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The best item in Skyrim is…Don’t axe me to explain

Don’t axe me to explain

This axe.

My new character inThe Elder Scrolls V: Skyrimis a bandit.

I have 101 mods installed.One of themlets me start as a member of the bandit faction, in theory meaning that all guards will attack me on sight, and all bandits will ignore me. In practice, one of the other 100 mods installed has clashed with it, so other bandits attack me anyway. There are also many, many more bandits. And the handful of combat mods I’ve stitched into my Gordian modlist since 2011 mean that, when fighting multiple people, anything short of heavy artillery basically guarantees death. Almost everywhere with people is hostile.

3 damage to you, 300 to my heart

I can’t slum it like you can in vanilla. Wandering in the hills alone, I will starve, I willfreeze, I willget sickfrom drinking untreated river water. I can basically only carry what will fit in my crevices (thanks to amodsome kind soultweakedto suit my needs). But I can forage. I can scrape together branches for a fire, steal vegetables from some mountain-living sucker’s tiny garden, and spend hours looking for a good rock to make into a flint axe, so that I may clad myself in the skin of goats.

I can’t win a fight like this. I can in theorynon-murderously rob travellerslike a sensible bandit, but I can’t even get to the road safely with skirmishes all over the place (thanks toanotherfewmods that it’s frankly foolish to use together, OH WELL), and swarms of bandits (and another). I can’t buy weapons, or sell anything I find (not that I can carry much anyway). I could build a storage box (mod), but for that I’d need a forge, and I’m not aware of any I can get to without fighting a lot of people. The outlook, it is bleak.

Me @ Skyrim: Other people have adventures while I walk past and judge them.

But then I find the axe.

How a Sin character sees the world.

When I come back to the cave a few days later to rob the survivors with my trusty bow and flint arrows, I find magical boots worth 4,000 gold. I throw them away. No use to me, mate. I’m a bandit. I travel light. And I have an axe.

You picked a bad time to get lost, M’aiq