i had to drop several very expensive items after jauffre gave me this stupid akaviri katana, i went to the imperial city to sell what i still had, then i went back to the temple and found everything i had dropped missing! the blades took several hundred gold of expensive items and i cant get them back!

i'm abandoning the main quest, i'll hack everyone in there apart for stealing my hard-won items!!!!!!!!!!!

why the hell did this happen? is killing them all and looting them even going to give me back my stuff anyway?

Probably not. Sounds like they didn't steal them, the cell just reloaded and your stuff disappeared.

How many days, in game, had elapsed between when you dropped the items on the floor, and when you returned to collect them. I'm putting it as better than odds on that is is more than 3 days.
As a result of that, the items have been nuked as part of the routine 3-day object ID reset. In this case, 3 days had elapsed since you dropped the items. The interior gameworld cell where Jaufree is did the reset, and your junk collection was purged from the cell.
Chance of recovering all of the items: non existent.
Chance of recovering some of the items: unless you have a savegame that is from before you dropped the items, then non existent.

Jenifur Charne

dropped them, fast-traveled to imperial city, waited 4 hours for the stores to reopen, sold stuff, fast-traveled back, and they were gone! that's not even 24 hours!

i did have a previous save, i just quit without saving when i saw all my stuff was gone, but not like i could get any other outcome. i cant possibly carry them all and from what i've seen, if i do just leave them and come back they'll vanish all over again.

Just drop the katana that jauffre gave you, even if you don't get it back there are more in cloud ruler.

so i guess i shouldnt have used my sigil stone as soon as i got a weapon i could enchant? i couldn't use it on any of my present equipment bc i had that crusader's armor on.

What you have not realized is Fast Travel does NOT remove the in game time it takes to walk/run from one marker location to another.
http://www.uesp.net/wiki/Oblivion:Fast_Travel#Fast_Travel
You might have only waited 4 hours in the IC, but you need to add on the time in game it takes to do the fast travel return trip from Chorrol to the Market District in the IC and back. That time, I am betting is what took you the three days in game.

What you need to find is a non-respawning container, and find it ASAP in the very earliest stages of the game. What the devs forgot, again, is to include in game a way for the PC to readily ID a safe container.

You need a safe container near the Market District, so you can build your initial hoard and have it available for easy transport to the Market District, when you are a snail paced newbie weakling who can't carry much at all, for selling off for cash, to buy and fit out the IC Waterfront Shack.

Jenifur Charne

i am aware that it takes time, that's why i mentioned it, but i had no idea how much time had passed. i thought a short trip like that would only take a few hours, the longest i've ever seen the clock jump ahead is like 8 or 10 hours i think. but i never bother to pay attention to the date on the fictional calender, that would truely be pretty stupid for it to take several days in-game when i can casually walk from one end of cyrodil to the other easily within a day.

i just have no luck at all, the last time i tried to do the main quest my character accidentally got turned into a vampire and i was having immense trouble curing it (lost my horse trying to find this witch or w/e and by then my vampirism had risen to 100%, meaning i couldnt go into the cities to feed without being attacked, how nice)

did you know at one point i had my computer break down three times within like two weeks? first a powersurge burnt out my harddrive, then my computer somehow caught a ransomware, no idea what the [censored] happened the third time. obviously i wasnt too happy about paying more than a thousand dollars within a few weeks fixing my computer again and again (we only have one shop here, so i couldnt take it to anyone else)

everytime i start to make progress in a game, either the game bugs on me and destroys everything (i've had the sims 2 blow up on me more times than should be possible, i've even had 3 sims die from having a satellite fall on them, one time it happened within seconds of my sim whom i had recently made coming from from college! most ppl never see one sattelite, even those who've played it longer than me). my sister tells me it's bc i'm not meant to play videos games and i need to just quit. as far as she's concerned, i'm being punished for trying to do everything. i actually have trouble finding the enthusiasm to do anything simply bc every single time i do attempt something the whole stupid project blows up in my face, i wouldn't be surprised if my house burned down with no explanation while i was trying to do something.

The open grain sacks is a safe container and they are very common, Imperial city marked district has 5-6 of them in the two areas with lots of barrels and boxes, they are very useful even late in the game as you can dump loot for sale in them if the shops is closed.
All the mages guilds and most fighter guilds have them; they are also common at camp sites around in the wilderness. Yes you have other safe containers to but I have never bothered learning about them as the marked district and mage guild grain sacks work well enough for me.

If you dropp your items on the ground it will desapear. Sorry buddy there is no way you can retreive your items :brokencomputer: :banghead: :flame: :swear:

Really? I drop plenty of items on the floor and display cases in my house since I owned the game, and they're still there? Can someone explain the whole process?

the houses are designed specifically so you can store stuff inside of them in any container and so you can decorate your house with any items you found.

but i've done this trick before, dropped some of my loot from an oblivion gate, fast-traveled to sell what i could carry, fast-travelled back to retrieve the items, then fast-traveled to the city again to sell them. this is the first time i had a problem doing this. that's why i had automatically assumed that one of the NPCs had picked them up since i hear that they do that.

The interior of a player owned house is a respawning cell, but, AFAIK, it doesn't erase items that are sitting loose in the cell.
example of respawn: the IC Waterfront Shack. Take the tomatoes and bowl off the table. Leave the shack. Wait 73 hours. Re-enter the shack. The tomatoes will be respawned, floating in the air just above the table, with no bowl.

Jenifur Charne

Oh GODS!
I can see WHERE you fouled up.
You dropped your loot in a cell you DO NOT OWN. Such cells are not safe at all from the 72 hour ID sweep.

Jenifur Charne

No the game assumes that you walk along the roads when fast traveling to a given location. If you travel the roads from one side of Cryodil to the other it would take you several in game days. That's running the entire way along the roads. I believe, when you fast travel, it assumes that you're also walking. It's not uncommon for me to fast travel from one location and another that's not too far away and have it go from 11am to 12am (13 hours.) There's no bad luck in this other than not knowing about the cells resetting. I can also explain many of the issues you've listed in the above post but this isn't the place to do so.

i do walk along the roads, not running, walking, at best i'll see the sunset or rise once before i reach my destination. and that's doing something like walking from anvil to cheydinhal. yes i've done that. partially for role-playing reasons, but also partially to avoid the leveling problem by fighting mobs along the way.

There is stuff lying by the side of the road that Angel dumped back at level 15 or so, She is now level 40 and the stuff is still there. I suspect it is safe to toss stuff on the ground when outside of towns.

yes, and i know for a fact that the weapons dropped by bandits i kill on the road remain there forever.

The cell itself changes after Martin & Jauffre take up residence. It's no longer quite the same cell which is why your stuff got eaten as soon as you left it. If you want to experiment load your save and walk out the front gate and back in again. I'm betting your stuff will be gone already.

You can usually leave stuff lying on the ground forever, but not in a quest-related cell that's due to be upgraded.

Mara

I never had anything like this happen, coz every time I restart a game, simply use Jauffre's chest in that abbey. It seems obvious that one is a safe container.

The hollow stump in the "park" in the Market District is also a safe container.

I'm not sure this is the answer. Martin and Jauffre were in residence already - (it was the Akaviri Katana that Jaufrry gave him at Cloud Ruler Temple that caused his problem in the first place).

No, they'd just arrived. The next time you come back Martin's little table and stack of books will be set up for him., along with the Heretics book on it or in his hands, moved from the shelf in the dining room. I'm not sure what other changes take place besides Martin's and Jauffre's routines, but I know the place gets changed a bit. I've had the Akaviri katana go poof in well under the normal three day reset time - which does not normally reset stuff dropped on the floor anyway. This can happen with other quest-related areas, too. Sometimes it happens after quest completion but occasionally it happens when the player enters and leaves and may the Nine help you if you didn't complete the qeust step while there.

Mara

Stuff you had in your inventory and then dropped becomes permanent and does not get cleaned up after 72 game hours. Things you place in "unsafe" chests will disappear when the chest itself is remade on cell reset, so be careful about being tidy.

The problem with dropping havoked items on the ground, especially in areas where NPC's move around, is that they can be knocked into inaccessible locations, or even through walls or the ground, and lost from player reach. I have a ring on the floor in the Skingrad house that's under a chair, so I can see it, but can't pick it up. That's double-annoying, because the only character that could have knocked it there is the player!

I know one thing, when you're talking to the heavy armor specialist in the imperial market, don't drop apotheosis on the floor or you'll never get it back! GRRRR. Its like it just sinks into the floor.