For the quests where you aquire the black books and the elderscrolls as I understand it the ids of the items you have in your inventory are not the same as in the object window, it gets some sort of quest id. If in some script you checked if you were holding the object listed in the object window it would say you don't have that item. Is there any point after you finish the quest where the item you are holding becomes a regular non quest item?

As you see I really haven't figured out the quest system at all. I'll get to it but even the tutorials make my brain ache.

Quest items are normal items assigned to an alias with the "quest item" tickbox checked.

If the quest ends, or if the alias is cleared, the item that was in it should lose it's special status as a quest item.

You're half right about inventory items. Add an item to a container and the game deletes the object reference that represented the item and replaces it with a reference to the Form the object referred to and a count for the number of that sort of item in your inventory. Drop the item on the ground and the form reference is used to create a new object reference

In the case of quest items I think what happens is that the object ref is protected from being recycled and is added to the inventory directly. I think.

Unfortunately, it doesn't; that's why so many quest items are stuck in your inventory, and, why the db "go kill" targets never disappear from the place they were when you killed them.

So how do you clear quest item status?

I'm sure I've seen quest items that become normal ones in vanilla.

I suppose as a worst case, you could always silently swap a quest item with a non-questy one and drop the quest one in a container somewhere in Oblivion.

clear the alias before you stop the quest.

(don't forget to make that alias optional for this to properly work)

Yes, and that will be a problem, if the alias doesn't fill... We're running in circles here.

It seems that using aliases makes some things possible in quests, especially repeated quests, while making other things impossible. In a quest do all items, actors, ect HAVE to be aliases for the quest to work? For a quest that only runs once and uses unique items and NPCs I don't quite see the advantage of using aliases instead of normal references.

Nah, you'll be all right. Have a non-optional alias for the item, and an optional empty quest item one to confer questiness. Then use the Force into reference when filled thing to force the non-quest alias into the quest item one.

Hey presto! Non optional alias and clearable quest item both!

Well, you can use aliases to find things in the area so you're not depending on things happening in a certain spot. You can add packages and items to aliases and they'll get put back afterwards. You can attach scripts to them without sriptifying every instance of the item or actor or depending on such-and-such a reference beinh available. There's also a lot of useful, generic beth scripts that work on aliases as well.

It's generally a cleaner way to work, with the downside that getting the sods to fill can be a pain sometimes.

But yeah, most of what you can do can also be done with properties on object references and quest scripts.

Great. Two aliases for the same object plus a fragment to make it clearable... They couldn't do it more complicated, could they?

how'd that be a problem?