4 items
About this mod
The Tower of Mzark, the location of the Elder Scroll (Dragon), is now inaccessible until you've opened the door by clearing the Silent City Ruin.
- Permissions and credits
INTRODUCTION
Have you ever been playing the main questline, had to travel through the Alftand Glacial Ruins, Alftand Animonculory, Alftand Cathedral, and Blackreach but still felt like you needed to be stuck in a Dwarven ruin for a while longer? Even if you went through Alftand Ruined Tower first? Does it not make sense to you that the Tower of Mzark, the location of an Elder Scroll, is barely secured? Then this is the mod for you!
Now, you need to get to the throne platform of Blackreach, located at the top of the Silent City Ruin, and use a lever to unlock the door to the Tower of Mzark. On top of that, Silent City Ruin is now harder to access. One entrance is blocked off and can only be opened from the inside, another entrance has a master-level lock, making the only remaining unsecured entrance the Silent City Catacombs, or the "sewers" below the ruin. And those are full of Falmer.
PLAYER CONSIDERATIONS
This mod is .esl flagged (it's an ESPFE), and it only adds around 16 objects to the Blackreach Worldspace with no changes to NavMesh. The only base game object it edits is the door to the Tower of Mzark - I put the "initially disabled" flag on it and replaced it with a gate that can only be opened by a lever. This mod, despite being intended to inconvenience you, shouldn't have a single incompatibility.
FREQUENTLY ASSED QUESTIONS
Q: Why the hell did you make this?
A: I'm working on IFDL v5 right now and expanding Lydia's interactions in Alftand and Blackreach since I've always thought of that as the place where the player's relationship with her, romantic or otherwise, really comes to fruition. I thought back to the first time I played Skyrim when I was in Blackreach and had absolutely no idea where to go (despite the fuckin quest marker lmao) and got sidetracked in the Silent City Ruin, because I assumed the large collection of structures with the very ominous orb hanging over them might be the place I need to go to find an Elder Scroll. On subsequent playthroughs, I basically just booked it from the door near Alftand to opposite end of Blackreach, took the lift up, put the Lexicon in place, mashed the buttons randomly until the scroll came down, grabbed it, romanced Lydia (on playthroughs after July 19th, 2020), and left. Having to do other stuff in Blackreach always felt more natural.
Q: Where is the lever?
A: Go through the lift in the hall of rumination.
Q: Will you make a more scalable version of this mod, with some options where the entrances to Silent City Ruin aren't blocked off?
A: No.