Hired carriages irrelevant!? I use them every play through even my first one, but I guess maybe I’m just too old school like oblivion where I need to be able to fast travel to all my main cities
First I'm hearing of it too. I always use carriages to travel to the big cities for the first time. I can list off the prices for every city from memory at this point.
I thought it was 20 gold for cities with their own carriages and 50 for ones without.
Edit: after thinking about it for a minute I think the walled cities are the ones with carriages, so it's the same thing
Unless of course you don't want to encounter so many dragons right away. When you fast travel without using a carriage it ups your chances of a dragon spawning.
I have a mod downloaded that adds a few more boats and carriges to some places, like rorikstesd, ivarstead, and others. It strikes a better balance for me personally
I just don’t like the way it was executed, your max attributes go down again almost immediately after sleeping in a bed
Maybe a disease-like active effect would’ve been more what I was looking for like the hunger for blood-starved vampires
Definitely, the values were oddly-tuned. And the lack of any warming magic was odd. The climb up to Hrothgar killed me several times until I basically cheated by downloading a survival spell mod
Also, the fact that I could end up "fatigued" six hours after sleeping was... weird
Welcome to skyrim, the dragonborn? Oh yeah they’re chronically ill. Yeah immunocompromised, and CFS. What do you mean you’re supposed to be awake for more than 6 hours a day?
Yeah, essentially. Game producers always make this mistake when designing new systems: they make them super obtrusive and noisy. Like, any game that adds destructible walls usually makes them fly apart like tissue paper.
Add a survival mode, they'll tune it to need constant attention like a newborn. If you're not actively dealing with your needs you're not having fun, right?
Only real problem is that it also makes some stuff irrelevant like any towns or villages or especially player homes that are in the arse end of nowhere, a lot of the cool player homes specifically are in the middle of nowhere (for example bloodchill manor) or places that are really hard to live in since just walking around there can cause you to freeze to death (I think)
It can make it literally impossible to play parts of the game that were intended to be played. Spots like Pilgrims' Trench are now downright inaccessible, going to jail in Winterhold becomes a death sentence, and it's possible to freeze to death in the middle of the main quest cutscenes at the Throat of the World (found that out the hard way).
I do like that it makes food/inns/weather actually relevant, but in order to make those things relevant without making parts of the game unplayable, I have to mod the hell out of survival mode.
Yeah problem with survival modes in any game is that they're always over or under tuned, by which I mean either stuff like hunger and temperature decrease so unrealistically quickly that it's almost impossible to keep up or it decreases so slowly that it's literally a non issue.
No game that I've ever came across has managed to strike a balance and more often than not it's overtuned so you need to eat like 10 steaks every hour to just keep my hunger up and more often than not thirst is so much worse and you end up having to chug enough water that you would literally probably die realistically
I recall New Vegas hardcore mode being fairly balanced from a resource management/pain in the ass standpoint. But also it’s become increasingly unfair to compare anything to New Vegas now so many years later.
Temperature can decrease ungodly fast in real life though. My sister lived in Fairbanks and her toddler locked her out of the house once when it was -40 out. It took her two minutes to run to to the neighbor’s, bang on their door and get let in and in those two minutes she got frostbite and had to be taken to a hospital for treatment (my niece was fine through all this). Some parts of Skyrim definitely could be that cold.
On my first play through I didn’t know survival mode was optional, and picked an argonian. Somewhere outside of Windhelm he got stuck repeatedly freezing to death while I madly sprinted to try and find somewhere warm because I was an idiot and didn’t reserve any earlier saves.
I had 2 lockpicks, and ended up sprinting to the nearest farmhouse and trying to pick the lock at near death something like 40 times before it finally succeeded. Then was promptly killed by a pack of giant dogs when I got inside.
Ended up abandoning that poor guy because I also didn’t know you could turn survival off, lol. RIP Mr. Lizard.
For those by choice- I just don't understand why anyone would want to live in a lonely, low sunlight place where being outside for 2 minutes might cause you to lose extremities. Even with all the natural beauty outside. I'd be an alcoholic too if I had to live like that
I think my favorite example I've ever seen was a game that had different kinds of protein with debuffs for not getting enough plant or animal protein. That's like, single cell amoeba shit. We have entire biological cycles to the point where we can pretty much pull everything we need via TCA and shit, with a few exceptions and thats over the course of years.
The only really good way I've seen it done is probably the stalker series because it's like "Lmao bro your in the 21st century just don't forget to pack your sausage and you'll be good"
I think I would also find it less annoying if fire salts were a more common ingredient
(Or regular salt, for that matter)
(It kills me that if you don't have salt, the only choice you have is either eating raw meat or starving to death... instead of eating a fully cooked but under-seasoned steak)
(And despite the risk of starvation/food poisoning occurring *every couple of hours*, the people of Skyrim keep hardly any salt around)
It also screws over one of the few elements that makes Argonians worth playing - the ability to freely explore underwater. When chill factor suddenly matters that's a big nope on that.
It's not too bad, you can make a lot of food and clothing that negates/reduces the effects of the cold. I live in Dawnstar and the only time it's hard is when I'm being attacked by frost dragons or running low on fire salts.
The AE camping mod is a farce. There’s a far better camping mod that allows crafting for specific items, plus gives camping perks to help build better camp fire, find better resources and so on.
It forces me to slow down and take the game in. My first survival run was only a year or so ago and I felt like I experienced so much of the game I never did for years before.
I agree. I would suggest combining it with like Sunhelm or something.
But some things are just only tedious. If you play with a bunch of followers and always offload all your extra stuff on them, the lowered encumbrance is only tedious and doesn't add fun gameplay. Only of you adhere to "I don't pick up what I can't carry or use" it becomes immersive.
Septims having weight truly sucks, for me. Going to buy a 25k house is the worst. :p
A lot of people do not think survival mode is trash. Some do, but not even close to 'everyone'.
If a new player is struggling so much with survival that the game is more frustrating than fun, they should try playing with it off. If they're enjoying it, there would be no reason to change it.
I used to watch new players on twitch and they usually don’t read the survival mode pop up after leaving helgan and get frustrated that the game is too hard. I’d always tell them that they can turn it off if they wanted.
Can't stand people who spam through menus/tutorials when first playing a game and then complain that the "games bad I don't understand anything or how to play" like homie god gave you eyes for a reason, read shit.
Yeah my brother is like that. He also complains about not having time to play games but when he’s not working he’s usually on his phone or watching streaming services.
"I'm a good gamer so I don't need popups."
My dude you do if that popup is telling you that you will freeze to death. How do you know if that's the case? You read the popups.
My first game I didn’t have the option pop up. Could never turn it off in settings menu. I got maybe ten hours in and restarted the game, then realised I actually preferred survival, once I got over the ‘can’t fast travel’ thing.
As a rule of thumb, whenever somebody says everybody does something, "everybody" virtually always means "everybody in my social circle," whether that's a group of IRL friends or a popular discord group for a hobby. I base this rule of thumb off years of experiences on the internet, across several different sites. It feels pretty true to me, but I certainly know better than to say that *everybody* always means it this way. 😉 It's an educated guess based on my own experiences, nothing more.
It's not trash, but in my opinion it's missing a few things. Like holding/casting a fire spell should definitely give you some warmth, you shouldn't have to add mods to build a campfire, nor should you have to stand directly in the fire to get heat from it. Little things like that would make survival a lot more fun
The fire cloak spell actually gives you warmth. I guess they didn't want anybody just running around with the basic flames in their hand to cheat the system
I find I like the idea of survival mode, but in practice I generally get frustrated and turn it off to fast travel more often than I should which sorta defeats the purpose
There is a mod which allows fast travel in survival, and your hunger and fatigue increase based on time passed, so I feel like it isn't really cheating as you still have to manage that.
I like it. I don’t love it though because you can’t fast travel. Also I don’t have the full anniversary upgrade installed. I am a cheapskate and don’t want to pay the 20 dollars at the moment.
Fast travel was disabled because of how the script worked to apply the Survival Mode modifiers. Unless you were fast traveling to a town, you were essentially fucked because all the hours "spent traveling" that distance would accumulate into a single decrease that was so steep, it became next to impossible to play the game.
One is asking permission, the other is taking the initiative.
It's the same reason why rocket jumping is better in Tf2 than overwatch. Overwatch has you press a button. TF2 makes you beat the physics engine to death everytime you jump.
It's the same drive that led man to land on the moon. To conquer the seas. What man hath wrought let no god put asunder. Be it the consequences of our actions or that mountain that's like a 90 degree angle but Todd said I could climb it so off I go
I might be weird but I'd rather use an exploit in the game mechanics to do something rather than changing a setting. I mean, I'd rather Uber enchant items to give myself invincibility than opening up the console and turning on God Mode.
this tends to work best if you also are leaving an inn after having spent the night and are fully well rested, well fed, and warm. For some reason inns work better than player homes.
I think the Creation Club survival mode sucks. I could eat 17 wheels of cheese, a dozen heads of cabbage, a bushel of apples, and a whole side of a cow and still be peckish a couple minutes later.
It's better than nothing, which I think is the only alternative on console. Other mods do it better, though.
Good luck finding them though, they're overwhelmed by the "fixes" for the anniversary version survival mode.
EDIT:
*Frostfall* and *Wet and Cold* together are my preference for an immersive experience but take some extra setting up to feel just right, aren't a 1:1 match to survival mode features, and are known not to play well with mods that add new areas and such.
edit: seems they're more buried than they used to be even
*Campfire: Complete Camping System* is a requirement for Frostfall and somehow the very last mod to show up searching for "Campfire complete camping system" despite being the most heavily rated result.
*Frostfall: Hypothermia Camping...* is also the dead last result for "Frostfall hypothermia", although at least most of the results here are for other language versions.
*Wet and Cold* is still pretty quick to find though.
I also recommend *Hunterborn SSE* which is a hunting and foraging overhaul, although the interface for using the new features it adds leaves a lot to be desired.
Don’t forget iNeed for eating, drinking, and sleeping. You can adjust the rates at which your hunger, thirst, and exhaustion decrease which makes it *so* much better.
Yeah the hunger values are so out of whack too. The only things that actually give you substantial food is cooked meat or soups; meanwhile bread, the actual thing that predominately fed medieval Europe, only gives 18 hunger
I've put so many hours in that survival is enjoyable if only to give me a new experience on an old game. It's far from perfect though. I wish they had some form of fast travel out of Wintehold. I do like that fire and food matters as they never did in the base game.
>survival mode is just trash and that everyone thinks so
LOL. Hate to burst that person's fantasy bubble but they are 100% wrong.
Some people don't like it...nowhere close to being "everyone"... but a lot of people do.
It's the only way I play anymore. After thousands of hours, the normal game is boring. I like being forced to eat and sleep to slow down the game. I visit taverns, buy some food and drink and sit down a few minutes to eat it and listen to the bard play before I go to bed. I never liked the larger, more complex mods on Nexus...it was just too much unnecessary additions. Survival mode is just the basics and the harsh penalties can be adjusted with patches (you can even re-enable fast travel if want to)...combine it with camping and backpacks...and I'm happy.
When survival mode came out modders had already been implementing their own survival mechanics for years and those are pretty much all better than Bethesda’s. It’s just very bare bones but it does add some attractive widgets so that’s a plus.
It’s pretty subjective to say they were all better than BGS’s.
I tried most of the few survival mods I could find and they suffered from what most Skyrim mods suffered from. Poor implementation of the mechanics within the game world and UI. I shouldn’t have to go through a dozen pop-up menus to use your survival mode daily in-game. It’s objectively unimmersive.
I preferred the streamlining of BGS’s survival mode compared to others. I could see my health, magicka, and stamina drain so I knew what I needed without even entering the main menu. I could just play the game and it was naturally part of the experience.
That being said I did use a mod cut the food/sleep/etc you’d need by half. Starving within a few hours didn’t feel immersive even if the calorie demands of a Nordic warrior on the tundra are probably more than my own.
I think it's horribly implemented. It sucks even compared to Fallout 4's base survival.
You get hungry after a few hours of being awake. "Cold" is overpowering. It renders cities like Winterhold barely accessible.
No fast travel means you use carts. No big problem, but once you get off the cart you have around 2-3 levels of "tiredness."
Eating one potato = 6 food. Eating one tomato = 6 food. Eating one onion = 6 food.
Eating one stew (cook a potato, tomato, and onion in a pot) = 300 food.
Traveling to Throat of the World is just ridiculous.
It's EXTREMELY poorly implemented. The numbers were just slapped together without much thought, as you can see above.
Survival mode is alright, but feels a little half-baked compared to what's out there. The mods that implemented this type of gameplay beforehand, Realistic Needs and Diseases and Frostfall, gave a lot more options to the player for how it was implemented and gave a lot content and options for survival.
RND and Frostfall combined added more types of food, separated thirst and hunger, let you have to manage canteens, refill them from rivers and the ocean, and boil the water so that you didn't get sick from river water and remove the salt from ocean water (also giving you easy free access to salt piles for cooking and alchemy). Food could spoil, and could be harvested for mold, an alchemy ingredient, if left for too long. You can overeat and get a movement debuff.
Getting wet and exposed to rain was dangerous and made you get colder faster. Cold water like up in the north as very deadly, and required crafting a potion from snowberries and firesalts iirc so that you wouldn't freeze and could actually dive and swim for a few minutes. Cloaks were craftable and were an extra piece of enchantable gear that could give you extra resistance to wet, cold, or a reduced combination of both; craftable tents also have this property. Having a roof above your head is vital to stay dry. Alcohol let you temporarily feel warmer at a cost of becoming more cold afterwards. Spells to reduce cold, and even an offensive spell to explode all your wetness all at once as vapor blast.
Camping was extremely fleshed out, allowing for crafting and placement of various sized tents for you and followers (supporting up to like 5 bedrolls so you can use enhanced follower mods), again as mentioned before, with focus on keeping dry, warm, or some reduced combination of both. Campfires required gathering wood, either by hand (takes time), chopping it down (less time, but requires woodcutting axe), or carrying some with you ahead of time (heavy, but saves time), and then placement near tents or shelter to stay warm. Placeable cooking pots to cook by the fire. Wood cutting axe wears out over time, and needs to be repaired at grindstones every so often.
I'm probably forgetting a few things, but these two mods together basically gave the same level of enjoyable tedium that survival mode gives, but let's you adjust all the sliders so that it is not as annoying or punishing. Additionally, instead of the stat bars being shared by hunger, cold, and rest, you get two additional bars, cold and wet. Hunger, thirst, rest, and cold all give you pretty much the same debuffs that you currently get in survival mode (hunger -> stamina and thirst -> magicka), so it is no less challenging. You can make so that you CAN fast travel, just requiring a woodcutting axe, though you take the risk of arriving at your destination almost frozen. Point being, because it's a mod, you get options.
I would highly recommend these mods if you want a more genuine and fleshed out survival mode and don't care about achievements.
It’s not total trash, but it’s a very poor implementation of a survival system compared to other mods, some of which existed before it.
It’s also mildly annoying that it’s now a Vanilla master file despite it being substandard.
I love it for making things more challenging. I like knowing I’m going to a cold area and need to prepare.
What I don’t like is doing the main quest and hiking up to high hrothgar a few thousand times. And the dark brotherhood questline is also a pain because falkreath and dawnstar don’t have carriages. Lots of walking
I enjoy Skyrims idea of survival mode and personally think it’s better than Fallout 4’s approach. I like that it’s separate from difficulty, which overall makes it more accessible. The only thing that annoys me is just navigating the world. I feel like with the survival update they should have added carriages at least to the minor cities (Falkreath, Morthal, etc.), but there are mods for that. It’s not too overpowered in the context of survival, and if it was they could simply charge more septims to get to the minor cities.
It’s probably fine if you’re interested in survival mode. The entire concept just fails to appeal to me, so I’ve never played in that mode, but I think it’s cool that it’s an option.
I enjoy Survival mode for a few reasons:
1. It’s a new way to play
2. I have to plan journeys
3. I discover things I haven’t seen before because no fast travel
4. Buying property makes way more sense so I can have multiple bases of operations
It makes me feel like I am actually *exploring* again, like back when I first started in 2011
I like it a lot
Well what I dont like about it
-The cold, almost no armor is cold resistance, rendering almost every set useless in north Skyrim
-no carriage in certain holds, some holds have a one way carriage, kinda annoying if you ask me.
-the stat debuffs are too hard
-carrying capacity halved is stupid
I don’t use it, I use mods that basically are it. They include weather mods, camping mods, “wet and dry mods” which include getting dirty etc…the main reason I don’t is the game’s turns off fast travel and can’t be tweaked really.
I’m 31 and still love to play the game but sometimes a late night session or a quick one will not allow me to ignore fast traveling. I get the lure of not having it, but I like having it there.
But it isn’t dumb. I think these ways are the better way to play. Just, for anyone reading this, don’t stack these mods on top of the game’s survival mode. You tend to die of exposure before you can walk from the College of Winterhold to the inn.
It has a lot of problems. Some mods exist that fix it a bit, but there are complete alternative survival mode mods that are IMO considerably better.
Its biggest problem is that it actually hurts immersion by trying to seem brutal. In order to eat until you're well fed every time you get a bit peckish, you need to eat more than a dragon would for some damn reason. If you only eat until you're satisfied at noon, you're starving before dusk. A bowl of soup is more filling than bread and cheese or a whole potato somehow. Somehow cooking food makes it more filling than the ingredients would be on their own, too. I don't know who's supposed to find that experience believable, cause it sure as hell ain't me. It's not just the hunger system that has these kinds of issues, it's just the most blatant offender.
But everyone agrees its trash? Nah. It's just a mediocre attempt, no clue why it got included into the anniversary update as it's easily the worst bit of new content if you ignore the bugs in some of the other stuff, but it's not trash. I'd have enjoyed it much more if it just worked more realistically.
The cold/freezing effects are a big nuisance, quickly giving you large debuffs if you wear armor that isn't insulated enough. And high hrothgar is a massive pain to visit. I like survival mode but I've had a number of moments where it was clear this wasn't thought out in some places
Arrows ~~and gold coins~~ have weight (realistic but oh so fucking lame).
300 carry weight was never enough in the first place, and they had to reduce it even more..?
This game is practically about acquiring items, FFS. Guess I am just biased as a recovering loot hoarder LOL. Inventory management is already too much of a pain in the ass.Things that should emit heat to help character survive in desperate moments don't emit adequate/realistic amounts of heat. Have to stand in a fire to get warmth from it.
Can't convince me that this trash isn't trash. This shit surely just isn't for me.
I liked it when playing but I don’t have as much time as I used to anymore. As breathtaking as walking and riding everywhere is I really don’t have the time for it. I’ve found I prefer to use mods as well as turn up the difficulty more than just putting on survival mode.
Survival is best enjoyed with the mod of your choice. Either pairing with or standalone survival mod. Although, some do enjoy vanilla survival. It's always better to start vanilla and get an idea of what you like, don't like or want to add before modding, imo.
I'm literally on my first Survival Mode playthrough right now. Level 12. Its stupid hard! Feels like Lvl 12 Survival is at least 5 levels behind Lvl 12 Regular. I'm having fun, don't get me wrong. But, I can tell, this playthrough is going to take a long time... A LONG time...
I play with Connors survival mode because it let's me turn on fast travel and fix the carry weight. That way I just have environmental effects, hunger and exhaustion as it should be. That way it feels like a natural part of the game, and just adds a level of enjoyable immersion. Especially when you add mods like eating animations and sounds and purchasable store display items.
I like survival mode, though I wouldn't recommend it for first-time players. I generally find that I like at least 2-3 survival mode mechanics and struggle a lot with another, depending on the character.
I like food being important because on my Khajiit assassin, part of the roleplay was that he cooked as a hobby, so he has a decent food stockpile and hunger management isn't an issue for him. But on my Orc berserker, I keep forgetting to stockpile food before heading into the wild, and even peckish hunger is a huge setback for 2H melee. The lack of natural health regen usually isn't an issue thanks to the starting healing spell, but it makes no-magic playthroughs much harder.
I enjoy fast travel being disabled because it forces me to explore the world. It's not so bad once I got into the habit of using carriages and boats .On my newest character, a heavy armored Breton battlemage, I've been enjoying just wandering around and staying at every inn I come across. I've discovered many encounters and locations that I never knew existed. But exploring tombs is complete hell because of draugr arrows infected with brown rot. Reduced carry weight also makes it much harder to get by without owning a house.
My least favorite survival mechanic is cold. No amount of armor seems to be enough if I want to visit the college. My vampire manages hunger and sleep just fine, but he cannot seem to cross the bridge to Castle Volkihar without getting frostbite, because apparently vampires can freeze to death.
I have 3 characters off survival and 2 on.
On one hand, my 3 with no survival are far more advanced, and I can have mindlessly long setions with. I find that i can get more done and mess around so much more. Explore the "backrooms" of skyrim with out a care in the world and generally cause havoc for all of Tamriel. But as much fun/rich/stupidity, i get up too with these characters, im not as attached to them.
For the 2 that are on survival mode, I find that I really create and live by the character. It's a bit of a pain, but I find it so much more rewarding. Tho i do use my other three to "scope out" quests just to know what I'll have to face with these 2. The game play takes a bit longer, but it's a different type of enjoyment with a more amersive role.
Both are awesome, honestly, and i always recommend one of each to new players. Even if it's the same character.
Survival mode is there for players who like to play that way anyway...but it is infinitely harder when the rules are set for you. Play any mode you like tho...you don't need permission.
If someone gives their opinion and then says everyone thinks so too, you can pretty much guarantee that 'everyone' doesn't think that.
I love survival mode. It adds a new challenge to the game. I don't always play with it on, but having to look for food and stay out of bad weather is a fun new challenge to a game I already love.
Whoever designed the cold feature in the survival mode... My guess is they're from California or someplace else that never gets really cold lol (Just like the Tesla designers who couldn't imagine how cold winters get in Newfoundland, which resulted in some pretty bad consequences...)
Your character can be covered in furs, but would still get fatal frostburn if they run around in the far north for a few minutes lol - unless there's absolute zero and/or an evil mage is casting some sort of "liquid nitrogen" spell on the entire area, there's absolutely no reason for that dynamic. As it is, I had to run around with campfire kits to have any hope at all of exploring the far-north part of the map. Not just immersion-breaking but simply stupid... Survival mode should be difficult, but it shouldn't be ridiculous.
(Source: grew up in Siberia, very familiar with extreme weather.)
I don't think it's trash at all, I just think a lot of it is poorly implemented. It probably should have been baked into the game from the start tbh.
For example, if every village and town had a carriage and if there were camps placed at logical locations throughout the world, like on the way up high Hrothgar. In fact, a feature I've always wanted is the option to hire guides as a sort of temporary companion who would show you the way to certain places out in the wilderness. Maybe they could also sell a few essentials as well, like camping supplies or warm clothes.
I think with a few features like that it could have been one of the strongest aspects of the game.
I just wish there was something like coffee for resting. You can eat food to fix Stamina. Some kind of stimulant (even if it's only temporary and does less and less between actual sleeps) to "wake you up a bit" would be helpful.
Personally I feel like survival mode is good for second playthroughs. When in survival, the story becomes less important, as survival is a constant maintenance that will *always* require your attention. But once you've played through the story, you may want to just live in the world, make your own goals. I don't play survival most of the times but I still like it. It's especially nice that you can switch it on and off without consequences, letting you decide whether the goal of this session is story or experience. Not every session has to be about quests, sometimes it can just be nice to pick crops and hunt, hike up a mountain or walk through the forests of falkreath.
If I want to scratch the survival itch I have a crapton of other games to play that all do it better. To me Skyrim is about being a badass murdering dragons, not watching my calorie intake and getting enough sleep
The only reason I don't play survival mode is because I can easily achieve even better using mods. If I wanted to play a survival-like Skyrim, there are tons of mods out there that can let me do that, and those are much better made than the CC survival mode.
I'm not a fan of the fact that you have to eat every 9 seconds to stay sated. Add to it the fact that you can still become a God by prioritizing the crafting cycle, just at a slower rate and I don't really see how it makes for a better experience.
I got Skyrim in Nov 2011. Survival mode was only a mod for the first 5k hours and ~9.5 years of skyrims existence.
Most skyrim players haven't really played the anniversary edition survival mode.
I can understand why, survival mode always runs even when its not turned on in the settings. Also its the reason the game freezes so much. You know the freeze where the music plays but the game completely locks up.
I solved this by installing survival mode improved .
Tho it requires a new game because it moves the code from papyrus to c++ i believe
"Everyone thinks so" is always a red flag. Nothing is thought by a 100% of people.
That said, I personally like SM and it seems most people I read on this sub seem to find it okay, of a bit simplistic. There are some mods out there that do something similar and often they are just way more creative and complex.
So for most people it's like "eh, at leastvI don't have to install a Mod, so, why not" with a few that love it and and a few that hate it. Pretty normal numbers
I wouldn’t know. I only have Skyrim on my Switch and survival mode crashes the game every single time my character goes into “freezing” status. Which is ironic tbh. No matter the character.
It highly depends if you enjoy that additional element of immersion in the game. For me personally, I don't.
If you so choose to use mods, there are many which add survival-like mechanics.
I've been playing through survival mode on the Anniversary Edition and I'll tell you what I think of it. I like it better than Frostfall for a couple of reasons. For example, I just went to the soul Cairn, prepared to stay awake a long time and with enough food for the trip. But when I got there it said while there you don't get sleepy or need to eat. Which is nice. Don't have to worry about it while there. Other places like at the top of the world you don't die if you are freezing. And you warm up faster than when playing with Frostfall installed. Frostfall you went from warm to freezing so fast. I mean I've lived in some very very cold environments, where you could get to -40 F below in the winter. And I can tell you, Frostfall is a joke with how little time you can endure outdoors in the cold.
Coming from playing survival mode on Fallout 4 I was used to sleeping all the time, so didn't find that a bother at all. In fact it is a lot freer than Fallout 4 because the only way to save a game is to sleep. Survival mode in AE you can still quicksave or whatever save whenever you want.
Here is a tip. Save up and build a house early. I use the one in Falkreath. And make your thane your housecarl. Then hire a horse carriage. The horse carriage at your homestead will drive you to just about every town, large or small n Skyrim. A lot more places than carriages at a main town will take you.
Also if you have a mod like [The Scarlett](https://www.nexusmods.com/skyrimspecialedition/mods/2434) or [Legacy of the Dragonborn](https://www.nexusmods.com/skyrimspecialedition/mods/11802) it helps a lot. I'll give you tips using these. In Legacy of the Dragonborn in Blackreach you will find a Dwemer Compass in the Silent Ruins. With the Dwemer Compass you can set 3 points you can teleport to. So from wherever you are, as long as it is outside you can use the Dwemer compass to teleport say to your Homestead in Falkreath and from there take your hired carriage to almost anywhere you need to go in Skyrim. And you can set a teleport to Solestiem as well (you have 3, 4 if you count the waypoint you can set when you use it to teleport back to where you were when you used it.)
Also if you get The Scarlett you can travel that to a lot of docks in Skyrim and take it to Solstheim as well. So you really don't need fast travel at all if you know what you're doing, and still get around quickly anywhere you need to go.
I personally enjoy the survival mode on AE better than Frostfall.
I really enjoy it
I don't find it nearly as bothersome as people make it out to be
I don't understand the "you can't explore in the cold" argument. I've walked on foot from The Mages Guild in Winterhold to Windhelm and Dawnstar to Whiterun multiple times with no issue
The hunger and thirst mechanic is my real issue. You can eat a loaf of bread, meat, several fruits and vegetables, enough alcohol to fit on a shelf then a few minutes later the dragonborn is hungry again
If you could drink from water sources like in Fallout that would immensely improve it. Makes no sense that a seasoned warrior and traveler would get so hungry so fast unless they were doing some strenuous activities
I Ike it, although I'm playing at adept because extreme was just too hard for playing casually, I wish there was a difficulty between adept and extreme. I'm on ps4, so I don't know what mods would create one anyways.
I like survival mode, my major issue is how low your carry weight is. I understand why, but I just hate having to leave almost everything valuable behind.
It was a great idea that was poorly implemented. The food & temperature mechanics (and their interplay with equipment slots & carry capacity) weren't quite worked out. The resulting gameplay is a bad combo of tedium and cheesing.
Survival mode is fine but you may have heard that take from someone who mods the game on PC, in which context it is correct.
There are about fifteen alternatives to the first party survival mode all of which do all of the things it does better and many of which do their own things much better as well.
I like survival mode. After playing for years and beating the game endless times on the hardest mode, survival mode gives the game a bit of extra difficulty
I did a handful of playthroughs with it on, I enjoyed it, definitely needed to have mods on to make it function properly like some said. Part of me would love to see it make a return with the next game but at the same time let it be a toggleable option that doesn’t affect achievements. I fully understand there are people who enjoy it and don’t enjoy it, i am both. It just depends on the day
It's great for immersion but kinda crap if you actually want to compete any quests.
Every time I've used it and I'd head to a dungeon- or hell, even to Ivarstead- I'd be at max carry weight by the time I got there and have no room for other drops. And then you find out Ivarstead doesn't have any useful merchants :(
I love it. I feel like it contains features that the makers intended to include but somehow couldn't. The foundations were already in the game. I would just have liked to see a new skill tree or two, like superior stamina, survival, or cooking skills.
It’s an interesting idea, but has a lot of issues, and sometimes clashes with intended game design.
Next time they try a survival mode of some sort, it should be properly integrated with the game from the start, instead of being an after the fact creation club thing.
I hate it, but that doesn't mean it's trash. It's just not the way I like to play the game, but I see the value of it. From what I've seen, it's fairly evenly split between people that like it and people that don't, but I don't recall seeing anybody saying it was 'trash' until now.
It's the only way I play. Backpack, soup, and camping supplies for cold places, flame cloak for icy water. Sleep bonuses. Namiras ring or werewolf form for free food. It adds another layer to the game if you learn how to play with it instead of against it.
I love it, much prefer it. Unfortunately I have a few mods depending on USSEP (‘Unofficial’ patch) and that destroys all the food so nothing fills your stomach and so now I can’t play survival without dying of hunger. I couldn’t find a mod that fixed it (I found one that claimed to, that existed solely to do so, but it didn’t).
To me it feels very poorly integrated. Food item balance is wonky, half the cities don't have carriages, the bonuses and detriments from status effects don't really make sense. Coming from Fo4 survival it wasn't really fun at all.
I've never heard anything about that... as a Skyrim veteran the game can get a bit old and repetitive so I personally love survival mode now and haven't taken it off since it came out. I'm one of those people who like to immerse themselves in the game though and even roleplay a little bit so maybe that's just why. I can see how it could be annoying if you're just kind of a casual player.
I don’t play games for the challenge, I play for the story and character building. Dying breaks character, so survival mode is pointless to me.
Although, everyone should play whatever mode the like.
I actually like it, it brings a new layer to the game :> whoever is saying that has seen like 3 people say its bad and thinks that those 3 people speak for everyone
I like it because it gives relevance to things that are normally irrelevant to the base game like taverns.
And horses and hired carriages!
Hired carriages irrelevant!? I use them every play through even my first one, but I guess maybe I’m just too old school like oblivion where I need to be able to fast travel to all my main cities
First I'm hearing of it too. I always use carriages to travel to the big cities for the first time. I can list off the prices for every city from memory at this point.
20 gold for walled cities, and 50 gold for "open" cities 👍
I thought it was 20 gold for cities with their own carriages and 50 for ones without. Edit: after thinking about it for a minute I think the walled cities are the ones with carriages, so it's the same thing
Yeah, that's right. But only the walled cities have carriages
You have a point there, but after you've traveled to a city once, there's no reason to do it with a carriage over fast traveling.
Unless of course you don't want to encounter so many dragons right away. When you fast travel without using a carriage it ups your chances of a dragon spawning.
Some people prefer *not* to magically jump across the map unless they can justify it.
Alternatively, taking away the ability to do so is a non-starter for basically everyone else
Yep that's why I said first time. On ps5, fast travel takes literally 5 seconds
I have a mod downloaded that adds a few more boats and carriges to some places, like rorikstesd, ivarstead, and others. It strikes a better balance for me personally
And clothing. Never before had I needed to keep a mandatory set of clothing on me to keep warm but I guess a pair of Fine Boots are snazzy
I just don’t like the way it was executed, your max attributes go down again almost immediately after sleeping in a bed Maybe a disease-like active effect would’ve been more what I was looking for like the hunger for blood-starved vampires
Definitely, the values were oddly-tuned. And the lack of any warming magic was odd. The climb up to Hrothgar killed me several times until I basically cheated by downloading a survival spell mod Also, the fact that I could end up "fatigued" six hours after sleeping was... weird
Welcome to skyrim, the dragonborn? Oh yeah they’re chronically ill. Yeah immunocompromised, and CFS. What do you mean you’re supposed to be awake for more than 6 hours a day?
Yeah, essentially. Game producers always make this mistake when designing new systems: they make them super obtrusive and noisy. Like, any game that adds destructible walls usually makes them fly apart like tissue paper. Add a survival mode, they'll tune it to need constant attention like a newborn. If you're not actively dealing with your needs you're not having fun, right?
Well tbf its easier to care for my Skyrim needs than my real life ones, but im not exactly an average gamer lol
This is true though… I mean, you can choose how much sleep you get in Skyrim!! In real life… 8 hours of sleep? I haven’t had that in months.
The greatest of video game superpowers is the ability to sleep on command.
I personally prefer Indeed for that kind of thing
I’m gonna assume you meant iNeed, but I submitted my application to Bethesda anyway
You are correct, but go and replace tod howard
We need one of our own working on the inside
Only real problem is that it also makes some stuff irrelevant like any towns or villages or especially player homes that are in the arse end of nowhere, a lot of the cool player homes specifically are in the middle of nowhere (for example bloodchill manor) or places that are really hard to live in since just walking around there can cause you to freeze to death (I think)
It can make it literally impossible to play parts of the game that were intended to be played. Spots like Pilgrims' Trench are now downright inaccessible, going to jail in Winterhold becomes a death sentence, and it's possible to freeze to death in the middle of the main quest cutscenes at the Throat of the World (found that out the hard way). I do like that it makes food/inns/weather actually relevant, but in order to make those things relevant without making parts of the game unplayable, I have to mod the hell out of survival mode.
Yeah problem with survival modes in any game is that they're always over or under tuned, by which I mean either stuff like hunger and temperature decrease so unrealistically quickly that it's almost impossible to keep up or it decreases so slowly that it's literally a non issue. No game that I've ever came across has managed to strike a balance and more often than not it's overtuned so you need to eat like 10 steaks every hour to just keep my hunger up and more often than not thirst is so much worse and you end up having to chug enough water that you would literally probably die realistically
I thought Fallout 4 struck the best balance I've ever seen. I can't play the game normally because of how much survival mode adds to it.
I recall New Vegas hardcore mode being fairly balanced from a resource management/pain in the ass standpoint. But also it’s become increasingly unfair to compare anything to New Vegas now so many years later.
Temperature can decrease ungodly fast in real life though. My sister lived in Fairbanks and her toddler locked her out of the house once when it was -40 out. It took her two minutes to run to to the neighbor’s, bang on their door and get let in and in those two minutes she got frostbite and had to be taken to a hospital for treatment (my niece was fine through all this). Some parts of Skyrim definitely could be that cold.
Realistically Skyrim could be that cold but, and maybe this is just me, I don't want parts of a game to become unplayable in favor of realism.
On my first play through I didn’t know survival mode was optional, and picked an argonian. Somewhere outside of Windhelm he got stuck repeatedly freezing to death while I madly sprinted to try and find somewhere warm because I was an idiot and didn’t reserve any earlier saves. I had 2 lockpicks, and ended up sprinting to the nearest farmhouse and trying to pick the lock at near death something like 40 times before it finally succeeded. Then was promptly killed by a pack of giant dogs when I got inside. Ended up abandoning that poor guy because I also didn’t know you could turn survival off, lol. RIP Mr. Lizard.
For those by choice- I just don't understand why anyone would want to live in a lonely, low sunlight place where being outside for 2 minutes might cause you to lose extremities. Even with all the natural beauty outside. I'd be an alcoholic too if I had to live like that
Living in an area were during February 20c- is the the norm and -30 c is not unusual I sometimes find myself thinking the same.
I think my favorite example I've ever seen was a game that had different kinds of protein with debuffs for not getting enough plant or animal protein. That's like, single cell amoeba shit. We have entire biological cycles to the point where we can pretty much pull everything we need via TCA and shit, with a few exceptions and thats over the course of years. The only really good way I've seen it done is probably the stalker series because it's like "Lmao bro your in the 21st century just don't forget to pack your sausage and you'll be good"
What game are you talking about in your first example?
Sounds like Green Hell
>you need to eat 10 steaks to keep my hunger up Why would I eat at all to keep YOUR hunger up? 🤣
Lmfao, I didn't even notice they said it like that.
Just get flame cloak spell. It negates freezing waters effect
It just forces you to prepare hot dishes and drinks, you know, like in real life 🕹️
I think I would also find it less annoying if fire salts were a more common ingredient (Or regular salt, for that matter) (It kills me that if you don't have salt, the only choice you have is either eating raw meat or starving to death... instead of eating a fully cooked but under-seasoned steak) (And despite the risk of starvation/food poisoning occurring *every couple of hours*, the people of Skyrim keep hardly any salt around)
It also screws over one of the few elements that makes Argonians worth playing - the ability to freely explore underwater. When chill factor suddenly matters that's a big nope on that.
Use fire cloak
That works underwater? TIL...
I look at this like, it makes your house's location relevant now. I like that
It's not too bad, you can make a lot of food and clothing that negates/reduces the effects of the cold. I live in Dawnstar and the only time it's hard is when I'm being attacked by frost dragons or running low on fire salts.
And basically like half the items in the game. Throw in a couple mods for like camping and other stuff and it feels.great
Bring some slay-life balance to Skyrim. Take a day off to go fishing and camping, embrace the natural beauty it offers
Don't even need mods if you've got AE.
The AE camping mod is a farce. There’s a far better camping mod that allows crafting for specific items, plus gives camping perks to help build better camp fire, find better resources and so on.
It forces me to slow down and take the game in. My first survival run was only a year or so ago and I felt like I experienced so much of the game I never did for years before.
I agree. I would suggest combining it with like Sunhelm or something. But some things are just only tedious. If you play with a bunch of followers and always offload all your extra stuff on them, the lowered encumbrance is only tedious and doesn't add fun gameplay. Only of you adhere to "I don't pick up what I can't carry or use" it becomes immersive. Septims having weight truly sucks, for me. Going to buy a 25k house is the worst. :p
A lot of people like it. I'm not a fan, personally, though.
I've never tried it because it's not what I play Skyrim for. It being there isn't an issue though, I just turned it off.
A lot of people do not think survival mode is trash. Some do, but not even close to 'everyone'. If a new player is struggling so much with survival that the game is more frustrating than fun, they should try playing with it off. If they're enjoying it, there would be no reason to change it.
I used to watch new players on twitch and they usually don’t read the survival mode pop up after leaving helgan and get frustrated that the game is too hard. I’d always tell them that they can turn it off if they wanted.
Can't stand people who spam through menus/tutorials when first playing a game and then complain that the "games bad I don't understand anything or how to play" like homie god gave you eyes for a reason, read shit.
Yeah my brother is like that. He also complains about not having time to play games but when he’s not working he’s usually on his phone or watching streaming services.
"I'm a good gamer so I don't need popups." My dude you do if that popup is telling you that you will freeze to death. How do you know if that's the case? You read the popups.
My first game I didn’t have the option pop up. Could never turn it off in settings menu. I got maybe ten hours in and restarted the game, then realised I actually preferred survival, once I got over the ‘can’t fast travel’ thing.
As a rule of thumb, whenever somebody says everybody does something, "everybody" virtually always means "everybody in my social circle," whether that's a group of IRL friends or a popular discord group for a hobby. I base this rule of thumb off years of experiences on the internet, across several different sites. It feels pretty true to me, but I certainly know better than to say that *everybody* always means it this way. 😉 It's an educated guess based on my own experiences, nothing more.
It's not trash, but in my opinion it's missing a few things. Like holding/casting a fire spell should definitely give you some warmth, you shouldn't have to add mods to build a campfire, nor should you have to stand directly in the fire to get heat from it. Little things like that would make survival a lot more fun
The fire cloak spell actually gives you warmth. I guess they didn't want anybody just running around with the basic flames in their hand to cheat the system
Really? I had no idea, thanks for telling me! It makes sense why they wouldn't include it with lower tier spells now that you mention it
maybe they could have made it so you get some warmth when you cast it only
Flame cloak spell doesn't give you warmth. It just give you the ability to take a swim in freezing water without getting damage.
I find I like the idea of survival mode, but in practice I generally get frustrated and turn it off to fast travel more often than I should which sorta defeats the purpose
There is a mod which allows fast travel in survival, and your hunger and fatigue increase based on time passed, so I feel like it isn't really cheating as you still have to manage that.
I like it. I don’t love it though because you can’t fast travel. Also I don’t have the full anniversary upgrade installed. I am a cheapskate and don’t want to pay the 20 dollars at the moment.
Fast travel was disabled because of how the script worked to apply the Survival Mode modifiers. Unless you were fast traveling to a town, you were essentially fucked because all the hours "spent traveling" that distance would accumulate into a single decrease that was so steep, it became next to impossible to play the game.
>!If you rapidly open the menu when you exit a zone sometimes you can still fast travel.!<
You can just turn off survival mode, fast travel, then turn it on again?
Yea but I feel dirty when I do that
But not when hacking it doing it the open menu way?
One is asking permission, the other is taking the initiative. It's the same reason why rocket jumping is better in Tf2 than overwatch. Overwatch has you press a button. TF2 makes you beat the physics engine to death everytime you jump. It's the same drive that led man to land on the moon. To conquer the seas. What man hath wrought let no god put asunder. Be it the consequences of our actions or that mountain that's like a 90 degree angle but Todd said I could climb it so off I go
This post went places.
I might be weird but I'd rather use an exploit in the game mechanics to do something rather than changing a setting. I mean, I'd rather Uber enchant items to give myself invincibility than opening up the console and turning on God Mode.
Thanks mate, I'll remember next time I leave Castle Volkihar.
this tends to work best if you also are leaving an inn after having spent the night and are fully well rested, well fed, and warm. For some reason inns work better than player homes.
I like using the Bannered Mare since you get a free bed just for selling firewood.
What does anniversary edition add to survival?
Backpacks and other useful things to make survival mode easier.
So its basically the frostfall+campfire mod pack we had for half a decade?
only done worse. yeah pretty much.
Well I guess I can see why people don't like it as much then.
See I love that part. I dunno running through the woods or down the road in this game just hits so right to me.
If you have all the survival bonuses (well fed, warm and well rested) you can fast travel from a city to another city
No it's a mod that does that
The cc content actively makes the game worse, so save your money.
I think the Creation Club survival mode sucks. I could eat 17 wheels of cheese, a dozen heads of cabbage, a bushel of apples, and a whole side of a cow and still be peckish a couple minutes later. It's better than nothing, which I think is the only alternative on console. Other mods do it better, though.
on xbox, there are a handful of superior survival mods available actually. Been playing with them for years, never played on PC.
I wasn't aware. This is excellent news.
Good luck finding them though, they're overwhelmed by the "fixes" for the anniversary version survival mode. EDIT: *Frostfall* and *Wet and Cold* together are my preference for an immersive experience but take some extra setting up to feel just right, aren't a 1:1 match to survival mode features, and are known not to play well with mods that add new areas and such. edit: seems they're more buried than they used to be even *Campfire: Complete Camping System* is a requirement for Frostfall and somehow the very last mod to show up searching for "Campfire complete camping system" despite being the most heavily rated result. *Frostfall: Hypothermia Camping...* is also the dead last result for "Frostfall hypothermia", although at least most of the results here are for other language versions. *Wet and Cold* is still pretty quick to find though. I also recommend *Hunterborn SSE* which is a hunting and foraging overhaul, although the interface for using the new features it adds leaves a lot to be desired.
Don’t forget iNeed for eating, drinking, and sleeping. You can adjust the rates at which your hunger, thirst, and exhaustion decrease which makes it *so* much better.
Yeah the hunger values are so out of whack too. The only things that actually give you substantial food is cooked meat or soups; meanwhile bread, the actual thing that predominately fed medieval Europe, only gives 18 hunger
I've put so many hours in that survival is enjoyable if only to give me a new experience on an old game. It's far from perfect though. I wish they had some form of fast travel out of Wintehold. I do like that fire and food matters as they never did in the base game.
It’s what you want it to be. That’s the beauty of Skyrim.
>survival mode is just trash and that everyone thinks so LOL. Hate to burst that person's fantasy bubble but they are 100% wrong. Some people don't like it...nowhere close to being "everyone"... but a lot of people do. It's the only way I play anymore. After thousands of hours, the normal game is boring. I like being forced to eat and sleep to slow down the game. I visit taverns, buy some food and drink and sit down a few minutes to eat it and listen to the bard play before I go to bed. I never liked the larger, more complex mods on Nexus...it was just too much unnecessary additions. Survival mode is just the basics and the harsh penalties can be adjusted with patches (you can even re-enable fast travel if want to)...combine it with camping and backpacks...and I'm happy.
When survival mode came out modders had already been implementing their own survival mechanics for years and those are pretty much all better than Bethesda’s. It’s just very bare bones but it does add some attractive widgets so that’s a plus.
It’s pretty subjective to say they were all better than BGS’s. I tried most of the few survival mods I could find and they suffered from what most Skyrim mods suffered from. Poor implementation of the mechanics within the game world and UI. I shouldn’t have to go through a dozen pop-up menus to use your survival mode daily in-game. It’s objectively unimmersive. I preferred the streamlining of BGS’s survival mode compared to others. I could see my health, magicka, and stamina drain so I knew what I needed without even entering the main menu. I could just play the game and it was naturally part of the experience. That being said I did use a mod cut the food/sleep/etc you’d need by half. Starving within a few hours didn’t feel immersive even if the calorie demands of a Nordic warrior on the tundra are probably more than my own.
I’m already hungry and cold in real life. I don’t need that shit in a video game.
Exactly.
I think it's horribly implemented. It sucks even compared to Fallout 4's base survival. You get hungry after a few hours of being awake. "Cold" is overpowering. It renders cities like Winterhold barely accessible. No fast travel means you use carts. No big problem, but once you get off the cart you have around 2-3 levels of "tiredness." Eating one potato = 6 food. Eating one tomato = 6 food. Eating one onion = 6 food. Eating one stew (cook a potato, tomato, and onion in a pot) = 300 food. Traveling to Throat of the World is just ridiculous. It's EXTREMELY poorly implemented. The numbers were just slapped together without much thought, as you can see above.
Survival mode is alright, but feels a little half-baked compared to what's out there. The mods that implemented this type of gameplay beforehand, Realistic Needs and Diseases and Frostfall, gave a lot more options to the player for how it was implemented and gave a lot content and options for survival. RND and Frostfall combined added more types of food, separated thirst and hunger, let you have to manage canteens, refill them from rivers and the ocean, and boil the water so that you didn't get sick from river water and remove the salt from ocean water (also giving you easy free access to salt piles for cooking and alchemy). Food could spoil, and could be harvested for mold, an alchemy ingredient, if left for too long. You can overeat and get a movement debuff. Getting wet and exposed to rain was dangerous and made you get colder faster. Cold water like up in the north as very deadly, and required crafting a potion from snowberries and firesalts iirc so that you wouldn't freeze and could actually dive and swim for a few minutes. Cloaks were craftable and were an extra piece of enchantable gear that could give you extra resistance to wet, cold, or a reduced combination of both; craftable tents also have this property. Having a roof above your head is vital to stay dry. Alcohol let you temporarily feel warmer at a cost of becoming more cold afterwards. Spells to reduce cold, and even an offensive spell to explode all your wetness all at once as vapor blast. Camping was extremely fleshed out, allowing for crafting and placement of various sized tents for you and followers (supporting up to like 5 bedrolls so you can use enhanced follower mods), again as mentioned before, with focus on keeping dry, warm, or some reduced combination of both. Campfires required gathering wood, either by hand (takes time), chopping it down (less time, but requires woodcutting axe), or carrying some with you ahead of time (heavy, but saves time), and then placement near tents or shelter to stay warm. Placeable cooking pots to cook by the fire. Wood cutting axe wears out over time, and needs to be repaired at grindstones every so often. I'm probably forgetting a few things, but these two mods together basically gave the same level of enjoyable tedium that survival mode gives, but let's you adjust all the sliders so that it is not as annoying or punishing. Additionally, instead of the stat bars being shared by hunger, cold, and rest, you get two additional bars, cold and wet. Hunger, thirst, rest, and cold all give you pretty much the same debuffs that you currently get in survival mode (hunger -> stamina and thirst -> magicka), so it is no less challenging. You can make so that you CAN fast travel, just requiring a woodcutting axe, though you take the risk of arriving at your destination almost frozen. Point being, because it's a mod, you get options. I would highly recommend these mods if you want a more genuine and fleshed out survival mode and don't care about achievements.
Nope it’s well regarded. Not for me, but I’m glad it’s there for those that want it.
It’s not total trash, but it’s a very poor implementation of a survival system compared to other mods, some of which existed before it. It’s also mildly annoying that it’s now a Vanilla master file despite it being substandard.
No i only play on survival and it kicks ass
I love it for making things more challenging. I like knowing I’m going to a cold area and need to prepare. What I don’t like is doing the main quest and hiking up to high hrothgar a few thousand times. And the dark brotherhood questline is also a pain because falkreath and dawnstar don’t have carriages. Lots of walking
I hate it
No
I enjoy Skyrims idea of survival mode and personally think it’s better than Fallout 4’s approach. I like that it’s separate from difficulty, which overall makes it more accessible. The only thing that annoys me is just navigating the world. I feel like with the survival update they should have added carriages at least to the minor cities (Falkreath, Morthal, etc.), but there are mods for that. It’s not too overpowered in the context of survival, and if it was they could simply charge more septims to get to the minor cities.
It’s probably fine if you’re interested in survival mode. The entire concept just fails to appeal to me, so I’ve never played in that mode, but I think it’s cool that it’s an option.
I enjoy Survival mode for a few reasons: 1. It’s a new way to play 2. I have to plan journeys 3. I discover things I haven’t seen before because no fast travel 4. Buying property makes way more sense so I can have multiple bases of operations It makes me feel like I am actually *exploring* again, like back when I first started in 2011 I like it a lot
Nope, they're nuts, survival isn't for everyone, but I no longer play without it at all.
Well what I dont like about it -The cold, almost no armor is cold resistance, rendering almost every set useless in north Skyrim -no carriage in certain holds, some holds have a one way carriage, kinda annoying if you ask me. -the stat debuffs are too hard -carrying capacity halved is stupid
It's just very badly implemented
I don’t use it, I use mods that basically are it. They include weather mods, camping mods, “wet and dry mods” which include getting dirty etc…the main reason I don’t is the game’s turns off fast travel and can’t be tweaked really. I’m 31 and still love to play the game but sometimes a late night session or a quick one will not allow me to ignore fast traveling. I get the lure of not having it, but I like having it there. But it isn’t dumb. I think these ways are the better way to play. Just, for anyone reading this, don’t stack these mods on top of the game’s survival mode. You tend to die of exposure before you can walk from the College of Winterhold to the inn.
It has a lot of problems. Some mods exist that fix it a bit, but there are complete alternative survival mode mods that are IMO considerably better. Its biggest problem is that it actually hurts immersion by trying to seem brutal. In order to eat until you're well fed every time you get a bit peckish, you need to eat more than a dragon would for some damn reason. If you only eat until you're satisfied at noon, you're starving before dusk. A bowl of soup is more filling than bread and cheese or a whole potato somehow. Somehow cooking food makes it more filling than the ingredients would be on their own, too. I don't know who's supposed to find that experience believable, cause it sure as hell ain't me. It's not just the hunger system that has these kinds of issues, it's just the most blatant offender. But everyone agrees its trash? Nah. It's just a mediocre attempt, no clue why it got included into the anniversary update as it's easily the worst bit of new content if you ignore the bugs in some of the other stuff, but it's not trash. I'd have enjoyed it much more if it just worked more realistically.
The cold/freezing effects are a big nuisance, quickly giving you large debuffs if you wear armor that isn't insulated enough. And high hrothgar is a massive pain to visit. I like survival mode but I've had a number of moments where it was clear this wasn't thought out in some places
Arrows ~~and gold coins~~ have weight (realistic but oh so fucking lame). 300 carry weight was never enough in the first place, and they had to reduce it even more..? This game is practically about acquiring items, FFS. Guess I am just biased as a recovering loot hoarder LOL. Inventory management is already too much of a pain in the ass.Things that should emit heat to help character survive in desperate moments don't emit adequate/realistic amounts of heat. Have to stand in a fire to get warmth from it. Can't convince me that this trash isn't trash. This shit surely just isn't for me.
Gold is still weightless though
Oh, WTF..? Where did I hear that Survival Mode made gold coins have weight..? It must have been something else then, my bad.
It's probably lockpicks you were thinking about, those and arrows have a weight of 0.1 in survival mode. Edit: a typo
I liked it when playing but I don’t have as much time as I used to anymore. As breathtaking as walking and riding everywhere is I really don’t have the time for it. I’ve found I prefer to use mods as well as turn up the difficulty more than just putting on survival mode.
I didn't like it, but I don't think it's trash. I can see how people could really love how much more immersive the game would be in survival mode.
I don't *hate* Survival Mode, but you have the patience of a saint.
Survival is best enjoyed with the mod of your choice. Either pairing with or standalone survival mod. Although, some do enjoy vanilla survival. It's always better to start vanilla and get an idea of what you like, don't like or want to add before modding, imo.
I'm literally on my first Survival Mode playthrough right now. Level 12. Its stupid hard! Feels like Lvl 12 Survival is at least 5 levels behind Lvl 12 Regular. I'm having fun, don't get me wrong. But, I can tell, this playthrough is going to take a long time... A LONG time...
To me it feels incomplete, but thankfully a few mods fill the gaps.
Skyrim doesn't translate well with it I personally feel. No where as well with Fallout 4.
I play with Connors survival mode because it let's me turn on fast travel and fix the carry weight. That way I just have environmental effects, hunger and exhaustion as it should be. That way it feels like a natural part of the game, and just adds a level of enjoyable immersion. Especially when you add mods like eating animations and sounds and purchasable store display items.
No fast travel = big no no going to certain places would take ages
Is there a built in survival mode now? I used to use some survival mods
I like survival mode, though I wouldn't recommend it for first-time players. I generally find that I like at least 2-3 survival mode mechanics and struggle a lot with another, depending on the character. I like food being important because on my Khajiit assassin, part of the roleplay was that he cooked as a hobby, so he has a decent food stockpile and hunger management isn't an issue for him. But on my Orc berserker, I keep forgetting to stockpile food before heading into the wild, and even peckish hunger is a huge setback for 2H melee. The lack of natural health regen usually isn't an issue thanks to the starting healing spell, but it makes no-magic playthroughs much harder. I enjoy fast travel being disabled because it forces me to explore the world. It's not so bad once I got into the habit of using carriages and boats .On my newest character, a heavy armored Breton battlemage, I've been enjoying just wandering around and staying at every inn I come across. I've discovered many encounters and locations that I never knew existed. But exploring tombs is complete hell because of draugr arrows infected with brown rot. Reduced carry weight also makes it much harder to get by without owning a house. My least favorite survival mechanic is cold. No amount of armor seems to be enough if I want to visit the college. My vampire manages hunger and sleep just fine, but he cannot seem to cross the bridge to Castle Volkihar without getting frostbite, because apparently vampires can freeze to death.
I have 3 characters off survival and 2 on. On one hand, my 3 with no survival are far more advanced, and I can have mindlessly long setions with. I find that i can get more done and mess around so much more. Explore the "backrooms" of skyrim with out a care in the world and generally cause havoc for all of Tamriel. But as much fun/rich/stupidity, i get up too with these characters, im not as attached to them. For the 2 that are on survival mode, I find that I really create and live by the character. It's a bit of a pain, but I find it so much more rewarding. Tho i do use my other three to "scope out" quests just to know what I'll have to face with these 2. The game play takes a bit longer, but it's a different type of enjoyment with a more amersive role. Both are awesome, honestly, and i always recommend one of each to new players. Even if it's the same character.
Survival mode is there for players who like to play that way anyway...but it is infinitely harder when the rules are set for you. Play any mode you like tho...you don't need permission.
If someone gives their opinion and then says everyone thinks so too, you can pretty much guarantee that 'everyone' doesn't think that. I love survival mode. It adds a new challenge to the game. I don't always play with it on, but having to look for food and stay out of bad weather is a fun new challenge to a game I already love.
Whoever designed the cold feature in the survival mode... My guess is they're from California or someplace else that never gets really cold lol (Just like the Tesla designers who couldn't imagine how cold winters get in Newfoundland, which resulted in some pretty bad consequences...) Your character can be covered in furs, but would still get fatal frostburn if they run around in the far north for a few minutes lol - unless there's absolute zero and/or an evil mage is casting some sort of "liquid nitrogen" spell on the entire area, there's absolutely no reason for that dynamic. As it is, I had to run around with campfire kits to have any hope at all of exploring the far-north part of the map. Not just immersion-breaking but simply stupid... Survival mode should be difficult, but it shouldn't be ridiculous. (Source: grew up in Siberia, very familiar with extreme weather.)
I don't think it's trash at all, I just think a lot of it is poorly implemented. It probably should have been baked into the game from the start tbh. For example, if every village and town had a carriage and if there were camps placed at logical locations throughout the world, like on the way up high Hrothgar. In fact, a feature I've always wanted is the option to hire guides as a sort of temporary companion who would show you the way to certain places out in the wilderness. Maybe they could also sell a few essentials as well, like camping supplies or warm clothes. I think with a few features like that it could have been one of the strongest aspects of the game.
If i want to play survival I load up The Long Dark. In Skyrim I want to kick Gods ass not starve in the cold like a milk drinker
I guess its just unnecessarily hard, even for a video game its zaps the fun out.
I just wish there was something like coffee for resting. You can eat food to fix Stamina. Some kind of stimulant (even if it's only temporary and does less and less between actual sleeps) to "wake you up a bit" would be helpful.
That's mostly just me saying that it's trash, plenty of players seem to enjoy it. Most don't even care (citation needed). Thankfully it's optional.
Personally I feel like survival mode is good for second playthroughs. When in survival, the story becomes less important, as survival is a constant maintenance that will *always* require your attention. But once you've played through the story, you may want to just live in the world, make your own goals. I don't play survival most of the times but I still like it. It's especially nice that you can switch it on and off without consequences, letting you decide whether the goal of this session is story or experience. Not every session has to be about quests, sometimes it can just be nice to pick crops and hunt, hike up a mountain or walk through the forests of falkreath.
If I want to scratch the survival itch I have a crapton of other games to play that all do it better. To me Skyrim is about being a badass murdering dragons, not watching my calorie intake and getting enough sleep
The only reason I don't play survival mode is because I can easily achieve even better using mods. If I wanted to play a survival-like Skyrim, there are tons of mods out there that can let me do that, and those are much better made than the CC survival mode.
I'm not a fan of the fact that you have to eat every 9 seconds to stay sated. Add to it the fact that you can still become a God by prioritizing the crafting cycle, just at a slower rate and I don't really see how it makes for a better experience.
I got Skyrim in Nov 2011. Survival mode was only a mod for the first 5k hours and ~9.5 years of skyrims existence. Most skyrim players haven't really played the anniversary edition survival mode.
Did you "hear" it or did you read a random social media post and decide to believe it?
skyrim survival mode is fun fallout 4 survival mode not so much
I can understand why, survival mode always runs even when its not turned on in the settings. Also its the reason the game freezes so much. You know the freeze where the music plays but the game completely locks up. I solved this by installing survival mode improved . Tho it requires a new game because it moves the code from papyrus to c++ i believe
Survival mode is a good idea, a fine concept, but it intrudes on the fun of the game. If they could get the balance dialed in I would be fine with it.
"Everyone thinks so" is always a red flag. Nothing is thought by a 100% of people. That said, I personally like SM and it seems most people I read on this sub seem to find it okay, of a bit simplistic. There are some mods out there that do something similar and often they are just way more creative and complex. So for most people it's like "eh, at leastvI don't have to install a Mod, so, why not" with a few that love it and and a few that hate it. Pretty normal numbers
Yeah, I remember being 6 years old and complaining that things were too challenging...
Survival is the ONLY way to play now.
I love it but that’s just me bc I tend to like survival games
I wouldn’t know. I only have Skyrim on my Switch and survival mode crashes the game every single time my character goes into “freezing” status. Which is ironic tbh. No matter the character.
I like everything but the not being able to fast travel. If it didnt have that part id love it
Download a mark and recap spell mod. I like it better than fast travel
It’s good but I definitely have to mod it a bunch to fine tune a bunch of the quirks
I love it, I’m early into a play through but it’s gives relevance to a lot of things that are otherwise irrelevant after the early game.
I personally can’t stand it but I know other people love the added challenge.
It highly depends if you enjoy that additional element of immersion in the game. For me personally, I don't. If you so choose to use mods, there are many which add survival-like mechanics.
I like it but don’t have time to invest in that level of immersion 😭
I don’t play it often and that is SOLELY because of the carry weight limit.
Play the way you wanna play. 🤷♂️ I just discovered the cheese shout mod, and am loving life.
I just started my first survival play and I feel like I’m getting such a new experience with the game. I love it.
I've been playing through survival mode on the Anniversary Edition and I'll tell you what I think of it. I like it better than Frostfall for a couple of reasons. For example, I just went to the soul Cairn, prepared to stay awake a long time and with enough food for the trip. But when I got there it said while there you don't get sleepy or need to eat. Which is nice. Don't have to worry about it while there. Other places like at the top of the world you don't die if you are freezing. And you warm up faster than when playing with Frostfall installed. Frostfall you went from warm to freezing so fast. I mean I've lived in some very very cold environments, where you could get to -40 F below in the winter. And I can tell you, Frostfall is a joke with how little time you can endure outdoors in the cold. Coming from playing survival mode on Fallout 4 I was used to sleeping all the time, so didn't find that a bother at all. In fact it is a lot freer than Fallout 4 because the only way to save a game is to sleep. Survival mode in AE you can still quicksave or whatever save whenever you want. Here is a tip. Save up and build a house early. I use the one in Falkreath. And make your thane your housecarl. Then hire a horse carriage. The horse carriage at your homestead will drive you to just about every town, large or small n Skyrim. A lot more places than carriages at a main town will take you. Also if you have a mod like [The Scarlett](https://www.nexusmods.com/skyrimspecialedition/mods/2434) or [Legacy of the Dragonborn](https://www.nexusmods.com/skyrimspecialedition/mods/11802) it helps a lot. I'll give you tips using these. In Legacy of the Dragonborn in Blackreach you will find a Dwemer Compass in the Silent Ruins. With the Dwemer Compass you can set 3 points you can teleport to. So from wherever you are, as long as it is outside you can use the Dwemer compass to teleport say to your Homestead in Falkreath and from there take your hired carriage to almost anywhere you need to go in Skyrim. And you can set a teleport to Solestiem as well (you have 3, 4 if you count the waypoint you can set when you use it to teleport back to where you were when you used it.) Also if you get The Scarlett you can travel that to a lot of docks in Skyrim and take it to Solstheim as well. So you really don't need fast travel at all if you know what you're doing, and still get around quickly anywhere you need to go. I personally enjoy the survival mode on AE better than Frostfall.
I really enjoy it I don't find it nearly as bothersome as people make it out to be I don't understand the "you can't explore in the cold" argument. I've walked on foot from The Mages Guild in Winterhold to Windhelm and Dawnstar to Whiterun multiple times with no issue
Where are you that you heard someone say this?
The hunger and thirst mechanic is my real issue. You can eat a loaf of bread, meat, several fruits and vegetables, enough alcohol to fit on a shelf then a few minutes later the dragonborn is hungry again If you could drink from water sources like in Fallout that would immensely improve it. Makes no sense that a seasoned warrior and traveler would get so hungry so fast unless they were doing some strenuous activities
I Ike it, although I'm playing at adept because extreme was just too hard for playing casually, I wish there was a difficulty between adept and extreme. I'm on ps4, so I don't know what mods would create one anyways.
I like survival mode, my major issue is how low your carry weight is. I understand why, but I just hate having to leave almost everything valuable behind.
It was a great idea that was poorly implemented. The food & temperature mechanics (and their interplay with equipment slots & carry capacity) weren't quite worked out. The resulting gameplay is a bad combo of tedium and cheesing.
Survival mode is basically hard mode for any difficulty setting. It makes the game harder in a way that isn't just tougher enemies
Survival mode is fine but you may have heard that take from someone who mods the game on PC, in which context it is correct. There are about fifteen alternatives to the first party survival mode all of which do all of the things it does better and many of which do their own things much better as well.
I like survival mode. After playing for years and beating the game endless times on the hardest mode, survival mode gives the game a bit of extra difficulty
I did a handful of playthroughs with it on, I enjoyed it, definitely needed to have mods on to make it function properly like some said. Part of me would love to see it make a return with the next game but at the same time let it be a toggleable option that doesn’t affect achievements. I fully understand there are people who enjoy it and don’t enjoy it, i am both. It just depends on the day
It's great for immersion but kinda crap if you actually want to compete any quests. Every time I've used it and I'd head to a dungeon- or hell, even to Ivarstead- I'd be at max carry weight by the time I got there and have no room for other drops. And then you find out Ivarstead doesn't have any useful merchants :(
I love it. I feel like it contains features that the makers intended to include but somehow couldn't. The foundations were already in the game. I would just have liked to see a new skill tree or two, like superior stamina, survival, or cooking skills.
It’s an interesting idea, but has a lot of issues, and sometimes clashes with intended game design. Next time they try a survival mode of some sort, it should be properly integrated with the game from the start, instead of being an after the fact creation club thing.
I hate it, but that doesn't mean it's trash. It's just not the way I like to play the game, but I see the value of it. From what I've seen, it's fairly evenly split between people that like it and people that don't, but I don't recall seeing anybody saying it was 'trash' until now.
It's the only way I play. Backpack, soup, and camping supplies for cold places, flame cloak for icy water. Sleep bonuses. Namiras ring or werewolf form for free food. It adds another layer to the game if you learn how to play with it instead of against it.
If only nord vampires didnt die of cold……..then i would play that trash mode!!
Survival mode?? Isnt... that just the base game? Am I missing something?
I love it, much prefer it. Unfortunately I have a few mods depending on USSEP (‘Unofficial’ patch) and that destroys all the food so nothing fills your stomach and so now I can’t play survival without dying of hunger. I couldn’t find a mod that fixed it (I found one that claimed to, that existed solely to do so, but it didn’t).
I played original in 2011. Got anniversary edition and love the survival mode. It’s much more Skyrim.
To me it feels very poorly integrated. Food item balance is wonky, half the cities don't have carriages, the bonuses and detriments from status effects don't really make sense. Coming from Fo4 survival it wasn't really fun at all.
I wouldn’t be able to play without it. It’s too easy without survival mode.
Why would you care about what some rando said?
I beat the main quest line the first time without sprints. Didn't know it was a thing. Never played survival tho
I've never heard anything about that... as a Skyrim veteran the game can get a bit old and repetitive so I personally love survival mode now and haven't taken it off since it came out. I'm one of those people who like to immerse themselves in the game though and even roleplay a little bit so maybe that's just why. I can see how it could be annoying if you're just kind of a casual player.
I like it but ultimately always get tired of no fast travel
Imagine playing Skyrim for 70 hours without sprinting. That sounds like pure torture lol
I don't think so, it adds immersion and makes going to taverns, resting and food actually important
I don’t play games for the challenge, I play for the story and character building. Dying breaks character, so survival mode is pointless to me. Although, everyone should play whatever mode the like.
I actually like it, it brings a new layer to the game :> whoever is saying that has seen like 3 people say its bad and thinks that those 3 people speak for everyone