Main quest - Omni-guides/Tuxborn GitHub Wiki

This page is an overview in FAQ format of the changes made to the main quest by Tuxborn.

Technically, yes. But be aware that several of our mods actively expect you to be the Dragonborn. And at minimum, to play through the main quest up through finishing The Way of The Voice. So if you don't launch the main quest, you'll be blocked out of a considerable amount of content, and other content may make much less narrative sense even if you can launch it.

Content known to expect you to be the Dragonborn, and to have played at least up through The Way of the Voice, includes:

• The Gray Cowl of Nocturnal
• Legacy of the Dragonborn. You do not need to launch the main quest in order to launch LOTD in general, but you do need to play through The Way of the Voice as a requirement for getting the airship Dev Aveza, as well as for running the quest Shattered Legacy
• Midwood Isle
• Moonpath to Elsweyr
• Tools of Kagrenac
• Warden of the Coast
• Wyrmstooth

Content known to rely upon you being the Dragonborn for narrative purposes includes:

• Project AHO
• If you're running Lucien as a follower, the latter stages of his personal quest

Thus, playing without ever launching the main quest is not recommended.

It is a common player preference to hold off on running Skyrim's main quest line, and that is possible in Tuxborn. This may be even desirable, given that Tuxborn's default difficulty level is higher than vanilla.

So take this into consideration when planning how your playthrough should go.

If you don't specifically want to delay running the main quest, we do recommend you launch it as early as possible, if nothing else to unlock the ability to get Shouts, as well as Lydia as an early follower. We're running the Improved Follower Dialogue - Lydia mod, which is a Lydia overhaul, and adds a lot more characterization to her! So that's worth doing at least once, if you're not already familiar with that mod, just to experience its changes to everybody's first housecarl. (See Follower overview: Lydia for a more in-depth look at her changes.)

Answer: go to Helgen.

Since Tuxborn does not include the vanilla start, you will need to take steps to go to Helgen on your own. No matter which option you choose in Alternate Start, you'll have an objective in your journal that won't go away until you do finally go to Helgen, so there's another reason to get that done early.

You have a few ways to do this:

1. The camping start option will put you just a short walk away from Helgen. As soon as you get close enough to Helgen, you'll see Alduin immediately, and can investigate what happened as he flies off.
2. If you take the Relic Hunter start coming out of chargen, which will set you up immediately as Auryen's relic hunter, he'll include Helgen in a list of places he asks you to go to get some initial relics. (Note: of course Helgen will be destroyed when you get there; you are not expected to actually FIND the relic Auryen asks for. This is just LOTD's way of giving you an excuse to go there.)
3. Ask the nearest innkeeper about rumors, and you should learn about Imperial activity near Helgen, and get an objective to go check it out.

‼️ Important note: asking an innkeeper about rumors will not have a voiced line about Helgen, but if you have subtitles on, you'll be able to see what they're saying. ‼️

And, of course, you can simply just go to Helgen at any time on your own. If you don't pursue any of the above options, whenever the normal course of your playthrough takes you near Helgen, you can take that an opportunity for main quest kickoff.

Before you go to Helgen, you may or may not wish to acquire a horse first. If you do, this could be helpful to you if you want to loot the place for useful items while you're there. See the Frequently Asked Questions: Horses and other mounts page for more info on the fastest way to get a horse.

First and foremost, get close enough to the place that you see Alduin roaring and flying off. Then go in through the gate and you'll find it on fire, with a lot of burned bodies all over the place. You should get an objective to investigate, which should lead you to a particular burned body. Check that body out and you should receive an Adventurer's Journal.

Read that journal so you can get an objective with two choices: either go investigate a nearby cave, or go straight to Riverwood to warn them about the dragon attack. Click any of the various options below for some additional details on things you should consider doing at this point.

Optional: retrieve the Mead With Juniper Berry...

For those of you interested in grabbing all the displayable items possible for Legacy of the Dragonborn's museum, there is a displayable item in Helgen: Mead With Juniper Berry. This is actually a vanilla item, but LOTD marks it as displayable!

To do this, you will need to get onto the inn's upper floor. You can't get there directly. You'll need to go into the tower immediately to the right of the inn. In the original vanilla start, you'd follow Ralof up the stairs of the tower, only to be interrupted when Alduin blows a hole in the tower wall. At that point, once Alduin moves on, Ralof would direct you to jump through that hole over into the inn's upper floor.

You'll need to do the same jump to get into the inn here. Jump over there and you can quickly find the bottles of mead. Grab however many of them you want. You only need one for museum purposes, but you can of course grab all five if you wish.

Optional: loot the keep...

When you run the original vanilla Skyrim start, you make your way with either Hadvar or Ralof out through the keep, looting things on the way, getting tutorial tips on how the game works, and such. You eventually make it out into the world and are on your way to Riverwood.

In Tuxborn's version of going to Helgen, you can still enter the keep, but it'll be blocked partway through and you will not be able to go all the way through. But that doesn't mean you shouldn't enter the keep! You can still make your way through as much of it as you can, and grab however many items you feel like looting. Anything you bring out of the keep can be sold as a quick way to build up your gold, and several of the armor and weapons will be displayable in the LOTD museum as well.

How much you should loot is entirely up to you. If you grab everything you get your hands on, this will overload you pretty quickly. You may or may not want to mitigate this by using LOTD's Stash Supplies spell to chuck things into Safehouse storage. If you do that, just remember that any armor and weapons you stash will not be available to you again until you have direct access to the Safehouse! So if you specifically want to sell your loot immediately, either in Riverwood or Whiterun, be careful about using the Stash Supplies spell.

You can also mitigate any issues with being overloaded if you bring a horse with you to Helgen, as well.

Optional: Go help either Hadvar or Ralof in the nearby cave...

As noted above, you do need to read the Adventurer's Journal to get this objective. You do not have to do it if you don't want to; you can go straight to Riverwood instead.

But if you do want to do this objective, go back out of Helgen and swing around to the left. You need to find the cave entrance that you'd normally be coming out of, during the original vanilla start. You should have a quest marker pointing you at that.

Enter that cave, and a short ways in, you should find additional markers pointing you at Hadvar and Ralof. Both of them should be wounded, and you'll need to choose which of them you want to help.

‼️ Important note: As with the innkeeper line about a rumor of Imperial activity in Helgen, Hadvar and Ralof's lines here are not voiced. You will need to have subtitles on to see the lines. ‼️

You can only help one man, so choose who you want to help. This is Alternate Start's way of providing you a path back to the vanilla version of how the main quest plays out. Once you choose who you want to help, give him a healing potion to get him back on his feet, then exit the cave along with him. At that point, normal main quest flow should kick in and you can proceed to Riverwood.

The reason helping Hadvar or Ralof is entirely optional is because they will not be killed if you choose to skip that objective. Both characters are set Essential, since the game needs them for their respective sides of Skyrim's civil war. Helping them at this stage is purely for RP purposes.

What to do if you find Hadvar or Ralof not in a wounded state...

Players have periodically reported entering the cave and finding Hadvar or Ralof apparently not hurt, and with the only dialogue available just being about dragons. The Tuxborn team so far has not been able to reproduce this issue.

If you can regularly reproduce it, and you haven't Rule 11'd your playthrough, then please check in on #txbn-support so we can get more information from you. And in the meantime, go ahead and skip trying to rescue either Hadvar or Ralof. As noted in the previous section, this is entirely optional. Proceed to Riverwood.

What to do if you go straight to Riverwood without helping Hadvar or Ralof...

If you go this route, then you'll need to look for an appropriate NPC in Riverwood to warn about the dragon attack. Your options are:

1. Alvor the smith, Hadvar's uncle, who you'd normally talk to if following Hadvar out of Helgen in vanilla
2. Ralof's sister Gerdur, who you'd normally talk to if following Ralof
3. Sven the bard, who is apparently an option here because Alternate Start is taking advantage of his having had some unused dialogue about dragons in vanilla

Talking to any of these people should let you get the objective to proceed to Whiterun to go warn the Jarl about what's happening.

What to do if talking to NPCs in Riverwood doesn't seem to work either...

If for whatever reason you can't get Alvor, Gerdur, or Sven to give you an appropriate objective to proceed to Whiterun, then worst case scenario is, go to Whiterun anyway. If you aren't challenged by the guard at the gate as should normally happen, then head straight to Dragonsreach.

Alternate Start has a failsafe that kicks in as soon as you enter Dragonsreach, to get the main quest finally kicked off properly. So if things have been looking broken for you, try this as a last resort. This has been confirmed by players to work in Tuxborn.

Once you get the quest to go to Bleak Falls Barrow, if you're still early in your game, you might want to take a bit of time to gear up first. In a vanilla game, you could charge all the way through killing Mirmulnir in your very first session. With Tuxborn, though, you should take at least a bit more time than that.

First and foremost: Tuxborn's load order and configuration makes things more difficult by default than in vanilla Skyrim. Both of the available combat overhauls make combat more difficult, no matter which profile you want to play. Roughly speaking, you should expect each level of difficulty in vanilla Skyrim to map to the next highest tier in Tuxborn. So for our load order, the default "Adept" Difficulty will actually be "Apprentice" in our load order.

If you want to see the actual numbers for these difficulty levels, you can do so in the MCM for Custom Difficulty UI, under System -> Mod Configuration -> Custom Difficulty UI. In that same location, you can also adjust those numbers if you want to.

You should also go into System Menu -> Settings -> Gameplay, and make sure the vanilla Difficulty setting is where you want it to be. In a default clean install of Tuxborn, it should still say "Adept" since that's the default for vanilla Skyrim. Change it at this point if you want it to be something else.

Second: once you're comfortable with your difficulty settings, then assuming you're on Novice or Apprentice, we recommend you target somewhere in the 5-8 range for level before you try to take on Bleak Falls Barrow. Adjust that higher if you want to play on higher Difficulty levels. Or maybe a little lower if you bring in multiple followers.

Third: As with going to Helgen (see strategy tips above for Helgen), it will be helpful to have a horse while you're running Bleak Falls Barrow. Because if you loot everything in there, including all of the gear wielded by any draugr you kill, you can sell that stuff. Or smelt it down to get an easy source of iron ingots, if you need them for crafting. And anything you can sell will help you gear up for fighting Mirmulnir.

Fighting Mirmulnir will be a bigger deal than Bleak Falls Barrow. Since we have a higher overall difficulty in this modpack, that does extend to fighting dragons.

If you play carefully, you can take out Mirmulnir around level 8, in one go, at Apprentice level difficulty. Adjust that range higher if you want to play at higher difficulty levels, to give yourself more time to get appropriate gear and training of your skills.

Alternately, consider recruiting one or more followers. Having good backup will help your chances of taking out Mirmulnir faster, especially if your squad has bows and/or Destruction magic. This could help you keep the level range for the fight a bit lower, even if you're on higher difficulty levels.

So balance out a) how much difficulty you want, b) how many followers you feel like running, and c) how much time you want to spend on leveling up and getting gear before you take on the dragon.

There are several followers easily recruitable within range of Whiterun, to help you make that call. Look on the Followers available in Tuxborn page for more details.

If you intend to run Legacy of the Dragonborn, try to get its initial three fetch quests done first, before you fight Mirmulnir. Regardless of whether you're running the Relic Hunter start, Silent Moons Camp will be one of the locations you'll need to hit. And inside Silent Moons Camp, you can find Denstagmer's Ring. That ring will grant you 30% Fire Resistance, and that will be incredibly useful for fighting the dragon.

Running those fetch quests will give you something to do to work up to a good level range, too.

If you don't want to run Legacy of the Dragonborn, try to get a reason to go hit Silent Moons Camp anyway so you can look for that ring. It should still be there, regardless. There are a few other ways you can get a reason to go to that location:

1. Talking to Proventus for a bounty quest in Whiterun, which may send you there
2. Talking to Belethor and asking him if he needs any help with anything could also send you off on a bandit bounty quest to that location
3. If you're running Katana as a follower, and you kick off her personal quest, one of the first things she'll have you to is to talk to Megara in the Drunken Huntsman. And Megara will send you to Silent Moons Camp to kill a specific bandit there.

And even if you get Denstagmer's Ring, stock up on any and all Resist Fire potions you can find. Also Cure Disease potions, as the primary means of curing the Death's Grip nerf from Shades of Mortality. If Mirmulnir kills you during the fight, your damage will be nerfed, and you need to fix that ASAP as soon as you come back out of the ethereal state. So having a means to do so is critical.

Lydia is hands down a solid choice, as per above commentary on her.

Aside from her, just about all the custom followers in the game will have running commentary on main quest events. So your options here will be many and varied.

After you have played through the earliest stages of the main quest, here are some recommendations for what happens next. Weave those into your playthrough as per your own preferences. Recommendations in this section are recommendations, not mandates!

This is the major checkpoint in the main quest you need to hit to unlock a bunch of content in our load order. So try to get to this point as soon as you can, within reason.

It will also get you the second word of Unrelenting Force, which is useful in combat.

Depending on what route you choose to take to get to High Hrothgar, you may be within good range of the spot you need to go to launch Carved Brink. (See Mod overview: Carved Brink for more on this.)

Once you're past this point, we have no particular constraints on when you should do the rest of the stages of the main quest.

You may wish to get this stage of the main quest out of the way fairly early in your playthrough, just to make sure you unlock all three words of Unrelenting Force. Also, running Ustengrav will get you access to at least one word of Become Ethereal.

Going to Ustengrav will also put you within range of Morthal, if you want to kick off Laid to Rest there, and set yourself up for the Hjaalmarch thaneship. You will also be within easy range of Myrwatch, but if you're early in your playthrough, you won't be able to get into Myrwatch unless you've altered the Rebalancing Anniversary Requirement setting dictating that your Magicka has to be at least 325.

You'll unlock a recipe to make a replica of the Horn of Jurgen Windcaller for LOTD, once you finish the part of the quest.

Since this part of the main quest requires you to go to Kynesgrove, this will put you within reasonable range of starting certain mods if you wish to do so: Project AHO, and Boethiah's Calling - Alternate Questline. Both of these can be kicked off in the Braidwood Inn in Kynesgrove.

You'll also be within reasonably short range of fossil hunter Darnette Lauven's camp, if you have the objective to recruit her for your Explorers Society in LOTD.

Once you get to the point of needing to run Diplomatic Immunity, and infiltrating the Thalmor Embassy, take stock of what followers you're running before you do this.

Several of our custom followers have code that will have them port into places to catch up with you, and this may also include the back areas of the Thalmor Embassy. Gore is known to show up there on his own even if you don't have him on active follower duty at the time. Xelzaz has specific extra RP steps he'll take to actually let him port in to follow you as well.

If you specifically want to run the Embassy solo, you should take steps to dismiss any followers with you beforehand, or otherwise tell them to wait for you in whatever location you like.

Otherwise, be prepared for them to maybe port into the back areas with you, on purpose or otherwise, which could very quickly turn your stealth operation into an aggro rampage!

If you're running the Thieves Guild in your playthrough, you'll probably already have been down in the Ratway by the time you get this objective, and you should easily be able to talk to Brynjolf or Vekel the Man for the info on Esbern.

If you aren't playing the Thieves Guild, you can bypass having to talk to Brynjolf by talking to Keerava in the Bee and Barb instead. (This works in vanilla Skyrim, and should also work in Tuxborn.)

In vanilla Skyrim it's normally a good idea to hold off on running this stage of the main quest until you make it to level 46, so you can get the best possible version of Dragonbane in Sky Haven Temple. In our load order, we're running Artificer, which unlevels all artifacts, so this should no longer be a concern.

Several of our custom followers will have amusing reactions to this part of the main quest, particularly once you reach Paarthurnax. For best results, we recommend maybe not having too many followers at once at this point, just so they don't all talk over each other and you don't miss any of the best lines!

Making it to the stage of the main quest is a good way to get yourself a reason to head down into Blackreach. There are other quests that also require you to head into Blackreach, namely, The Tools of Kagrenac, and The Teleportation Machine quest from Interesting NPCs. If you're interested in running either or both of these quests, it might be good to layer them in on top of running Elder Knowledge, so you can cut down on how often you need to care about entering Blackreach.

There are several points of interest about Blackreach that you may want to read up on at this point, documented on the Blackreach page.

Also, this is an issue in the vanilla game and it can reproduce in Tuxborn as well: once you get the Elder Scroll in the Tower of Mzark, do not, repeat, do not forget to retrieve the now-etched lexicon off its holder for Septimus! If you don't have that lexicon in your inventory when you take the lift back to the surface out of that tower, then the lift won't work correctly. Any followers with you may be stuck behind the lift gate, while you yourself are pushed outside of it. The Tower of Mzark fast travel marker won't activate either. And most importantly, you'll have to go all the way back down into Alftand to retrieve that lexicon so you can give it to Septimus to finish that part of the quest. Or you'll have to roll back to a prior save.

There is a longstanding known bug in vanilla Skyrim where the cutscene that teaches you the Dragonrend Shout can get into a hung state, and yes, this can reproduce in Tuxborn.

If this happens to you, there are suggested workarounds on the UESP's page for the quest, in the Bugs section.

Since the workarounds do involve having to launch the console, Steam Deck players, remember that you may need to invoke known workarounds to use on the console on the Deck. See Frequently Asked Questions: How to use console on Steam Deck if you need further help with that.

As in vanilla Skyrim, you don't need to care about running Season Unending if you've completed the Skyrim civil war questline. So if you don't want to bother with Season Unending, finish up the civil war before you get to this part of the main quest. If you're not done with the civil war yet, you'll still need to do the peace conference, but how the war has played out up until that point will have an impact on how the peace conference proceeds.

Tuxborn is running JaySerpa's Paarthurnax quest expansion, so you will have expanded opportunities for how to handle it when Delphine and Esbern insist that you kill Paarthurnax.

If you are running Tuxborn 1.1.3 or earlier, and you've attempted to run the quest to get the studded dragonscale armor at Yorgrim Overlook, then you will need to get to this stage of the main quest before you can return to get that armor. The reason for this is, the armor quest will expect you to get the diamond dragon claw, which is found in Skuldafn. This is the stage of the main quest that will send you there.

This will not be a concern in Tuxborn 1.2.

These are the two final stages of the main quest, and mostly play out as they do in the vanilla game.

One point of interest here though is that if you've played Warden of the Coast before you get to this point, there will be an additional bit of detail in Sovngarde to look for. There is a bit of additional spoilery detail at Mod overview: Warden of the Coast. Here, we'll simply recommend that if you're interested in that mod, finish it up before you get to the main quest finale.

Thanks to the following players on #txbn-general:

• TSP, for the tip to get Denstagmer's Ring for the fire resistance, to prep for fighting Mirmulnir
• Kok0, for pointing out that you need to run The Way of the Voice in order to be able to launch The Gray Cowl of Nocturnal