Skyrim talk:Muffle (effect)/Archive 1

This is an archive of past Skyrim talk:Muffle (effect) discussions. Do not edit the contents of this page, except for maintenance such as updating links.

Testing Needed

I've just add buggish notes here and at Nightingale Boots about the magnitude of the Muffle effect. To figure out whether the notes mean anything, though, it would be very useful to have the results of in-game testing.

Probably the easiest thing to start with would be to see whether the Muffle spell seems to be more effective than a pair of Boots of Muffling. If the magnitude matters, the spell should be 100% effective, but the boots only 50% effective. Another test (PC players only) would be to compare the lowest-level version and highest-level versions of the Nightingale Boots.

I'm not sure what a conclusive test would be though -- run past an enemy ten times and see how many times you're noticed? Any ideas are welcome, as are any results. --Nephele^Talk 22:18, 28 November 2011 (UTC)

---

Got some hard data on this. Posting now.

Test setup:

• Lvl60, Sneak 66, Stealth 1/5
• Full Daedric armor aside from boots
• Enchanting/smithing/alchemy max, crafted custom muffle item
• Followed path shown in white. NPC guard has SetUnconscious 1 for ease of testing.
• Test area = Dragonsreach Patio area

Legend:

• 5 trials each
• No boots: Blue dots
• Muffle 0.25pt (Nightingale): Yellow
• Muffle 0.5pt (Nightingale): Red
• Muffle 35pt, and 0.25pt+Muffle spell, and custom enchant: Shown as text. ND = not detected.

My conclusion is that far from the 35pt enchantment being bugged, the 0.25 and 0.5pt enchantments are in fact bugged. A pair of Glass Boots of Muffling has the same result as the 0.5 data point (not shown). I think by default the muffle enchants on armor may be too weak, esp when wearing heavy armor and considering custom enchants. The reason why this is confusing is that this is much MUCH less evident while wearing light armors (or armors with weightless perks) to the point where the 0.25 pt and 35pt enchantments are in fact (almost) the same (again confirmed by testing). Wild hypothesis, but I think the muffle magnitude somehow corresponds to "negative" weight - i.e. the weight that is subtracted or multiplied (by some factor) off the total weight of the armor when calculating sneak effectiveness. This is more confusing when considering that the weight to effectiveness ratio is in all likelihood nonlinear.

Please feel free to compile these ramblings into something cohesive for the actual page.

Jimhsu 21:14, 29 November 2011 (UTC)

My gut feel (based on being the author of most of the Sneak details in the Oblivion wiki) is that you've got the right concepts but are favoring the wrong one of your hypotheses. "Full Set" weights aren't on the wiki and I don't feel like working them out, but Daedric Torso is 50lbs, vs 10lbs for Dragonscale. That's a huge difference, so even if muffle does work the way it "should" (which is anybody's guess, given Beth's track record), you're looking at 25 vs 5 from that slot alone, and probably around double that for a full set. Whatever way it counts as a penalty to your Sneak skill, that sort of difference is certainly more than enough to "matter". Your tests show a small but clear improvement even for only 25%, and quite a significant one for 50%, with what looks an awful lot like an exponential increase, which makes sense. If muffle-the-spell is 1.0 and 100%, then the "35pt" muffle is unquestionably a bug. I think it's almost certain that not only is the value wildly wrong and should be 0.35 (and given how often TES games refer to "pts" and "%" as the same thing, it's not really surprising that someone made that mistake), but the order in the levelled list is wrong too, as it was for so many Oblivion lists.

Regardless of any of that, your testing is excellent. Nice work. :) Aliana 21:05, 5 December 2011 (UTC)

I ended up doing a small amount of testing earlier after one of the sleeping inhabitants of a shill job kept leaping out of bed when I wasn't even in the room yet, sneaking around in the DB set (ie 0.5 Muffle). Sneak-Running, he popped up every time. Sneak-Walking, he stayed asleep. Spell-Muffled and Sneak-Running, he stayed asleep. This is with a high Sneak (65ish) and 2/5 Stealth, and only in Leather, not Daedric. So even "half" noise, in very light armor and with quite a lot of investment in skill/perks, is still "enough" noise to be detected by an utterly generic sleeping NPC more than 15ft away. I don't know what the multiplier is for Sneak-Running, but it's clearly not small. I don't have the (auto)saves from there any more, but it's probably a safe bet I could easily have made it walking without the boots, which does make me wonder what benefit you really get from a muffle item: if you're sneaking in Leather, it doesn't really make any difference to what you can and can't "get away with"; and if you're trying to sneak in Daedric it's obviously never going to be enough, and you need the spell anyway. This has interesting implications for the Muffled Movement perk as well: essentially, both are useless individually; but (theoretically) awesome when combined. Obviously the "ideal" long-term plan is to burn enough perks for Silence and use Fortify Sneak boots instead, but if that's too expensive a Muffle Perk and Muffle Item char should be able to mimic it well enough in all the cases that "matter". Aliana 03:59, 29 December 2011 (UTC)

69 Sneak apparently, and since I have a bunch of spare perks I bumped it up a point and tested the theory with getav MovementNoiseMult

• DB Boots and no perks, 0.50, i.e. half noise
• No boots and Muffled Movement, also 0.50
• DB Boots and Muffled Movement, 0.00, i.e. no noise
• No boots and Silence, -0.50: i.e. Silence is "full muffle", and actually 0.5 larger than it needs to be, since it stacks with the prerequisite perk.

I think that pretty much answers everything. Aliana 04:32, 29 December 2011 (UTC)

I just tested this on a couple of characters using player.getAVinfo MovementNoiseMult

I'll put everything down here to keep it thorough.

• Sneak level had no affect on the numbers. (Tested with Sneak level 20 & Sneak level 100 + 45% Sneak boot enchant)
• 1.00 = Movement Noise Multiplier Base
• Permanent Modifiers
  • -0.50 = Muffled Movement perk
  • -11.00 = Silence perk
  • -0.50 = Cicero's Boots
  • -0.50 = Jester's Boots
  • -35.00 = Nightingale Boots
• Temporary Modifiers
  • -0.00 = Ebony Mail (while standing)
  • -1.00 = Ebony Mail (while sneaking)
  • -11.00 = Muffle spell (dual casting does not change the amount muffled, only duration of spell)

• These are all added together and then taken away from the 1.00 base to give a "Current Value" which can go into the negative. For example, I took both perks (-11.50), wore Nightingale Boots (-35.00), Ebony Mail (-1.00 while sneaking), and cast Muffle (-11.00) equaling -58.50 total. The "Current Value" displayed -57.50.

Considering that the Silence perk and the Muffle Spell are -11.00 (not to mention the Nightingale Boots), I don't think having 0.00 or below means you're 100% silent (although it may be very close).

As was pointed out above, the testing done looks like there's an exponential increase. Movement noise is probably not directly multiplied with the "Current Value" until it's 0 or less. Instead it's more likely used in an equation similar to Armor Rating.

-Patrick 123.224.242.207 14:29, 12 January 2012 (UTC)

If you're getting -11 for Silence and "Full" Muffle, either your game is glitched or you've got some mod that changes it, because the rest of us get -1, and the raw game data has the magnitude of the spell as 1. That's probably confusing things a bit for you, because empirically, having 0 or below does mean you're 100% silent, and it is a simple multiplication (I'd consider Muffle * Muffle * Weight to still count as "simple" even if it is that, but the exponential part is almost certainly in the distance falloff to the listener rather than the Muffle itself). Aliana 11:49, 18 January 2012 (UTC)

I have no mods. It's vanilla Skyrim except for the updates Steam gives it.

I was surprised to see those numbers as well. That's why I posted it. I'd like to see if more people can test it with player.getAVinfo MovementNoiseMult before and after the perk, or simply with the muffle spell. -Patrick 118.8.88.84 14:53, 1 February 2012 (UTC)

I'm seeing the same results as Aliana, on the PC, 1.3 and 1.4 -Vardis 23:28, 1 February 2012 (UTC)

I believe that the uses of perk, spell and enchant work on 3 different levels from what the testing shows us is that the perk is good for complete silence, the spell muffle seems to work completely when using light armor and probably only while walking in heavy armor, and the enchant works for walking in light armor also the sneak point has nothing to do with noise, but is purely visual. i've seen people with loads of sneak enchants being able to walk up to a person undetected in front of them, but getting detected as soon as they ran(made noise) — Unsigned comment by 91.182.157.15 (talk)

---

This isn't exactly the place for balance fixes, but I propose the following:

• Change the 35pt enchantment to 1pt
  • If your hypothesis is correct, there should be NO change from decreasing this from 35pt to 1pt, but we need the editor to confirm.
• Scale down enchanting so that max enchant skill corresponds roughly to 1pt (unfortunately don't have the exact value).
• No changes needed to the muffle skill
• Possibly bump up the 0.25 and 0.5pt enchants a bit

Jimhsu 20:42, 10 December 2011 (UTC)

More Testing Needed

Does silence obsolete muffle? i.e. Does muffle no longer have an effect when you have the silence perk?

Also, does silence negate heavy armor vs light armor vs no armor?

Level 35 Sneak 51 (Stealth 1/5) Muffled Movement 1 Full Iron Armor Set: It seems Muffle spell improves my sneaking further. I always find it hard to sneak upon Falmer, with Muffle spell on I can get them close enough to execute a Backstab, however without spell they seem to spot just before I can attack. --Heartseeker 22:16, 11 December 2011 (UTC)

Silence says nothing about armor at all. Silence allows you to run instead of just walking. My gut feeling is that they intended the player to wear muffle boots plus the muffle perk, or regularly cast the muffle spell, to get 100% muffling. My thief character is lvl 53, and he's yet to see any disenchantable boots with muffle on them even though there are supposed to be low level muffle boots in the game. NFR 16:01, 21 December 2011 (UTC)

From my experience (my experience being wearing full nightingale armor (I assume the boots were the 0.5 muffle version [they came with the 30 stamina, 30% frost resist body])and having 100 sneak with all perks in that tree(which includes silence), with the exception of only having the 1/5 for the first perk (20% enhanced sneak), and being able to sneak up to falmers, analog stick all the way forward, and not being detected. Noise made while sneaking ties directly to armor weight, which leads me to a required test, does having the perks "unhindered" or "conditioning" for the light and heavy armor respectively, which reduce armor weight to 0 when worn, does having either of those perks while wearing full light or heavy armor stop all noise? Also for future reference: if testing for armor noise use falmers as they are blind but apparently have an increased hearing ability. -mattrimkevx

Boot Value

The value of the Nightingale boots suggests the 32+ boots are glitched.

For all the Nightingale gear, each level is valued a few hundred septims higher than the previous, with the exception of the boots; The value of the level 32+ boots is several thousand septims higher than the level 19-31 boots. Furthermore, everything else relating to "Muffle" in Skyrim seems to be on a 0.00 - 1.00 scale. So a value of 35 compared to everything else being no greater than 1.00 is grossly out of balance.

The Muffle spell = -11.00

The Silence perk in the sneak tree = -11.00

-Patrick 123.224.242.207 14:28, 12 January 2012 (UTC)

Custom Enchantments

hmm... re http://www.uesp.net/w/index.php?title=Skyrim:Muffle_%28effect%29&curid=113036&diff=835726&oldid=835686, I gave myself a pair of disenchantable Muffle boots and made some new ones with a Petty gem and 93 Enchanting, and was more than a bit surprised to discover that they have *100%* Muffle. So I think you're probably both right: there's no question that the magnitude on the item does matter, and it's not shown, but it may well be constant, and it's certainly at least capped. I've got a bunch of Enchanting perks as well though, so you'd need to test it with a low-skill perk-free char to see if e.g. 20 skill gets you 0.10 Muffle. Either way, it doesn't really change things much - as long as you can actually get a Muffle item to appear in a shop/loot in the first place: I haven't seen one yet in hundreds of levels, to the point where I was wondering if they were actually in any lists. Aliana 04:59, 29 December 2011 (UTC)

Custom Enchantment, Enchant level 67, Enchanter perk 4/5, petty soul: 100% muffle effect

Custom Enchantment, Enchant level 0, no perks, petty soul: 100% muffle effect

So this seems to be constant. Everey custom enchantment seems to give you 100% muffle. --Killfetzer 19:14, 4 January 2012 (UTC)

I'm sorry to go against you're testing but i enchanted some boots with muffle using a petty soul gem, around level 50 enchanting, 2/5 enchanter perk, and I wasn't getting 100% muffle, sneaking through a dwemer dungeon, found some falmer and they were still detecting me when I moved (falmer are supposedly blind so it wouldn't have been a visual detection) however when I made my optimized gear using 100 enchanting level, 5/5 enchanter and a grand soul gem (I also had the "insightful enchanter" perk which makes skill enchantments 25% better, I'm not sure if that affected it or not), even the higher ranked falmer (gloomlurker, shadowmaster, etc.) were not detecting me, (all of this was without the "silence" perk or the "muffled movement" perk and using normal, crafted glass gear). --Mattrimkevx 21:50, 3 February 2012 (UTC)

I don't think you can use the fact that they detected you with your first boots as proof that the boots didn't provide 100% muffle. It's not like they are blind in the sense that the game treats them as having no vision whatsoever, because if that were the case, you should be able to walk or run around with 100% muffle without sneaking, and they wouldn't attack because they don't hear you... So rather than assume that vision and stealth skill played no part in the difference you found, a better test would be switching between the boots in the exact same situation, with the same sneak skill, same everything except the boots. -Vardis 01:10, 4 February 2012 (UTC)

Ok, I made another muffle enchanted boots using a petty soul (although I still have 5/5 for the "enchanter" perk and level 100 enchanting) using these boots I can sneak right in front of and past falmer while moving at full sneaking speed and can shadow bandits without them ever noticing me (again without the "silence" perk or the "muffled movement" perk), therefore I concluded that using a petty soul to make muffle boots when you have 5/5 "enchanter" and level 100 enchanting makes a 100% muffle effect. However, in my original statement above when I made the first pair of muffle boots I again used a petty soul but I did not have level 100 enchanting or 5/5 for the "enchanter" perk and I was not getting the results I have been getting for these 3rd muffle boots (note my sneak skill has gone up 6 levels in this time period). I also got my brother to make a pair of muffle boots using a petty soul when he found a disenchant-able pair, his enchanting level is 17 with no perks and his sneak skill is 16 (he went warrior style) and made him go to the same falmer dungeon I went to (blackreach) and he too was being detected while wearing his muffle boots, but he was being detected much further out, I'm going to assume that was because of his heavy armour compared to my light armour. All this makes me think that if you have low level enchanting, using a petty soul gem to make muffle boots may not give you a 100% muffled effect, that is just my hypothesis, also I am testing all this on the xbox 360 version so it may in fact be different to the PC version. --Mattrimkevx 02:34, 7 February 2012 (UTC).

Well, can't really ask for better testing than that. :) My expectation (around here somewhere) was always that Enchanting skill/perks WOULD affect Muffle, going from 7.5% quieter at no skill and 0/5 to 100% quieter i.e. completely silent at 100 and 5/5: but that's provably not true on the PC, so I abandoned the theory. I still think it would make more sense that way - despite the descriptions always saying "silently" even on the built-in boots that we know AREN'T actually silent - rather than being an all or nothing effect like waterbreathing, but that's simply not how it is here, and after 25 levels sneak-running through Falmer in my Petty Soul Muffle Boots while I waited to reach 100 Enchanting and Extra Effect, my ingame experience unequivocally supports the console data. Regardless of how subjective your experiments have to be though since you don't have access to the console, they're certainly thorough enough and consistent enough to not argue with, so I think they have to be given consideration. One thing that's worth pointing out though is that there are several NON-Falmer monsters in Blackreach, and it's technically an outdoor area, so if your brother's running around in there (literally) with no sneak ranks at all, there's a really good chance he IS actually being seen by something. It would be very odd for it to be different on different platforms: but it certainly wouldn't be the first time, so probably the best plan right now is to VN it for consoles and wait for more data to come in. Aliana 05:41, 7 February 2012 (UTC)

I have the Australian version of the game (eg "armor" is spelled armour, it also means I get the Australian version updates, yes they exist as do the French, German, etc. updates) I don't think that would change anything major but it meant a lot in Left 4 Dead 2. Something I forgot to mention earlier: the testing performed in blackreach was at a very small falmer camp at the base of a spire which has a frostbite spider nest (somewhere off to the right of where you first enter blackreach) this camp has only 2 falmer in it and on all tests I made sure all the frostbite spiders and the unactivated dwemer centurion that are near the camp were killed. It is also nearly pitch black at the camp, the only light source is a soul gem ore vein nearby. It may just be my copy of the game being "glitched" if you would call it that, but I prefer it this way, makes the game a little bit more challenging during the earlier stages. While I'm on the topic of glitches, sometimes my muffle boots make noise when I walk and run normally (un-sneaked) it doesn't have any effect on the AI, un-equipping and then re-equipping the boots fixes the problem. --Mattrimkevx 04:00, 8 February 2012 (UTC)

NPCs

Are NPCs affected by Muffle? It would be very useful to have a note a note on the article either way, as people may enchant their followers' equipment with muffle in an attempt to prevent them hindering stealth characters if their sneak skill is very low. --87.115.178.208 18:44, 4 January 2012 (UTC)

Does Muffle muffle spellcasting?

Does anyone know if the Muffle spell makes spellcasting quieter? If I have a Muffle spell up if seems like I can cast Runes without being detected as much by nearby hostiles, but maybe it is my imagination. Has anyone tested this?

i think this would be your imagination, since muffle is all about noise u make while moving. it has no effect on casting/swinging/shooting to silence casting u have a specific perk for that so i doubt they would let muffle apply to this.

Confirmation

Alright so i read all the muffle disscusion page. There is so much information that i got a little confused.

SO.

Does muffle on boots that i enchant have just as good of an efect as a... standard pair i have found. Should i stick with predaters grace, the nighting gale boots, one of the DB pairs or will one i make do the job.

I want to know which is better.

Thanks bearhiderug 02:03, 18 January 2012 (UTC)

A pair you make won't just "do the job", they'll do it better than any of the "standard" boots except Predator's Grace (or the max-level Nightingale boots) and as good as job as those (i.e. perfectly). The relevant note in the article is: All custom-enchanted Muffle effects have a magnitude of 1.0, regardless of skill level or soul gem used, making them greatly superior to most pre-enchanted Muffle items. Aliana 11:59, 18 January 2012 (UTC)

working on a vampiric dark elfand I wantedto verify since there are so many conflicting opinions. If I muffle my own boots, it makes nooooo difference what other armor I have on I still will be silent? So if I have invisibility) , quiet casting, and custom muffle boots I am literally undetectable until I touch or become offensive?

Clarification on Muffle

This article and the internets are very confusing, so i had to make some testing and this is what i found:

• The "100% Muffle is also available via the Silence perk" is WRONG. What silence perk does is it removes the additional sound you radiate when running (moving at normal speed, w/o sneak) (dont know if it also makes your sprint silent). You can easilly test it by wearing heavy armor, high sneak skill, sience perk taken, and enemies would hear you moving behind their backs. Then cast Muffle spell and they wont hear you anymore.
• Muffle is indeed a multiplication coefficient to the armor weight. Built in boots give 0.5, muffled movement perk gives 0.5, spell or custom enchant gives 1.0. If you have a sum of 1.0 or greater your armor doesnt cause any noise (so you are completely 100% silent, make no noise, when in sneaking mode, and even in running mode if Silence perk is taken, dunno about sprint).
• In other words, casting a spell or having custom-made muffle enchant on boots solves your noise problems while sneaking once an for all, making you completely silent (enemies will never detect you if they dont look in your direction) (well unless you make some other noise like cast as spell w/o silent casting or fire a bow etc). Otherwise, built-in enchanted boots + muffled movement perk does the same. If you have custom made enchanted boots or use a spell, however, both muffled movement perk or built-in enchanted boots would be of no use to you (1.5 muffe you get from custom-boots + perk or spell + built-in boots is just the same as 1.0 muffle).
• Readying or shealthing weapons does NOT make any audible noise, enemies wont hear you doing it. Neither does throwing crap around (like touching an item laying on the ground), (however this should be extensively tested to confirm, but from my experience while at least 1.0 muffed i never had items give out my location, even though i often had stepped on swords and crap laying around in dungeons)
• Attacking with daggers, wether you hit anything or not, doesnt make ANY noise ever. Other weapons do make noise when attacking or hitting a surface
• I didnt extensively test this, but it seems that muffle effect also makes other weapons make no noise when attacking.
• Killed enemies dropping down do not make any noise! This means that if you instakil an enemy with a dagger behind another enemy, he wont hear a thing!
• However, anything touching an enemy will alert him, so if a falling enemy touches a live enemy, he will turn around, or if an item hits him, he will turn around (often happens when you step on some skeleton and its parts start flying and ricochet off the cave walls and eventually hit an enemy).

— Unsigned comment by 194.190.40.89 (talk) at 10:55 on 18 January 2012

Another item with Muffle.

Seems like the Ebony Mail, from Boethiah's daedric quest, may have a muffle effect. Tests made with Sneak lvl 50+, Stealth 1/5, sneak running:

• Naked: MovementNoiseMult = 1.00, easily detected.
• Full set of unenchanted heavy armor: MovementNoiseMult = 1.00, easily detected.
• Only custom muffled ebony boots: MovementNoiseMult = 0.00, can get behind a guard at pickpocket range in broad daylight.
• Only Ebony Mail: MovementNoiseMult = 0.00, can get behind a guard at pickpocket range in broad daylight.
• Full set of heavy armor, with Ebony Mail + custom muffled ebony boots: MovementNoiseMult = -1.00, can get behind a guard at pickpocket range in broad daylight.

I think I'm going to give Lydia the muffled boots and keep the Ebony Mail.

--84.90.27.57 03:01, 21 January 2012 (UTC)Kam0laZ

Silence perk giving 100% muffle is FALSE

Is the purpose of this wiki to provide information or dis-information? The "100% muffle can be gained from Silence perk" is a false statement, however, when i tried to delete that string, someone put it back! How was this information obtained? Who tested it? I cannot say i am 100% sure and would bet my life on it, but it didnt feel like so, and i tested it for about 10 times, and from what i saw, having no muffle effects on you apart from muffled movement and having silent perk, when i cast muffle on me, i am harder to detect than when i dont have muffle on me. With muffle, i can sneak right behind them, without, they sometimes turn around. With muffle, i can stay undetected closer when up front (enemy looking right at me), without muffle they notice me in the same situation in the same position (tested by re-loading in a cave with a set patrol path for a guard, so "already seen you" bonus to detection doesnt count).

The information was obtained through the console. You may not be 100% sure of your interpretation of it, but I am 100% sure of mine, because the information is coming directly from the game itself. (If you're on the PC, you can see it with "getav movementnoisemult" with and without the perk). That's not to say there isn't the possibility of there being some weird bug that explains your experience, but if so you're the only person to have run into it so far, and it conflicts with every other test and report on both this page and the Sneak discussion page. Even if that is the case, the correct way to handle it is to add it as a bug note (which belongs on the Sneak page, not here) rather than deleting the information. The note on this page, which simply says "100% Muffle is also available via the Silence perk", is provably correct through the console command I mentioned, and that's where this page's "interaction" with Silence ends. I'm going to remove your note from the article, but don't take it personally: this simply isn't where it would belong even if it was happening to everyone else too. Since you seem to feel strongly that Silence is broken (no pun intended) I would encourage you to use Sneak's discussion page (NOT the article page) to see if you can get some other players to test it out more and try to reach a consensus on what might be happening. One last thing: although it's not in any way required, you might want to consider creating an account since your IP address keeps changing: aside from the benefits to you personally (like being able to find any old edits easily) it would save confusing other editors, since right now it makes it look like your changes are coming from multiple different people. Aliana 23:19, 25 January 2012 (UTC)

But how can you be sure that movementnoisemult applies to walking noise? If it was used as a multiplier for people running or sprinting, then the silence perk wouldn't help at all to muffle the noise from someone walking. The only testing I've seen is the picture at the top of this page. The statement "it conflicts with every other test and report on both this page and the Sneak discussion" is clearly wrong as other people on this page have said that silence isn't equivalent to 100% muffle. It's wonderful that you've posted how this variable changes for different spells and perks, but no one has posted an in-game test, or even proposed a formula explaining how it is used. NFR 17:03, 26 January 2012 (UTC)

Well, it is called movementnoisemult, not walkingmovementnoisemult or sprintingmovementnoisemult... The only info I've seen from people saying it isn't equiv to 100% muffle is when they are just reading silence's perk description and deciding it must work the way it reads. The actual tests mentioned on this talk page all support the conclusion that at zero or lower for this value, you won't be detected while sneaking because of the noise you make. It's possible that it can help prevent detection when walking/running/sprinting when not sneaking, and maybe silence changes another variable for that, but that doesn't change the fact that the muffle spell changes movementnoisemult, the "muffled movement" perk reduces it by .5, and the silence perk reduces it by another point. So the variable appears to be what the game uses to track muffle values. -Vardis 17:26, 26 January 2012 (UTC)

(←) NFR: I don't think I quite understand exactly what specific case you want tested. If you could spell it out for me, I'd be happy to look into it. There's no formula here because it seems silly to guess at numbers when the CK will probably provide the exact ones, but if you want one with variables it's as simple as this at heart: Noise = (BaseFootstepVolume + ArmorWeight) * SpeedPenalty * (1 - MovementNoiseMult) and that fits with all of the testing on this page, which from top to bottom is: Jimshu, me, HeartSeeker, mattrimkevx, 84.90.27.57, so I'm not sure why you think things haven't been tested enough. Note that this page is about Muffle, and *only* Muffle. Sneak has its own page, but there's a comment there (in reply to you, no less) by 62.30.162.142 about the Silence perk along with his testing details on that.

("BaseFootstepVolume" is just an arbitrary term to make it clear that being naked doesn't magically make you silent. Pick whatever number you like for it, say, 10; and the same for SpeedPenalty, say, 4). In practice, Bethesda tend to overcomplicate their formulae, so there'll probably be all sorts of "extra" numbers in that equation: there's almost certainly an "ArmorWeightMult", because otherwise even the DB gear would actually be worse than just going naked; and there'll be a bunch of "odd" things, and there MIGHT be a SneakSkill term (though if so it'll have a very small effect, since the general sentiment seems to be that Sneak ranks don't do anything for noise), but that simplified version should get the point across. Try a couple of sample cases for it in your head:

• Full Ebony (no shield), no perks, trying to sneak "properly" (ie slowly) = (10+96) * 1 * 1 = 106: you wake the dead from 20 yards away.
• DB gear, no perks, sneaking properly = (10+13) * 1 * 0.5 = 11.5: you have no problems sneaking through houses at night while everyone's asleep, and can easily go right up to them and backstab them, but often get detected right before your SA when trying to pick off Bandits etc like this.
• DB gear, no perks, being sloppy = (10+13) * 4 * 0.5 = 46: this is the case I posted on 29 December 2011, and it's pretty clear that it's noisy enough to wake people up.
• Dragonscale, no perks, being sloppy, custom Muffle Boots = (10+20) * 4 * 0 = 0: this is what I went with on for my last char at endgame. Despite a "base" noise level of *120* (using our imaginary numbers), i.e. worse than sneaking "properly" in a full set of Ebony, I could move (relatively) quickly through Falmer camps at will, backstabbing everything in sight without ever being detected.
• Glass, Muffled Movement, no Muffle Boots = (10+13) * 0.5 = 11.5 sneaking properly, 46 being sloppy: the same overall results as the DB cases above, as you'd expect. This is what my first char was for about 20 levels: I never saw a single pair of Muffle boots in the entire game (though I also believed the blatantly false "moves silently" description on the DB boots back then). This char eventually got Silence: not because I understood what it really meant, but because the description made it sound like it was the same as Oblivion's Expert perk, and that was desirable enough for me, after literally dozens of hours of having to move at a crawl to avoid detection. Once I finally had that, I never touched the "Walk" button again: but again, not because I understood the TRUE impact, which was that running now made LESS noise than WALKING had last level, but simply because my time in TES4 made me think running now made the SAME noise that walking had last level. But even with that misapprehension, the end result was the same: after all, you still have to move, so whether it was better or just the same was irrelevant: I "ran" absolutely everywhere when sneaking, since there was no reason not to, and 15x'd my way through everything without breaking a sweat.

These days, my approach to Skyrim is to not use perks for things I can get with equipment, so once someone showed that custom muffle enchantments were wonderfully OP I was more than happy to not waste FOUR perks just to get Silence, and just use one of my 12 enchantment slots for it instead. The only real reason to ever bother with it is if you don't do your own enchanting, or you want Shadow Warrior - which, while it certainly has its admirers, seems a bit pointless to me since almost nothing survives my first SA anyway. But that's a discussion for a different page. Aliana 01:15, 27 January 2012 (UTC)

Theory and praxis

Well, while the theory says that noise = 0 with 100% muffle ( Noise = (BaseFootstepVolume + ArmorWeight) * SpeedPenalty * (1 - MovementNoiseMult) , see above), praxis shows otherwise. Even with 100% muffle, enemies sometimes can hear something when approached (no perks). Seldomly (especially npc with a much higher level and/or bosses) they even hear something with 100% muffle and all related stealth perks. I tested this in literally hundreds of hours, hundreds of savegames, and uncountable variations of npc-types/levels. So, all in all, my experience is somewhat like the following:Noise = (BaseFootstepVolume + ArmorWeight) * SpeedPenalty * (1 - MovementNoiseMult) + (EnemyLevel - PlayerLevel + EnemyIsBoss)/100. This formula is raw, based on approximations and therefore not correct (Noise could become negative, for example). If this formula isn't possible (based on extracted formulas from the game) there definitly has to be another mechanism (perception?) that involves EnemyLevel, PlayerLevel and EnemyIsBoss. Another possibility could be (We are still talking about a Bethesda game): It's bugged and just a surprisingly coincidence that happens over and over again. But anyway, the suggested formula in the paragraph above mine simply can't be right in praxis, because then the bigger part of the enemies would behave in a other way. But they don't. [I'm not a native speaker, and some if not all parts may not be in proper english, I apologize] --84.151.147.62 14:59, 24 February 2012 (UTC)

Did you mean "practice"?205.133.160.79 16:13, 24 February 2012 (UTC)

Effect of Muffle

I don't know where people have gotten the information that Muffle reduces the noise made by armor, but I don't think this is true. Certainly, the Muffle Movement perk which claims to do exactly this simply uses a Muffle effect, but from my actual testing I don't think this is what it does, and it's very simple to test; Muffle seems to reduce noise made from movement even while -naked-. Silence uses exactly the same effect with a completely different description as to it's effect, and I actually don't think that perk's description is totally accurate either because the 100% Muffle it gives seems to -negate all- sound made, not just remove the extra penalty from moving quickly. 68.84.190.48 22:51, 25 February 2012 (UTC)

disenchantable locations ??

ive got all the gear that cant be broken ....anyone know anyplace thats good for muffle boots that can be ???

--170.40.250.14 10:57, 2 March 2012 (UTC):According to Generic Magic Apparel , the muffle effect on boots should appear in random .
My suggestions are...
— Do "Fast travel shopping loop" between Riften and Markarth, The items in the shop will get refresh every time you travel
——You will get even more chance If you completed the Thief guild's Special Job Quests to the point that add 1-4 more shops to the guild ,see Thieves Guild
——The lowest level muffle item seem to be 11 , make sure to get proper level and golds before the shopping
— Or clear the dungeons (not recommended because the chance may be slim)
— Or get the item from the console directly if you don't mind using the console .

Prev: None

Up: Skyrim talk:Muffle (effect)

Next: None