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While playing Skyrim on the Xbox 360, I have encountered a problem with stored Items going missing. It has happened with enchanted weapons/armor (both found and personally enchanted). The weapons/armor were quest and just standard armor/weapons.
Before responding to this please note.
Yes the items were stored in a none-re-spawning container
The Items were stored Lake-view manor, and we have all the recent updates and have the legendary disk.

"we have all the recent updates"

if multiple people are using the save file, it's possible someone else could have taken it... aside from that, i dont know of any reason this would be happening

Just one person playing on the save. We can't find out any reason either.

Unfortantly one of the weapons gone missing is Ariel Bow

I have never had any problem with containers losing things with hearthfire but I have had a bandit steal from my chest outside. Which containers did this happen with?

Hmmmm....interesting. Did you lose EVERYTHING in the container or just certain items? If you lost everything, the only thing I can think of that could cause that is using a container that got moved or changed upon upgrading the house with the drafting table. I personally have not had problems with that, but it's worth considering. If this caused the container to get reset, then you may want to wait until the house is finished before storing anything. If only certain items were missing then I wonder if it could be similar to an old panic-inducing bug from Oblivion. In Oblivion, if you had too many items stored in a container the game would stop displaying some of them. They were still in there just not visible. You could save then reload and they would appear as normal. You may want to check the relevant UESP page(s) to see if this same thing occurs in Skyrim. I'm honestly not sure if it does or not. Other than that, I don't know what the heck it is that you're experiencing. Safe containers like the ones in a player house (many others too, though) are pretty much 'turned off'. What goes in there is exactly what stays in there, and nothing short of a ghost in the machine is gonna make 'em vanish. Good luck, friend.

Containers can sometimes go wonky when too much stuff is crammed into them. Everything should still be there, but individual items may not be displayed. Removing things from the container will cause the "hidden" items to be displayed again.

In general, I avoid mixing container contents. A barrel full of food, weapons, armor, potions and books is going to be a mess on the inventory screen. It's best to store similar things together in their own containers.

Interesting thread. I was recently showing a friend my Lakeview Manor house, and he asked if I had all the daedric items. I said you bet, and went to the safe on the main floor in the back where I keep them. What the ???? Where is my Skull of Corruption? It was missing from the safe, although all of the other daedric items were still there.

I went back through saves, and found out the last save where if I traveled to Lakeview the skull was still there. When I got there, bandits materialized in the house, and I quickly dispatched the bandit chief, who was in the back room with the safe. When I checked the safe, the Skull of Corruption was GONE! So I searched the *&^% bandit, and sure enough, in his inventory was the Skull of Corruption. The bas&*&^ stole it right out of the safe!

Now here are my problems/questions:
1) First off, I was shocked to learn this could happen, and it makes me wonder what ELSE has been stolen that I just don't realize yet?

2) Is it possible that this only can happen during an attack where I maybe either forgot to check the bandit bodies for loot, or left the room/house and so when I came back the bodies were gone?

And most important of all:
3) Since the first save file where the Skull of Corruption was missing was several hundred hours ago, is there any way it still exists somewhere in Skyrim, and is there any way for me to find it?

I play on xbox 360, so PC version (and console) are not available to me, although I am curious to know if that could be used to get the Skull of Corruption back - or to locate it if it is still in Skyrim somewhere. My PC is not good enough to play Skyrim on, and I don't really want to deal with installing steam etc. So is there any safe way (without having the PC version) to take a save file transferred from my xbox, edit it on the PC to add the Skull back somewhere, and then transfer the save file back to the 360 again?

Thanks! Hope it is OK to reply to a thread that has not been updated for a few months, but did not want to start a new thread since this one is here.

PS. I was going to attach an image of the bandit's inventory showing the Skull in his inventory, but could not see a way t attach/upload an image. Is there a way to do this that I missed?

Do you have your Housecarl - Riyya there? ...or is she a follower/spouse? This can happen, but the presence of your housecarl prevents it, as they typically kill them before they can steal anything.

Yep - She is there, and probably Lydia as she is my steward for Lakeview (although I would have to verify whether I had made her steward back when this appears to have happened.) But if they are outside, and the bandits materialize inside the house (which I believe was the case on my replay), not sure either of them could stop them. It seems like when that happens everybody but me waits outside, shouting insults at the bandits, but they don't go in after them.

That is odd. I have not heard that bandits spawn inside the homes, and have never seen it in 16 PC's, over 2400+ hours. The only thing that spawns inside, are the skeevers in the basement, as far as I knew.

As for recovering the Skull of Corruption, if they are dead, then they despawned, with any items they had, so I doubt you can get it back.

As for posting images, it is a system set up, where you need 10 posts and 10 days. To prevent spammers/bots from posting adds and such. To bypass the wait, you can post in the Welcomes and Goodbye topic in General Discussion, and a mod can add you to the members list.

Thanks for replies! Lakeview is the only HF house where I have had bandits spawn inside the house. I would say about 20% of the times bandits spawn at Lakeview, it was inside. Giants (jerks always try to kill my cow), dragons, wolves, vampires (and maybe mages??) always seem to spawn outside. And of course, skeevers in the cellar.

I wonder if it is just an xbox 360 thing, or if it depends on how you build the house. My 3 wings at Lakeview are Bedroom, Kitchen, and Alchemy Tower. I say that because the different wings have a different size (different dimensions) depending on what you build, so a location that is outside in one configuration could be inside in another.

The dead bandit chief with the Skull is on a replay of the save file at the point where it disappeared. What I don't know is if in my actual game play did I kill and not loot him, or did he escape with the Skull and therefore still has it somewhere. But I did check the locations mentioned as target locations for the kidnapped wife to be taken to, and could not find it at those. Without knowing the internals of the Skyrim game engine, I don't know if the spawned bandits logically come from and go to specific camps/locations in Skyrim, or just spawn at the house and either die or escape and are then despawned without being continued. I have to keep in mind that this is a game and not real, so an escaped bandit may not actually go anywhere - he may simply cease to exist - taking my stolen Skull to Oblivion.

I probably should just not care, since unless I get the PC version (and a better PC) I am probably done playing Skyrim for now - but dang it - it irritates me! Especially since the Skull of Corruption is a Daedric Artifact, and it was stolen from a safe!

Interesting. It may be an xbox thing. I play on PC, and the bandits always spawn on the left side of the house, coming up the hill leading towards the entrance.

The game always despawns/respawns area's/zones. This is to keep bloat/overload off the system, so it runs better. The creatures/npcs should stay in their spawn area, unless they are chasing you, or are scripted to travel. Even if you did not kill the bandits, they were probably despawned anyhow.

I think they did the "house breaking/stealing" thing, to have you keep your housecarls at home. I once returned to Whiterun with Lydia as a follower, and found a "Thief" in my home. I've never used a Housecarl as a follower since. Although, the thiefs only show up once you've returned the presence of the Thieves Guild in that town/hold.

Sounds like a "one-time" glitch, which, unfortunately, had aggravating consequences in your case.

Personally, I never take Housecarls and Stewards as Followers. I let them stay at their respective properties where they can do their protective jobs, and, so far, I've never experienced finding Bandits inside any of my residences.

I know this thread is 2 1/2 years old, but I have been messing around with Skyrim on the PC lately, and found more information. I took my final save from the xbox (hundred of game hours after the bandit stole my Skull of Corruption) and transferred it to the PC version, and started to investigate.

I used the console in the PC version to do a: save savetest 1
The 1 following the save command tells Skyrim to dump a .txt file out with tons of info about objects in the save
Warning: doing the save command this way takes several minutes, and the game appears to hang while it does it.

In the dumped save data, I found that the Skull of Corruption was still in the game, along with the associated Form ID

I then used the console to do: player.moveto xxxxxxxx
where xxxxxxx was the form id (0010DE0E in my case - not sure if that is what it always would be)

That took me to my Lakeview House exterior. After a few minutes looking around, I found out that Rayya had it!! Now I don't think Rayya stole it, but my current belief is that what probably originally happened was that I probably killed the bandit that spawned inside the house (or maybe Rayya did), and then at some point Rayya looted the bandit's body of the stolen Skull of Corruption. Full details of the original problem in posts above.

So after 2 1/2 years, this mystery is solved to my satisfaction, and more importantly, the Skull of Corruption is back in my Lakeview safe where it belongs!

Thanks for reading. Maybe it will help somebody out if they experienced something similar.