January has been rummaging around Solstheim and her inventory has gotten packed full of elder scrolls and black books. These of course cannot be removed, ever. (well, you can sell the elder scrolls to the librarian at the Mages College, but January has not joined them yet). I looked for ways to remove them, but there are not really any, aside from a few house mods that have displays built in specifically for them. Since I don't want to use any of those, I came up with the following method. It will work on any item.




Use the Help console command or UESP Wiki or Creation Kit to get the ID of the item in question.

Now remove it from your inventory with the following command:

player.removeitem <ID> 1 (the final number is the number of items you want to remove)

This will delete the item from your inventory.

Then click on the container you want to store the item in to select it. Then open up the console again, and press the Up Arrow once to bring up your last command. You don't have to do it this way, but it is the most convenient.

Change it to:

additem <ID> 1

This will spawn the same item in the selected container.

Yes, where would we be without the ability to remove deadwood from our inventories? ... Now, just imagine playing these games on consoles, where quest item statuses never get removed. Imagine making a mistake and murdering some NPC. Lucien gives us that Blade of Woe which can NEVER get dropped. Imagine trying to justify this evil item in the inventory of a character who is otherwise a goodie!

I recently learned the Creation Kit has the ability to temporarily assign Quest Item status to ordinary items too, by giving this item an Alias with the Quest Item toggle flagged on. This coud be anything: a book, an outfit, whatever. As long as the quest is running, that item is going to be a Quest Item. So in those cases it's not a good idea to remove their QI status and then drop them, that would mess the quest up.

Not that anybody here would do such a thing, I just found it interesting how the CK does things so differently from earlier editors.

So far as I can tell, all quest items in Skyrim are done the way you just described, with the quest assigning it a temporarily alias. I looked yesterday, and could not find a Quest Object check box anywhere in the item records. So they all must be getting them from the quests themselves.

The reason I did it this way is so that you can store the items for later. You can still get them back out of the chest and back in your inventory for when you want to finish those quests, assuming you ever do. So far as I know, that would not break the quests. Though I have not experimented, so I am not sure. I guess I will find out when I need the elder scroll again for the Dawnguard questline.

Just an update. I did this with Meridia's Beacon, transferring it to a chest to get it out of Avery's inventory until he actually got around to doing the quest. Out of curiosity I went to her shrine without the beacon, and while she lamented the inconstancy of mortals when I got close, I could not start the quest by putting the beacon in its cradle, as I did not have it.

So I went back and got it, and returned. It worked without a hitch. I finished the quest, and noticed I still had the beacon in my inventory. From there on I could move it to another container with no trouble, as it was no longer quest-flagged.

So it is all working fine.

UCH, that damn beacon. It became immmmmmmersion-breaking, the number of times I'd either 1). See the beacon sitting there, and then make a PLAYER decision (me, not my toon): DON'T TOUCH IT! ... only because I know it'll be stuck in inventory forever if we don't do the quest. And how many times can you do those sort of quests?

2). Pick it up without thinking. Which means the only way to get rid of it is reload a save if we don't follow the quest. And how many times we we do those sort of quests? Again, breaks the "I" word.

I was writing a Laprima quest a couple days ago, and wanted to make an ingredient into a Quest Item. Was surprised I couldn't do it with a simple toggle. There wasn't a toggle to make the ingredient Quest Item! Same goes with potions. No toggle. Although at least there are Food Item and Potion toggles for both sorts of items. This means we can't accidentally consume them if these toggles are off.

But yeah, Beth often uses Aliases to assign quest status to items, which are tricky to understand. I haven't mastered how Aliases work, yet.