With my latest character I decided to make my own Alternate Start, using the guidelines At the bottom of the UESP Wiki's Console page. I was surprised at how easy it was. To be honest, most of the things the wiki shows in their batch file are unnecessary. All you really need to do it edit the Skyrim.ini file and add one line to the [General] section with the place you want to start (the wiki is very handy in providing the ids of every location in the game). For example:


Note that as long as you have that line in your .ini file every time you start the game it will always start a new character at Riverwood (or wherever you set for the starting cell). It skips the main menu, and goes right to the new game there. So you might want to comment the line out with a ; mark except when you actually want to start a new character.

It starts you out as a male Nord (a Mord!), preset #1, with all of this stuff. Basically a full set of iron armor, some iron weapons, some potions, lockpicks etc... The Puppeteer Figurine is from my Puppeteer mod.

From that point all you have to do is open the console and type in the following:

player.removeallitems
showracemenu

You can even skip the removeallitems command if you want, if you want to keep all that iron stuff.

At that point you are basically naked wherever you started. I just used the Help command to equip my character with what I felt was appropriate. This is one of the most useful improvements in the ES series. All you have to do it open the console, and type in the following:

Help "item or spell name as it appears in the game" 4

So if you wanted to start with a steel sword, you would just type in:

Help "steel sword" 4

It will then give you the ID of not only the base steel sword, but every enchanted version with "Steel Sword" in its name (Like Steel Sword of Burning, Steel Sword of Rabbit Slaying, etc...)

From there you can simply use the player.additem command to add them to your character. This even works with modded items, and in fact, is the easiest way to get the ID of something from a mod, as the first two characters of every mod item's ID changes depending on where it is in the mod order at the moment. But the Help command always gives you the correct ID at the moment.

I discovered some interesting side effects of starting the game this way. The main one is that the main quest does not start. Not at all. When I got to Whiterun I did not get the usual guard walking up and saying: "Holt, The city is closed due to Jarl Baalin being too busy dancing on the table." The guards ignored me, and the gate had the "locked, needs a key to open" message. But it was easily opened by opening the console, selecting it, and typing in the unlock command. From then on everything was as usual.

I found Helgen was even stranger. The gates are likewise locked and requiring a key to open. But the unlock command gets you in. That is where the weirdness starts. The place is not destroyed, and there are Imperials standing guard on the walls. Some of the Stormcloaks are lined up near the west gate, along with Lokir. The civilians are all just standing around looking. There is no sign of Tullius, Elenwen, or Ulfric. The real fun is Hadvar and Ralof, who immediately start attacking everyone on the other side. But the others all ignore the two! You can actually go inside the inn, though there is just a generic little room there. You can go inside Helgen Keep as well. Gunjar's dead body is there like normal, but without the Imperial Captain to loot, you cannot get the key to open the first gate to the basements. The unlock command works of course. The cave-in happens like normal, but most of the soldiers you encounter down there are missing. I only saw the torturer, who ignores you. I followed it almost to the end, but found that after the sleeping bear there is a closed wooden portcullis blocking the cave exit. I have no idea where that came from!

Finally, I found that you can still start the main quest if you want to. Just open the console and type in:

setstage mq101 0

It then starts the regular opening sequence on the cart. Neat thing, if you are in third person when you type the command in, you remain that way through the entire tutorial!

The cart ride in third person

I am still trying to figure out who these two are (they have nothing to do with the alternate start, they always show up as the wagon rides into the fort, walking alongside the road. Once the cart is inside Helgen and draws abreast of the inn, they just vanish.

It looks really weird when the game forces your character to move during the scripted sequences, your arms disappear.

Once you get into the keep and Haddie/The 'Lofster cuts your binds, the game goes back to normal. I found my level, skill points, and all my perks had been unchanged. However, all my gear was gone. So if you want to do this, put your stuff in a safe container beforehand.

I am not sure if there is a way to not do the main quest, and change Helgen to its ruined, bandit infested state. That would be nice. There is probably a quest somewhere in the game that runs in the background that does it though.

I think I will probably do this for all my future games, and eschew alternate start mods. Since I don't do the main quest, it is actually nice not having it clutter up my journal. I just would like to find a way to make Helgen a bit more 'normal'.

I find this really fascinating. Thanks for taking the time to write this up. I like Arthmoor's mods but he does something in all of them that gets on my nerves: he removes quests. I don't know why he does that. He removed the first Arena fight in his Oblivion mod and he removed the first quest from the Imperial civil war beginning in his Skyrim mod. What gives?

Anyway, I love the idea of crafting a home-made alternate start. That seems so much more satisfying to me than using somebody else's mod, as nice as that mod might be.

I was really interested to see your Helgen 3rd-person screenshots. I have managed to catch glimpses of my characters in 3rd person by using, of all things, the Deadly Dragons mod. This mod knocks your character backwards when a Dragon lands on them. So for giggles I will often run my characters up to Aldie when he lands in front of Haming. I then get to see my characters ragdolling wildly through the air and then struggling to their feet for a few seconds in third person. Your method is more dignified.

What places have you started in? Have you experimented with BAT files to give your characters more than one item at a time? The DIY aspect of all this is pretty exciting to me. If the word "empowering" weren't so overused I would use it here.

If you're interested in making Helgen more normal you might take a look at the Helgen Rebuilt mod, if you haven't already. It doesn't get enabled until Helgen is finished, so it might work with your "alternate alternate start" system.

Thanks a lot for sharing this. I am definitely going to try this out myself.

Wyrd! It is good to see you back!

If is funny you mentioned Arthmoor's mod, because it was discontent with Live Another Life that led me to do it myself. My latest character Persephone is undead, so I wanted to start her in a necromancer dungeon. But the necromancer start in LAL is in Blackreach, with nary a necromancer around. So that was no use to me.

So far this is the first character I have done my own alternate start with. Though I plan to do all of them that way from now on. One thing it requires is a knowledge of the game world, since you have to pick where you want to start, and supply the name of the cell. But once you have played the game as much as I have, that is no problem. In fact, it makes it a lot easier to roleplay and become immersed in the game, since you can craft exactly where you start to suit your character's story.

So I have not tried different batch files with different item or spell loadouts yet. I'll probably just continue to use the command console with the Help command, since it is an easy way to look up IDs, especially modded ones.

One thing I really like is the lack of main quest quests cluttering up my quest log. I spent days with it completely empty. So far I have seen no lines of dialogue in relation to the main quest when talking to the people like Alvor or Gerdur in Riverwood. The guards at Whiterun do not challenge you at the gate (though you have to open it with the console. I fixed that with a mod.) I have not tried walking into Dragonsreach yet, so I am not sure what happens in there. My guess would be that it is the same as your first visit in the game though, which might make the main quest still doable.

I did find that if you try to run any other stage of mq101 than 0, it breaks the game. It starts a new game as usual, with the screen all dark at first, then gradually bringing up the video. But it always starts with the cart stopped, and everyone standing around it. You cannot access the console, or any of the in game controls, or do anything really. So you can forget trying to run specific quest stages.

I finished my Helgen Starts With Bandits mod. It was not easy. That place is really confusing. I can see why so many modders say it is a difficult place to work in. Among other things, I has both the pre-dragon buildings and people, and the post dragon buildings and people, all on top of one another. The post dragon stuff is all linked to activators that start the game disabled. Plus there are main quest activators that take up huge areas all over the place. But I could not tell what things were specifically linked to what activators. In the end I wound up manually deleting all the pre-dragon things, and re-adding in many post-dragon things that refused to work. Such as the bandits all showing up naked, but with weapons.

But now I have Helgen in a nice, ruined, bandit-infested state the first time my characters visit. I even made all the beds sleepable, and the keep interior waitable in. So it would make a good base for a character. I suppose I should check the storage to make sure it is safe though.... This vid is an example of it

I discovered something else. Starting this way also disables the Falkreath Stormcloak Camp. Except for the quartermaster, who stands around in the empty space (and will still buy and sell things). I eventually found a static marker that turns all of the camp back on. Except of course like the bandits, the Stormcloaks all show up naked. So I deleted them and re-added them, which gives them their clothes back.

Now I am curious about Fort Neugrad. I will be headed there soon to see if it too is affected.

Edit: Neugrad looks normal, and starts infested by bandits (mercifully all clothed).

I had a chance to visit Dragonsreach today. There was no signs of the main quest anywhere, which I particularly enjoyed. Irilieth does not chase you around the place sneering "What is the meaning of this?". There are no scripted scenes between Jarl Baalin' and the other npcs. Farengar does not try to rope you into finding the Dragonstone. Nothing. Everyone just walks around doing their thing, you can talk to them, trade with Farengar, etc...

Okay, you've convinced me. I'm going to try this myself later today. I love that the Whiterun guards and Irileth don't accost you. Now I just have to decide where I want my character to start. So this should only take another couple of weeks, lol.

Your video was really neat. I noticed extra chests in Helgen (around 4:40 and 8:40). What mod adds these? And, more importantly, why the heck did you just run past them without looting them? I was aghast. I stared at my monitor in disbelief. I back up the video and watched it again just to make sure I was really seeing this. I'm still in a mild state of shock.

(This has nothing to do with anything and I think I may have said this before but I love the look of your white-haired characters. You tempt me to make a white-haired character myself. But I can't, because then I'd be copying every single thing you do and I would lose all of my self-respect because I wasn't able to think for myself (which is obviously, like, my whole goal in life)).

Thank you for uploading this video. I enjoyed watching it. Unfortunately, I got stuck watching Mike Loades Bronze Age Spear Fighting after that and then AntAgonizer 05 - Purification and then AntAgonizer 04 - Liberty Prime and then AntAgonizer - 03 - Vault87 and then AntAgonizer - 02 - Talon Company and then AntAgonizer 01 Giant Radscorpions. Finally I was able to stop myself. *wipes brow* I had planned to write this post an hour ago but, thanks to your videos and the fact that I have YouTube on Autoplay, I am an hour behind schedule. Everything I had planned to do for the rest of the day will now take place an hour later than it was supposed to have happened. I will start Wednesday an hour behind the rest of humanity, thanks to you.

...Oh, and happy birthday!!!

This whole conversation is fascinating - have to agree with PW on the failure to loot, it was killing me to know what I was missing, lol. Also love the white haired characters you make. Peresphone is beautiful!

I love the idea of no main quest cues, and wondered about the civil war stuff on that alt start? Either way it is a boone to me.

Those chests and spell tomes in the room with Gunjar's body are all from my own home-made mods. There is a big list of most of them here. Things like a weaker Bound Bow (with the stats of a Hunting Bow) that would be appropriate for a low level character, poison-based spells and items, etc... Back when I used to go through the tutorial, I often put modded items in Helgen so my characters could have them from the start of the game.

I did not bother going through that stuff because my current character won't be using any of that. They are not part of her concept. I skipped a few chests and things elsewhere just because I did not want to waste the time of the people watching. It is already long enough as it is, without adding extra minutes just of me looting things.

I love white-haired characters! I am an anime fan, so that probably explains why. But even long before I discovered anime I was reading Michael Moorcock's Elric books. Granted, some might say that Elric is an anime character, just in print rather than drawn on film... I think my first white haired ES character was Saya, she started out with black hair, but she really came into her own when I changed it to white. Of course there have been many since, My Ayleid Queen Astarte (whose hair is slightly lavender), my Snow Elf Mielikki, my undead avenger Revansch, and of course my current undead character Persephone

I am sorry I wasted an hour of your day.

What am I saying, of course I am not! If you want to waste more time look through my Vid topic in the Fan Art section! I also highly recommend the entire documentary that the Mike Loades clip was from - Helen of Troy by Bettany Hughes. Its on You Tube if you do not want to rent it. She is a fantastic historian. I love all of her work: The Spartans, The Minotaur's Isle, etc...




I am sure that the Civil War is broken as well. It is tied into the main quest. You still get people telling you to join both sides. But to get past the initiation quest and Korvanjund you have to slay the dragon for Jarl Ballin'. So this is very game-breaking. But if like me you do not want to do the main quest or the Civil War, then it is a wonderful way to avoid annoyances.

I recognized Saya right away!

Yes, I most definitely wanted to avoid both the main quest and the civil war stuff.

It looks like I've got my Helgen Starts With Bandits mod finished. At least I think so. I have been using it to straighten out all the loose ends that get created by doing the Alternate Start this way. I think I have them all - Helgen, the Whiterun gates, and the Falkreath Stormcloak camp.

I do not plan on posting it online, as I doubt many people would be interested in it. I expect most would just say things like "OMG! You broke the main quest!" But if anyone would like it PM me your email address, and I would be glad to send it to you.

You may not believe this but after I wrote my post I started browsing YouTube and ended up watching an hour and a half documentary entitled "Boudica - The Iceni Rebellion." That enticing list of related links they display prominently over there on the right hand side of the page led me to "In search of the Trojan war - The Women of Troy" which in turn lead me to "In search of the real Helen of Troy" by Bettany Hughes.

Imagine my astonishment! The same Mike Loades, wearing the same shirt and everything. I quickly realized "In search of the real Helen of Troy" was part of a 7-part series called "The Ancient Worlds." I now have this series cued up, starting with Episode 1, on YouTube to watch later today.

Neat! It looks like that Ancient Worlds series you found is actually a group of standalone tv documentaries that Bettany Hughes did over several years. Alexandria, Helen of Troy, The Minoans (which I have on dvd under the name The Minotaur's Island). Someone must have put them all together into a series, maybe Bettany herself?

Ah, I had it backwards then. I had assumed that "In search of the real Helen of Troy" was a renamed upload of the original "Helen of Troy" episode of her Ancient Worlds series, when really it's exactly the opposite. That's me all over. I get everything backwards.

I also want to see something else by her titled When God Was a Girl - BBC Documentary (Women and Religion). Now I'm wondering if this might be part of the retitled Ancient World series I'm planning to watch. Well, no matter. If it's good, it's worth watching twice.

I have always absorbed information best through reading. Half of what I hear goes in one ear and out the other, as my mother used (constantly) to say. I did horribly at school in those areas that required me to learn orally and did well in those instances in which I could study from a text. All of which is meant to explain why I could watch the same video twice in a row and expect to get something new out of it the second time around.

Back on topic! A couple of threads on similar subjects have popped up on the BGS forums Joining the bandit faction and Playing the game as if I wasn't the Dragonborn.

I did a little more tinkering, and found that while you have the following line in your Skyrim.ini file:



Whenever you start the game it will always start a new character at Riverwood (or wherever you set for the starting cell). It skips the main menu, and just right to the new game there. So its probably a good idea to comment the line out with a ; unless you are actually starting a new character.

It starts you out as a male Nord (or a Mord I suppose), preset #1, with all of this stuff. Basically a full set of iron armor, some iron weapons, some potions, lockpicks etc... The Puppeteer Figurine is from my Puppeteer mod.

So on one hand it is a word of warning. But on the other, if like me, you like to experiment with your new characters before you actually play them, it works very well. The Riverwood start gives you good lighting for editing the face, and gives you a clean start to fiddle around with. It is also quick, as it immediately puts you in the game with your character. It looks like a good way to try out new race mods, to see what they really look like. After you get your character's face created in Riverwood, and all kitted out with spells and items via the console, you can use the coc command to teleport to anyplace you want to actually start playing the character. Or you could even create a new cell with some good lighting to do all of that.

I started another character today and used a batch file to add some items. Rather than place the file in the base game folder, I put it in the Data folder. That way I could keep the .txt extension on the name, which makes it easier to edit.

I didn't do anything spectacular. Just added some gold and potions. Here is what I did:


Everything else I started the character with is modded, and it is easier to just use the console Help command to get their ids than to look them all up in the CK, and get the mod prefix from TES Mod Manager.

Now I am wondering how the game decides to give you all the stuff listed in that pic in my last post? I opened up the CK and checked the Male Nord #1 Preset, and it is not in his inventory. His inventory is blank in fact. There must be a list somewhere though, in a quest or even just a FormList. It seems to me that editing that would be the simplest way to go.

Aha! I found it. There is an Actor under Male Nord Race called Player. All of the default starting items are his inventory. So you could just make a mod that alters his inventory every time you start a new character with the items and spells you want. Same with Perks, or changing stats. I imagine you can even add in a standing stone effect. Basically this makes those mods like Character Creation Overhaul redundant. You can even use it to remove the starting Flames spell if you want. It is not in character for a lot of my characters, and I have never been able to remove it via the console.

I found one more bug that I am sure is due to this method of alternate starting. I have been noticing bandit bosses spawning with no clothes. They have weapons and shields however. I used the openactorcontainer 1 command to confirm that they do not have any armor in their inventories.

But it is not all bandit bosses. It appears to only be the ones in the Civil War forts. The other bandits in the forts spawn with all their armor however. I did some digging around in the CK, and found that the regular bandits are spawned by X Markers. There is no marker to spawn the boss. There is a CWGarrisonEnableMarkerMonster marker outside the forts however, which spawn all the X Markers for the bandits, etc... Whether the bosses are tied to them or not I cannot tell. My guess is not.

So I looked up every instance of the CWGarrisonEnableMarkerMonster markers. Besides the instances on the map in the forts, there were a bunch used in the civil war quests. There are 8 of them that seem to reset the fort's occupants. My guess is that something in one or all of those is causing the bandit bosses to spawn without their outfits. But I will be damned if I can figure out what is what in the fetching scripting.

Which took me to Plan B. I looked up the bandit bosses, which led me through about 4 layers of leveled characters to get to the actual actors used in the game. Checking their inventories, I found that the items they are missing are the ones specified in the Default Outfit field. So I made some new outfits, and assigned them to the bandit bosses. My initial testing shows the formerly naked bandit boss of Fort Hraggstad to now be geared up in iron. So it appears to have worked.

...what the hell. Did someone forget to give them a new outfit I'm guessing?

It is just one more example of how Bethesda really does not want anyone to skip doing their main quest. Even the clothing of bandits is tied to it...

I did some more experimenting, and I can say that editing the default Player actor is not a good idea. I tried making a small mod using a bunch of other mods as masters, to add in their spells and items to the Player. But when I started the game only one of the modded things was actually present, a night eye spell I made. OTOH, the attribute modifications I made worked, so too did adding a standing stone effect. I even went so far as to change the race and sex of the actor to a Breton Female, and the game started with that as the default character.

That is also where the weirdness starts however. It started out with the player as Breton Female Preset #1. But the head was vastly darker than the rest of the body. Using Showracemenu immediately cleared that up however.

The real problems started after saving the game and disabling the mod I made altering Player. Immediately my character's race and sex changed back to a male nord. Well, the body changed back to the male Nord body. She still had a the female head from before, and a huge crack between the head and body where they no longer fit together right. Likewise my inventory automatically filled up with all that stuff the default Player normally begins with.

So if you are going to mod the default Player actor, you have to leave the mod active the entire time you are playing that character. Otherwise you are in for a surprise! Given that the number of active .esps and .esms you can have is finite, it does not seem to be worth wasting the space that you could be using for another mod. So I will just stick to using batch files and/or just the Help command to equip new characters. And you can still change attributes and add standing stone signs through the console as well.

Since modding Player does not look like a good idea, I did some experimenting with batch files today, and created a new orc character.

Here is an example of what I will probably be using as a base start file for future characters:

I could just start out with player.removeallitems, but the problem with that is many mods add items to the character at the start of the game. The Puppeteer pose mod for example. Those get removed too, and you have to go and manually add them back. All those individual remove commands leave your starting character with 140 gold and 5 potions of healing, magicka, and stamina. I have tried starting some characters with no potions as well, but do not recommend it. The first few levels become too dangerous, as the first real serious fight you get in - like against Falmer - you have no way to save your skin. I even had a 7th level character with no potions run into a Draugr Death Overlord. Let me tell you, that did not go well!

The timescale and healrate commands are just personal preference for me. I do not like the auto healing, as it makes me feel like all my characters are Wolverine. It also takes Restoration long enough to level as it is when you are using it every time you need to heal up after a fight. Auto healing means it levels even slower. The timescale of 10 is my personal sweet spot for how long time passes in the game, going back to Oblivion.

I did some more testing, and you can add in a standing stone power just fine this way. But you have to look up the id in the Creation Kit. The Wiki does not list them, and using the name will not work in a batch file. I gave my new Orc the Steed Stone, like so:


You can also tweak your skills, basically adding in the old Major Skills of Oblivion. I started taking 7 skills and giving each a 10 point bonus. You can use the Player.Modav command. Skill names with two words are typed with no spaces, and some skills do not have the names you would expect. For example, Archery is Marksman, and Speech is actually Speechcraft. The entire list of Actor Values can be found Here. However, every skill you modify this way shows up green in your Skill window. That is normal because it has been modified. But if you are like me, you don't like to see that unless you have some kind of active power or spell or other effect modifying it. You could use Player.SetAv instead, which changes the base value of the stat. But the problem there is that you lose all of your racial bonuses if you do that. So I just manually use SetAv after I run the batch file.

I decided to start giving my characters one favored Attribute, and add 20 points to it at the start. But for some reason using Player.SetAv on Health, Magicka, or Stamina does not work in my batch files. Though it works fine if I type it in manually at the console.

So for Durga I wound up using the following batch file:

This gives her Banded Iron armor, an iron battleaxe, a hunting bow, some arrows, a lockpick, a torch, and the standard potions and gold.

Very cool. If I want to try a set start like this, I'll be using your file here as a template.

A note from my own tweaking, SetAv doesn't always seem to 'stick'. For example, I made Aravi smaller than other Khajiit (SetScale) and slightly faster (SetAv speedmult). I've had to reapply those changes every now and then.

I did some digging, and some people have reported SetAV resetting after a reload. Others not. It seems that some values reset, and some do not. So far I have found that the skills and attribute I have changed have all remained the same.

I found a list of things that will reset:


I think it might be that these things are values created by the game crunching the values of other stats to get to them. When you reload the game does its number-crunching, and changes the value.

It isn't consistent in my experience. Aravi's scale (and Kharjo's) seemed to reset after a game update. SpeedMult resets more often (as your list suggests it would) but it isn't every time I load a game.

I created a starting cell. Basically a big room with good lighting. I put chests in it with all the various types of weapons and armor. Plus a smithing station to forge anything else. So far it is working really well. It provides a good place to work on faces, and since all the stuff is there in chests, it is easy to try on outfits to see how they look. Obviously I could not get modded items into the room, otherwise it would have about a hundred dependencies. But it is a good starting point.

An Argonian? They look really cool in that Falmer armor.

Why not just start in the qasmoke cell? It has everything in it already!

So, is this a technical sort of dev studio, or like an actual area where you would start the game?

I have never looked inside qasmoke before. I just tried it now, and it does have all the stuff, including from the DLCs. But the lighting is awful! I suppose I could change that, but the mod I created seems more convenient. I don't like the way qasmoke puts everything in just a few containers. It creates huge long lists of items to go through.



Both. Its a place to tweak a character outside of actual play and save them. Then all you have to do to start actually playing is coc to whatever cell you want to go.

I am the opposite, I actually prefer everything to be in one container. Less walking around and less wondering is it in that container? Wait no it's over there. No, neither of those, it's actually over in the corner.

Maybe, if you're able, you could put in an Imperial/Stormcloak/Jarldom registrar to set the sort of starting load out.

"Are you here to ply your craft as a warrior? A mage? Perhaps (chuckle) a thief?"

"You are going to have to sign for all of that. And make sure to bring it back clean and in good repair, or you will receive a fine of no less than 100 septims and up to the value of the borrowed equipment. And this here is your insurance policy..."

I just discovered something neat. I made spell tomes of all the standing stone signs. All you have to do is read it to get the standing stone power. Simple as that.

This is awesome! Oh my gosh, to begin with your Standing Stone power! I love it. Some Novice spell tomes would also be great so that mages start off with their basic “gear” as well. Excellent idea to put in an anvil for the mod items. When my inevitable second install happens I am definitely going this route.

Also I’ve been trying to figure out how to disable auto-healing, and there it is right in your batch file. Awesome, thanks!