A recent discussion with BenC got me interested in testing a particular skill (it's a secret, shh!) which, in turn, got me interested in something that I had never actually sat down and tried to figure out. Skyrim has now been out for over two years so topics such as 'Loot tables' should absolutely be figured out however if one spends time trying to find answers to a few specific questions you will probably find the information surprisingly lacking. This discussion will attempt to explain four key modifiers to the loot system of Skyrim, namely:
- Prowler's Profit
- Golden Touch
- Treasure Hunter
- Imperial Luck
Some of this is very straight forward and easy to understand but some will require briefly discussing how certain aspects of the loot system works. For ease of use I'm going to include a Conclusion for each of the four topics so if you are only interested in the end result just skip ahead to that part, otherwise give the whole topic a read and hopefully everyone can learn something and questions can be answered. This will not be a short read but I will do my best to save you from spiraling down the black hole that is Skyrim's loot system...you have no idea how silly this can actually get.
NOTE #1: Think of drop tables like throwing dice which can land on any number from 1-100. If a container has a 30% chance of having an item:
- 1-30 = item is spawned
- 31-100 = item is not spawned
PROWLER'S PROFIT
Prowler's Profit is one of those amazing perks/powers that everyone knows about but many have never actually used. If you want to know how to gain this power (it's technically a spell) please refer to any of the popular wiki's, it is far too involved to explain here. Once a player has finished the quest and recieved this power you will now get a massive modifier to the loot table for gems, both flawless and regular (not soul gems). Gems can be obtained from numerous sources but the majority that we are concerned with are classified as 'Containers' and typically fall under the following:
- Chests (all sizes, including strongboxes and safes)
- Urns (all sizes)
- Dragon corpses
- Draugr corpses (the ones that don't come to life)
An additional category that we will be interested in are NPC's that are classified as 'Rich' (think Maven Blackbriar). There are other containers that Prowler's Profit will affect but they are of no real significance.
Each type of container listed has it's own loot list which it pulls from to create it's contents and this is calculated when you enter the zone. The drop chance for a gem can vary between 10% and 100% but Prowler's profit doesn't modify this chance, it adds seperate chance rolls...here's what I mean.
eg: Treasure chest with a 10% chance of leveled gem
- 1 chance @ 10%
When you enter the area that contains the chest it will create it's contents. In this example the chest has a 10% chance of returning a positive variable which means it will contain a random leveled gem and a 90% chance it will be negative and thus not contain the gem. Prowler's Profit adds four SEPERATE new dice rolls to each eligible container, each with varying percentages. the new calculation will be:
- 1 chance @ 10%
- 1 chance @ 100%
- 1 chance @ 75%
- 1 chance @ 50%
- 1 chance @ 25%
Basically once we have the Prowler's Profit we will be guaranteed a leveled gem in every single container that qualifies, then additional gems at the decreasing rates above. Each of these is considered a seperate and unique 'dice roll' so it's not a 50% chance of 3 gems and 25% chance of 4 as is commonly cited. The type and quality of gem you recieve is based on your character's level at the time of generating the loot. The levels for each type of gem (and the chances) can be found on the popular wiki's.
Conclusion: Prowler's Profit increases the amount of gems you recieve by an extreme amount. As a rough estimate you can count on getting 2-3 gems from every single chest/urn/dragon/draugrcorpse and it is common to leave a nordic crypt with between 100-150 gems of various quality. The quest to get the perk can be difficult and lengthy but once you finish it money will never be a concern again. If you combine this with the 'Merchant' perk in the speech tree you will be able to sell gems to every merchant in the game and trade them for training; if you can get some gold/silver, smithing can be trained to 100 at an incredible pace since xp is based partly on value. My main thief character currently has over 5,000 gems and more gold than I can spend. If your character is around level 50+ the majority of the gems you get will be flawless diamonds which have a value of 1000 gold each (meaning each dungeon can net you 100-150k profit in gems)...Prowler's Profit is a total game changer.
GOLDEN TOUCH
This is probably the most interesting and useful of the four topics in this discussion. How this perk works is fairly easy to understand, treasure chests (and other containers) are given a new dice roll when you have this perk which breaks down as follows: (example uses a REGULAR chest)
- 10 gold
- 9 gold
- 8 gold
- 7 gold
- 6 gold
- 5 gold
- 4 gold
- 3 gold
- 2 gold
Each value is assigned a number from 1-9 and whatever number is rolled, you get the corresponding amount of gold added to the chest's loot. BOSS chests use the same method except the values are multiplied by 10 (100 gold, 90 gold, etc.). The perk says you find more gold in chests but this is incorrect, the perk works for all chests (except Dwarven) as well as urns and dead draugr (the ones that don't come to life); basically everything that is affected by Prowler's Profit is also affected by Golden Touch.
Something to note, urns (both large and small urns) come in two main subtypes, regular and EMPTY...as you can guess the EMPTY urns don't generate loot which is why with Prowler's Profit (and golden touch) you don't get gems from every single urn, although most will contain loot.
Conclusion: When you take this perk almost every treasure chest, burial urn, and dead draugr corpse (the one's that don't come to life) will contain an extra 2-10 gold, and BOSS chests will have an additional 20-100 gold. This amount may sound trivial at first but consider how many chests/urns/corpses you will loot in any given dungeon, It is common to gain approx. 300-400 gold per dungeon from this perk. This perk will not give you the kind of unlimited money that Prowler's Profit will but it will add up over time to the tune of tens of thousands of extra gold. I wouldn't define this as a game changing perk, but for characters built around dungeon crawling and getting loot this perk is a very solid investment.
TREASURE HUNTER
From looking around various sites for information regarding this discussion this perk is easily the one most people are interested in, and the least understood. This perk is not as good as you probably think.
Skyrim has things called 'Global Variables' that it uses for various things, it isn't important to understand everything about them...just know that they exist. When creating loot, a treasure chest pulls from a loot table that is specific to it's type. Within this table there are categories of items such as potions/gems/armour/scrolls/etc. What we are interested in for this topic is a specific category of items that fall under the 'SpecialLootChance' table, this specifically includes two things:
- ItemSpecialLoot100
- ItemSpecialLoot10
What these two categories do is tell the treasure chest the % chance of generating special loot, specifically either 100% or 10%. This is going to get even more confusing so I'll try my best to be clear.
For the most part there are two types of treasure chests in Skyrim, BOSS chests and REGULAR chests; there are subtypes for each of these (Draugr, Falmer, Dwarven, Bandit, etc). Each subtype will have loot specific to it's type (bandit chest will have bandit related items, etc) but for our purposes here they all can be considered the same (dwarven being the exception, I'll touch on this in the conclusion for this topic).
The main thing you need to remember is BOSS chests use the 'ItemSpecialLoot100' category and all others use the 'ItemSpecialLoot10'. What this means is BOSS chests have a 100% chance to generate special loot while all other chests have a 10% chance. Special Loot contains the following (and ONLY the following):
- Leveled Armour
- Leveled Armour - Enchanted
- Leveled Weapon
- Leveled Weapon - Enchanted
BOSS chests have two chances to generate unenchanted weapon/armour and one for enchanted, REGULAR chests have one chance for each. From the many sources I read people often cite jewelery/gems/scrolls/potions/etc. as special loot however this is not the case; special loot only means leveled (un)enchanted armour and weapons. To make matters worse there is another issue regarding the TreasureHunter perk, because BOSS chests have a 100% drop rate for special loot they are also flagged to not use the Global Variable that this perk modifies. What this means is the Treasure Hunter perk only benefits you when you are opening basic treasure chests, that aren't Dwarven, and only modifies the 10% chance to 15%. It does nothing for BOSS chests.
Conclusion: There are two main types of treasure chests in Skyrim, BOSS chests and REGULAR chests. REGULAR chests have a 10% chance of containing leveled (un)enchanted armour/weapons and the 'Treasure Hunter' perk bossts this to a 15% chance. It does not boost your chance of any other type of loot and has no affect on BOSS chests. To further detract from it's value Dwarven chests are their own subtype and they are not affected by 'Treasure Hunter' at all. This perk will give you an increased chance of 5% for getting enchanted armour and weapons, which can certainly be useful if you are collecting enchantments or just like selling the loot, but the overall value of this perk is a lot less than it seems on the surface. The majority of chests and containers you will open are not affected by this perk.
IMPERIAL LUCK
I am including this in the discussion for two reasons, first because it's a modifier so it fits the theme and second because thanks to an unavoidable glitch, every single character you've ever played has had this power. Imperial Luck works in a very similar way to Golden Touch so only a few points need to be clarified.
As I've discussed 'Golden Touch' is a set of gold values that is multiplied by 10 for BOSS chests. While ImperialLuck doesn't do this, it does do something else. For BOSS chests you get 5 dice rolls and for most regular chests you get 2. I'll explain more clearly.
Using the same gold list as found in the 'Golden Touch' section:
- 10 gold
- 9 gold
- 8 gold
- 7 gold
- 6 gold
- 5 gold
- 4 gold
- 3 gold
- 2 gold
Imperial luck gives the player a varying number of dice rolls for each type of container. The basic breakdown is as follows:
- 5 rolls - BOSS chests (except Falmer BOSS chests which give 1)
- 2 rolls - REGULAR chests
- 1 roll - All urns (except 'EMPTY' urns)
- 1 roll - Draugr corpses (the ones that...yada yada)
- 0 rolls - Dwarven chests (because screw you!)
From what I can tell every roll has an equal chance at landing on each of the 9 spots (meaning if one lands on '9 gold' it isn't eliminated). Over a large enough sample size you can expect each roll to average an extra ~6 gold for you so BOSS chests will average ~30 gold and regular ones ~12.
Conclusion: Due to an unavoidable bug every character is given this power when you leave Helgen for the first time, the power will not be displayed under active effects but it's being applied. We've all become used to getting 10-15 gold from chests and burial urns as we go through dungeons so it's interesting to note that the original intention was you would be getting virtually no gold at all...except Imperials. Kind of makes you wonder how different the game might feel if this mechanic had worked properly.
While there is no need to give an opinion whether Imperial Luck is worthwhile, it's certainly worth knowing what exactly it is doing behind the scenes. I couldn't really find any information on what this power actually did other than most people citing that it adds 2-10 extra gold to a chest which is not accurate. A pleasant surprise to me, the power is actually a lot more useful and profitable than I thought.
IN CLOSING:
So there we have it, a short (kinda?) discussion on how Skyrim generates certain loot and the four main modifiers the player can have and what they do. This is a very involved and boring subject that I could literally write 50 pages of information on but, for the most part, most of what isn't mentioned here is very routine and likely not of much interest. There's not really anything earth shattering in this discussion but for you nerdy types (like myself) that are interested in what is going on behind the GUI I hope you found something interesting here today.
The aim of this discussion was to hopefully answer any questions people had about these topics so if anyone has any further questions please feel free to post them below and I'll answer them if I can. I'm extremely sick this week (damn Canadian flu) so I might be posting another discussion this week which is related to this one. I spent more time than I care to admit taking apart the Lockpicking skill but I'm not sure if there's enough interesting things to mention...we'll see.
Thank you for reading,
-James
A recent discussion with BenC got me interested in testing a particular skill (it's a secret, shh!) which, in turn, got me interested in something that I had never actually sat down and tried to figure out. Skyrim has now been out for over two years so topics such as 'Loot tables' should absolutely be figured out however if one spends time trying to find answers to a few specific questions you will probably find the information surprisingly lacking. This discussion will attempt to explain four key modifiers to the loot system of Skyrim, namely:
- Prowler's Profit
- Golden Touch
- Treasure Hunter
- Imperial Luck
Some of this is very straight forward and easy to understand but some will require briefly discussing how certain aspects of the loot system works. For ease of use I'm going to include a Conclusion for each of the four topics so if you are only interested in the end result just skip ahead to that part, otherwise give the whole topic a read and hopefully everyone can learn something and questions can be answered. This will not be a short read but I will do my best to save you from spiraling down the black hole that is Skyrim's loot system...you have no idea how silly this can actually get.
NOTE #1: Think of drop tables like throwing dice which can land on any number from 1-100. If a container has a 30% chance of having an item:
- 1-30 = item is spawned
- 31-100 = item is not spawned
PROWLER'S PROFIT
Prowler's Profit is one of those amazing perks/powers that everyone knows about but many have never actually used. If you want to know how to gain this power (it's technically a spell) please refer to any of the popular wiki's, it is far too involved to explain here. Once a player has finished the quest and recieved this power you will now get a massive modifier to the loot table for gems, both flawless and regular (not soul gems). Gems can be obtained from numerous sources but the majority that we are concerned with are classified as 'Containers' and typically fall under the following:
- Chests (all sizes, including strongboxes and safes)
- Urns (all sizes)
- Dragon corpses
- Draugr corpses (the ones that don't come to life)
An additional category that we will be interested in are NPC's that are classified as 'Rich' (think Maven Blackbriar). There are other containers that Prowler's Profit will affect but they are of no real significance.
Each type of container listed has it's own loot list which it pulls from to create it's contents and this is calculated when you enter the zone. The drop chance for a gem can vary between 10% and 100% but Prowler's profit doesn't modify this chance, it adds seperate chance rolls...here's what I mean.
eg: Treasure chest with a 10% chance of leveled gem
- 1 chance @ 10%
When you enter the area that contains the chest it will create it's contents. In this example the chest has a 10% chance of returning a positive variable which means it will contain a random leveled gem and a 90% chance it will be negative and thus not contain the gem. Prowler's Profit adds four SEPERATE new dice rolls to each eligible container, each with varying percentages. the new calculation will be:
- 1 chance @ 10%
- 1 chance @ 100%
- 1 chance @ 75%
- 1 chance @ 50%
- 1 chance @ 25%
Basically once we have the Prowler's Profit we will be guaranteed a leveled gem in every single container that qualifies, then additional gems at the decreasing rates above. Each of these is considered a seperate and unique 'dice roll' so it's not a 50% chance of 3 gems and 25% chance of 4 as is commonly cited. The type and quality of gem you recieve is based on your character's level at the time of generating the loot. The levels for each type of gem (and the chances) can be found on the popular wiki's.
Conclusion: Prowler's Profit increases the amount of gems you recieve by an extreme amount. As a rough estimate you can count on getting 2-3 gems from every single chest/urn/dragon/draugrcorpse and it is common to leave a nordic crypt with between 100-150 gems of various quality. The quest to get the perk can be difficult and lengthy but once you finish it money will never be a concern again. If you combine this with the 'Merchant' perk in the speech tree you will be able to sell gems to every merchant in the game and trade them for training; if you can get some gold/silver, smithing can be trained to 100 at an incredible pace since xp is based partly on value. My main thief character currently has over 5,000 gems and more gold than I can spend. If your character is around level 50+ the majority of the gems you get will be flawless diamonds which have a value of 1000 gold each (meaning each dungeon can net you 100-150k profit in gems)...Prowler's Profit is a total game changer.
GOLDEN TOUCH
This is probably the most interesting and useful of the four topics in this discussion. How this perk works is fairly easy to understand, treasure chests (and other containers) are given a new dice roll when you have this perk which breaks down as follows: (example uses a REGULAR chest)
- 10 gold
- 9 gold
- 8 gold
- 7 gold
- 6 gold
- 5 gold
- 4 gold
- 3 gold
- 2 gold
Each value is assigned a number from 1-9 and whatever number is rolled, you get the corresponding amount of gold added to the chest's loot. BOSS chests use the same method except the values are multiplied by 10 (100 gold, 90 gold, etc.). The perk says you find more gold in chests but this is incorrect, the perk works for all chests (except Dwarven) as well as urns and dead draugr (the ones that don't come to life); basically everything that is affected by Prowler's Profit is also affected by Golden Touch.
Something to note, urns (both large and small urns) come in two main subtypes, regular and EMPTY...as you can guess the EMPTY urns don't generate loot which is why with Prowler's Profit (and golden touch) you don't get gems from every single urn, although most will contain loot.
Conclusion: When you take this perk almost every treasure chest, burial urn, and dead draugr corpse (the one's that don't come to life) will contain an extra 2-10 gold, and BOSS chests will have an additional 20-100 gold. This amount may sound trivial at first but consider how many chests/urns/corpses you will loot in any given dungeon, It is common to gain approx. 300-400 gold per dungeon from this perk. This perk will not give you the kind of unlimited money that Prowler's Profit will but it will add up over time to the tune of tens of thousands of extra gold. I wouldn't define this as a game changing perk, but for characters built around dungeon crawling and getting loot this perk is a very solid investment.
TREASURE HUNTER
From looking around various sites for information regarding this discussion this perk is easily the one most people are interested in, and the least understood. This perk is not as good as you probably think.
Skyrim has things called 'Global Variables' that it uses for various things, it isn't important to understand everything about them...just know that they exist. When creating loot, a treasure chest pulls from a loot table that is specific to it's type. Within this table there are categories of items such as potions/gems/armour/scrolls/etc. What we are interested in for this topic is a specific category of items that fall under the 'SpecialLootChance' table, this specifically includes two things:
- ItemSpecialLoot100
- ItemSpecialLoot10
What these two categories do is tell the treasure chest the % chance of generating special loot, specifically either 100% or 10%. This is going to get even more confusing so I'll try my best to be clear.
For the most part there are two types of treasure chests in Skyrim, BOSS chests and REGULAR chests; there are subtypes for each of these (Draugr, Falmer, Dwarven, Bandit, etc). Each subtype will have loot specific to it's type (bandit chest will have bandit related items, etc) but for our purposes here they all can be considered the same (dwarven being the exception, I'll touch on this in the conclusion for this topic).
The main thing you need to remember is BOSS chests use the 'ItemSpecialLoot100' category and all others use the 'ItemSpecialLoot10'. What this means is BOSS chests have a 100% chance to generate special loot while all other chests have a 10% chance. Special Loot contains the following (and ONLY the following):
- Leveled Armour
- Leveled Armour - Enchanted
- Leveled Weapon
- Leveled Weapon - Enchanted
BOSS chests have two chances to generate unenchanted weapon/armour and one for enchanted, REGULAR chests have one chance for each. From the many sources I read people often cite jewelery/gems/scrolls/potions/etc. as special loot however this is not the case; special loot only means leveled (un)enchanted armour and weapons. To make matters worse there is another issue regarding the TreasureHunter perk, because BOSS chests have a 100% drop rate for special loot they are also flagged to not use the Global Variable that this perk modifies. What this means is the Treasure Hunter perk only benefits you when you are opening basic treasure chests, that aren't Dwarven, and only modifies the 10% chance to 15%. It does nothing for BOSS chests.
Conclusion: There are two main types of treasure chests in Skyrim, BOSS chests and REGULAR chests. REGULAR chests have a 10% chance of containing leveled (un)enchanted armour/weapons and the 'Treasure Hunter' perk bossts this to a 15% chance. It does not boost your chance of any other type of loot and has no affect on BOSS chests. To further detract from it's value Dwarven chests are their own subtype and they are not affected by 'Treasure Hunter' at all. This perk will give you an increased chance of 5% for getting enchanted armour and weapons, which can certainly be useful if you are collecting enchantments or just like selling the loot, but the overall value of this perk is a lot less than it seems on the surface. The majority of chests and containers you will open are not affected by this perk.
IMPERIAL LUCK
I am including this in the discussion for two reasons, first because it's a modifier so it fits the theme and second because thanks to an unavoidable glitch, every single character you've ever played has had this power. Imperial Luck works in a very similar way to Golden Touch so only a few points need to be clarified.
As I've discussed 'Golden Touch' is a set of gold values that is multiplied by 10 for BOSS chests. While ImperialLuck doesn't do this, it does do something else. For BOSS chests you get 5 dice rolls and for most regular chests you get 2. I'll explain more clearly.
Using the same gold list as found in the 'Golden Touch' section:
- 10 gold
- 9 gold
- 8 gold
- 7 gold
- 6 gold
- 5 gold
- 4 gold
- 3 gold
- 2 gold
Imperial luck gives the player a varying number of dice rolls for each type of container. The basic breakdown is as follows:
- 5 rolls - BOSS chests (except Falmer BOSS chests which give 1)
- 2 rolls - REGULAR chests
- 1 roll - All urns (except 'EMPTY' urns)
- 1 roll - Draugr corpses (the ones that...yada yada)
- 0 rolls - Dwarven chests (because screw you!)
From what I can tell every roll has an equal chance at landing on each of the 9 spots (meaning if one lands on '9 gold' it isn't eliminated). Over a large enough sample size you can expect each roll to average an extra ~6 gold for you so BOSS chests will average ~30 gold and regular ones ~12.
Conclusion: Due to an unavoidable bug every character is given this power when you leave Helgen for the first time, the power will not be displayed under active effects but it's being applied. We've all become used to getting 10-15 gold from chests and burial urns as we go through dungeons so it's interesting to note that the original intention was you would be getting virtually no gold at all...except Imperials. Kind of makes you wonder how different the game might feel if this mechanic had worked properly.
While there is no need to give an opinion whether Imperial Luck is worthwhile, it's certainly worth knowing what exactly it is doing behind the scenes. I couldn't really find any information on what this power actually did other than most people citing that it adds 2-10 extra gold to a chest which is not accurate. A pleasant surprise to me, the power is actually a lot more useful and profitable than I thought.
IN CLOSING:
So there we have it, a short (kinda?) discussion on how Skyrim generates certain loot and the four main modifiers the player can have and what they do. This is a very involved and boring subject that I could literally write 50 pages of information on but, for the most part, most of what isn't mentioned here is very routine and likely not of much interest. There's not really anything earth shattering in this discussion but for you nerdy types (like myself) that are interested in what is going on behind the GUI I hope you found something interesting here today.
The aim of this discussion was to hopefully answer any questions people had about these topics so if anyone has any further questions please feel free to post them below and I'll answer them if I can. I'm extremely sick this week (damn Canadian flu) so I might be posting another discussion this week which is related to this one. I spent more time than I care to admit taking apart the Lockpicking skill but I'm not sure if there's enough interesting things to mention...we'll see.
Thank you for reading,
-James
