So imagine I carry alot of books and decide to stack them on one another.

Consider that I wanna make a tower of 4-5 books stacked together. I hold down X (ps3) and place the first one, but when placing the second and third makes the first book fall off the table.

It's also very tedious getting the right angle on stuff. There doesn't seem to be a direct science when stacking stuff or just RPing and placing it nicely on tables and so forth.

I don't wanna put them in bookshelves or weapon racks all the time, I wanna make a reading spot where I have some books and a dagger and maybe som gems and stuff, just to make a better home-feeling.

Arranging items is the easy part. Getting them to stay where you put them once you leave and re-enter your house is far more difficult.

Time and practice is all I can say. I've become quite good at placing objects. However, after the 1.6 patch Bethesda decided to reverse the gravity of objects in the game making it very difficult to place items in the world. I've been waiting in vain for a fix since that update and I don't suppose we'll be getting one any time soon. I don't have any idea what caused it to happen but it came with the update that put in mounted combat if I remember correctly.

Explain to me as if I never played Skyrim. How do you do the arranging-part?

If I need to rotate an item out of Skyrim's weird "THIS IS THE ANGLE THIS ITEM WILL TILT AT NO MATTER WHAT" physics then I'll touch it against other surfaces nearby to get it at the angle I want.

But as I said, once you arrange these things they're going to be sprawled all over the floor once you leave and re-enter your house. I don't know why.

Hehe, okay man.

So you're telling me that the stuff gets un-arranged as soon as you leave the house? I've left some things spread out (239 items to be exact) in the same spot, I just spammed "drop item" and they haven't moved yet. but what you're saying is that if I took the time to arrange them it would become a mess again?

You can't arrange items. There is no option for rotating it in mid-air, and no option for moving it towards or away from you without physically walking that direction. Which, of course, means that you can't put things any farther from you than the default, and you can't put anything down close to you if there's something behind you.


I don't know why, but TES has gotten worse and worse at manipulating objects that are in your inventory to be in the world space.

Morrowind was ok, you could put stuff where you wanted it for the most part.

Oblivion was worse because physics was odd, but at least you could grab the item at different places and let it rotate around.

Skyrim is just impossible. You can only grab an object in the default spot, and you can't rotate them. End of story.

Next game they probably won't even let you pick stuff up. I don't see why they did in Skyrim tbh.

Most object you have to drop leave and reenter your home and they will now go and stay were you want. Key word MOST not all.
So drop item, leave house. Reenter house. Pick up item do not put it back in your inventory (Or you will have to repeat the process) Place item where you want it to go and (Again most items not all) will now stay where you placed them.
This is for PS3 only, I do not know if this works on PC or X-BOX.

And yes. There's a certain time at which the house records the object's position. There is a trick to get it to remember where you put stuff if you save/load and enter/leave in a certain way. I'm not sure how it works. You have to look that one up.

However, for the most part, even if you do get it where you want, it will explode into a random mess the next time you enter your house.

Okay. So no point in trying to make a cosy little reading table.

This has been the case for me about 90% of the time. It usually stays put once you arrange it again for the second time, but it usually messes itself up at least once. I have no idea what causes it or how it can be avoided.

I think some people are saying that you need to do it like this:

Enter house.
Drop stuff.
Leave house.
Save.
Exit Client.
Open Client.
Reload.
Enter house.

Decorate.

I think it works if you go like that.

Here is how it happens. Each item as a "Clipping outline" (not the right term, but it's what i am using here) that denoted the outer boundaries of the object. This clipping outline keeps one plate from merging with another one if you put them next to each other. So, you line up all your stuff and it all looks neat.

Then you leave the cell and come back at some point. Two things will happen, either the game will try to reset all the stock objects in the cell which can knock other objects off the shelf. However, this is not as big an issue as the other reason. When you enter the cell, all items in the cell are rendered again and placed where the game remembers them being. However if the placement was just a little off, then an item can fall or drop. If the item was not flat on the table, then it can tip when rendered. When it does this, the clipping outline can bump into another object which can set off a chain reaction of things being moved around the cell.

It was even worse in Oblivion and Fallout 3 when they first came out. I could bump into a vase, and everything would explode all over the room like a popcorn popper. They adjusted the physics to reduce this in those games. They got item placement pretty good with this change in FO3 and FONV. But, as one poster above said, the ways to spin the obkjects or flip them has been taken away.



This works as the game somehow treats objects that are rendered in the cell, then later moved, differently than items that are just dropped in place, then rendered again at a later cell load. Items placed this way seem to get moved less when the cell renders. They can still get bumped around, but it does make for a more stable item placement.

So this is the reason I get damaged when walking over skeletal remains?

Pretty much. Hit a bone, set off a chain reaction and you are smacked with a bunch of bones in the pile.

Either jump over them, or Fus Do Rah them across the cell.

It's a lot harder to do in Skyrim than Oblivion, especially with books since they open now. I usually make use of the new bookshelves.

Yeah, the opening of books makes it very hard for placement.

There are several objects that always acted weird. For example, dragon claws or the map of dragon tombs. Most of the time, they always sunk a bit deeper into the surface they laid on.

I'm either seeing things or it stopped with 1.8.