Insights to Shalidor's Insights

[Tantrevalles]

At only 200 hours I'm still a noob, and I'm directing this to other noobs having trouble with Shalidor's Insights.

YouTube won't help you. Everyone has to find the item in a different place. The game selects randomly from the entire list of available "boss" chest locations. If you've got Dragonborn and hearthfire, that's 140+ locations.

Here's how it worked for me.

After hovering the mouse on the quest and pressing "m" to mark my map, the quest pointer didn't seem to mark anything specific. It merely placed itself close to Shearpoint, which I knew from being there already didn't have a dungeon. Still, there I went, and searched the entire Shearpoint area plus its surrounding mountain range several times.

No luck. So I checked these forums. "Must be on the other island," seemed to be the consensus, so there I went. The pointer wouldn't even work there. Back to Skyrim, and back to the Shearpoint mountain for an even more obsessive search.

Nothing.

At a loss, I wondered if it would help me to see where the very tip of the location pointer was. At a crawl, checking my pointer every few feet, I finally had to conclude that the tip of the pointer landed at the base of the mountain range rather than its outer, upper edge.

So down I jumped and Lo! there was . . . a giant camp? Yup - a giant camp.

It turns out that the pointer couldn't point me directly to the camp because I hadn't discovered it yet in my travels.

In its chest: Shalidor's Insights.

So: follow the arrow. Happy gaming!