legitamate items get incorrectly marked as stolen

[/*ShadowHero*/]

So this has probably been covered before, but I just want to see if it is a common issue.

So I purchased a Master Mortar and pestle from sombody. Then I steal a different master mortar pestle from somebody else. When I got caught by the guards, both of these are now gone from my inventory. When I use TFH command in the console, I see that both are now marked as stolen. This has to be a bug, because this makes no sense whatsoever and its expensive to buy yet another one of these. If this is always the case then I can never steal items that I already own or I will lose those too? this is just bizzare and makes me like this game a little less

[/*ShadowHero*/]

For the record the only mods I'm using are Morrowind Code Patch and Better Bodies

[Chrono]

if you get them back drop 1 get arrested then it will remove the stolen marker on you so guards won't take your stuff as they take anything that is marked stolen no matter the quantity beware if you stole multiple of said item it may take you doing that for the quanitity you stole the idea behind that feature is to return the stolen item back to said person you stole from them even if you purchased it legitamately

[Zemecon]

I think I know how this happened. Did you try to sell the mortar and pestle back to whoever you stole it from? Because if you did, the game should mark only one of the two as belonging to the owner but if you sell one of them then it cannot be marked because you already sold it, so the other mortar and pestle is marked instead, and what you see are both of them belonging to the owner of the stolen mortar and pestle because technically they are both now owned by the owner.

If that doesn't sound confusing enough, the game may try to make predictions based on this possible chain of events, even if you haven't sold either objects, whereby it marks entire stacks rather than single objects. Then the guard A.I. removes the second object and lets the merchant keep the first object, figuring it is the legitimately owned object. The game cannot retrieve an object once it has been sold and therefore can't account for it so it accounts for any spares you have instead. This may be an object stacking bug that was created when a developer tried to foolproof a possible exploit involving hiding an object by selling it back.

But then all of this assumes you even tried to sell one of the objects back. It could also be a bug regarding an inability of the game to mark stacks at all once they've all been lumped together. That is a common bug that happens in other games as well. In order for this whole misassociation thing to be solved, multiple objects need to be labelled differently based on what happens to them so that they can't be stacked. They can't just be tracked by the NPC A.I.'s in this game once they've been stacked because once that happens the status of the stolen object becomes identical to the rest of the objects in that stack, whether the entire stack gets marked as "Stolen" or not.

This should be fixed in the MCP, though. What version do you have? When did you download it? There is a similar fix that the MCP does cover so I would suggest going through the MCP itself and checking it. If it is checked then there could be an issue with the MCP instead.

I tried this out myself and ran into the same problem so I am not sure what is happening, only that I know this is definately a bug.

Originally posted by Teralitha:

If you already had one, why did you buy another?

OP said they bought a mortar and pestle first. Then they stole the second one.

EDIT 1: Added to sentence in third paragraph and added separate sentence.

EDIT 2: Added sentence to second paragraph and separated first line in response..

[/*ShadowHero*/]

Originally posted by Salinité:

I tried this out myself and ran into the same problem so I am not sure what is happening, only that I know this is definately a bug.

Thank you for confirming. I just used the console to restore the item and threw the other one away. At least I know about this so I can be more careful with it in the future.

[Caethyril]

Yes, it's a bug, but it's probably not going to get fixed. >_<

Morrowind tracks items based on their base objects. Multiple instances of items with the same internal ID (e.g. your two Master's Mortar & Pestles) are tracked as stolen or not based on that ID, e.g. steal one piece of saltrice and suddenly any saltrice you obtain, even by picking it in the wild, counts as stolen. ._.

MCP[www.nexusmods.com] currently offers this fix:

- Confiscated item fix. Prevents guards from always taking items they have confiscated before. Merchants will no longer seize items stolen from their faction containers in the past. Taking items belonging to dead people not longer marks the item as stolen.

This makes stealing stuff much more bearable in certain cases, but doesn't change the stolen flag's scope (presumably it's too difficult to do).

[psychotron666]

It's a bug that's coded right into the engine and unable to be removed. It makes it so for example if you steal a diamond, every diamond in the entire world will have a stolen flag. Let's say you steal a diamond from the balmora alchemist. Later if you try to sell her another diamond you got from somewhere else, she'll claim its hers and attack you. All guards wi confiscate diamonds for the rest of the game because they're all flagged as stolen.

It's basically the biggest glitch in morrowind that's been unable to be fixed in the last 15 years.

Your best bet is to drop everything before talking to a guard if you have a bounty

[/*ShadowHero*/]

Interesting.... I can't believe a glitch that bad would be left in the game. Seems like a huge oversight to me. Yea that actually happened though, I bought like 4 diamonds from a different merchent but the guards took them away from me. I was pretty pissed to say the least XD

[XsilverwaterX]

Originally posted by /*ShadowHero*/:

Interesting.... I can't believe a glitch that bad would be left in the game. Seems like a huge oversight to me. Yea that actually happened though, I bought like 4 diamonds from a different merchent but the guards took them away from me. I was pretty pissed to say the least XD

Considering Morrowind was never X-mass rushed or anything, just idiots smashing their balls on the keyboards and letting the game run with the ball-smashed code. This is a hilarious yet honest embarrassing bug. Even the dedric gear from the statues gets marked as stolen even though the guards were there?! Conclusion: Elder Scrolls Guards are just jerks to divine levels.

[theo]

Imagine you're a guard officer and someone stole a sweetroll in your town.
You catch a thief next day and he has 2 sweetrolls on him. He's also an outlander. Will you be so kind to assume only one was stolen? Will you bother sorting out which one? If you ask me I'd just eat both.
I mean of course this behavior is caused by technical limitations (item type sharing one ID) but there are technical limitations designers are consciously ok with, even sometimes using them intentionally.

[Zemecon]

^^^ Good point.

And I don't even think it's that much of a bug, either, now that I think of it. More likely, it seems to be some sort of safeguard against various exploits that could render recognising stolen goods useless. You would be able to steal something, trade it in for the same thing somewhere else, then sell the duplicate back to whoever you stole the original item from.

To go even further, let's say you have two merchants selling the exact same thing. You steal the same item from each of them and cross-sell them. Giving each item their own unique merchant tag, then trying to foolproof any possible exploits, would probably make the required programming too unnecessarily complicated when all you would need to do is add a generic Item Missing tag instead.

[theo]

Yeah and when they added unique codes to each item in Oblivion that made things (troubleshooting, using console and modding) unnecessarily more complicated.
The way it is in Morrowind, it's an elegant design and the issues it causes ain't really issues. For most items it doesn't make sense for guards to recognize them as unique because they're as generic as pieces of bread.
Like what kind of divination magic guards use in Skyrim to know it's THIS particular ruby that was stolen?
So both designs have limitations and the actual reason people complain isn't concern for proper work of a game mechanic, but the fact that they can lose more than they expected and cannot exploit the system the way they're used to.

[Spirit]

Criminal scum... just take it back from the stolen goods chest. It is really your choice if you get arrested or not.