u/Catalysten

It's about preparing for a journey, and all the troubles that come with it. And about learning the skills you need to survive - both from a leveled-character perspective, and in the very Outward way of knowledge-of-the-world. The latter, of course, is a skill which you carry with you across characters.

Earning knowledge-of-the-world is one of my favorite feelings, and one that is hard to come by in many games nowadays. I used to think that Morrowind was the epitome of that experience, but then I found Outward. And now, Kenshi. All three have remarkable worlds, though, that feel meaningful to spend time dwelling in.

If you have other recommendations along this vein, I'd love to hear them.

https://jeanfrancoisracine.bandcamp.com/album/runeverse-ost

They've got that wonderful Outward feel to the music! I recommend checking them out. (-:

I've noticed that a common post pattern on Reddit is of someone feeling upset and potentially defensive about their save becoming unstable, and others responding by telling them that they probably failed to practice save saving, etc.

Safe saving is essential. It's good advice.

But it's not the only variable in maintaining a stable save. It's okay to sometimes be playing perfectly normally and responsibly, and then discover that your save is getting borked. You don't have to feel bad about yourself, or mad at someone else. There's a lot of moving pieces in these modlists. And there's ways to regain a stable playthrough after encountering instability.

One approach is of course to load a previous save from before the instability. Another is to try to repair the save directly. Resaver is an excellent tool for certain kinds of instability. Here's a link to it: https://www.nexusmods.com/skyrimspecialedition/mods/5031

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Here's a couple stories of how I encountered issues, and fixed them.

I fought a dragon priest in Lorerim, and then proceeded to run away from that priest (because it was terrifying, and my then-level-8 character was a justified coward). I noticed that the save started to lost stability. I happen to know that dragon priests have a lot of scripts firing. So I loaded a save from before the combat encounter. All better! I had a similar experience in the-modlist-forbidden-by-name.

Also in Lorerim, I noticed that using the glider would sometimes leave a flapping fabric sound after landing. Saves after that point would sometimes become unstable. And when I checked out those saves on resaver, I observed that indeed there were unattached instances sometimes left behind on saves after using the glider. A couple of clicks later, and the save was fixed and stable again.

I could have of course just avoided the glider. But the glider was fun! I'm glad the list has the glider. And it's quite simple to run resaver between play sessions when I'm actively using the glider. Takes only a few seconds, and you can even do it while the modlist is still loading up.

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Image from https://www.nexusmods.com/skyrimspecialedition/mods/134795

Love that guy. Has good taste in fishy sticks.

It's a new story set on Tamriel. There is perhaps no fantasy game world with as deep a lore, with literal libraries full of knowledge written subjective histories and tales and spells.

It's a new first person RPG by Bethesda. Nobody has quite replicated the lived-in experience of Skyrim, all seen from the first person. There's a reason why VR Skyrim is widely considered the best RPG on VR headsets, in spite of its numerous technical hurdles that require mods to overcome. Because Skyrim is meant to be more than a place where you fight bad guys. It's a home, and you're meant to see it with your character's eyes.

It's a chance to hear new takes on old music. Soule's themes are unrivaled in score, when it comes to games. I know he's not composing for this one. But I guarantee that Zur will play with his themes somehow. (I assume it's Zur. No official confirmation yet. Would love to see a variety of composers working together. Derrick from ESO would be good.)

It's a chance to see what's over *this* horizon, around *this* cliff-face, behind *this* tree. Wouldn't it be wonderful to play Morrowind again, and see those crazy Daedric ruins again for the first time? Hammerfell will have beautiful places. You will only get to find them for the first time once.

And after the first time, for new characters, you can take different routes. Find the same places in different orders. Mod the game, and see what art other players have come up with. Exploration was the biggest thing missing from Starfield. ESVI will bring it back.

Recently, I have been trying to remember any and all examples of short pants in the Elder Scrolls series. But all I could recall was the fisherman's waders. Do people just never wear short pants in Tamriel? What other examples of short pants can folks remember?

The idea is metaphorically rich: you can put a nut in a jar with a narrow aperture and the monkey will find the nut and stick their hand into the jar to grab the nut. They find that with their hand wrapped around the nut they cannot extract their hand from the jar so they stay stuck with their hand around the nut in the jar, unwilling to let go of their new treat.

I see this story over a lot of the internet and many people claim that it is true. I haven't seen anyone claim it isn't true but I also don't see any videos of a monkey being caught in this way. Nor have I yet found a reliable source of it being used to catch monkeys in the wild. Can we prove or disprove this story?

https://www.econlib.org/archives/2018/03/inside_the_monk.html