Skyrim talk:Bandit Attack

Is there any spesific trigger?

Is there any trigger in specific for this mission? I'm curious to try it, but I've had Lakeview Manor for months and she's never shown up.24.138.254.232 01:15, 13 February 2013 (GMT)

I'm having the exact same issue. I'm starting to suspect that one of the causes of the frequent crashes when arriving at Lakeview Manor may be this quest trying to trigger. --Xyzzy ^Talk 16:09, 31 August 2013 (GMT)

RobinHood70 added a note to the article that says that if you have a personal steward, Rochelle will join the attack on your homestead, rather than sending her minions to kidnap your spouse, preventing the quest from ever happening. Can somebody check to see if there is a way to retrigger this quest, perhaps by dismissing your steward (if that's even possible)? --Xyzzy ^Talk 03:12, 31 March 2014 (GMT)

It's the housecarl, not the steward...at least that's how it looked in the CK. I didn't check into it beyond the fact that it referred to having a housecarl in the code commentary. – Robin Hood  ^(talk) 03:39, 31 March 2014 (GMT)

I'm just doing a little more research on it, since I'm trying to trigger it myself. It looks like if your housecarl is with you (rather than at home), it can trigger. The problem is that it also looks like whether the quests succeeds in triggering or fails, it won't appear again for another 50,000 in-game hours. Since that works out to nearly six years, that probably means it'll never happen again in a normal game if you've done something to cause it to fail previously. In other words, you pretty much have to plan to get this quest; a few will undoubtedly trigger it by fluke, but for most people, it'll probably never happen. At least this is what it looks like to me. Since I'm also hit by the 50,000 hour limit, and I can find no way to reset that, it'll probably only be my next game before I get this quest to trigger. – Robin Hood  ^(talk) 04:27, 31 March 2014 (GMT)

On another note, the crashiness around Lakeview seems unrelated to this quest. I've had it crash numerous times while testing this, the latest one being while I was writing the above. My character was just standing still outside Lakeview and the spinning "screensaver" (for lack of a better description) was going. In other words, I was doing nothing whatsoever that could've triggered this or any other quest. – Robin Hood  ^(talk) 04:31, 31 March 2014 (GMT)

Does this mean that if you recruit a non-housecarl NPC (e.g. Annekke Crag-Jumper) as the personal steward of your homestead, you may still be able to trigger the kidnapping? --Xyzzy ^Talk 06:20, 31 March 2014 (GMT)

(←) You can only trigger it if you have no housecarl at all, or if you have Greggor, Rayya, or Valdimar and they're currently accompanying you. If you've left them at the home where your spouse is, they're deemed to be defending the home, thus not allowing Rochelle to make off with your spouse. – Robin Hood  ^(talk) 19:22, 31 March 2014 (GMT)

What if a housecarl IS my wife? I am planning to marry Rayya, I wouldn't really miss the quest, but I'm curious. Bulvik (talk) 12:47, 26 April 2014‎ (GMT)

Based on the code, I believe that if Rayya is your wife, you can't trigger this quest. She would still count as your housecarl, which means the kidnapping won't happen. – Robin Hood  ^(talk) 17:23, 26 April 2014 (GMT)

I had Annekke Crag-Jumper as a steward and leaving her as well as Rayya at Lakeview Manor can trigger an attack but never the kidnapping. This is consistent in several playthroughs. — Unsigned comment by 210.186.52.140 (talk) at 03:50 on 29 August 2014 (UTC)

What if the steward is one of the vanilla housecarls like Lydia? — Unsigned comment by 210.186.52.140 (talk) at 03:58 on 29 August 2014 (UTC)

(←) Coming back at this again, I believe it would be all but necessary to have a spouse before you ever build any of the Hearthfire houses. If I'm right in how this works, the ideal situation, which would all but guarantee that you'd be able to trigger the actual kidnapping, would be to build the house and most of the bedroom furniture (whether that's the bedroom add-on or just the regular bedroom) at the same time, then move your spouse in before ever visiting the house again (including not entering and exiting the house more than absolutely necessary). It's definitely a twitchy quest to trigger. – Robin Hood  ^(talk) 09:19, 1 April 2016 (UTC)

I'm trying to manually trigger the quest, as I have Rayya as both Housecarl and Steward so she extremely rarely leaves the manor. I used console and the setstage command, but it didn't do anything. Anything I'm missing? 210.185.88.92 16:46, 1 August 2019 (UTC)

Repeatable?

I was simply wondering if this quest is repeatable, for you can pay Rochelle the Red, so, if you do, can she take my wife away again? Just wondering :) — Unsigned comment by 86.160.49.66 (talk) at 20:53 on 1 April 2013 (GMT)

Moonwalking bug

This solution is from another page but i decided to post it here too in case people are looking for it. If your spouse is still jumping around weirdly and walking backwards on the PC you can simply use 'resurrect' in the console commands. My spouse bugged too; probably directly killed the bandit before she could speak and never looted the body so had to fix it this way. If you play on the console i have no idea what to do :( — Unsigned comment by 83.83.177.98 (talk) at 06:21 on 20 June 2013

I ran into a solution for spouses who are followers that seems to work. Have them follow you, then take them away from the house, so there's no complications, then attack them until you see the message that they have left your service. This seems to reset their pathfinding and fixes the moonwalking bug. I'm not entirely certain if something like this would work on non-follower spouses. I'd assume it'd work on essential ones like Ysolda, but it'd have to be confirmed. But I'm reasonably certain it works every time with follower spouses. I repeated it on Marcurio three times and it worked each time. Since this is just an in-game action, it should work on consoles, and I did it on the 360.—Mjr162006 (talk) 22:29, 30 August 2013 (GMT)

I can confirm this for xbox 360. My character is married to Brelyna, and had this bug after being kidnapped. Just for the sake of specificity, in order to make your follower leave your service because of attacks by your hand, his/her health needs to drop to the point that they go to their knee. Basically you need to do enough damage that any non-protected npc would die. 1stTimeWiki (talk) 04:18, 25 January 2014 (GMT)

Are you sure it wasn't just 4 attacks to cause your follower to leave? I just tried it with Valdimar, my personal steward at Windstad Manor (not my spouse), and punching him 4 times barely lowered his health, but it did cause him to leave my service as a follower, but not turn hostile. --Xyzzy ^Talk 08:16, 25 January 2014 (GMT)

I'm very sure. It took me close to ten minutes to figure this out. I lost count of the number of times I attacked her. I used fists mostly, but also used spells. For some reason I didn't want to let her health get too low, and would stop to let her health regenerate. I probably should have explained that part in my previous post. I also can't say with certainty if this is unique to my game, but I just could not get her to leave until I decided to drop her health nearly to zero. 1stTimeWiki (talk) 18:23, 25 January 2014 (GMT)

(←) So in short here are the steps to fix moonwalking bug on consoles, not sure about pc because of UESP patches and mods. Step 1 get spouse to follow you after rescue. Step 2 attack spouse until they kneel down and enter recovery state. Step 3 If spouse doesn't have head tracking after Step 1 & 2, paralyzing them should fix it. Wrath425 (talk) 00:35, 18 February 2014 (GMT)

Definite Fix for the Spouse Moonwalk/Bugwalk

Apparently fixed in the USKP, I'll still present my research and solution to this issue from way before the USKP, I came up with that idea when I read about the many "backwards walking spouses" out there.

--Old post starts here--

Ok, I've found out that temporary fixing this is possible with using "resurrect", and with beating your Spouse down until he/she is "stunned" and needs to get up - but many times, it will not be solved for ever and ever. So I nearly broke my head over this issue and found out:

I've located the key structual point being both the Quest/the Quest "countdown" running in the background and the character "Rochelle the Red" - interacting with her in ANY way whilst having read the note and having the quest active causes a "virtual countdown" to run down. After that counter runs out, your spouse will automatically get her cell unlocked (most times) and become bugged, doing sidestepping, backwards movement, happyfeet, etc.

It is easily visible if you quickly fight to the spouses cell, and wait one hour. The quest will say "Complete", and your spouse will free her/himself and walk away, starting to glitch.

The problem is, the quest (or quest timer) randomly stops, sometimes without notice, and this causes the bugging behaviour.

To avoid the glitch reliably:
1. Whatever you do, DONT KILL or attack THE MESSENGER BANDIT - YET. This will cause Rochelle to become hostile on sight, making it impossible to check if it works. SAVE as soon as you see the bandit approaching you.
2. Find location of the hostage - requires talking to the bandit, getting the note and location, and re-load after that.
3. Kill the messenger and go to the location you need to remember. Do not search the bandits body let alone read the note he carries. On-site, you will get attacked by Rochelle immediately, so kill her.
4. Go straight into the Keep where your Spouse will be. You are free to kill any bandits on the way, they arent related to the Bug.
5. Free your spouse from the cell by opening the gate and talkng to him/her.
7. The backwards-walking glitch shouldn't happen.

For the hell of it, here's how to reliably glitch your spouse on purpose;

8. Load the pre-bandit-killing savegame, talk to the bandit and get the quest, go to Rochelle, and either kill her or talk with her - but don't pay ransom.
9. THEN go to your spouse's locked cell and wait 1h.
10. "Quest Completed" should show up (if it didn't already during your venture to get there), spouse frees him/herself, we know the Drill - Spouse bugged.

The whole quest is very erratic, as with many things in Skyrim. I mean, come on, the first time I had a bugged spouse, the quest auto-completed while I just left my home to go to the meeting point to pay the ransom. The next time it autocompleted before I even lockpicked the cell door. You get the idea, it's nonsensical at some point.

Hope this helps. MarukiTheFaceHater (talk) 02:34, 10 August 2013 (GMT)

Mjoll the Lioness

I'd just like to add that this quest and its annoying bugs still happened while married to Mjoll, so the info isn't entirely correct. This was on PS3, the house was Lakeview Manor. — Unsigned comment by 2.151.236.54 (talk) at 14:36 on 8 March 2015 (GMT)

Happened to me too, married to Lydia (who should also be on the list of people but that's a separate problem), had Rayya staying as steward, still kidnapped. I'm thinking maybe there's a bug with Lakeview Manor where the conditions for the bandits laying siege instead aren't set up correctly. I'm a PC player. Lavacano201014 (talk) 00:44, 20 March 2015 (GMT)

I've had them kidnap Aela. All that ought to do should be cut the (imaginary) groceries bill a bit until she's finished digesting. 31.185.62.240 21:32, 16 March 2021 (UTC)

Housecarl and fifty thousand hours

Housecarl doesn't seem to help the situation. My husband has been kidnapped today and when I played yesterday. Both times Rayya was patrolling the manor. Also, where did the fifty-thousand figure come from? 82.193.139.231 09:51, 8 May 2016 (UTC)

The 50,000 comes from the Creation Kit. If you're playing with the unofficial patch, though, this was recently updated to a much lower number. Kidnappings will now appear with about the same frequency as the other random encounters. I'm not sure why Rayya being there didn't prevent the kidnapping, but now that USLEEP has made the kidnappings more frequent, it'll be easier to document this quest based on in-game experience rather than just what's in the CK. – Robin Hood  ^(talk) 18:08, 8 May 2016 (UTC)

Spawning inside house

I'm having an odd problem. Not sure if it would consider to fall under triggers, but I was directed to post under here. When the Bandits have attacked today, instead of spawning near/around my house[Lakeview Manor], they spawn through my house. In my opinion, it's as if the game doesn't register my house being there, and spawns the Bandits inside-ish my house. The two people at my house just stare at the house, sometimes doing laps around it. However, the Bandits aren't acutally INSIDE the house, for, when I go inside, they aren't there. When I go back outside, they respawn properly, but none of them have notes, and my wife and kids are gone. I tried walking far enough away and waiting a couple in-game hours with the same results. Going to a previous save didn't help, either. 162.196.27.111 19:03, 25 June 2016 (UTC)

This has happened twice now on my current game, after never occurring in any previous game. Once at Windstad, once at Lakeview. Windstad was empty save for my housecarl who was outside, and nothing happened when I checked the interior. However, at Lakeview, where my family resides, the bandits spawned indoors and made a huge mess as they attacked Rayya and Jordis the Sword-Maiden (my wife), and died quickly, because they attacked Rayya and Jordis and myself. One thing I wasn't able to check was the possibility they spawned on the roof of a tower. Echo (talk) 19:16, 25 June 2016 (UTC)

The bandits that attacked me were different. They didn't actually spawn what the game definied as the inside of the house. They LITERALLY spawned in it. As in, I was outside, and I could sometimes hear them yelling and see an arm poke out of the wall. Still haven't found a fix for it.162.196.27.111 21:58, 25 June 2016 (UTC)

It's not unheard of for bandits to randomly spawn in inappropriate places. In fact, sometimes other creatures will do that too. I recently had a skeleton that was sitting outside the walls of a dungeon for no apparent reason. These things happen randomly, often with no explanation. Sometimes, they can be triggered by objects sitting near/against the house, causing odd clipping, but more often than not, there's no obvious source of problems. Sometimes fast travelling away and back will fix it, or saving and reloading may as well, but often it won't. If you're playing on a PC, you can use the Console and move the bandits to a more appropriate location. Typically, you would use TCL to allow yourself to clip through the walls, then click on the bandits one at a time, move back outside your house, then type moveto player. Alternatively, you can just toggle clipping so you're inside the house, turn it back on so you can kill and loot them, then toggle clipping to get back out.

As for entering your house and wreaking havoc there, the only thing I can think of is if somehow, they got into conversation with one of your family, then the family member went inside during the convo. When it's the player, this will often cause NPCs to follow you to places they won't normally go. I don't know if that can actually happen with NPCs talking to each other, but it's the only thing I can think of. – Robin Hood  ^(talk) 22:35, 25 June 2016 (UTC)

Alternate peaceful solution?

On the quest page it says that the only ways to complete the quest are either to pay the ransom fee or kill the bandits, but after Rochelle talked to me and I chose the "Money's not going to do you much good after I've killed you" option, instead of turning hostile she said "Hold on. We didn't know it was you we were messing with. Look, we'll let him go and call it even, all right? No need to cause any more trouble" and let my husband go. The line was fully voiced so I'm fairly certain it wasn't added by any mods. Should this be added to the article? --213.141.107.32 09:24, 19 June 2017 (UTC)

There does appear to be an intimidation option, which when successful ends with the lines you heard. The bugs section acknowledges the option noting that it is not marked as such. I don't see anything to suggest it is broken, so the page should be updated. Silence is Golden^{Break the Silence} 17:59, 19 June 2017 (UTC)