have the PC version, so I used the console tricks, but even with them, while you can get the place cleaned up, you'll always have the "Investigate" quest markers in there, which irritates me so much I haven't played that character since.

Apparently it will be fixed in 1.4, so fingers crossed!

add to the list of things that don't work to get this quest going/getting the house

1. enter/leave city several times entering at night, many times after 2am
2. pickpocketing the hjerim key from tova shatter shields body, entering hrejim, and getting the 2 journals and amulet to trigger quest
3. try talking to everyone in windhelm w/ and w/out evidence
4. doing the stormcloak side of the civil war till given the option to buy the house but the "unpleasentness" prevents that, damn stewart

this quest is horribly bugged, while looking for answers I've come across multiple PC players unable to start this quest even w/ console commands, that is bad

Doing the Imperial side has the same result as #4.

Number of times entering or leaving is irrelevant. My oldest character had never managed to trip this quest; another got it on her first time walking into Windhelm.

The 1.4 beta fixed it for me- my oldest finally got it on her next trip to Windhelm, right after installing it. I started it in the early morning, finished off the real killer by afternoon. Either time of day/night requirements have been removed removed from the quest, or the bug with days being out of sync with the time was royally messing it up (for those who didn't know, the day of the week was not changing at midnight; fast travel and carriage use threw it out of whack, along with all the NPCs' scheduling).