Survival mode

[Felipedsi]

Is it worth it to play this game on survival mode? How much this mode can contribute to a different and better experience? Thanks

[Neo]

I think it's worth it. Makes it so you need to prepare for your next adventure. Makes it feel more like an RPG. But it's not as good as the fallout 4 survival mode.

[Sairek Ceareste]

I like survival mode, but I don't like how it was implemented into the game for a few factors:


1. It doesn't respect Timescale settings. So if you change your timescale, everything goes out of whack. And if you change it too low, well, sleeping for one hour will nearly make your starve/dehydrate to death. Sleeping for more than 1 hour will probably kill you. And you will of course need to sleep every hour for 8 hours and -- it just breaks it.

2. Sometimes you just want to fast travel and there's no carriage nearby. Very annoying when you have fetch quests that require you to go back and forth the entirety of Skyrim over and over again, or up to the Throat of the World.

3. It doesn't disable health regen like it says it does. It just slaps a -1.00 to your health regen multiplier, so acquiring +1.01 to your health regen mulitplier enables health regen again, and that's very easy to do. A better way to effect health regen would be to effect the base number (you can do this in the console yourself though, so it's just a small nitpick)

4. The value of food items are just all over the place. How can some food restore only 2 points of hunger, while a cooked meal restores 360 hunger? Like I understand a stew is more filling than a single carrot, but it's not 180 times more filling than a carrot. I'm sure if I ate 180 carrots at once, I would die from overeating.

5. Having to level up via a bed. I get it was a classic thing, but I didn't like it.

6. The lowered weight capacity. Again though, this can be remedied via the console, so small nitpick.




Personally I think there's better mods you can use instead which allow you much better options and respect timescale better, such as iNeed and Frostbite. iNeed gives you the food, drink and sleep you need for survival mode, and Frostbite gives you the whole temperature thing. Both are extremely light and work with other mods, too. If you want food to still provide benefit as well, than something like "Simple Food Overhaul" also has that covered, too.

[Rez Elwin]

I agree with the above, iNeed and Frostbite provide a better survival experience and don't have the almost draconian restrictions the built in one has.

[Fitness Lauch]

Don't really like it. By playing the mode it becomes very obvious that survival mode was just added into an existing game that wasn't designed around it. It's okayish if you just want to play the game as a sandbox but as soon as you want to do quest lines it becomes a boring backtracking nightmare since not all towns have carriages (mage guild, Dawnguard, Dark Brotherhood for example). It could work with more carriages and faster mounts but currently it just feels out of place. Doesn't really add much of a challenge imo, just makes everything take 10 times longer.

[ĿIFE oƒ ƤIE]

There are mods you can download that do the same thing but more and far better.

[Neo]

I'm playing as a vampire in my latest play through, using better vampires and in survival mode, having a blast. Can only travel during the night unless I want to slowly burn to death in the sun and have my powers restricted. Use blood potions to deal with my hunger when no people are about to feed on.

Means I can't use carriages too often because at the end of the journey I'm too tired to cast mortal mask to hide my vampirism, so the town folk want to kill me. When I'm in towns with mortal's mask spell on me, I take that time to collect blood from sleeping people so I have enough "food" to last for my next adventure.

I only play fallout 4 now with survival mode active. It was done much better in fallout 4 though, it's much more brutal and can't be easily toggled on and off like skyrim (need to use the console)

[kharille]

I'm on my 2nd playthrough for Skyrim and FO4. Its good once you figure out the game mechanics. You can use an optimized enchanted load out to help overcome some issues. Time consuming, more so so since I hoard all my gear in one location.

Bearing in mind it go too easy once you've maxed out crafting skills, it helps keep me engaged. Might try to raise the difficulty level up eventually.

[Enemy Brown]

I agree with Sairek Ceareste and the others about the poor implementation of vanilla survival mode, especially regarding food.

Another food issue is its connection to warmth. Torches don't warm you enough, and the map wasn't built with places to get warm in mind.

So, walking from Winterhold to Windhelm (for example) - because there's not even a boat between them, even though they could have easily made one - you will probably freeze to death without hot food. But hot food requires fire salts. which are rare, especially in earlier levels.

[Junior]

Originally posted by Sairek Ceareste:

I like survival mode, but I don't like how it was implemented into the game for a few factors:


1. It doesn't respect Timescale settings. So if you change your timescale, everything goes out of whack. And if you change it too low, well, sleeping for one hour will nearly make your starve/dehydrate to death. Sleeping for more than 1 hour will probably kill you. And you will of course need to sleep every hour for 8 hours and -- it just breaks it.

2. Sometimes you just want to fast travel and there's no carriage nearby. Very annoying when you have fetch quests that require you to go back and forth the entirety of Skyrim over and over again, or up to the Throat of the World.

3. It doesn't disable health regen like it says it does. It just slaps a -1.00 to your health regen multiplier, so acquiring +1.01 to your health regen mulitplier enables health regen again, and that's very easy to do. A better way to effect health regen would be to effect the base number (you can do this in the console yourself though, so it's just a small nitpick)

4. The value of food items are just all over the place. How can some food restore only 2 points of hunger, while a cooked meal restores 360 hunger? Like I understand a stew is more filling than a single carrot, but it's not 180 times more filling than a carrot. I'm sure if I ate 180 carrots at once, I would die from overeating.

5. Having to level up via a bed. I get it was a classic thing, but I didn't like it.

6. The lowered weight capacity. Again though, this can be remedied via the console, so small nitpick.




Personally I think there's better mods you can use instead which allow you much better options and respect timescale better, such as iNeed and Frostbite. iNeed gives you the food, drink and sleep you need for survival mode, and Frostbite gives you the whole temperature thing. Both are extremely light and work with other mods, too. If you want food to still provide benefit as well, than something like "Simple Food Overhaul" also has that covered, too.

1- thats bad true,
3- thats good as you can still get health regen with items and stuff
4- it should not be realistic, it should be balanced, a cooked food should give you more food, and a item taht you find easily on the ground should give almost nothing.


i do prefer the official survival one than the mods, but its just personal taste in the end, i like that the diseases really matter in the official survival mode.

[th]

OP, Survival Mode is a perfect match for this game. It feels like Skyrim and Survival Mode were created for each other. It turns Skyrim into something it always should be. Must be even. From the moment I've tried Survival Mode I now can not imagine at all how to play without it. Almost every single aspect of it is perfect. I am no joking, nor trolling.

Listen to almost none of the speakers above me. They are just some weak willed, casual, softcore players who want to play hardcore by not playing hardcore coz it's too hardcore for them. They fundamentally contradict themselves.

Survival is the best creation of all 74 of them. The entire CC program is justified completely due to Survival Mode alone.

It does a lot of really good things.
1) The entire inns system in the game is now a thing. Inns were mostly useless without Survival. But now you just have to use them very actively and for very natural reasons. It's awesomely immersive change that Survival delivers.
2) The same goes about food and cooking system. This system was basically ornamental without Survival. I struggle to remember one single use of it in my old survivalless playthroughs. But now your life depends on it and it's totally cool.
3) Legendary difficulty was always not difficult enough for me. But now with Survival the gameplay is significantly harder which is totally good for me. Skyrim always has been a casual game in comparison with Morrowind. But Survival at long last has mitigated this problem a little.
4) The absence of fast travel makes the game much more immersive. I can not comprehend at all how it is possible to have an equivalent of a subway in a fantasy world. It ruins the immersiveness completely. But with Survival it's just perfect.
5) Reduced carry weight is a good thing too. You start to value every point of carry weight. You have to think through your preparations better to avoid taking non necessary things with you, as in real life exactly. You have to choose wisely what loot to grab. It's awesome.
6) And much, much more. It's awesome how such small changes turn the game into almost completely different game by the features of the gameplay process.

I can give you some advises.

There is a creation which is a must have to use with Survival and it's Camping. It gives your an ability to avoid deaths from freezing. Insanely important.

Also Adventurer's Backpack and Wild Horses are pretty useful. The first one coz it helps a lot with your low carry weight problem. And wild horses are immortal and have more stamina than normal horses so they can galloping longer. And they are completely free which is very handy at the start of the game.

You can get a lot more Fire Salts using the Atronach Forge. It takes any soul gem, any ruby or a jewelry with a ruby and a usual salt. Very handy.

[th]

Let me add some more things.

OP, if you really want to try a totally hard Survival playthrough then choose an Argonian. They have a weakness to cold so they are the hardest race to play with Survival. I now prefer to play as Argonian because of that.

As I've said Survival has almost no flaws. But one of them is a shortage of torches. There are no reliable source of torches in the game. No vendors sell them. So grab every torch you see in every dungeon where you may find them lighting the areas being hanged up in sconces on the walls.

[Sefirotfl]

I am currently playing Skyrim for the first time (Anniversary Edition), after watching some let's play, and immediately took survival, because I hated how all that food laying around was unnecessary :D. I enjoy it, though admittedly I don't have comparison with survival mods that exists. In my books it really helps with immersion, especially when it's cold. Whenever the weather turns to ♥♥♥♥ I almost physically feel my character freezing XD and cuss as I would in real life in a snowstorm :D. I would agree with above mentioned, that it is a bit irritating that in survival bread and cheese is treated as 'uncooked' and gives little hunger points; also the discrepancy between uncooked and cooked is much too big. The lack of fast travelling can be annoying, but then again that's the whole point, isn't it? For things to be a little more realistic, and realistic does mean annoying. However it does add its own flavor, when you have to reach everywhere on foor or horse (horse is a must). I haven't noticed the lack of health regeneration, maybe it was fixed? My health definitely does NOT regenerate at all, unless I go to sleep. The lowered weight capacity was fixed to a point by a backpack, and also you can always have a companion and/or invest in stamina. Though honestly I'm doing a no companion playthrough and it really isn't such a big issue, you just have to keep in mind to drop by your home from time to time, which, again, is quite realistic, and not to grab every single valuable heavy thing you found. One truly broken thing is the warmth of armor, t you basically HAVE to wear light armor or else think constantly about torches, camping, hot food (and there is too litle fire salts to cook much of it).

[Fitness Lauch]

Originally posted by th:

Listen to almost none of the speakers above me. They are just some weak willed, casual, softcore players who want to play hardcore by not playing hardcore coz it's too hardcore for them. They fundamentally contradict themselves.

What, Skyrim isn't hardcore or competitive in any way to begin with? There are literally a million ways to break the game, even without exploits (which the game is full of) and survival mode doesn't change anything about that. Yes, it becomes a tiny bit more difficult but nothing that you can't play around. The main difference is that the playthrough will take 10 times longer than intended. Speedrunning the boots which increase movement speed by 100% was the first thing which I've done and it still became incredible boring once I did hit the mid game.

If Legendary is too easy for you then you can also restrict yourself by avoiding companions/summons, play a melee build (without stealth), don't use any items from the Anniversary Edition, play without crafting or whatever for example.

[th]

Originally posted by Fitness Lauch:

What, Skyrim isn't hardcore or competitive in any way to begin with?

For me it kind of is. I kind of compete with myself.

Originally posted by Fitness Lauch:

There are literally a million ways to break the game, even without exploits (which the game is full of)

Which I don't use at all.

Originally posted by Fitness Lauch:

and survival mode doesn't change anything about that.

It does if you don't use them.

Originally posted by Fitness Lauch:

The main difference is that the playthrough will take 10 times longer

Which is my intention.

Originally posted by Fitness Lauch:

If Legendary is too easy for you then you can also restrict yourself by avoiding companions/summons, play a melee build (without stealth), don't use any items from the Anniversary Edition, play without crafting or whatever for example.

I do set other restrictions for myself. For example I don't use mods or creations which make the game easier as I see it. For now I have installed only 10 creations of 70 as a result of this limitation I've set for myself. Another example is that I am really sad that wild horses from Wild Horses creation are essential. Too cheaty. It would be a lot better if they would be just normally respawnable along with the cell from which they originates and you would need to tame them again.

[Fitness Lauch]

Originally posted by th:

Originally posted by Fitness Lauch:

What, Skyrim isn't hardcore or competitive in any way to begin with?

For me it kind of is. I kind of compete with myself.

Originally posted by Fitness Lauch:

There are literally a million ways to break the game, even without exploits (which the game is full of)

Which I don't use at all.

Originally posted by Fitness Lauch:

and survival mode doesn't change anything about that.

It does if you don't use them.

Originally posted by Fitness Lauch:

The main difference is that the playthrough will take 10 times longer

Which is my intention.

Originally posted by Fitness Lauch:

If Legendary is too easy for you then you can also restrict yourself by avoiding companions/summons, play a melee build (without stealth), don't use any items from the Anniversary Edition, play without crafting or whatever for example.

I do set other restrictions for myself. For example I don't use mods or creations which make the game easier as I see it. For now I have installed only 10 creations of 70 as a result of this limitation I've set for myself. Another example is that I am really sad that wild horses from Wild Horses creation are essential. Too cheaty. It would be a lot better if they would be just normally respawnable along with the cell from which they originates and you would need to tame them again.

- For most people it's not, there's no leaderboard, no achievements, no pvp, no anything behind it (other than bragging rights).
- No idea what you're exactly using but doubt that you're not using anything which could be considered as op.
- I've done a "challenge" run (melee, no followers/summons, no crafting, no exploits, no stealth) pre Anniversary Edition and after and it was almost exactly the same with the only exception that it took me 5x longer. Wasn't really harder, just delays everything.
- Up to you if you like it. I do not because there's barely any value or fun experience moving from A to B and from B to A over and over and over again. Some generic random encounters on the way aren't enough for me.
- Well almost everything from the CC club is broken, there's high end armor around which can be grabbed on level 1 or that farm which allows you to max alchemy in 10 minutes on level 1 and pays 1k gold passively each day. Don't have the new creations but I've heard that there's a summon now that reduces the magic cost of spells by 50% like seriously. Makes me wonder if the target audience moved from rpg players to exploiters and cheaters ~.~