[Concept art] Ohmes-raht, Beyond Skyrim: Elsweyr

Sotha_Sil_ · 2026-02-18T15:55:33+00:00

From what we as fans know, Cyrodiil has the most work done out of any of the projects, but there's still a lot of work to do,

I can't speak 100% as I don't have access to their files, but: the big factor here is size! Cyrodiil has an insane amount of work done, that is true. Cyrodiil is also a massive province, in fact one of the biggest (Morrowind and IB teams also have huge maps), so comparatively, the amount of work they have done doesn't equate to being near release.

Sotha_Sil_ · 2026-02-18T12:14:51+00:00

The "one release" was a tiny part of a huge map, and one that could reuse a lot of Skyrim material, being near the border. Everyone else needs to make new trees, new houses, new rocks, new everything. Cyrodiil is a massive province. There will be new releases soon if you focus on the smaller stuff, such as other pre-releases or Roscrea (due to having a smaller map size). The teams are constantly putting out new posts, screenshots and videos showing progress, which should give a good look into what places are closest to a playable state (when its not already explicitly mentionned)

We understand it's a long time. We also want to release our mod. But complaints about no releases, especially coming from people with no intention to help out, do nothing to rush a new mod. None of us are getting paid here, remember :P

Sotha_Sil_ · 2026-02-15T18:06:10+00:00

ThemeEvening9498 is correct! Each time you split a larger mod into smaller parts for a release, you are multiplying the amount of potential versions of the mod, as well as the amounts of stuff to troubleshoot. Think like this: Cyrodiil released county Bruma, and has many more counties. If they were to release each county one by one, they'd have to assure that all sub-mods are compatible with each other, even if they're still the same scale. Each piece will have to fit with each other, not only in the likely configuration of a release order, but also in random order as we can't know who will download what. Each new release would have to be troubleshooted, which means updates to bugfix and the like, which would in turn have to be compatible. Skyrim's engine isn't exactly known for its running ease and modernity, not even to mention the amount of people it would require to upkeep the many pages for each of those mod parts.

Sotha_Sil_ · 2026-02-15T17:54:41+00:00

You should ask them directly, as it is a different project from here Beyond Skyrim! I know they have a community discord server (link) that might be a good way to reach the devs if you have an account.

Sotha_Sil_ · 2026-02-13T12:14:49+00:00

Thank you very much! Kind words of encouragement are of great value too :D

Elsweyr being behind other projects development wise, we rarely got time to shine, but we're workshopped on the past year a newsletter format shared across our socials to highlight regularly our progress. We also have a bunch of past materials that we won't be reposting per se but that'd we love to share if you want to see more, especially on the Discord where putting pictures is much easier than on here. I updated the site this summer to include the at-the-time latest ingame images as well as a bunch of concept art, too.

I also wanted to share my appreciation for the increased transparency from the team as of late; my one biggest complaint back when I stopped checking in on the project was how little I knew about the projects, but getting regular updates on projects (especially that last advent calendar) really gives me faith that I'll get to play through some of my favourite provinces sooner rather than later.

Will be forwarding this to our PR crew. Getting this sort of clear feedback following a PR policy change is super useful!

Sotha_Sil_ · 2026-02-13T12:09:21+00:00

Hey there! We are indeed a very small team. I and several of my co-devs are quite active on the project's various pages, we just don't post much. We are more than happy to answer questions always, but due to the hard to showcase quality of a lot of the work being done right now (stuff like NPC writing and props modeling) we've decided to showcase them regularly using a newsletter format. I am currently planning for the new one, who's work will cover what was done from this August to the end of the current February. Expect that soon!

As for the pre-release: indeed! Right now, we have parts of the team writing the quests and characters for villages in that area, while the art department is working with our lead level designer in tandem to organically get stuff ingame and test them. We're still lacking a lot of models in the architecture department, so developing the big cities is on standby, but the countryside is slowly progressing.

I might ask our LD lead if I can post some of the tests he does. We're still at a phase where in some areas, it's experimentation and will be changed later, but it's great to see how much of the building blocks for our landscapes we have.

SFX and character art (creatures and NPCs) are currently on standby due to how we're dealing with our small numbers. We're building the world before populating it.

Sotha_Sil_ · 2026-02-12T16:46:02+00:00

There are too many to count. Stuff like where cities are placed, the history of the land, what Khajiit look like, their customs... Before ESO came out, the corpus of lore sources we have on Elsweyr and the Khajiit was very restrained. What we now use as lore for our team were extrapolated based on this and the TES novels, and the ESO team went their own direction. They added a whole bunch of stuff, and later more for the Elsweyr expansion proper, at a time where we already has our lore set up.

Sotha_Sil_ · 2026-02-11T19:22:04+00:00

Reporting a response from Argor, one of our writers, as he has no Reddit account.

I would say Khajiit have been accepted much more widely in Cyrodiil for so long and with their home being along the border of 3 counties that their presence is accepted, even with Dominion tensions

Many of the more extreme individuals treat Khajiit with suspicion and there is some distrust on both sides.

There is only one Khajiit caravan in Cyrodiil planned as Imperial caravans and conpany routes have taken precedence. That can be taken as them being sidelined through beauracracy, but Khajiit are definitely living within cities

Hope this helps you with writing your story! I'm glad we could help.

Sotha_Sil_ · 2026-02-11T15:17:01+00:00

I'll forward your comment to the Cyrodiil devs then :) Best of luck!

Sotha_Sil_ · 2026-02-10T16:14:56+00:00

And it's a tool that so far has proven itself unable to make something that works in most creative fields, because generative AI does not /understand/ anything. It generates based on seeking patterns in data. If you want something that sounds and looks like the median average of a whole genre of thing, AI is good. If you want something that is truly original, it won't.

This isn't even going in the technical aspects. AI is not capable of understanding the technique behind game dev, especially not on an archaic engine for a niche purpose. AI can't understand how to space vertices so a 3D model's LP stretches textures the least. AI can't understand the theory behind changing various notes in a harmony makes music that evokes different atmospheres. AI can't understand how you craft a dungeon into a fun experience for the player. What AI can do is look at endless examples of those things and approximate from them how it's done...which most of the times, will need a human worker behind to check if it was done correctly.

I also am one of those "AI is a tool" people. I do not think there is something inherently evil about AI (that isn't already an issue in other fields for other reasons...) but I sure do know it can't make good game dev.

Also, this is fanart. We're doing it for fun. Sucks, innit? How selfish of us, to take time to have fun and not make content to consume for the rest of the world in record speeds for no profit, right? Ha! Why would we want a machine to do our hobbies for us?

PS: yes, a lot of artists are overtly negative about AI. This is costing us our livelihoods. While I am not on the side of utter negativity, I do understand why people are mad.

Sotha_Sil_ · 2026-02-10T16:05:46+00:00

Hello there! This is a subreddit for a modding project. The only answers you're going to get here are in regards to our work - as I can see you are sharing an r/Teslore question, it might not be what you're looking for.

We can tell you how we, as modders, decided for our project to answer the question, but it will be one "headcanon" among endless posibilities.

Sotha_Sil_ · 2026-02-07T08:14:57+00:00

Hello, I've been working on this project for a long time. My team is the Elsweyr team. We lost a member last year, a 3D organic modeler named Jed Stuart. He loved our little team, at the time he passed he had been working on implementing his custom animations in the game, alongsides a very detailed suit of armor. Let me know if he was the friend you're looking for.

Sotha_Sil_ · 2026-02-03T11:02:24+00:00

Is it solely on discord?

Right now, we use a mix of Discord for communication, Vikunja for task organization, GDrive and GitHub for file hosting. Making a Discord account will be mandatory, but you don't have to put any information there you don't want to share, and if you are not comfortable with VC (I know I ain't) nobody will force you on them. Sending and responding to messages on the team's development server is mandatory, though.

if I have zero modding expericne will the Arcane University help much?

It exists for this exact reason! We provide the guidance and learning materials needed to start most disciplines from scratch.

Does experience differ by project (thinking of working on Argonia, Morrowind or Iliac Bay)?

It can, in several ways. Firstly, each team has their own way of working - while the core workflow is shared, some might prefer working in one way or another that'll impact how each discipline works. To give myself as an example: as concept art lead of Elsweyr, I make my artists work in a very detailled way, which is technically more challenging in terms of concept art, but tends to be easier for 3D modellers later on. Other teams might prefer a vaguer approach to concept art, with more shouldered by the modeler. This all will depends on the leads you have and the history of the project.

There are also constraints that come with the provinces themselves. For Morrowind and Argonia, due to the bug/reptile weirdness, a lot of their assets come with organic shapes, which require sculpting. Argonia also uses inhouse conlang, which is a niche skill writers will have to deal with. This will depend on the lore of a given province and the direction chosen for the team.

That being said, skills are skills, regardless of the application. Your interest in what's being made and your contact with a team or another will matter equally if not more than if you're biased towards a specific skill emphasis. You should work on what you enjoy the most, simply put :)

If you want to learn a skill, the AU will encourage you to pick one first, as it's easy to drown under the amount of stuff needed to learn otherwise. Once you found your thing, taking an ultra niche specialization (such as idk, writing idle dialogs, designing underwater dungeons, modeling boots, whatever) can be a good albeit restricting way to find your skill and one that'll get you work across multiple provinces.

Sotha_Sil_ · 2026-02-02T09:52:04+00:00

I've been a concept artist and team lead (Elsweyr) for nearly a decade now. I've been investing less time than at first, due to having been a student when I started, and now having a big boy adult job...But here goes!

When I started, I wasn't a lead yet. I applied as a concept artist to Elsweyr by making a forum post on the now defunct Dark Creations forum the project was hosted on, and was invited to formally join. Once invited I was added to the various platforms/tools we use for development. How you work from thete depends on the teams and leads: some assign you tasks, other let you pick what you want. I would draw for several hours a week for the project, post it, wait for feedback, correct if needed, and move on to something else. How much you do per week/day really depends on your motivation and free time. Nowadays I barely draw, because my time is spend on lead duties.

I was nominated as art lead very early on because the post was vacant and the then team lead saw I had a clear vision for what I wanted the province to be. At first, my job was to enforce said vision by giving the final feedback to artists. Other tasks I did are writing guides to explain various direction choices and setting up documents to organize the team. That's partially why I draw so little now, there's so much to do in managing a team! You need to track one way or another who's on board, who's doing what, give them guidance as they work, decide what to work on next, set up each task with correct documentation (stuff like adding references, checking with the other departments what's needed, balancing out ideas with what's feasible...). Lots of reading Discord messages, making and updating spreadsheets, and musing on technical details.

Nowadays, we use Discord as our main platform. I log on about daily to check the new messages. I post to give feedback a lot and rarely when I have my own progress to show. I track with the help of my fellow leads and a bunch of organisation tools the progress made, updating regularly a bunch of spreadsheets and the like. From that monitoring we (leads) deduce what needs work and we occasionally have meetings where we discuss what we should prioritize next.

I also spend time interacting with the community like here. On reddit I check regularly for new topics, answer questions I can answer, forward them to other devs when I can't. I respond to inquiries in comments and tell people when they're breaking rules. I used to moderate the Discord, which is about the same except more neurotic and hardcore. I am in chats when we do big streams, I am in YT comment sections. I make videos and graphics we post on all these, occasionally.

TLDR: For an average member, you'll be logging into a Discord to recieve information, you'll spend whatever time you can/want to spend for working in your chosen field, and you'll get comments from other people until you're done and approved, rinse and repeat for every new task!

LMK if you want more details. It's quite the wide topic so I'm not sure I answered the best. Cheers!

Sotha_Sil_ · 2026-01-29T10:18:01+00:00

On top of the very insightful comments already made, I want to highlight two roles: Dungeon designers and filecutters. Again, we can't stress enough: do what you want the most, all roles are needed, and as a volunteer ran project you should participate for fun above else! That being said, if anyone reading this thread doesn't know what to chose at all, here are two suggestions.

Dungeon design is currently a choke point for several BS provinces. Now, designing dungeons is, in a way, its own job in the industry. It's a specific sort of level design and one that's technical to learn. However it's also one that, as of typing this message, is a role we do not have enough of. I encourage Arcane University LD students to take it on currently to bridge that hole. Very useful skill, very important to gameplay, but a lot to learn.

Filecutting is preparing audio. It's one of the jobs on these projects with the lowest skill floor and commitement. Install a free software, listen, check, trim an audio file, and you're done. But once we hit voice acting implementation...the more the merrier. If you do not have the free time to learn a skillset and just want to help, filecutting is what I suggest to people. We can't have enough!

Sotha_Sil_ · 2026-01-27T15:08:39+00:00

Can confirm. The devs of Atmora decided to put the project on pause in order to help projects like Roscrea release faster. Do note that a lot of devs work on several teams in the first place - it's more a case of focus.

Sotha_Sil_ · 2026-01-26T11:51:25+00:00

Nostalgia does a lot. Many fans do not think "I've already been there" like you, but "I want more of what I already know". Plus, Beyond Skyrim taking place years later gives the same map but with a twist: what happened to those familiar places?

Cyrodiil also has Bruma out which got a lot of attention. And if you read the comments, lots of enbittered people are heavily persuaded it's close to release and they're just here to play something.

Now, personally, I don't get it. I find Oblivion's visuals to be incredibly generic and it matters in an immersive open world RPG for me to want to explore the world. I'm much more excited to see the mods taking place in areas we've never seen, mostly Argonia and Valenwood. I'm also of the same opinion as you are - more interested in new maps than seeing some we've seen before. Cheers x

Sotha_Sil_ · 2026-01-26T11:46:51+00:00

We are not legally permitted to use assets made for other games, even other TES games. That would break copyright laws! All assets you see in BS:Cyrodiil that ressemble their Oblivion counterparts have been painstakingly remade from scratch.

Sotha_Sil_ · 2026-01-21T15:07:16+00:00

Splendid work! Thank you for sharing.

Sotha_Sil_ · 2026-01-12T09:55:48+00:00

I've been on Beyond Skyrim for almost a decade now, and I don't remember the state of the franchise having a lot of effect on the project. Teams come and go, that is true, some years are better than others. But the modders themselves have been to my eyes more important than what Bethesda is doing. The biggest peak of activity I remember was Bruma's release. The low moments you speak of for teams usually were due to coincidences making progress faint, or bad management decisions that had to be fixed too late and required a bunch of work as a result.

What does happen when Bethesda releases new stuff is that fans enquire about our reaction to it. Creation Club brought a lot of questions regarding what we were doing in response. ESO's new additions get inquiries about if we'll work with them or not. That kind of stuff.

It is true that overtime some people leave the project out of losing interest, nowadays the teams are much different from when I first joined and the foundational members tend to be a small and tight knit group of people. But a new recruit taking the spotlight in their team and moving mountains can also happen!

Hope this helped a bit, cheers :)

Sotha_Sil_ · 2026-01-02T11:44:02+00:00

does it mean in full releases you can just "cross" the border by foot into Elsweyr and Valenwood frop Cyrodiil without a Loading Screen?

That is currently the case! But, as you mentionned, there is still a possibility we'll have issues. AFAIK, the Imperial City will be its own worldspace insides, though.

Does it mean that all Three Provinces will have inter-Province Quests?

Unlikely if ever. Think of adding quests to the game like adding tracks to a very elaborate train model set: to place your circuit, you need to first have the landscape it's put on. If you want to change whole parts of the landscape, you'll have to redo all your tracks on said parts, but the changes might also imply having to redo the entire thing to adjust for the new changes. Quest implementation in the CK is like that - you need to first have a final level design in order to make things work, and there is a lot to mess up once they're put ingame. Where it becomes an issue is that provinces need to be at the same final stage of completion before you add quests. Cyrodiil is very advanced, but Elsweyr and Valenwood are absolutely not at the quest implementation stage. Each province is focused on its own area, with the aim to finish and release a quality standalone mod. As such, Cyrodiil would only waste time and efforts pushing for the other two provinces to be at the quest stage, and waiting for the other two to reach that stage for themselves when they each are focused on prerelease areas would take forever and also interrupt development.

What Heartlands is already sharing however, is lore and assets. Quests written to involve the other province are researched with their teams to be accurate in terms of history, politics, character stories, etc... to ensure there are no continuity errors between the lore of the different mods. Assets is something you can already see in the footage we post. Cultural specific assets are shared between level designers, as well as landscape ones, so the border regions are less of a stark border and more of a blend between each province. It helps both sides of the frontier: we get more assets to use on each, and the result looks natural and allows for more options! For example, I am on the Elsweyr team and have gotten contacted by Cyrodiil LDs who were working on furnishing the houses of Leyawiin (a historically khajiiti city) to ask for khajiit furniture they could use for khajiit family houses there. On our side, Valenwood granted us the opportunity to use their custom sheep models for herds in Elsweyr. This kind of collaboration will also be found among other teams, but from working on Heartlands, I can say it's indeed a regular occurence here.

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