The land nords call home…
The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim needs no introduction. First released in 2011, with more re-releases than anyone asked for, it has become one of the most popular RPGs ever made. The game is not without its flaws, but it has enough stuff to do to keep players coming back to it even 13 years later. But what if you want something a bit more fresh? An extra challenge, perhaps?
Survival Mode
Well, then you’re in luck. In 2017, Survival Mode was released, initially for the cost of 500 Creation Club Credits, and later made free and part of Skyrim Special Edition in 2021.
Survival Mode is a hard mode that’s actually good: your health regeneration is reduced by 100%, you can’t fast travel, you need to eat, sleep, and keep warm, lockpicks and arrows now have weight (both are weightless in vanilla Skyrim), diseases can progress to more severe forms after each day they go untreated, and more.
But how does each feature introduced by Survival Mode affect gameplay? Well, that’s what I’m hoping to explore with this essay.
New stats to manage
Well, let’s start with one of the most obvious additions: Survival Mode adds the need to eat, sleep, and keep warm. All 3 are denoted by a dark region on the stamina, magicka, and health bar respectively. Let’s go over them one by one.
Hunger
A fairly system. Over time, your hunger depletes. As you get hungrier, you lose a percentage of your stamina until it reaches 0, you also become slower with weapons, and less effective when sneaking and blocking. If your hunger drops low enough, there’s also a chance of you becoming weakened, an affliction which causes you to be 30% less effective with melee weapons and blocking for 24 hours.
Hunger can be restored by eating food, with cooked food restoring more hunger, and raw meat having a chance of giving you food poisoning (unless you’re a Khajiit or Argonian), which causes magicka and stamina to regenerate 50% slower, and food to no longer restore health for 3 days. Werewolves and holders of the Ring of Namira may also feed on corpses to restore hunger, and vampires may feed on sleeping NPCs, or drink Potions of Blood.
This actually ends up having quite an interesting effect on the game, taking some mechanics which are otherwise rather forgettable and putting them in a new light. Food is normally useless, but now it becomes a resource you must constantly make use of. The Ring of Namira offers some buffs which are otherwise nothing special, but in Survival Mode it becomes one of the most useful items in the whole game. Vampirism and lycanthropy are put in a new light as well, offering alternative means of managing your hunger. The changes also end up offering some interesting opportunities for roleplaying. What if your vampire character could only survive by feeding on blood? What if you wanted to roleplay a Bosmer who abides by The Green Pact, meaning you could only feed on meat?
Fatigue
Much like hunger, fatigue depletes over time. As you get more fatigued, you also start loosing a percentage of your magicka pool, and your ability to regenerate magicka and stamina, until they reach zero. If your fatigue drops low enough, there’s a chance of becoming addled, an affliction which causes you to regenerate magicka and stamina 30% slower for 24 hours.
You can can restore your fatigue by sleeping, however you can only fully restore it if you sleep indoors. Sleeping outside can only restore your fatigue to a level of “drained” (the highest level that still has negative effects on you).
The main way fatigue affects gameplay is in planning your routes. You need a bed to rest, so it can be quite a big problem if there are no beds on the way you chose to travel. Living in a city also means it’s more important now to either make enough money to rent a bed in an inn, make friends who let you sleep in their beds, or buy a house you can sleep in.
Cold
Cold is a bit more complex. Skyrim is now divided into warm, cold, and freezing regions. The temperatures also lower during the night. In warm regions, this mechanic largely takes a backseat, but in colder regions you will become colder over time until you match the environment’s temperature. As you get colder, your health pool drops, you become slower, and less effective at lock picking. If you get too cold, your health pool can reach 0, killing you. Much like with hunger and fatigue, when you’re cold enough there’s a chance of becoming frostbitten, an affliction which makes it 30% harder to pick locks and pockets, and reduces the damage you deal with bows by the same 30%, once again for 24 hours.
Water in colder regions also deals damage, along with causing your temperature to rapidly drop. This effect can be countered with a Flame Cloak spell, but those without the spell will have one more thing to worry about.
You can slow down the effects of colder environments by wearing warm clothes (all clothes and armour now have an associated warmth value), or using torches. Restoring warmth can be done by sticking close to a heat source (such as a campfire or smelter), or eating hot soups. Most interiors are also warmer than the outside, so taking refuge inside a cave, mine, or hut works just as well.
This ends up affecting longer trips among the colder parts of Skyrim the most. You can’t stand around for long, you can’t just wander aimlessly, you have to plan your trips carefully to make sure you have a place to warm up before the ruthless land claim your life.
All in all…
They make up the most constant challenge in survival mode, and I’d say they’re pretty well balanced. They provide a challenge, keeping you on your toes, and planning your routes and resources accordingly, but don’t put so much pressure on you that you can’t do anything but manage your hunger, fatigue, and warmth.
In short: I like it, and I think most people who praise Survival Mode do as well.
Superman no more
It’s no secret video game characters can often times carry so much in their inventories they sometimes put even Superman to shame, and the player character in Skyrim is no exception. So of course, Survival Mode had to fix that. After all, where’s the challenge if you can just carry everything you’ll ever need?
Your carry weight is halved, from 300 to 150. The extra carry weight from The Steed Stone and Extra Pockets perk form the Pickpocket skill tree are also halved, from 100 to 50. All other carry weight bonuses (from enchanted gear, potions, or the +5 carry weight you get every time you increase your base stamina on level up), remain unaffected.
Oh, and just in case you thought that was still too easy. Arrows and Lockpicks now weigh 0.1 instead of being weightless, which doesn’t sound like much but it adds up quickly.
All of this, along with the fact you now need to carry food, ends up making inventory management far more important. No more can you just carry thousands of arrows and hundreds of lockpicks, instead you have to manage it carefully, only keep what you really need and either sell the rest, or leave it home, in a guildhall, or wherever you decided to make a base of operations.
Transport, and how anemic it is in Skyrim
Survival Mode disables fast-travel, forcing you to use in-universe transport, which shines a light on a design decision Bethesda took with Skyrim which I wish they didn’t.
As mentioned above, Skyrim normally allows you to fast travel to any location you have visited by just clicking on it on the map while outside and not in combat. This is definitely convenient for those who don’t have time to travel for potentially hours across Skyrim. But it also affected the base game’s design in ways you don’t really notice until it’s gone.
Quests often times take you all across the map. This normally wouldn’t be an issue, but the game very much expects you to fast travel instead of walking and making use of in-universe transport. Again, normally not an issue, but it becomes the bane of your existence in Survival mode. Take the quest Hard Answers as an example: The quest starts just outside Snow Veil Sanctum, located north-northeast of Windhelm, it then sends you to Winterhold up north. Okay, it’s in a very cold and harsh road but not too far. Then it sends you to the far west of the map, to Markarth. At this point your shortest path is to talk down to Windhelm, and from there take a carriage to Markarth. Not a very short path actually. When you finish your business in Markarth, you have to return to Winterhold, this time you can take a carriage from Markarth straight to Winterhold, but once you’re done there you have to go down to Riften, and once again, your shortest path is walking down to Windhelm and taking a carriage. This might not sound like a lot, but it of is when it’s almost every quest that does it, especially when some trips are for nothing but some exposition.
Skyrim does offer some in-universe transport, but it’s very little: just outside the cities of Markarth, Riften, Solitude Whiterun, and Windhelm, you can find carriage drivers who can take you to any of the aforementioned, as well as to Dawnstar, Falkreath, Morthal, and Winterhold. The Dawnguard DLC also adds a ferry service that can take you between Dawnstar, Solitude, and Windhelm, as well as to Castle Volkihar once you start the quest “Bloodlines”. All of this means there are only 6 places in the entire game that you can access any sort of transport from, which might not sound the worst until you compare it to Morrowind’s very robust transport network.
Practically every settlement besides the nomadic Ashlanders' camps is connected by some form of transport, and to top it off, the game offers transport spells as well. Divine and Almsivi Intervention spells can take you to the nearest Imperial Cult Shrine or Almsivi Tribunal Temple, and the Mark spell allows you to, well, mark a location to return to later from anywhere in the game map using the Recall spell.
I know this is sounding a lot like I’m just trash talking Skyrim and praising Morrowind like it’s the Nerevarine, and I’m very well aware there’s not nearly as much need for this kind of transport when fast-travel is an option, but I still think the game would’ve been better off as far as immersion is concerned if it had a few more transport options, maybe add carriages in the minor hold capitals, maybe some mages who could teleport you like the guild guides in Morrowind, or at the very least bring back Mark and Recall from Morrowind.
As it is, however, this is probably going to be the biggest issue in Survival Mode: following any kind of questline means ungodly amounts of travel that will make you question if it’s even worth it anymore or if you should just retreat in a cabin in the woods and hunt deer to survive.
Diseases and Afflictions
As mentioned above, neglecting your hunger, temperature, or fatigue puts you at risk of contracting an affliction. Diseases are worse as well, with new diseases added to the roster, and most of them progressing to a more severe form for each day they go untreated. Eating raw meat will also cause result in food poisoning for all characters besides Argonians and Khajiit.
Curing diseases is harder as well, as now shrines require payment to cure diseases and bestow their blessing.
Health no longer regenerates
Or rather, you get -100% health regeneration, reducing it to 0%. This means you can’t regenerate health normally, but any enchanted gear which boosts your health regeneration by a percentage will still take effect. This ends up being a particularly big issue for vampires, as in daylight you get an additional -100% to health regeneration, which together with Survival Mode adds up to -100% health regeneration in daylight, meaning you need any enchanted gear and potion effects to add up to over 100% to actually get any health regeneration in daylight if you’re a vampire.
Racial differences
And on one last note, some races also get some buffs and debuffs for survival mode. As mentioned above, Khajiit and Argonians are able to eat raw meat without contracting food poisoning. In addition to that, Argonians are 25% weaker to cold, while Khajiit get +15 warmth. All elven races get a +25% resist fatigue, allowing them to go for longer before they’re tired. Nords being used to the harsh, cold lands of Skyrim also get +25 warmth. And finally orcs, being rugged warriors, get 15% resistance to hunger and fatigue, and +10 warmth. Redguards, Bretons, and Imperials get no buffs or debuffs.
Closing Toughts
Survival Mode is great. Maybe not for first time players, but anyone who has been roaming the harsh lands of Skyrim for a while will likely enjoy it. It’s not without issues, some unique to it, others just part of the base game and exacerbated by it, but at the end of the day I think it’s a welcome addition to the base game, and far more fun for seasoned players.
And of course, I hope its popularity leads to Bethesda thinking of Survival Mode when designing The Elder Scrolls VI. A man can dream…
Acknowledgements
The maps featured above are both sourced from The Unofficial Elder Scrolls Pages. Some of the information mentioned is also sourced from UESP (a man can only source so much info directly from the game).
Also a quick note: UESP doesn’t mention all the debuffs associated with low hunger/cold/fatigue. Don’t say I didn’t do some of my own research :P
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