There are some video games that tower above others as they define genres, make players lifelong fans of franchises, and/or change the industry around themselves. They’re rare to come by, but when you’ve been touched by one, it impacts on your life and you never forget it. When games are remastered and/or become available on a new system for the first time, a familiar exchange will occur. Somebody will state that it’s their first time ever playing such-and-such a game, and somebody else will tell them how lucky they are, getting to experience this momentous game for the first time. That’s the impact titles of this caliber can have.

Needless to say, The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim is one of these games. Originally released back in 2011, it has since been ported to just about every system known to humankind. Along the way, it’s become a popular culture phenomenon, so much so that a throwaway line about “taking an arrow to the knee” became a worldwide meme sensation. Skyrim is a fantastic and much-beloved experience, certainly, but don’t go thinking for a moment that it’s flawless. It’s a game we appreciate, adore, and value like a significant other in spite of its flaws, not for its absence of them. While Bethesda’s masterpiece may not leave the toilet seat up or always ignore the fact that the dishes need doing, it sure has some shonky moments and glitches. The devs often haven’t troubled to deal with some of these issues, though some known exploits have been removed. Let’s take a look at some of these, as well as some general tips and tricks that still work as well as they ever did.

25 Still Works: Arrows, Arrows, And More Arrows

1- Infinite Arrows
Via: Nerds And Scoundrels

Let’s be real here. Skyrim veterans know that a lot of the appeal of the game comes from setting up characters differently in repeated playthroughs. Will you role play? Will you opt for an entirely new build? Sadly, Skyrim veterans also know that much of the time, you’ll end up with ANOTHER stealthy archer. With this inevitability in mind, you’d better be sure that you’ve got a plentiful stock of arrows. Luckily, there are some super-sneaky ways to do this.

One favorite method would be exploiting NPCs. If you encounter somebody training their archery abilities on a dummy, you can pickpocket their own supply and give them a single high-quality arrow. They’ll then continue to fire said arrow into the dummy over and over, which you can simply collect after they’ve fired them.

24 Still Works: The Legend Of Sleepy Hollow

2- Sleepy Hollow
Via: SciFiNow

No, I’m not talking about the questionable horror movie with Johnny Depp and Christina Ricci (not that I’m snarking on it, either, because I love that movie). What we’re talking about here is another aspect of Skyrim’s incredible replay value: the chance to see something new and unique each time, no matter how experienced you are.

The Headless Horseman, for instance, appears only between the hours of 10 p.m. and 4 p.m. and leads you on a bit of a horse-chase when you do encounter him. Following him all the way to his lair at Hamvir’s Rest will yield a battle, a master level chest, and (as per the legend) his skull.

23 Banned: As Pink Floyd Once (Almost) Said, “Hey! Teachers! Leave Them Monks Alone!”

3- The Monks
Via: YouTube (FudgeMuppet)

This is no time for snarky jokes with Another Brick In The Wall lyrics, though. This is serious business. As we know, Bethesda are rarely interested in dealing with some of Skyrim’s weirder glitches and exploits, but they do have to put their foot down at times.

At some point in your Skyrim career, you’ve probably messed with the monks of High Hrothgar. They were a handy way of building your skills with your weapon, as well as your sneak. As of patch 1.09, though, IGN reports that you can’t beat on these harmless souls for your own gain any longer: “Attacking them even when hidden will result in angering them to the point of where the only way to shed the [dislike], would be to reload your save.”

22 Still Works: When You Take Your Enchanting Super Seriously

4- Enchanting
Via: Eurogamer

Speaking of things so many players have dabbled in over their Skyrim careers, the famous alchemy/enchanting loop is a difficult one to resist. For the uninitiated, it’s a simple matter of exploiting the fortify Alchemy enchantment. As the Wiki details, the fortify enchanting potion can increase the strength of said fortify Alchemy enchantment, which in turn, can create a stronger potion, and so a stronger enchantment, and so…

You see where I’m going with this. Super strong gear, that’s where. In the end, it’s one of those issues that’s part of the game, so it’s really down to the player how far to take this concept.

21 Still Works: I Just Want To Open My Front Door!

5- Breezehome
Via: The Elder Scrolls Wiki

Here’s another interesting angle to consider, when we’re talking about Skyrim tricks. These aren’t necessarily positive things, like that business with the fortify Alchemy enchantment/fortify enchantment potion or those poor old monks. As much as we all enjoy messing with the game, Skyrim sure does mess with us right back on occasion.

It’s just incredible that some of these issues are still cropping up. Sometimes, they’re isolated incidents, but they’re still surprising oversights. Take one poor soul on the Se7enSins forums, who purchased Breezehome in Whiterun and put the key to the house in the chest. Some time later, they report that they found themselves unable to re-enter the house, and they couldn’t replace the key or even buy the house again.

20 Banned: It Sure Looks Cleaner Around Here Without All That Ash

6- Ash Piles
Via: YouTube (TENSUKI)

As I say, Bethesda are rarely quick off the mark when it comes to patches. Much of the time, debugging and general shonkiness damage control is in the hands of PC players, whose unofficial patches (and, of course, reams and reams of mods) help to keep the game afloat and running smoothly.

However, this isn’t to say that the team themselves don’t ever step in to fix problems. One bug saw ash piles (left behind when enemies are hit by Destruction spells) hanging around and accumulating in some areas. There’s been some discrepancy between existing ash piles and new ones, but this issue was largely fixed by official patch 1.9.26.0.8.

19 Still Works: It’s… A Ghost!

7- Phasing Through
Via: PCMag

So, yes. There’s no doubt that Skyrim is one of the greatest and most influential games of recent times. It was the game that broke the open world mould, the title by which all free-roaming sandbox-tacular epic adventures would be measured.

It was also, as with all games this sprawling and ambitious, a buggy mess. That’s just part of its quirky charm, now, and we’ve come to accept the fact that we’re going to become impossibly trapped behind the scenery and such on occasion. Fortunately, there’s a convenient fix. With handy-dandy console commands, you can toggle collision detection on and off, allowing you to walk through whichever item you’ve ridiculously managed to get stuck behind. Then, toggle it back on, obviously, or you’re going to have a bad time.

18 Still Works: A Very Important Dragon

8- Dragon
Via: Gamers Heroes

In any vast and sprawling RPG, you’ll encounter a whole kingdom’s worth of NPCs. They’ll run the gamut from interesting, quirky, bizarre, unique, and all manner of other words that largely mean the same thing. There’ll be ones you love, ones you dislike, and ones whose unexpected demise shakes your entire world view. They may repeat the same line or two of dialogue over and over and over, but they’re part of the experience, and you’ll find yourself getting attached to them.

If memories of past NPC demises still haunt you, how about a non-playable friend who won’t ever leave you and won’t spout endless repetitive junk? If you want your very own indestructible dragon, get yourself to the Throat of the World after you’ve learned to summon them. Your dragon buddy here, VG247 explains, is treated by the game as an important NPC, rendering it invincible.

17 Banned: The Human (Or Khajiit Or Whatever) Pincushion

9-Pincushioned
Via: The Elder Scrolls Wiki

Here’s another trick that doesn’t benefit you in gameplay terms, but still… well, it’s hilarious, and that counts for a whole lot where I come from. Archery, as we’ve seen, is a huge part of combat in Skyrim. It’s a very popular route to take and your enemies will commonly employ it, too. As a result, it’s inevitable that there are going to be a whole lot of arrows flying around.

Some of these arrows from your opponents will remain lodged in your body when fired, essentially becoming part of your character model! Even reloading saves won’t help you (it sometimes will, as is the nature of Skyrim glitches)! What can you do? Well, according to IGN: “Completely de-equip everything, fast-traveling, and sleeping usually remove these arrows. If worst comes to worst, Lycanthropes can use their Beast Form to remove these unwanted blights upon your character's... err... beauty.”

16 Still Works: The Disappearing Draugr

10- Draugr
Via: Postcards from Skyrim

Now, the appearance of a Draugr is usually enough to make anyone’s day take a swift downturn. I mean, look at these mouldering fiends. Monday mornings are bad enough without ancient, reanimated, glowy-eyed warriors shuffling over and thrusting swords at your bodily orifices.

Quite understandably, you might want to dispatch these spooky apparitions with a quick sneak attack. Take care when doing so, though, because as the Wiki reports, Draugrs that are taken out by “a sneak attack while lying down or standing in a crevice can disappear through the floor. This can become a problem for certain quests, which require you to obtain an object from the body. This is due to a physics bug when calculating where the body will fall.”

15 Still Works: Wake Up, I’m Talking To You!

11- Sleeping NPC
Via: Nexus Mods

As is often the case with RPGs, our player character doesn’t seem to have a whole lot to say. Everybody else in the world will make up for that by talking and talking and talking at them, but we ourselves aren’t the greatest conversationalists around.

We don’t seem to be able to pick the best times to chat when we do opt to, either. Curiously (and unintentionally), however, Skyrim makes up for our shortcomings. Some players have encountered an issue where, on trying to talk to an NPC who is currently sleeping, the NPC will both reply and continue sleeping.

14 Banned: Oghma Not-So-Infinium

12- Oghma Infinium
Via: The Elder Scrolls Wiki

As anyone with any experience with Skyrim will know, advancing the skill tree in key areas is the essence of the game’s customizability. Just about every act levels up your abilities in some field or other, and some of the sweetest perks in specific areas can take an almighty grind to acquire.

The Oghma Infinium glitch centers around exploiting a specific book to max out said skills (as detailed by The Tech Game). Needless to say, this is hardly the developer-intended way to go about things, and so they set about fixing it with version 1.9 of the official patch.

13 Still Works: The Trouble With Trainers

13- Trainers
Via: Postcards From Skyrim

Or, rather, the trouble FOR trainers. As I’ve mentioned, leveling different skills is the key to customizing your character. Put simply, just as in real life, the more you perform a task, the better you become at it. This applies to everything from the use of certain weapons to sneaking, stealing, and whipping up potions.

As you progress through the world, you’ll come across certain NPCs who will train you in certain abilities, for a fee. With the way that pickpocketing works in this game, you can go ahead and steal the money you paid right back from them, but only if you’re a sufficiently-adept pickpocket. Even better (and less risky) is choosing a follower who can also give you training (Faendal, Njada, Aela and Talvas are examples). Having paid them, you can then just “trade” the money back!

12 Banned: Just When You Thought It Was Safe To Go Back In The Water… It Is

14- Water
Via: GameFAQS

Like most of you, I’m sure, I’ve been gaming for a long time. Back in my day, patches and updates weren’t a thing. You got the game as it was on the disk/cartridge no matter how  buggy it may have been and you just had to live with it.

Today, post-release fixes are common, but they’re not infallible. It’s easy (and again, common) for developers to break multiple other things in the process of resolving one issue. Early in Skyrim’s life, many players installed the latest version of the game, only to find that it brought about a new issue: the game would sometimes freeze when the player character entered water! Luckily, this issue was resolved.

11 Still Works: Not So Fast!

15- Text Glitch
Via: Windows Central

The trouble with a title as delightfully glitch-ridden as Skyrim is this: the issues aren’t just everywhere, they’re also unpredictable. Bugs can be tough to replicate and don’t behave the same for everybody.

One example would be the text glitch. According to SpeedRun, this glitch would activate after leaving the game running for around three hours or more. Whereupon, you would find that you can skip through dialogue much faster than usual. As the report explains, it’s very inconsistent and doesn’t work the same on everyone’s system, so the use of it during speed run attempts is forbidden.

10 Banned: Get Those Console Commands Out Of Here, Too

16- Console Commands
Via: Nintendo

As tends to be the case with PC games, console commands are an invaluable and versatile tool, but in a game like Skyrim, they can be beyond defective. You can instantly activate a god mode, which will negate damage, give you unlimited arrows, magicka, and stamina, as well as other perks.

Needless to say, it’s not very sporting to activate a “cheat code” and freely fly around the landscape (literally) during a speed run, so these sorts of shenanigans were also removed from speed runs.

9 Still Works: The Enemy Is EVERYWHERE

17- Combat Music
Via: Nintendo Wikia

If you’re a horror fan, you’ll know how important music (and the absence of it) can be to the whole experience. But, when does the music kick in? How long for? How softly? These are the things you have to think about. In Skyrim, there’s nothing more unnerving than the combat music kicking in, especially when you aren’t sure exactly where the enemy is. What if the enemy actually isn’t anywhere? Those are just wicked mind tricks on a whole new level.

Sadly, this is another glitch that can sometimes occur, resulting in the music continuing to play at the end of an encounter. Sometimes, you’ll need to restart the game or input a console command to fix this.

8 Banned: The Impossible Gauldur Amulet

18- Gauldur Amulet
Via: The Elder Scrolls Wiki

Some games take a curious approach to rings that characters can equip. Generally speaking, you would think that the average warrior would be able to work with several at once. Up to ten, if he or she wished, even if the whole rings-on-thumbs thing is a step too far for old-fashioned guys like me. That’s a bold statement right there.

Despite this, you’re often limited to just the one ring at a time. This is the case in Skyrim itself, although there have been glitches to help with your jewelry needs. One was the Gauldur Amulet glitch, which allowed the player to equip two necklaces at once by cunningly swapping them around. Sadly for everybody who liked to cosplay as Mr. T during their Skyrim runs, this was also patched out by Bethesda.

7 Still Works: Hey, That Armor Looks Familiar!

via: kickstarter.com

Personally, I’ve never forgiven mannequins for suddenly coming to life in that first episode of the rebooted Doctor Who series. They’ve always creeped me out a little, and discovering the Autons and their weird plastic gun-hands was not a good time for me back in 2005.

Nevertheless, I suppose you’ve got to be able to look past some of these things and move on. So, let’s celebrate some of the good that mannequins have done for the world. For instance, in Skyrim, you could use them to duplicate your armor. You still can, because it hasn’t been (officially) fixed. It’s a simple three-step process, as detailed back at the Wiki: Place the armor that you want to duplicate on your mannequin; don't exit out of the equipping screen, then take all of your armor back; leave the area (loading screen) and come back. The set of armor you did the action with will now be duplicated on the mannequin.

6 Banned: More Bad News For Speedrunners

20- Hotkey
Via: Tokyo Games

We’ve previously seen that certain aspects of Skyrim have had to be reined in for speedrunning purposes. After all, there are records to be won and lost here, and all of that falls apart if everyone isn’t on an even footing. Therefore, all-powerful god modes and text exploits that not everybody can implement were dispensed with.

There’s something else that was removed, too, something much more specific: the Ctrl+PrtScn hotkey. What does this do? I think DrTChops of Speedrun puts it best: “This hotkey changes the game speed to be based on framerate rather than real time, which means the game runs normal speed at 30 FPS. Higher than that, the game runs too fast (2x speed at 60 FPS, 4x at 120, etc.) and lower than that, it runs slower. Since not everyone can maintain a constant 60 FPS (framedrops in Riften are common), this hotkey is not allowed.”