Skyrim talk:Miscellaneous Quests

Archives
Dragonborn Archive: August 2013
Archive 1: Nov 2011 - Oct 2015

Miscellaneous Quests disappearing

I have a game-breaking bug in which Miscellaneous Quests start disappearing from the bottom of the list. This is in Skyrim SE on PS4, no Mods. Ever. I turned off the console, left it off long enough for the capacitors to discharge, and the bug still manifests. I am playing from a disc, so I doubt this bug is caused by faulty download. I also find it difficult to believe that corrupted patch downloads would result in such specific, repeatable, and limited problems. I have had this problem with three different characters now, and the three different characters were on different accounts on the console. In all three cases, it began with dropping the Miscellaneous Quest, Join the Imperial Legion, but that is most likely because that's nearly always the first Miscellaneous Quest added to the list for any of my characters, so it's nearly always the quest at the bottom of the list. The problem doesn't end there; once the bug manifests, further play results in more quests disappearing from the bottom of the Miscellaneous Quests list, which is why I believe it's a problem with the Miscellaeous Quest list itself, rather than a specific Miscellaneous Quest. At first, I thought the bug was triggered either by the Blindsighted quest or by Special Jobs quests. With this third character, the bug appeared without a single Special Job being assigned let alone completed and after Scoundrel's Folly was assigned but not started, so well before Blindsighted. I now suspect that the bug is unrelated to any specific quests, but I have been unable to identify anything specific that causes the bug to manifest other than to note that Miscellaneous Quests tend to disappear after fast-travel, but I have also verified that once the bug manifests, fast-travel is not necessary to cause Miscellaneous Quests to disappear. It will happen even if I don't do any fast-travel.

The worst things about this bug are that it doesn't have an immediately obvious effect unless you obsessively monitor your Miscellaneous Quests list, so it can go unnoticed for a long time, and the bug has no cause identified, making it difficult to predict or reproduce reliably and virtually impossible to avoid, circumvent, or fix.

At present, my best guess is that this bug is somehow related to having a Dead Thrall. Dead Thralls are supposed to be permanent conjurations, so I don't know why it should cause problems for one to be kept around long-term, but this is a Bethesda game. In any event, that's about the only thing I have been doing with my characters lately that is uncommon enough in gameplay that any problems it caused could go undetected by others for this long. Unfortunately, removing the Dead Thrall by conjuring a short-term creature does not fix whatever has been broken behind the scenes. Once the bug has made its way into a save, I have not found any way to prevent the loss of Miscellaneous Quests, even if that save has not yet lost any Miscellaneous Quests, and I do not know how to identify which saves have the bug other than to load the save, play, and see if I start losing quests. This is a time-consuming process, and because there appears to be a period of time between when the bug manifests in save files and quests actually start disappearing, I could play for a considerable time, believe that the save was good, and have the bug show up again later - all without knowing whether the bug was triggered later or just took that long for its results to show up in the quest list.

I would like to add this as a bug to the Miscellaneous Quests page, but I don't know whether the proper procedure is simply to add a new section to the relevant page or whether it's something more complicated. I spent a few minutes poking around in Help and other pages but I didn't find any guidance on how it should be done. Valeria (talk) 18:38, 17 June 2020 (UTC)

Update. On all three characters that had the bug appear, the problem began during either Hearthfire or Last Seed of 4E 203. All three characters had done at least some of the Thieves Guild questline, and all three characters had made use of Dead Thralls. A character named Brienne on yet another account has reached 4E 206 without having this bug manifest. Brienne is the goody-two-shoes character who has never done any of the Thieves Guild questline and doesn't practice necromancy, so therefore has never used Dead Thrall. I didn't even have her learn any of the necromancy spells. Valeria (talk) 18:56, 18 June 2020 (UTC)

Adding a bugs section is as simple as adding text at the appropriate place on the page. Normally, that's after any Notes section and before any trailing categories or navigation templates. In this case, there's none of that, so it goes at the very end of the page.

I've added a very primitive outline of the bug, but feel free to edit it however you feel necessary. Keep speculation for here on the talk page, though—the bug report itself should contain only what we know or at least what's most likely to be the problem. We don't normally tag bugs with a platform specifier unless we're sure fairly sure it's local to that platform (PS4 in your case), but it seems almost certain that this is an engine-level bug, and those tend to be platform-specific, so I went ahead and added the PS tag. Besides that, something this bizarre would almost certainly have been noticed by someone in the last 8.5 years if it affected all platforms and/or Oldrim. – Robin Hood  ^(talk) 20:07, 18 June 2020 (UTC)

Thank you for the help. If I figure out anything more about what does and doesn't cause the bug, I'll post it here. It will be interesting to see if anyone else reports having seen anything similar. Valeria (talk) 21:48, 18 June 2020 (UTC)

Hello, I'm sorry if I'm not doing this right. I've never used UESP for anything other than information. I wasn't sure how to reply to the discussion here. If this isn't the right place I'll delete this and move it to wherever it needs to go. But I'm having this same issue where the miscellaneous quests have started disappearing. I didn't even notice it until it was too late. I'm on PC, I have a ton of mods, but given that Robin Hood doesn't I don't think that's the issue? I've finished the Thieves Guild questline. I may have cast dead thrall on a dragon skeleton, but I'm not certain if that was the spell I tried to use. I save fairly often, usually with the quicksave but I also use the new save a lot just in case things like this happen. So I went back through my saves to find when it first started. I took a bunch of screenshots. The oldest save I have where "Join the Imperial Legion" is still on the list is on the 2nd of Hearthfire, 4E 202 on December 17 of 2020. And then at some point between then and the 17th of Hearthfire, 4E 202 on December 22 of 2020 that quest disappeared. I didn't notice something was wrong until like an hour ago? I saw that a bunch of quests were missing and thought maybe it was a graphical glitch or a temporary glitch (like when the map screen gets all buggy with the weird rainbow lines, or the tcl command not working, both usually go away when I exit to desktop and reload the game), but closing the game didn't fix it. I tried going back to older saves and saw that it was something that happened over time. So I tried a google search and found this. I don't want to have to start my save over again, but unless someone knows how to fix this I guess I'll have to. 24.21.76.246 08:47, 11 January 2021 (UTC)IosefKoranison

I just did some google searching and found a few different places with people reporting this issue. Here's a link to one of them: https://forums.nexusmods.com/index.php?/topic/1884390-quests-disappearing-from-journal/ Also I have a couple of misc. quests that are only for putting a quest marker on a mod follower (In this case it's Lucien Flavius) so you can keep track of them. And one of those has disappeared, along with the quest marker. Lucien is still there, but the marker is gone.24.21.76.246 09:16, 11 January 2021 (UTC)IosefKoranison

(←) I've updated the bug report on the page to reflect the new information. In the absence of any other explanation, my only guess would be that maybe there's a limit to how many quests the game can handle, but I've always been one to have a ton of incomplete quests in my log, so that seems unlikely unless everyone reporting the issue is worse for that than I am. :) – Robin Hood ^(talk) 09:52, 11 January 2021 (UTC)

Don't know how to edit tables, need help or for someone to do it for me.

I am trying to change the requirement for Whiterun Hold -> Outside Towns -> The Words of Power from "The Way of the Voice" to "The Horn of Jurgen Windcaller" as it were properly indicated in it's page, but the way the wiki is formatted, I do not know how to make this edit without recreating the chart from scratch. I do not know what I have to type to access "{{/Whiterun Hold}}." I have checked the help articles and either none of them will properly explain it to me, or they are, and my autism is preventing me from being able to parse the information.

I would like it explained to me as if I were five for future reference, or just done for me.

--Hyperhippy92 (talk) 21:04, 2 June 2024 (UTC)

Hey there! The curly brackets indicate a transclusion (content pulled from another page) and the forward slash indicates a subpage, so in this instance, {{/Whiterun Hold}} indicates the content is being transcluded from Skyrim:Miscellaneous Quests/Whiterun Hold. --Enodoc (talk) 21:42, 2 June 2024 (UTC)