Is it impossible to have a Skyrim Treasure room?

Question

On Xbox One with Skyrim Special Edition Digital, download with no mods ever used. I have played for around 1,500 hours on 2 playthroughs.

I have a dream of a glinting gleaming treasure room. But my recent attempt to fill my trophy room with gemstones and gold ingots crashed my game. I had about 200 gems and 100 gold ingots. After dropping the diamonds first and then the gold on the other side of the room, turning around and looking at the diamonds freezes the game.

Upon testing this myself, I was now freezing the game when opening the door to my trophy room. These 300 treasure items are nothing close to the thousands I will be putting in the room — so I can swim around like Scrooge McDuck. The items I dropped were barely even clutter in the huge room.

So I'm wondering, why the game would be treasure oriented, but the game crashes when I drop my treasures to look at and admire them? I'm hoping there is something I have overlooked.

Answer 1

Skyrim's physics engine, Havok, was designed to handle small numbers of infrequently-colliding clutter objects, like the plates and cutlery on a dining table. It performs poorly when hundreds of objects are spawned in a confined space. On a monster gaming rig, you might be able to pull off a small scale version of this, but probably not on a console. But I can't actually recommend that, because Havok also tends to behave unstably in these conditions. Objects may rocket off in a random direction with high velocity, for example.*

There are ways of visualizing your accomplishments in the vanilla game without dropping gemstones on the floor. In particular, the Hearthfire houses (in Dawnstar, Morthal, and Falkreath) provide a large number of weapon and shield mounts, mannequins, shelves, and also allow you to build a trophy room (which showcases the remains of various enemies you have slain). You can also smith gemstones into jewelry, which can then be displayed or sold as you like. Finally, a number of player house mods provide more elaborate treasure rooms, with display slots for practically every significant quest or artifact in the game.

---

* This paragraph has been my observation of Havok Physics as it behaves in Skyrim specifically. You may find that it works differently in other games which use the Havok engine. Nevertheless, collisions are hard to simulate accurately, so many games will run into other problems even if they don't have these exact issues.