Dragon endlessly circling bleakwind basin ....

[Edgemoor]

Here is a weird one, on the last two play through I had a dragon turn up (from no where apparently) over Bleakwind Basin and just enlessly circle overhead. For reference Bleakwind basin is the giant camp in the centre of the plains outside of Whiterun.

Weirdly you can also see the dragon circling from inside of whiterun as well.

On the first playthrough as I approached a specific spot near the basin the dragon attacked and I killed it. Not problem.

On my current play through the dragon appears and I can't get it to attack. So I leave it alone.

Later on I am going to Fallowstone cave for the orc stronghold quest and the same dragon is in the cave attacking me and everything else. I know it is the same dragon because I checked the id of both dragons (ff000ef8).

No way to kill the dragon in the cave, as it can fly through walls. So I reload from a saved game and head back to white run plains and go near to where the dragon is circling over bleakwind basin.

Using console commands I manage to kill the dragon:

prid ff000ef8
kill
disable

Close console and dragon disappears, reopen console

enable

The dragon reappears and falls to the ground and take it's soul as normal.

Does anyone have any idea what is going on? I'd say it was a mod but I have literally playing with a lot of the mods for a long time.

[psychotron666]

Dragons circling overhead and not attacking has been a thing since the original 2011 release

[CrackeR]

Verify game files?

[Death Approaches]

dragons shouldn't be able to clip through walls nor follow you into other cells, they have the same rules for physics as you... if they're behind the face normals they can pass through the wall to the "proper" side, but should not be able to pass back through. that's bonkers, is it flying proper, or moving around static posed, like it has 'tcl' active on it?

well, you did what I would do, 'disable' and 'markfordelete' and forget about it; if it's happened only once in one place per playthrough? it's not worth your time and effort for the troubleshooting involved. if this was happening to ALL dragons, or causing other related weirdnesses, OK maybe take the time to track it down... I'd just move on, otherwise. I mean it's a rando spawned dragon, hence the ff refID not a named one or tied to any dragon packages or event you need to happen, I wouldn't worry about it.

[Edgemoor]

Originally posted by CrackeR:

Verify game files?

A good idea, but the fact the dragon has appeared in the same place on two seperate play throughs suggests it's deliberate, or at least a bug that can be replicated. But it's always worth a try :)

[Edgemoor]

Originally posted by psychotron666:

Dragons circling overhead and not attacking has been a thing since the original 2011 release

I've had that quite a few times, but they always disappear. This one is permanent.

[Edgemoor]

Originally posted by Death Approaches:

dragons shouldn't be able to clip through walls nor follow you into other cells, they have the same rules for physics as you... if they're behind the face normals they can pass through the wall to the "proper" side, but should not be able to pass back through. that's bonkers, is it flying proper, or moving around static posed, like it has 'tcl' active on it?

well, you did what I would do, 'disable' and 'markfordelete' and forget about it; if it's happened only once in one place per playthrough? it's not worth your time and effort for the troubleshooting involved. if this was happening to ALL dragons, or causing other related weirdnesses, OK maybe take the time to track it down... I'd just move on, otherwise. I mean it's a rando spawned dragon, hence the ff refID not a named one or tied to any dragon packages or event you need to happen, I wouldn't worry about it.

I've changed a few mods and updated a few and started a new character, hopefully it won't happen again. It's definitely not a named dragon, this time it was just a normal blood dragon.

What is weird is once I killed the dragon there was a corpse on the plains outside Whiterun and inside of Fallowstone Cave. Even if I had not gone into Fallowstone cave. Not two sets of loot though sadly.

[psychotron666]

Originally posted by Edgemoor:

Originally posted by psychotron666:

Dragons circling overhead and not attacking has been a thing since the original 2011 release

I've had that quite a few times, but they always disappear. This one is permanent.

Ah okay, that is weird. And in the same spot no less.

[Hypertext Eye]

If you spot a dragon before it attacks, and you watch it, it will never attack

[AshenBuncakes]

Have you used the skipper mod? Let's you skip certain quests with scripts? I have had this problem with the western watchtower dragon. Just circled bleak falls barrow continuously. That's not too far from bleakwind basin. It was there because the watchtower quest was skipped.

After killing it, it disappears as usual.

Idk. I have never heard of a dragon flying through a cave.

[toasty frosting]

Neither here nor there I suppose, but the sky above Bleakwind Basin is (0,0,0) on the map, so a lot of orphaned items from negligent mods will end up suspended above it.

[P.]

Its form id starts with 'ff', it means the dragon was probably generated for a random encounter.
There's a random encounter where a non-hostile dragon just fly around, it doesn't attack unless provoked. Once you get far enough, the dragon despawns.

But by disabling it through the console, you're risking to break every random encounter in your save file because the scripts that shutdown this random encounter might not run correctly as the dragon was previously disabled or deleted by console commands.

[Death Approaches]

Originally posted by Edgemoor:

What is weird is once I killed the dragon there was a corpse on the plains outside Whiterun and inside of Fallowstone Cave. Even if I had not gone into Fallowstone cave. Not two sets of loot though sadly.

yeah no loot because it's not a corpse it's the corpse, if you had tagged it I bet it was the same refID; re-ragdoll'd at a new location... sometimes they move with you, not sure of the criteria that's required to trigger it, but I've seen it a few times over the years, you fast travel or cell transition, even minutes after the kill, then <poof!>, here comes a dragon skeleton, or intact if it was a respawn you can't get another soul from, sliding down the hillside or falling from the sky... or you turn a corner in a town and there it is, middle of the street or draped over a building like some nordic trophy. (happens in vanilla too.)

problem is you can't 'tcl' fly back to the last location to check if there's a duplicate corpse, because it requires a cell load, but I'm thinkin, nope it's the same one, following you, haunting you... some days these curiosities make me wonder, other days it's just "welcome to Skyrim!" and move on with your playing. (and other days, ooh look, a septim!)

[Death Approaches]

Originally posted by P.:

But by disabling it through the console, you're risking to break every random encounter in your save file because the scripts that shutdown this random encounter might not run correctly as the dragon was previously disabled or deleted by console commands.

not remotely true.

while it makes logical sense, pretty sure that's never going a problem... you're thinking that the ff###### redID that was disabled, over a save that's hundreds of hours old, that refID eventually gets re-used, and whatever gets assigned that 'disable'd one will still be disabled, and yes it's not proper culling to 'disable' without any cleanup, but to be fair, lots of things are just 'disable'... take critters, when you nab a butterfly out of midair, it pops out of existence because you touching just disabled it.

it's still a temporary refID and just for that particular instance/alias, reset by both the cell culling resets and the world instance spawn routine enable, I'm fairly sure. I mean the spawning objectreferences has states you can set to disable before bringing it into the world so you can manipulate it without the player seeing it, pre-kill it on loading so it starts dead, and so forth. while I'm sure there's probably a few outlier cases, and I wouldn't do this with refIDs within the mod order load order ranges as those are stable references, I've never personally ran into a problem doing this with temp references.

here's a real-world example, find a vanilla aliased objectreference instance; I spotted Faldrus[en.uesp.net] wandering to Azura's shrine, he's got a refID of FF0021B9, I 'disable' him and verified with 'getdisabled' (GetDisabled >> 1) and then kept playing, traversing a lot of cells over the next 10-15 mins, went to Solstheim to check on Ralis and the "Unearthed" dig and such, etc.

do a 'prid ff0021b9' and it's currently (ha this is funny, my exact example) assigned to a critter target, DoNotPlaceCritterLandingMarkerHelper and 'getdisabled' most certainly returns GetDisabled >> 0... and 5 minutes later, it's an empty refID that can't be 'prid' anymore, it's been recycled.

your experiences may differ, but then you may not have experienced this, just parroting something you read once that sounds logical, cause it does. but that's not the truth, at least not all of it.

[P.]

Originally posted by Death Approaches:

Originally posted by P.:

But by disabling it through the console, you're risking to break every random encounter in your save file because the scripts that shutdown this random encounter might not run correctly as the dragon was previously disabled or deleted by console commands.

not remotely true.

while it makes logical sense, pretty sure that's never going a problem... you're thinking that the ff###### redID that was disabled, over a save that's hundreds of hours old, that refID eventually gets re-used, and whatever gets assigned that 'disable'd one will still be disabled, and yes it's not proper culling to 'disable' without any cleanup, but to be fair, lots of things are just 'disable'... take critters, when you nab a butterfly out of midair, it pops out of existence because you touching just disabled it.

it's still a temporary refID and just for that particular instance/alias, reset by both the cell culling resets and the world instance spawn routine enable, I'm fairly sure. I mean the spawning objectreferences has states you can set to disable before bringing it into the world so you can manipulate it without the player seeing it, pre-kill it on loading so it starts dead, and so forth. while I'm sure there's probably a few outlier cases, and I wouldn't do this with refIDs within the mod order load order ranges as those are stable references, I've never personally ran into a problem doing this with temp references.

here's a real-world example, find a vanilla aliased objectreference instance; I spotted Faldrus[en.uesp.net] wandering to Azura's shrine, he's got a refID of FF0021B9, I 'disable' him and verified with 'getdisabled' (GetDisabled >> 1) and then kept playing, traversing a lot of cells over the next 10-15 mins, went to Solstheim to check on Ralis and the "Unearthed" dig and such, etc.

do a 'prid ff0021b9' and it's currently (ha this is funny, my exact example) assigned to a critter target, DoNotPlaceCritterLandingMarkerHelper and 'getdisabled' most certainly returns GetDisabled >> 0... and 5 minutes later, it's an empty refID that can't be 'prid' anymore, it's been recycled.

your experiences may differ, but then you may not have experienced this, just parroting something you read once that sounds logical, cause it does. but that's not the truth, at least not all of it. :devilskiss:

I'm talking about reference ids assigned to aliases. Those ref ids cannot be recycled while their quests are running.

While a quest that makes a dragon fly around is running, the ref id (dragon alias) cannot be deleted or reset. If the script that shutdowns this quest fails to run because the ref id was disabled, the ref ID (dragon) will persist forever in OP's save, and next random encounters (quests) might not run because the game uses the same script event to trigger random encounters. For example, if the node that runs road random encounters has the property Max Concurrent Quests set to 1, none of road random encounters will run anymore until the quest that makes a dragon fly around stops. Source: https://ck.uesp.net/wiki/SM_Event_Node

Sources (persistence of references):
https://ck.uesp.net/w/index.php?title=Cell_Reset
https://ck.uesp.net/wiki/Delete_-_ObjectReference


In short, if you disable a quest NPC, this quest might break.
The dragon is a quest npc. Dragon flying around is a quest, as I stated above. Source: https://en.uesp.net/wiki/Skyrim:World_Interactions

[Edgemoor]

Well I've started a new character, after removing a lot of mods, and I can say the game is much more stable.

Not sure what the exact problem was, but the problems that were occurring (not just the one I detailed in this post) suggested historical issues that should have been resolved by the Unofficial Skyrim patch.

Very peculiar since the latest version was loaded. Either way removing old mods seems to have resolved the issue, thank you to everyone that responded.