The long-running webcomic xkcd did a strip I think about a lot. It’s about why we shouldn’t make fun of people for admitting they didn’t know something. As the strip says, for everything you know “every day there are, on average, 10,000 people in the US hearing about it for the first time.” Earlier this week, most of those 10,000 people seem to have been on the Skyrim subreddit.
“I must be stupid,” a user called Skyrim_For_Everyone posted, “been playing for a while and never realized you could shoot beehives from trees.” It’s true. There are beehives in Skyrim and you can knock them down with arrows or spells to get at the honey inside. (As well as husk and bees.) And yet, I’ve never seen a mod that lets you play as Yogi Bear.
“You’re not stupid, I didn’t realize that either” set the tone for most of the replies, with the occasional “Wait, there’s beehives?” and quite a few people sharing other things they didn’t realize until they’d been playing Skyrim for hundreds of hours.
A lot of them are about other things you can shoot, with spells or arrows or even dragonshouts. There are all kinds of unreachable items to knock down, like bird’s nests, the burning braziers over the convenient oil slicks in dungeons (they’re the patches of ground with the pinkish sheen), and the magical crystal traps that shoot lightning. You can even shoot tripwires to set them off, and shoot hawks out of the sky to get their beaks and feathers for alchemy.
Maybe none of this is news to you because you’ve 100%-ed Skyrim and collected all the Stone of Barenziah and done everything there is to do. But, like the xkcd strip says, “If I make fun of people, I train them not to tell me when they have those moments. And I miss out on the fun.”
Best Skyrim mods
Best Skyrim Special Edition mods
Skyrim console commands