A Plea to the Bethesda Staff from a longtime Necromancer : V - Skyrim

» Mon Jun 04, 2012 1:46 am

Large numbers of dead bodies, along with the ash pile problem, is one of the causes of corrupted and bloated save files.

And arrows.

» Mon Jun 04, 2012 1:37 pm

Make your Archmage's room your corpse storage chamber. The cell reset timer for that location is long, very long.

» Mon Jun 04, 2012 12:47 pm

Large numbers of dead bodies, along with the ash pile problem, is one of the causes of corrupted and bloated save files.

Dead bodies don't cause thee save file bloat. Beth doesn't know how to fix the bugs causing bloat so they are cutting back on other things that are working fine.

» Mon Jun 04, 2012 11:59 am

Make your Archmage's room your corpse storage chamber. The cell reset timer for that location is long, very long.

The whole college seems to never refresh. I used call to arms in one of the sleeping towers and the entire place looks like a tornado blew through weeks later. Strange that that spell will completely destroy a room's arrangement.

» Mon Jun 04, 2012 3:21 pm

be interesting (and creepy) if there was some kind of necromancy related dlc with an area specifically dedicated to corpse storage, similar to a weapons rack or stand but for thralls instead of gear.

» Mon Jun 04, 2012 10:02 am

be interesting (and creepy) if there was some kind of necromancy related dlc with an area specifically dedicated to corpse storage, similar to a weapons rack or stand but for thralls instead of gear.

OMG I had A dream last night like that! But Instead it was a Black Keep Dlc for Death Knights!

» Mon Jun 04, 2012 5:32 am

So is this issue the same problem that I ran into with my necromancer? Specifically, I had a character that was using Uthgerd the Unbroken as a thrall. After clearing out Broken Ore Cave (and turning that Captain into a 2nd thrall), both Uthgerd and the Captain couldn't leave the cave. Even worse than that, they both eventually just disappeared and vanished along with my entire inventory stored on Uthgerd's body.

» Mon Jun 04, 2012 11:48 am

Dead bodies don't cause thee save file bloat. Beth doesn't know how to fix the bugs causing bloat so they are cutting back on other things that are working fine.

not true, over time if the number of bodies are high enough there will be bloating. This goes with anything that generally is spawned and doesn't go away. It does however, take a massive amount of bloating to cause save corruption.

» Mon Jun 04, 2012 4:54 am

Large numbers of dead bodies, along with the ash pile problem, is one of the causes of corrupted and bloated save files.

And don't forget the Nirnroots' glow being reapplied every time you enter the cell; only the most recent one disappears. The rest remain, just like the ashpiles.

» Mon Jun 04, 2012 3:03 am

Bump.

I'm not going to lie or exaggerate, Beth devs who probably won't see this topic - given my individual playstyle, the change made in patch 1.3 is the single worst thing to happen to me in one of these games since Oblivion's Glitch of Doom. It's actually bad enough that I'm considering never downloading the patch (and subsequently never getting to play the DLC) in order to keep things the way they were prior to the patch.

» Mon Jun 04, 2012 7:51 am

Bump.

I'm not going to lie or exaggerate, Beth devs who probably won't see this topic - given my individual playstyle, the change made in patch 1.3 is the single worst thing to happen to me in one of these games since Oblivion's Glitch of Doom. It's actually bad enough that I'm considering never downloading the patch (and subsequently never getting to play the DLC) in order to keep things the way they were prior to the patch.

Are you sure you can't store dead bodies in your house? I have a dead body in. my house and she has been there for a while.

» Mon Jun 04, 2012 3:53 am

Short corpse duration = necromancer's complain
Long corpse duration = lag/bloated save file = everyone else complains

» Mon Jun 04, 2012 8:56 am

Short corpse duration = necromancer's complain
Long corpse duration = lag/bloated save file = everyone else complains

sadly this honestly if they changed this it would be bad especially for ps3 users that have framerate issues after 10+mb 100+ hour saves my complaint is the dead thrall level cap I wanna dead thrall alot of people but it won't let me the dead thrall level cap should be your level

» Mon Jun 04, 2012 12:15 pm

The only way to fix this is to buy the game for PC, you can make your own mod for it or you can set the timescale to a smaller number which will slow the rate of corpse decay. The only other option you have would be to not install the patches. Take your pick.

Bethesda should never have made this game for console anyway, they ended up having to cut so many features and leave so much to be desired simply because consoles are not able to handle the workload anymore.

» Mon Jun 04, 2012 8:47 am

sadly this honestly if they changed this it would be bad especially for ps3 users that have framerate issues after 10+mb 100+ hour saves my complaint is the dead thrall level cap I wanna dead thrall alot of people but it won't let me the dead thrall level cap should be your level

Corpses aren't the reason for the ps3 problems. The bugs are the reason, e.g. no arrow cleanup, no ash pile cleanup, multiple glow affect on nirnroots, they contribute greatly to save file bloat. Shortening the timer on corpses is a quick solution they can adjust with little work to help compensate for thee fact they can't squash their bugs.

» Mon Jun 04, 2012 4:26 am

be interesting (and creepy) if there was some kind of necromancy related dlc with an area specifically dedicated to corpse storage, similar to a weapons rack or stand but for thralls instead of gear.

This is actually a great idea. Unfortunately, I doubt that Bethesda will make a DLC for something like that since it only appeals to a small amount of people, they would want to make DLC that appeals to many in order for people to buy it.

This is a project for modders, however it seems rather complex to implement and only a few modders have such skill and they would actually have to have personal investment in necromancy to want to do it.

If the creation kit ever comes out, I might think about trying to do this.

» Mon Jun 04, 2012 12:30 pm

Corpses aren't the reason for the ps3 problems. The bugs are the reason, e.g. no arrow cleanup, no ash pile cleanup, multiple glow affect on nirnroots, they contribute greatly to save file bloat. Shortening the timer on corpses is a quick solution they can adjust with little work to help compensate for thee fact they can't squash their bugs.

Very much this. If cleaning out corpses quicker was such a magical fix, they would have done it in Oblivion, FO3, and NV (yes, I'm still counting NV), or they would've done it from the get-go in this game; this is a quick, sloppy fix, and there's still a part of me that believes that, as such, it might just be temporary (dream the dream). And I doubt anyone will make a topic complaining about them finally clearing up arrows and ash piles, so maybe they should focus on that.

And this isn't just one man's problem - there's plenty of players with necromancy on the mind who are directly affected by this, whether or not they realize what's causing it (I've actually gotten pretty tired of explaining the problem over and over again).

» Mon Jun 04, 2012 1:49 am

Are you sure you can't store dead bodies in your house? I have a dead body in. my house and she has been there for a while.

Well without burning through several frighteningly boring paragraphs on my history with undead-army building and the collective knowledge I've built up on the subject...I only tested things on patch 1.3 for a couple hours before I deleted it, but unless the corpse is permanent, it'll get cleared out after a day without exception. Prior to the patch, you could keep virtually any corpse around indefinitely provided you never stayed away from the cell you were keeping them in longer than it took for the cell to refresh (roughly 7 days); by rolling that number back to 1 with the patch, it becomes virtually impossible to leave your house and travel even into the next hold without them disappearing on you.

And naturally-occurring permanent corpses are rare, save for the multitude of pre-deads scattered around Skyrim, whom are generally worthless as thralls anyway.

The only way to fix this is to buy the game for PC, you can make your own mod for it or you can set the timescale to a smaller number which will slow the rate of corpse decay. The only other option you have would be to not install the patches. Take your pick.

Well, yes, that is indeed the dilemma, but like filling in your own 'maybe' box on a yes / no note, there's an outside chance that a mysterious third option might work, which is to make a complaint topic on their official forums in the hope that they might take notice of the certain peoples' problems with their unnecessary changes. It's probably just as futile and asinine as filling in the 'maybe' box, but hell, it wasn't that hard to create an account anyway.

» Mon Jun 04, 2012 2:09 pm

Oh hey Masterpug, I know you from gamefaqs. Unfortunately I am unable to activate an account at gamefaqs because of some stupid technical reason, so I spread my necroknowledge here.

Yeah it svcks that you no longer can keep generic corpses in your home if you visit it every week, I enjoyed being able to rely on a stockpile of corpses.

What most of you don't understand about what Masterpug53 is talking about is that generic enemy corpses disappear after 1 day which no longer allows you to travel very far after you dump them off.

It used to be one week. You can pretty much travel anywhere in skyrim and back in two days, so you could keep many different types of corpses such as forsworn ravagers, electromancers, bandit chiefs as long as you returned to your corpsepile each trip.

This allowed you to pick between different thrall configurations, melee, magic users, archers or a mix to suit your needs each with different pre enchanted weapons and armor.

But now, you have to keep your thralls with you at all times or they disappear.

Only a select few named enemy corpses will not disappear ever, such as Orchendor, Sild the Warlock, Silus Vesuius, Galmar Stone-fist, for example.

Nor will corpses that spawn dead and used as decorations, such as bodies named "Corpse", "Orc", "Victim", "Adventurer." Almost none of these decorations are any good at fighting. Only one that I can think of off-hand,

Spoiler

Skjor after a certain point in the companions quest line

is any good.

Townsfolk corpses tend to always disappear due to the fact that they are moved to the halls of the dead in whatever town they were residing in.

» Mon Jun 04, 2012 2:12 am

On behalf of a small but devoted cabal of necromancers who happen to enjoy taking their work home with them, we'd greatly appreciate it if you would undo the change made in patch 1.3 and return the corpse refresh rate back to its normal, longer period of in-game time (7 days I believe, as opposed to 1 day under 1.3).

Theatrics (mostly) aside, I decided to make an account here based on the notion that you'd probably pay more attention to a topic here than on Gamefaqs (and I'd have a hard time blaming you for that). Based on the info I've gathered, I'd assume that the change was made as part of the 'general fixes to stability' and probably went toward reducing load times. However, since the great Lord Vaermina decided to bless us with a...umm...much different Skull of Corruption this time around, I doubt I'll be able to figure out a glitch for making corpses permanent like I did in Oblivion; as such, I was very much reliant on constantly returning to my house within the refresh window in order to keep some of my more favorite kills from disappearing. Obviously with Patch 1.3 in effect, this becomes quite impossible for all but naturally-occurring permanent corpses (which are rare).

I realize that my and others' methods of keeping potential thralls on standby in our houses might not fall in line with your developmental intentions, but it is a pretty big kick in the pants to have necromancy featured so prominently in this game (as opposed to the last entry, at least) and yet to have a patch seeming on a whim limit our options so severely, not to mention wiping out hours of my RP'ing pursuits in an instant - it's also hard to understand why a change like this has been implemented now of all times, when nothing of the sort has ever been implemented in any of your other games into which I've had the pleasure of sinking embarrassing amounts of playtime. I can't say for sure what the attitude is towards this issue on these forums (if there is one at all), but in the dank cesspools of Gamefaqs there are indeed a decent amount of people who'd like to be able to return home to their corpse-piles once again.

\
I agree - I kept 2 elwen soldiers as my personal guard, and then, they disapeared.

» Mon Jun 04, 2012 11:16 am

@berserkenstein

I actually found a simple little way to keep the corpses of walled-town citizens around like normal - just thrall them after killing them, fast-travel to another walled town, return to the town in which you killed them, and enter an interior location, which should spawn them like normal. The last step or two might be unnecessary, but I like to check to make sure the game 'buried' them (added a coffin or urn in their honor) before I release them from thrall status. Of course this info doesn't mean **** to anyone playing under patch 1.3, but still...

And I had that particular NPC (sorry, I don't know how to flag spoilers properly here) disappear at the end of his questline, which was a shame, since I had had him around practically forever (it might have also been that the dungeon he was killed in got re-formatted and cleared him, but I doubt it, since the named NPC boss you fight in the same room is still around).

» Mon Jun 04, 2012 8:34 am

Yeah when an area resets it usually takes the person/corpse with them.

It is one of the reasons why your thralls sometimes disappear.

If you remember where you got them, you can go back to that location they will come running back to you still as your thrall.

That's why I try to keep tabs on where I get them.

On an unrelated note, if you could, could you take a look at the videos in my sig?

If you find them helpful, could you post them on gamefaqs in the dead thrall thread? I would do it myself, but for some reason I can't get my account validated there.

» Mon Jun 04, 2012 4:56 pm

@Berserkenstein

I couldn't watch the whole vids as my internet can be pretty crappy, but I went ahead and posted them for you. Hopefully you didn't hide any boobies in there or anything ;-)

» Mon Jun 04, 2012 5:18 pm

I just really, really wish they would fix ash piles. I know I keep going on about it but... I just really can't bring myself to use reanimation spells in their current state. It's the same thing with learning spells in Oblivion and using energy weapons in Fallout 3/NV. I wonder how much third-party research Bethesda does on bugs and glitches in their games, a trip to the UESP glitch articles may cause them to break down and weep.

» Mon Jun 04, 2012 3:57 pm

be interesting (and creepy) if there was some kind of necromancy related dlc with an area specifically dedicated to corpse storage, similar to a weapons rack or stand but for thralls instead of gear.

Oh, the potential...
:clap: