I had taken a couple days off from following quests, both Main & Miscellaneous quests,
and just went out hunting for animal pelts, mining ore and do some exploring.

If I came upon a Bandit Camp or Cave, I would go ahead and clear these, and loot.

Evidently, I had retrieved a "Quest Item" before activating that particular quest,
and although the Item Inventory recognizes the Item as a "Quest Item", (You cannot store or drop said item),
the Quest Journal does not recognize, that this Item HAS been retrieved.

Kind of stuck on this one, not sure if there is a work around, or have to forget about this Quest.

I also have one Miscellaneous quest that directs me to talk to "So-an-So",
but this quest cannot be activated at all.

I'm guessing that "So-an-So" is dead.

Anyone else running into similar issues ?

I will also say, that I wish the Quest Journal provided more details for each step,
and the ability, to "Read, Review" the details from the previous step, as I usually forgot,
what brought me to this step in the first place.

I never played Morrowind, but the Oblivion Quest Journal did provide a fair amount of details,
that you could refer back to, for each step in a specific Quest Line.

Great game overall, immersion for me is definitely there.

Sadly it plagues the entire game right now. Someone dropped the ball, big time. You'd think this would be stuff they have down by now considering how long some of the staff has probably been doing this. But who knows. Maybe they fire the staff every year and hire new cheaper employees.

Also agree on quest journal. Really underwhelming. I thought it'd be nice to play without quest hand-holders/baby mode, but the context of many quests don't provide enough information to figure anything out on your own unless there is a giant arrow saying GO HERE, STUPID. Of course, who is ever going to turn off quest helpers on the 360? (Because you can't...)

On PS3 you can. Is it a bug on xbox or something? :unsure:

I have quite a few quest items in my bags for quests I don't have or never have had. I also have a journal of someone who is now dead (died as part of the quest) and the quest is long since finished. I still can't drop his bloody journal.

Also if this happens to you for a quest that is part of a line of quests, like finding books for the orc at winterhold college, then you are locked out of ever doing any of these quests for that character again.

This needs to get fixed, it's total BS.

Wow this is complete garbage if true.

"HEY GUYS OPEN WORLD GAME FREE EXPLOREEEEEEEEEEE btw doing so will break quests".

Agreed. From my experience, it seems to be quest items that are randomly placed at the start of the game that cause this problem. I don't recall coming across it for "fixed" items. There's also some bugs where you can get a quest to kill a bandit in [insert random] dungeon, but it can point you to a dungeon that has a named bandit leader, who does not respawn, thus rendering the quest impossible to complete.



Umm, yes you can turn it off, quite simply. I typically use it to show me what dungeon it's in, and then turn it off when I get to the dungeon entrance.

Been playing for quite a while and I'm lugging all sorts of stuff around that I can't drop- musical instruments of Bards College quests (finished the quests but their instruments have remained in my possession for some reason), quite many unusual gems (because I don't want to join Thieves Guild), some journals, some more misc items... quite a list

Gallus? This has happened to me also, but on the whole, it's improved. I only have about 4 bugged quest items in my inventory (bloody bard's quests). Usually in Beth games I end up with about 40.

Then there's the fact that not only can you not drop the items, but the items have weight too! This damn elder scroll is taking up 20lbs of inventory space from me!

Quest journal is awesome. Would you rather go back to only being able to track 1 quest at a time?

Not sure how difficult it would be to change, but to allow "Quest Items" to be Stored in your Chest only , (not dropped),
so you would need a house, and if this was a premature "Quest Item" , once retrieved from your Chest, would then be recognized
by the Quest Journal as "retrieved".

This would then allow you to finish the quest.

Just a thought.
Not sure if this would be a correct fix or not.

Although the item says it encumbers your for x amount of points.... it really doesn't. IE a quest item has weight but as long as it is an essential item you can't drop... it will not encumber you. (you can test this... put all your stuff except quest items in a container and voila zero encumbrance.. )

My main problem with the Quest Journal, is the lack of Details in some instances,
and the inability to go back to a previous step. (Just so I can refresh my memory).
I kind of want to re-read the steps, just to fully understand;
"why am I getting this Item for Ulrich ?"

Admittedly , I sometimes end up taking on a new quest, mid-stream, and forget
some of the details on another quest I was working on.

Call it, Quest Management. :biggrin:

Well, now I know.
So now I can go back to railing on the lack of sorting of inventory and how armor/weapons get jumbled up in no logical order in storage chests.

Yes, this pisses me off. How the hell does BGS do something like this? But they must be sorted according to some logic. What is it?

I keep breaking quest. One time I saw a guy sitting at a campsite near a old ruin. You're suppose to talk to him about Dragon Cultist [I watched my brother do this quest] and then you find a Dragon Priest in it too. But so many damn times have I stumbled across a [censored] dungeon with bandits sitting outside I killed the quest giver because I didn't know he wasn't a bandit. Btw, this was with my stealth character hiding in the shadows kind of thing. So now that quest is entirely broken.

My brother also did another quest recently and I was searching around for Dwemer Cogs and ended up in the same Dwemer dungeon my brother did the quest for last night and I was like. Damn it I did a quest dungeon and cleared it out already. -.-

It's hard to explore when nearly half the dungeons equate to a quest of some sort.

What platform do you use?

I haven't experienced this issue, I think. First, I don't see any "quest item" around. Maybe I didn't notice the tag.

I have a couple experiences with finding items or doing things with still to be started quests. For example I had a medalion, and later in game I spoke with someone that mentioned that medalion, and my next dialogue option was: "Oh, you mean this one? I got it right here". Also, someone told me about a cave to be cleared, and the dialog was something like: "I've already been there, it's all clear".

Maybe this is platform related, or just happens on some specific quests, or under some determined conditions, I'm not sure, but it sounds odd that keeping in mind this is a open world to explore, they didn't count on that.

It would be good if someone that already played quest X for an item Y, loaded a recent savegame, before taking the quest, and then tried to retrieve the item before speaking to the NPC that gives that same quest, to see what happens, and report it on the appropiate board so they can fix it. I will see if I got something available.

I made a topic for fixing the quests for certain quest items:

http://www.gamesas.com/index.php?/topic/1296124-placeholder-bug-fix-found-quest-items-before-the-quest-itself-read-on/

As for quest items themselves, they actually don't WEIGH anything (as far as I've tested it). I've tried it - find an item you KNOW is a quest item, look at your current weight carried, then pick up the quest item. Your carried weight shouldn't go up. (unless it resets the next time you load an area, in which case that svcks.)

Alternatively, dump everything you can dump and check your carried weight - should read 0.

I don't currently have this fabled 20lb quest item, so I can't confirm if it weighs anything, but at least my other items don't weigh me down unnecessarily.

It's pretty awesome reading!

I took one quest, and then got the option to say "Is this the xxxx you are looking for?" and the response was "Oh, you got it."

So much for that... *facepalm...

I'm on the PC



This is a GREAT find, thanks for posting this.
Yeah, I should have went through the "H/S Issues" forum to see if there was a solution.
I'll give this shot, and report back.

Thanks again.

It was the Dragon Tablet, wasn't it? The one the Whiterun Jarl's mage (Farhndal Secret-Fire or something) asks you to get?

This one works perfectly fine because it was the first thing shown to the press, and at almost all of Skyrim's demo videos and outings.

Wait till you get to the less-polished parts of the game...

This has basically been my experience too.

-- PC, for me.


-- They wont be labelled 'quest item' or anything. Generally your only clue is that trying to drop them gives you a message 'you cannot drop Quest Items', and they don't show up for sale.


-- Some quests have the decency of doing so. Other, more notorious ones such as the College Arcaneum quests, Bard's College, the White Phial, etc. etc. etc. are infamous for NOT giving you this option.


-- I've seen this occur across all platforms, so it isn't limited to one platform.


-- I suspect the problem is that the dialogue options that trigger the 'Oh, I already found Y for you' aren't scripted properly. It may be a fault in the Radiant quest system, since most of these tend to be randomly generated, but even some of the non-random quests sometimes suffer from this (unless I'm wrong and the Bard College quests are not Radiant quests?).