My avatar has spent many hundred hours in Cyrodiil (and elsewhere). During his adventures he's managed to acquire a vast horde of treasure. Weapons, armor, books & notes/letters, keys, spell scrolls, potions, jewelry, etc.. You name it, he has it... in abundance. How much does this contribute to save-game bloat (and performance/stability for that matter)? Is it significant enough to warrant a major pruning of assets? Does loot location (dwelling-chests as opposed to avatar pack) make a difference?

Related, does having, say, 450 Ayleid Coins in my pack (all represented by a single coin icon) add more bloat than a single coin?

Many of my horded items are written communication amassed while advancing quests. It is safe to toss these (if need be to reduce bloat) once that particular quest-branch is finished, or would it bork the quest/mod?

Thanks!
-Decrepit

I don't really have the answer you're looking for, but I have to wonder why does savegame bloat scare everyone? I've had saves get up in excess of ten megabytes, but it never really affected my game or playing or anything.

Is the size of the file, or something?

it effects how long it takes to load the save game or to save a new one. I would think that loot does contribute to it, but it would not make a noticeable difference in the long run and then you could sell it or just drop it and it would be taken out of the game. There are much worse things that can cause bloating (such as placeatme)

I would think that what is being described here is one of the smallest factors to save game bloat, bloating is really an issue if you start misusing the console.

I wouldn't even call that bloating. http://www.yacoby.net/es/forum/25/6336491170651720.html of savegame bloating:

That's not really an example of save game bloating, as stacks of items still retain one formID. Bloating typically refers to new items being created that have a new formID associated with them. There is a limit to how many formIDs can exist, and once that limit is reached no new items can be created for that index. While large stacks of items can increase save game size it will never cause bloat.

Overly large savegames eventually become corrupted. The limit has actually been hit on the 360 without Shivering Isles (read: without any horri-bad PlaceAtMe going on), though that took something like 300 hours of gameplay to achieve. But with PlaceAtMe (for example), you can hit the limit much faster - in particular, a specific place in Shivering Isles could hit it in about ten minutes if you just stood there.

The patch fixed this somewhat, which removes the hard limit, but even without that you still get performance, stability, and animation issues as the savefile gets too big.

What would be a save file that is too big? Mine is 13MB.