Frequently Raised Issues - About the Patch

[Arthmoor]

Frequently Raised Issues - About the Patch

On a regular basis, people circulate rumors about how we're making incorrect changes to the game based on personal preferences. What follows in this topic will be explanations for the ones that come up most frequently. This is material that is probably too much to shove into one of the distributed doc files, so it was decided to do it here on the forum instead. If you have anything to discuss, please do so civilly, but be aware we are not going to be swayed by arguments that lack evidence to back them up.

[Arthmoor]

Redbelly Mine is supposed to be an ebony mine, but you guys changed it to iron, why?

This is an incorrect assumption with no valid reasoning behind it. Redbelly Mine at no point was ever planned to be designated as an ebony mine:

1. Redbelly Mine is specifically mentioned by the local NPCs as being an iron mine. During "Truth Ore Consequences" (FreeformRiften17), Filnjar, the blacksmith, will state:

[Dialogue form: 0005B0D5]
"Redbelly is supposed to be nothing but an iron mine. Been working it for years."
"Then right before the spiders had moved in, we found that chunk of ore. Never seen anything like it."
"I want to know what I'm dealing with before I start tearing it out of the ground."

2. As part of the same quest, he asks you to take a sample of ore to be identified by Elgrim in Riften. When that item is given to the player, it has the inventory icon of a piece of Quicksilver.

3. Grogmar gro-Burzag, one of the local miners, offers to buy iron ore from the player. This type of local job is always keyed to the type of ore found in a town's mine.

4. Grogmar gro-Burzag also offers this statement when asked about the local mine:

[Dialogue form: 000E4A06]
"Damn place is filled with this reddish mist. Can't see more than ten feet in front of your face."
"But when you can sniff out a vein of iron like me, it isn't too much trouble."

5. Odfel, one of the other local miners, offers this when asked about the mine:

[Dialogue form: 000E4A04]
"Mining iron takes a lot of strength and special reinforced tools."
"I must have broken five or six pickaxes in the last few months alone."
"But now that I've got Rocksplinter here, I can cut through stone like a hot knife through butter."

6. The red mist talked about by Grogmar is a common effect found in IRL iron mines. It's apparently an indicator that while they are getting ore from it, they aren't going about it properly and generating something called "powdery red gossan".

7. The official Prima Guide for Skyrim lists Redbelly Mine as a source of iron ore, indicating that at the point the game "went gold" it was still set up to be an iron mine.

So given that all of the available in-game information clearly states that the site is an iron mine, and all of the voice recordings were done based on that dialogue, there is no other logical conclusion to reach other than the site being an iron mine. Further, given that the ore sample you're taking to Riften uses the Quicksilver Ore model, there is no evidence whatsoever that Redbelly Mine should contain ebony at all. Therefore the only logical, evidence based conclusion that can be reached is that the ebony veins were placed in error.

One valid alteration suggested to us is that in addition to correcting the primary ore veins, one new vein of Quicksilver should be added. We do not consider the lack of an accessible vein of Quicksilver to fall under the definition of being a bug since that would entail labor to expose the vein that Filnjar has already said he doesn't want to risk until he knows what it is. So this modification is better suited to be done in an independent mod.

We did however keep supply balance in mind when this bug was fixed and turned Northwind Mine into an ebony mine to compensate for the loss.