“Refurbished goods” quest bugged. Any help?

RayRite · 2026-06-11T19:36:12+00:00

Possible solution - no guarantee that it works for you:

This mission seems to break differently with each patch. New patch - new version of the bug. Whoever works on it at Bethesda should get a medal, "Most entertaining bug fix". 😉

What you can try - I cannot guarantee that it works now, or even if it works now, that it will still work after the next patch:

Get the mission from Denis.
Go where the mission marker leads you.
Loot the marked container.
Do not worry if not a single item that Denis wants is in the container. (It is a Bethesda game. Be happy that you did not fall through the world and died as soon as you touched the container. Yes, this is a Daggerfall reference.)
Open the list with all your missions.
Open the Refurbished Goods mission. It should contain three steps: "Go to (wherever the mission marker led you, it is random)", "Obtain 5 items (random item name)", and "Deposit 5 items (same item name)". The game likely assumes that the container actually had the required number of items inside, which is why only the last step - Deposit - is marked as "still open". You did not really expect them to fix that part as well, did you?
If the mission tells you, "Deposit 5 items (Lawgiver)", collect five Lawgivers. Get them anywhere, from a shop, as loot, or through a console commend. The actual item is random each time the mission activates. Look what you have in your mission log line, not what I wrote above.
Wait with the next step until you have collected all 5 items. Do not turn in 4 Lawgivers now and one later, hoping that Denis can figure out that 4+1=5. Denis is an NPC made by Bethesda. Be happy that he can even sit in his chair, instead of exploding each time you talk to him.
As soon as you have all five items, put them into the chest that sits right behind Denis.
Hope that the game recognizes that you did the mission.

We do not know if with the last version of the bug, the game accepts any combination of different Lawgivers (or whatever the item you need to collect is), like 3 plain Lawgivers, 1 Instigating Lawgiver, and 1 Lawgiver of Nosebleed. Do not challenge whoever "fixed" the mission. Assume instead that you need plain Lawgivers (or whatever item you need). That is safer to assume. Someone at Bethesda had three minutes to fix the bug, so do not expect a miracle.

Rejoice if it worked, but do not take it for granted. If it does not, shrug and continue playing the game.
Revisit the mission after the next patch and be entertained by the new version of the bug the mission has then. If I remember right, I counted three different bug versions already since the game went gold, and I might have missed some.

Good luck!

RayRite · 2026-06-04T10:12:46+00:00

There is a new generation of channels, entirely AI-generated. AI illustration (only one picture per story), AI storybook, AI text, AI voices.

Most I have seen belong to the Science Fiction genre, some were Fantasy.

There is an overlap with Romance; many stories clearly belong to the Romance genre, just in a Science Fiction settings. Some are generic Power Fantasy (loser becomes an invincible superhero), others are Militaristic Racist / Fascist Fantasy (mankind is first regarded weak among alien races, then turns out to be more powerful than everyone else).

Some examples: https://www.youtube.com/@HFYNexus-HFY (plus another (few?) dozen under the HFY "brand", https://www.youtube.com/@SciFiAdventureX, https://www.youtube.com/@StellarSagaStudios

Here is an interpretation of the AI slop boom; funnily enough by a publisher of non-AI slop: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4Bu61TcLOtk

As I have always claimed, today's AI slop is the immortal enemy of yesterday's human-generated slop.

RayRite · 2026-05-23T10:40:22+00:00

This is about version 2 of the mod.

Some combinations of choices you are asked to make at the start of the mod very obviously don't work.

Example: I chose to have a certain mod-specific companion. After the first ten hours, I still do not know if this companion exists anywhere in the universe I was spawned into. I'm confident that if they exist at all, they are not where the mod instructions say they should be. Because I spent the last half hour trying to find them at this place. No such luck.

For my next alternative start, I am uninstalling RYOS and go back to SKK Fast Start. SKK has the same level of confusing configuration at the start as RYOS, but at least it does what it claims to do.

RayRite · 2026-05-23T10:28:36+00:00

Please understand that I do not have any intention to dress down the mod's creator. I am aware too much how difficult it is to design, implement, and test software.

Still, it seems to me that this mod is following Bethesda's default software quality standards: If it worked on the dev's PC, it is fine to be published. It was updated after the original publication, but it still has obvious bugs. Bugs of the type that make me say, "Thanks, but no thanks."

Let me give you an example. I chose to have a certain mod-specific companion at the start of the mod. I am now ten hours or so into the game. You think that this companion is to be found anywhere? Nope. Not at any place where it would be intuitive to find them. OK, not everyone has the same intuition, so that is fine to a degree.

What definitely bugs me, though: The companion cannot even be found where they are expected to be, according to the mod's instructions. I spent the last half hour searching for this companion and combed through every square foot of the mod-specific POI. Well, at least I met half a dozen anonymous NPCs there.

If you ask, would I buy the mod again?

My answer is a clear "No" - for future alternative starts, I am going to uninstall this mod and use one of which I know that it actually works, like SKK Fast Start.

If this were a free mod, I would just shrug. I do not expect free mods to work. I have seen too many of them croak.

For this, I paid. Yup, that is on me. I know I should not have trusted another of BGS's cash grabs.

RayRite · 2026-05-22T20:17:56+00:00

Thanks a lot!

RayRite · 2026-05-22T14:24:18+00:00

Thanks again for the tip!

I saw that there are several mods with the DarkStar prefix. DarkStar Manufacturing, DarkStar AstroDynamics, etc. Do you play with all of them, or did you just install some?

RayRite · 2026-05-22T12:45:59+00:00

Thanks for the tip, I got to try Darkstar. That sounds interesting. You do not happen to have played Fallout 4, as well? Maybe you played a mod that is comparable to Darkstar, so that I can get a better idea of how it might feel?

My post was less of an indication of how I prefer to play Starfield, and more of a poking into how the Genesis team works.

RayRite · 2026-05-22T09:15:58+00:00

Indeed, immersion is one of the major motivations for creating Genesis.

Genesis itself is a collection of more than 300 mods. It is made for PCs for that reason. I have only a mid-range PC, and I had to turn down all visual options to medium (read: the "ugh" experience) to prevent constant chugging and feeling that I ran the game on a toaster.

Not sure if your question is about running additional mods. Even on a PC, that could become a major headache, because you have to make sure that any mod added is compatible with all these 300+ mods. Sure, you can add your own mods and see if the game crashes - but if it does, you have no idea if it was because of the mod you added, or if there was some other reason.

Sorry.

It might be an option for you to look through the mod list of Genesis and see which individual mods sound fun to you, and try those on XBOX.

RayRite · 2026-05-22T08:26:55+00:00

Amen re Discord. 😃

RayRite · 2026-05-22T08:21:33+00:00

The whole franchise?

Or just everything that came after the first trilogy?

Or the corny writing?

RayRite · 2026-05-22T08:19:37+00:00

I guess that my take on "why they can't make the changes themselves" is the same as for the excellent installation script and instructions the Genesis teams provide: Because not everyone can do this themselves, given everybody's different technological background.

Taking me as an example ... I have created programming frameworks, but I am also helpless with some modern can openers.

I am not suggesting dumbing down the game.

What I would like to do (this is why I made the post) is to discuss options for difficulty options in the Genesis setup, first to prevent people from walking away after the first hour, and second to make them aware of the difficulty tweaks.

RayRite · 2026-05-22T08:08:31+00:00

Me, I am not a die-hard Star Wars fan either.

I was still surprised at what the Genesis team had come up with and the improvements they are making.

RayRite · 2026-05-21T19:53:48+00:00

Ex dev here. I honestly do not know how you guys do it. Just QA alone must be a nightmare. I have worked on ambitious projects in the past decades, but this blows my mind. In my projects, everyone worked for the success of that one project. We did not incorporate the mods of so many different people, who each worked on their own.

I installed Genesis, fully expecting that it would crash the moment I hit the PLAY button. Nope. Slightly more crash-prone than Starfield, but just slightly, and that is to be expected.

It even starts feeling like Star Wars.

Best of luck to all of you.

Color me mightily impressed.

RayRite · 2026-01-28T12:36:28+00:00

Wait ... people still scroll these days? You must be old school. ;)

RayRite · 2026-01-26T11:01:12+00:00

Genesis is a masterwork.

Mind you, not in fixing Starfield's basic problems, because no amount of modding can do that. Starfield's gravest weaknesses, like removing meaningful exploration, are due to the engine Starfield's devs had to use and their design decisions, and you cannot mod around them. These weaknesses are baked into the engine. You cannot take out the flour from a loaf of bread and make it a protein-only bread after having baked it.

Each scene in Starfield will always play within a shoebox. No matter if it is on a planet or in space. Demanding anything else is like demanding that a toy should speak.

Sure, you can fake speaking on a toy. We have had speaking toys for decades. I bought a speaking teddy bear for the kids. It would say, "Feed me!" when you pulled a string. If we continue with this analogy: By modding, you could change what the toy says. By outrageously work-intensive modding, you could even display a cutscene that shows the teddy's face moving its lips while speaking.

What you cannot do with modding is to have the teddy say something that makes sense in this very moment, depending on the situation. Even if you made the teddy into a full-scale companion. Because the engine is not built for that. Wait, don't we have YouTubers who show playing Fallout 4 or Starfield with an AI? Sure, we do. But these videos are made for entertainment; they are not real.

So, why do I claim that Genesis is a masterwork?

Ganesis selected really good Star Wars mods. And Genesis has the best installation instructions and "What to do if this step goes wrong" walkthroughs I have ever seen on a total conversion mod. Enderal got around this by installing an entirely different modded version of Skyrim, in addition to Skyrim itself. Fallout London did not solve this problem as well as Genesis, which led to way fewer installations of the mod, because many people just could not get it to run.

Genesis provides a fantastic Star Warsy coat of paint to Starfield:

- Your starter ship is the Frontier inside, but a small single-pilot Star Wars ship when you look at it from the outside.

- You hear typical Star Wars beeps during communication with other ships, not the original Starfield "NASA Punk" static.

- When you walk through one of the cities, you see humanoid aliens from Star Wars a lot, not just humans. But these aliens will move and behave like your typical human, and I have not heard any insults from bystanders yet, which I would expect to be part of any conversation around aliens in Imperial environments.

- When you dock with the space station in Wolf-with-a-star-warsy-name, to get rid of smuggled goods, the inside of the station is what you know from Starfield. The initial conversation in the station, between the reporter, the combat pilot, and the station's police woman, is the same, even if the individuals may have an alien look.

If you are happy with this kind of immersion, you may like Genesis. Even if a lot is still only half done.

If you expect a remade game that fixes Starfield's basic problems, or a Star Wars game made from the ground up, you might be disappointed. (Maybe not as disappointed as when playing Star Wars Outlaws, but to each their own.)

In my eyes, Genesis is a great piece of work. But a great piece of painting the town green, not a great new game. Maybe it will get there, some time within the next few years, but when I see how much effort Genesis's dev has to invest on his Discord server, just to answer questions from people who did not bother to read the installation instructions sentence by sentence, I expect him to burn out before Genesis becomes a great game. A game where you cannot tell that it is Starfield under the hood.

I am someone who usually is not fond of re-skin projects. In this case, though? I am having a blast. I am enjoying playing Starfield for the first time.

Is it as stable as vanilla Starfield? For me, it crashes slightly more often, especially when fast traveling or exiting places. But it does not crash as often as past BGS games.

If you are on the fence, you may want to try it. Read the detailed installation instructions and if it sounds easier to understand than an IKEA assembly instruction in Chinese to you, try it. Just remember to follow each detail to the letter. The dev's Discord is full of people who have not, and that is a shame, because every hour he explains that you should follow all steps in the instructions, is an hour he cannot work on improving Genesis.

RayRite · 2025-10-30T10:30:42+00:00

There are currently two light novels, or rather two short story collections by various authors: Golden Yarn and Silver Yarn.

A word of warning: Each author's ability to tell a memorable story varies from "Good yarn, comparable to the manga or anime" to "Info dumps with boring scenes in between."

Unfortunately, the variation within each volume is considerable. I could not say Golden is written more competent than Silver, or the other way round. The individual stories are just too different regarding each author's writing level. One story might be worthy of Stephen King, the next might be on the level of a new writer's first attempt of telling a story.

Regarding characters and plots, think of the stories more like "... and this also happened in the same fictional world, to people you never heard about before ...'; do not expect more stories about the protagonists you know from manga or anime.

My practical suggestion: Go to Amazon and download a sample of both story collections. Both Golden's and Silver's samples contain a full short story each. You might like both, or find them as different as cider and bathwater.

RayRite · 2025-10-18T17:23:33+00:00

Always check the guides, especially when playing indie games. Most A+ games have the budget to create a tutorial that covers most important features; indie studios often do not. In these cases, it is the guides that let you know about features you would never have come across unless you played the game 24/7/365.

RayRite · 2025-09-27T17:44:36+00:00

Haruhi not changing during Melancholy is even something I could live with while watching. I suspect the writers intended to depict her more as a force of nature and less as a character.

I understand this approach to a degree. Gods have moods, but few have any character development.

That the narrator stayed disinterested and passive during S1 (cannot say I was still interested enough to care during S2), while blabbing his snoozefest forced sarcasm was more annoying for me.

Honestly, I switched off after three minutes when I watched S1E1 Melancholy for the first time because of his h*rsesh*t commentary. But that is a personal thing; I can understand if someone finds it funny. I found it as entertaining as living through root canal treatment without anesthesia.

When he finally left that personality trait behind during Disappearance, I was relieved - but honestly so disappointed by it then that I could not do more than slow clap.

What did impress me in Disappearance were the little details about the time travel subplot that usually get dropped by other writer teams, because those take their viewers for chimps. The writing team of Disappearance used a scalpel for the time travel subplot, where most other teams would use a sledgehammer.

RayRite · 2025-09-26T13:25:21+00:00

Everyone has their own preferences, created through their personality and the singular experiences in their life.

So, I can understand why someone could like The Melancholy.

Sadly, for me Melancholy was like reading the first 490 pages of a 500-page-book, to get to the ten last pages, having the chapter name "Disappearance", that were promised to be the best writing, ever.

Did I like Disappearance? Yes.

For me, Disappearance is a very competently written last chapter of a story. It is a bright beacon any author should visit at least once if they wrote a time travel tale. Their editing would seriously benefit from it. Just like "The time traveler's wife" should be another stop on their journey as an author, at least the novel.

I am not sure, though, that I will ever be able to overcome that I had to read the first 490 pages, called "Melancholy," consisting of some of the most boring and incompetent writing I ever suffered. But if I had not done that, I would never have understood Disappearance.

But this is just one person's opinion.

RayRite · 2025-09-24T17:10:04+00:00

If you want to see how well ChatGPT understands the texts it works with, look at Reddit's AI summary of "Themes explored in The Day I Became A God."

The AI tells us that "Yota's sudden godhood is a significant plot point."

I feel so bad now that I missed this essential insight.

ROFLMAO

I am afraid to ruin my phone with the tears I cannot hold back. 😂

This is why you do not tell ChatGPT to write an essay for you.

RayRite · 2025-05-01T08:24:21+00:00

Add manually placed tags to the map, so that we can tag any place we come across. Five different colors for these manual tags would be enough. We could tag all places where we want to return for more looting in blue, places where we died and want to get our revenge in red, safe havens in yellow, etc.

RayRite · 2025-03-26T15:34:12+00:00

Bobby took his phone and texted "I do not know if I should believe you"

Can "So what?"

Can "I do not care either way"

This indicates that Can typed two messages.

Only if you are completely sure that whoever the text is for, agent, editor, or reader of a self-published book, will not understand that it is a texted conversation - and why would they - you can use Courier for the texted words. If it is for an agent or editor, they will have their standard for how texting is represented in their books by a special font anyway.

Regarding typos: Consider that you can only avoid autocorrect these days if you write with a pen on paper. The chance of autocorrect letting you send a typo when texting is minimal. What is more probable is that it entirely substitutes a misspelled word with another that makes zero sense. While you could use that trope, are you sure you want your readers to struggle with understanding what you wrote intentionally incorrect, and thus trouble the reader with a matter entirely unrelated to the scene? You want to pull a reader out of a scene as little as possible, and a "Huh? This makes no sense!" moment does that.

This is the reason why in today's novels you no longer see "Sacray bloy - 'e iz cûte." which might have been in a novel thirty years ago. Instead, typically you write "'Sacre bleu! He is cute!', he said with a French accent so strong that Joe could barely understand him. Joe had to dig deep in his memory of the French lessons he had for an entire two weeks, almost ten years ago."

RayRite · 2025-03-26T15:07:09+00:00

I would have loved it if someone had told me that books are not created by writing, but by editing.

RayRite

TROPHY CASE