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. Necromancy seems very limited to begin with, so let's at least provide a little bit of leeway for those have have managed to get along with it.

Wow, slightly off topic here but I'm pretty impressed with your dedication to the necromancer playstyle.

Speaking of corpses, and I haven't taken notice of this since 1.3, but do dragon corpses disappear after one day? It seems like they won't go away, but humanoid and creature bodies do.

I don't think so, and the corpse of my old horse (Frost) which died some 150 hours of playtime ago still hasn't disapeared. Odd that they didn't fix the Ash Pile problem either since Markarth is still littered with them. Not to mention the weapons opponents drop, which never despawn and I can only imagine this contributes to my save file bloating issue.

Totally with you - I have played Necromancers where you can hunt down powerful enemies just to turn them into your own personal followers. If the game has a limit on the number of summoned critters - then allow you to store them in a GEM and pull them out when you need them until destroyed. Nothing like collecting a necromatic army in your pocket. At high levels, it would be great to even be able to put a dragon you killed in pocket

My other favorite is to play an Enchantress - who controls others to do all her fighting and stands back and watches everyone kill one another. There is a bit of that in Skyrim under Illusion but its really not even close to what I would want to be able to create an Enchantress.

The next time they do a new version - Hope they think through the schools a bit more to allow players to play Roles and have spells they can raise up in each - everything from a Pyromancer (or whatever energy type they pick to grow in Destruction), to Illusionists who have REAL shadow magic (Clairvoyance? are you kidding me) and not one illusionary wall or creature to create, Enchantress (not the same as a witch but a manipulator of people, creatures, using their appearance and spells to bost persuasion), a witch both good (druid/healer) and evil (hex/demonic summoning) with familiars, Better Conjuration (more choices like lions, bears, and other mystical creatures), and Priests (I think they did an okay job with Restoration magic)

The hard part is getting the balance - correct. I've been doing this stuff for over 25 years and its not easy -but I would love to help them on the next release.

If they haven't gotten fixed in Fallout 3 yet, then I wouldn't hold my breath on this game.

The annoying thing is....a modder would be able to fix this in an afternoon.

Just make sure the reset cleanup includes removing ashpiles.

Someone's been playing pokemon too much

Rotted Sabre Cat, I choose you!

Might as well bump this I guess.

Gamefaqs Official King of Worms must be heard!!


...
... ...please...?

Excuse the noob question, but... why exactly would you need corpses to remain where they died for more than 1 day? I mean, after you went somewhere and killed ppl you almost certainly won't ever be coming back to make use of the corpses... And if you do come back, you'll have a brand new stock of living bodies waiting to be slain and revived...

Throw Frost into the ocean. Out of sight, out of mind.

I agree with the OP. They need to fix the respawn bug so we can have more corpses, I mean areas outside if dungeons have not respawned its been over a year in game time. I also wish they would fix the ash piles I have no idea why they have had this issue since Fallout 3. I mean Oblivion had ectoplasm and that cleaned fine in that game.

If(!this->alive && !this->perm){
if(curr.utc > this->utc_despawn){
this->despawn();
}
}

Need it really be any more complicated than this on an intermittent clean up/collection routine?

The answer is probably "yes" though I'm not sure why.

Stuff all destroyable items into a dynamically, doubly, circularly linked list and walk it at intervals. Insertions based on oldest nearest to head and the list would remain manageably small if cleaned regularly and the decay interval isn't set too long.

Edit: I noticed that you could make the two initial checks criteria for putting an item into the linked list in the first place thus speeding up the clean up process.

Well, it's just a different mentality. Without spoilers, say I kill a unique NPC as part of a quest, or a storyline character dies, or I just really like the way a particular dungeon enemy looks and fights - as a necromancer, I'd like to keep these NPCs around to do my bidding whenever I want, and not just for a one-shot use. In Oblivion I could go nuts since I had a glitch to make any non-respawning NPCs permanent - I'd have houses packed with statuefied corpses (another fun glitch I found) to display my necromantic pursuits. Thing is, now we're in Skyrim, and the ability to reanimate a body and have it fight for you is a legitimate and encouraged facet of combat rather than a novelty ability given to you late in the game (depending on your playstyle, of course); as such, it's ironic and more than a little disappointing that they finally decided to axe the lengthy amounts of time you could keep corpses around, not to mention that said axe was done without warning in a patch, rather than being initialized in the vanilla game.

Ritual stone... nuff said

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

Doesn't the "set timescale to 1" affect the 1 day duration of corpse? It could help you if it work.

What it does is making 1 minute irl equal to 1 minute in-game.

Doesn't really help with this particular issue, though, unless there's something I'm missing.


Personally it's a risk I'm willing to take - I would never complain at or even in the general direction of Beth over a glitch or freeze which I directly or indirectly caused. To be honest, I've got over sixty corpses packed in Markarth's Hall of the Dead and nearly 50 in Vlindrel Hall (I deleted the patch after the initial fiasco), and haven't noticed any more freezing than a regular playthrough.

But I'm not of the mentality that just because it doesn't happen to me, it doesn't exist - I'm sure Bethesda has their reasons for making the change, and I understand that most people couldn't care less about whether or not corpses disappear after 7 days or 7 minutes. The point of this topic is to illustrate that, while I and other who share my opinions are in the minority, the change made in 1.3 is still a very unwelcome one, especially since the game wasn't made that way to begin with. Between Oblivion, FO3, and NV (yes, I'm counting NV), the devs have never targeted corpse disappearance rates as a way to reduce lag, and it's painfully ironic that they would finally choose to do so in this game, when necromancy is finally given the spotlight it deserves.




If you're referring to a PC fix, I'm unfortunately playing on the 360. Hell, if I was playing on PC I probably wouldn't have made this topic, and I think the change made in patch 1.3 has finally driven me over the edge to give up on console Bethesda games; It's really dragging me down to have such minor and easily-fixable issues with these games compelling me to constantly tilt my head wistfully and wonder what could have been, especially now that developers have gotten into the habit of toying back and forth with core game elements through patches rather than simply fixing bugs. The only thing holding me back at this point is that my fairly-new computer (mac-mini) has a 3rd party external disk drive that won't properly download the Windows OS program.

Bump.

Hey Op I killed my wife in my riften house and she has been downstairs dead where I put her for a long time and I don't visit daily. So I don't think the quick cleanup applies there.

Oddly enough - whlie I owned part of the company that created it - I have never played Pokemon.

Also, for me not being a necromancer. I miss finding people Ive killed and forgotten about. I go somewhere for a while, then come back and am like "lol I remember that" Would be nice if NPC's would stick around for 10-15 days

I like the Gem idea Falantrius.

Been through dungeons with lots of nasty traps, wishing that I could store my zombie thralls away for a bit and then resummon them once I get past the trickier areas. Being able to store bodies in a gem to keep them from despawning, is also a godsend to my necromancer type character as it means no more storing potential thralls at a home hoping they don't disappear.

Sometimes I feel that if necromancy was given more attention during development, then it wouldn't constantly come across as being so much more trouble than the results it is gives. I personally find the playstyle of finding and using enemies and their abilities interesting, considering the very small number of summons conjurers get.