What counts as a dark secret in Skyrim? Oh, we know there are a lot of “secrets” in the game, just about everywhere, that you are meant to discover. The hidden quests and little scenes and fun weapons or tricks that people are supposed to find and make memes about. That stuff is ordinary. Most games have them, especially a game as complex as Skyrim.

Instead, we are talking about the other kind of secrets, the sort of secrets that aren’t exactly mean to be discovered. The secretes that are kept for a reason – sometimes out of fun, sometimes out of embarrassment, and sometimes just because they weren’t meant for the players. Well, the players proved them wrong, and we have a whole mess of Skyrim secrets for you that are hidden away in deep code, rare glitches, and reading just the right book that tells you what is really going on.

Not to boast, but we bet even the longest term Skyrim fans may encounter a few surprises on this list. It’s the stuff that players don’t really find out unless they really, really dig deep. Some of it goes entirely against popular beliefs, and some of it explains the weird stuff you’ve always wondered about. So let’s take a look behind the curtain to see what Skyrim is really made of, and what big reveals have been hidden from us this whole time.

25 What Soul Gems Really Are

For many games now, soul gems have been magic crystals housed with the souls of people or animals you really don’t like – you use them to power your weapons and armor, and for various types of necromancy if that strikes your fancy. But it wasn’t until Skyrim DLC (and technically an earlier card game) that you discover just what the price is. You see, you aren’t technically capturing souls, just the spirit energy inside a living being.

The soul itself goes to the Soul Cairn, a horrible place overseen by a strange group called the Ideal Master.

There, souls wander forever until they eventually go mad and appear to fade away. Every time you capture a sentient soul in a gem (which is thousands of times), they end up here. As players can attest, the Soul Cairn is a pretty awful place to be, but we doubt it stops anyone from stealing those sweet souls.

24 The Briarheart Secret You Have To Guess

Briarhearts are the leaders of the Forsworn natives, basically the end boss in all the Forsworn dungeons. They are incredibly powerful in both magic and weaponry, and infamous for slaying even powerful characters in mere moments unless you are careful. However, there’s a way to destroy the Briarhearts instantly that no one in the game ever hints at.

You see, Briarhearts are created when the hagravens replace the heart of a Forsworn with, well, a bundle of briars. It gives them special powers, but if you go into sneak mode and creep close to a Briarheart, you can active pickpocketing…and discover that you can steal the briar if you are skilled enough. Taking it out will immediately slay the Briarheart, and net you a powerful alchemy item. Nice!

23 Skyrim Is Filled With References To Ancient Lore

Most of the stuff in Skyrim feels like it is made up. Obvious, right? It’s a fantasy game – and even though it’s one inspired heavily by Norse culture, the things in it are pure Elder Scrolls fiction…for the most part. If you take time to dig through the lore, you find that there are actually a lot of references to real-world mythology. Like hounds and dogs that are named after real characters in Scottish and Norse mythology, or names taken straight from Norse fables about Odin and Thor. We can’t really blame them, because the game is obviously a perfect spot for stuff like this, but it is funny that they put references into the game only the very Norse-obsessed would find. Fortunately, the copyright on those stories is probably expired by now.

22 The Crazy Crypt Of The Goners

When first creating Skyrim, the developers had a bit of a problem. Players were going to eliminate a lot of enemies, especially complicated NPCs with lots of coding. It would take too much processing power to wipe those characters from the game completely every time it happened. To solve the problem, they created a room of the deceased, a cross-shaped hidden dungeon where the people you slay in the game reappear, waiting like endless ghosts.

You can get there by console commands and see any of the important deceased there, just…hanging out. There are even a couple coffins for decoration, which is better than nothing. It also really makes you want to run a pacifist build so you don’t think about just who is waiting down in that room, somewhere you can never go without cheating.

21 There Is No Good Side In The Civil War

One of the first ways Skyrim tricks you is making you think that the civil war embroiling the country has clear sides: The bad guys are obviously the ones who kidnapped you and are about to chop off your head. The good guys are obviously the ones who save you and ask you to join their resistance.

But if you explore the story, you realize that’s not at all true.

The bad Imperials are actually trying really hard to save their empire, bring peace, and fight their enemies at the same time. The good Stormcloaks are actually angry, racist, and have no clear plan for governance. They both have their good points too, but when the time comes to pick a side, it’s a lot harder than you would expect from a casual playthrough.

20 The Fate Of The Falmer

Some of the darkest secrets in Skyrim involve how things came to be…and one of the worst stories is the fate of the Falmer. If you casually progress through the game, you only know the Falmer as evil little goblins in deep caves that have a lot of magic and a lot of poison damage. If you look a little closer, you realize they are blind and have to hear you instead of seeing you.

Then, if you actually dig into a few books in the game, you find that the Falmer were actually beautiful snow elves an age ago: Hiding from men after a failed war, they made a deal with the Dwemer (dwarves, basically), and the Dwemer tricked them. The dwarves fed the snow elves a blend of fungi that made them blind, hideous, and stupid, so that they would serve as slaves. When the D-bags disappeared, the Falmer lived on in the deep.

19 You Can Go To All Those Mountains (Not Really)

The famous line about Skyrim, from the mastermind himself, was, “You see those mountains? You can go there!” It was meant to show that everywhere in Skyrim could be explored, that the horizon was very real and all you had to do was walk there. It’s…sort of true.

The mountains really are an in-game object that exists right along with you.

The problem is that you are still bound by gravity and gradation, so there are actually many mountains were you can’t go, because they are just too steep. The only way up to most mountaintops is through random trails that were put there on purpose. Or, of course, through magic horses and a combination of backward jumping, because in the end, this is still a video game.

18 Characters Trapped In the Underworld

Skyrim is a world made of layers. Literally, digital layers on top of each other. The problem is that sometimes these layers get a little mixed up. Quest characters can, infamously, disappear and sink down into one of the underworlds – which look a little like the normal world, except they are free of detail and filled with floating objects, where you can wander endlessly.

Find the way into these other dimensions through just the right spots or fissures, and you can even search for the missing NPCs and talk to them, where they act entirely normal, probably out of defense of their sanity. Like all famous Skyrim issues, this bug continues on to this day, and you may still run into it if you are unlucky.

17 Wood Elves And The Horrible Green Pact

You may know wood elves as the short dudes with funny faces who are just, way worse than all the other elves. They shoot arrows and can, uh, talk to animals sometimes. But what no one mentions outside of the deep lore is that the wood elves of Valenwood have a sort of religion called the Green Pact, which is all about honoring nature…and always, always preserving its balance.

Specifically, that means eating people.

Religious wood elves never slay someone in battle without also, uh, eating them. Wood elf warriors would starve themselves for weeks before a war just to prepare. Not only does that put a new spin on these worst-ever elves, but it also makes us want the next game to take place in Valenwood.

16 Everything You Can Do With Torches

One of the most powerful objects in the entire game is the little, humble torch. You can find them anywhere – in fact, this is one of the many powers of the torch, since you can find lit torches in closed wooden chests, in sealed altars that haven’t been opened in centuries, and even in treasures at the bottom of lakes.

With a torch in your hand, there’s nothing you can’t do: Enemies will get lit on fire if you block with the torch, and you can light up everything from spiderwebs to patches of oil or gas in dungeons, clearing the way or creating fires as you wish. Perhaps the least known benefit, if you try to pick a lock with a torch in hand, it will add a bonus to lockpicking skill because of the extra light. Likewise, the light will ruin your sneaking!

15 Not All Enemies Scale With Your Level

It is traditional in Elder Scrolls games that enemies do a certain amount of scaling – in other words, they get stronger as you level up. This was especially horrible in Oblivion, because the enemies would level up all the way and you would eventually find bandits wearing the most powerful armors in the game.

Enemies scale in Skyrim too, but in a more balanced way.

You face tougher draugr, better dragons, and so on. However, within this system, there are some enemies that don’t level up at all. This appears to be intentional. You see, very powerful enemies like giants and mammoths start off super strong and easily crush you. However, they don’t scale, so once you have leveled up and become an indestructible warrior wizard, you can go back and get handy revenge. Pretty clever!

14 Alduin…The Good Guy?

Alduin is the evilest dragon, the end of the world, the big boss for the main storyline. He’s called the World Eater! I mean, come on. However, and this is only for diehard fans to realize, but Alduin…is not really the bad guy at all. It’s a yin-yang sort of deal: Alduin is the Nordic name for Akatosh, who is one of the holy gods, specifically the god of time, who is represented by a dragon symbol. Part of Akatosh’s role as time itself is to see that all things end in their own time, including the world itself, so that reality can be reborn. Alduin is technically just a manifestation of this important role. Which means you sort of delayed the necessary destruction of the world and could have caused all kinds of chaos.

13 Animating The Dragons

Dragons in Skyrim are technically pretty simple to understand. You take some dragon bones, you slap some code on them that makes them move through the air, and cover the whole thing in graphics and animations. But in practice, they are very difficult to create.

This has lead to all sorts of problems.

Players have discovered dragons flying backward in hilarious spirals because the bones were switched the wrong way around, or have found dragon skeletons fighting them when the dragon should be deceased (except for that one mage mission, which is totally intentional). Other dragons fly straight up into the air and never come back down, or flop around on the ground as they try to get their balance. Not always majestic creatures, is what we’re saying.

12 The Gods Have No Power

No, we’re being serious. Those 8/9 gods you pray to (depending on your religion), and who cure disease and grant blessings? They don’t have any power. To find out why you have to dive into Skyrim’s cosmic lore, which is tricky: There are a dozen different scholar theories in the books around Elder Scrolls, and they are all best considered partly true metaphors.

But essentially, the gods were the most powerful Aedra who decided to sacrifice themselves to create the world (or were possibly tricked, or a mix of both). They don’t have any power now because their power is constantly at work to ensure gravity, matter, and time, all function properly. They can’t really do anything else. Even the small blessings you get from them are quite impressive, considering. But don’t expect any big miracles if you decide to roleplay a priest.

11 The Secret People Eaters All Around You

This is a common secret that many players discover, but it’s still a very dark one, and if you’ve never done all the quests in Markarth, you may have never found it. The quest is a Taste of Death, where you investigate some corpses in the Hall of the Dead where it looks like people have been snacking on the goods. You follow this quest to a Daedric Prince of gross things, but the long and short of it is that multiple people in Markarth are part of a secret cult that eats people. That includes popular shopkeepers, officials, and servants who all act entirely normal…until you do just the right thing to discover them around a sacrificial table, about to chow down. Then you realize they all like talking about how the food in the city is so fresh…

10 Unfinished Treasure Quests That Still Annoy Us

There are a lot of unfinished quests in Skyrim. The problem is that a number of them are still in the game. You can find an old wizard’s belongings, but he never has an option to finish the quest (sorry, Tolfdir, you were always our favorite). You can find missing apprentices, but never what the quest that actually wants you to.

There are journals you can find and swords you can collect that don’t allow you to complete their quests.

It’s very infuriating, especially in your first playthroughs where you are carrying these items in your inventory forever without knowing if they have a purpose. Sorry, everybody, you are never going to get rewarded for that stuff. At least quest items don’t take up inventory space, right?

9 Merchant Chest Cheats That Break The Game

Players who seek every advantage probably already know about this one, but it may come as a huge surprise to the more straightforward characters. You see, every merchant in the game has their inventory in a hidden, inaccessible chest, because it’s easier to code all the stuff in that digital space than coming up with some other way.

However, certain merchant chests in the game are accessible, if you know what to do. A crack in the wall there lets you slip into the underworld.

A small pocket here lets you dip through the surface.

Get these chests, and you have a full inventory of totally free items, including the rarest stuff in merchant inventories. It doesn’t even count as stealing!

8 The Insects In Jars We Have To Know About

So let’s talk about collectibles in Skyrim. Most of them have some purpose, as long as you collect enough of them and follow the right quest. Everything has a purpose. But that doesn’t apply to the insects in jars. At various places throughout the world, you can find pretty insects like butterflies or moths trapped in little glass jars.

There’s about five of them in total, and…they don’t do anything. You can collect them and display them at will, but there is no quest involved with these rare items. Skyrim players have nearly gone crazy trying to figure out just what the jars could do, but there has never been an answer despite many theories. However, if nothing else they are very pretty to display in the houses you bought, which may be all the meaning they need.

7 A Hidden Developer’s Room

It’s a time-honored tradition for developers to hide various secret rooms in giving, honoring themselves in the process. The hidden developer room in Skyrim is a bit different, however.

One of its purposes was to help developers quickly test out various parts of the game.

As a result, this room has literally every major item in the game, including all weapons and armors, so that you can get equipped however you want. This room is only accessible by using command codes on a PC, so console users can’t really access this room, which is too bad. However, if you spend enough time in Skyrim, you can pretty much get all the weapons and armor you want, anyway, so not everyone needs a developer’s room.

6 Finding Ancient Lands From Past Games

Here’s the funny thing about Skyrim: There are a number of gateways into other parts of the world, like Cyrodil. However, they serve as essentially ends to the map, the places you finally get to after searching for hours only to find the message that you can no longer go that way. So, of course, players found a way around that. It turns out, you can cheat in specific ways and bypass these barriers to explore the land beyond.

What they found was…impressive. The lands beyond Skyrim are low-res, sketched out places, but they are also amazingly authentic and well-designed replications of the lands from other games. And the fun thing is that no one was ever really supposed to see them. They just happily exist to make the world a more real place.