Morrowind talk:Cursed Items

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[edit] Reusing Cursed Items

Lurlock, I removed these statements from Morrowind:Cursed_Items#Exploits

• "Dremora Lords make a handy distraction for guards in towns if you want to pull off some sort of sneaky business. Just be careful, as it could have unintended side effects if the Dremora Lord decides to attack somebody important who's standing nearby. You can also use them as free allied summons in hostile areas, provided you have a good Command Creature spell.
• In order to safely pick up a cursed item without summoning a Dremora Lord, open your inventory first, and then click the item and again click in your inventory to take it. You can also avoid future hassle by storing your cursed items in a container or on a Permanent Corpse, instead of out in the open.
• The summoning effect is not once-only. If you go into another cell, drop the cursed item, and pick it up again, you will get another Dremora Lord, with another quality weapon. There is no limit to the number of times you can do this. "

Nephele, rpeh and I could not reproduce these effects, with three different versions of MW. Can you shed some light on it? --Benould^•T•C 15:24, 28 June 2008 (EDT)

Hmm. I know this worked because I used to do it all the time, but it was a while ago - I suppose it's possible a broken mod somehow caused this behavior - or perhaps it may be that you need to drop the item in the room, then leave the room and come back (maybe after staying away for a few days) in order for this to occur - I know for a fact though that I had Dremora Lords attack me when I picked up cursed items in my own house, so there's something to this - it bears further investigation though. --TheRealLurlock ^Talk 15:30, 28 June 2008 (EDT)

(I moved the first part of this discussion here from Lurlock's talk page to keep the discussion with the article for easier future reference.)

I just tested the "not once-only" part on the Xbox, non-GOTY edition. I could never get the Dremora Lord to re-appear, even after dropping the item, leaving the area, sleeping for six-odd days (long enough to fully recharge a nearly-depleted Dagoth Dagger, so long enough to recharge about 1500 enchantment points), then returning. Because of confusion on the place page about which item in Ibishammus was cursed, I actually did the test using all three items that had been on the altar.

I also looked at the script (BILL_MarksDaedraSummon). A flag (done=1) gets set the first time the Dremora Lord is summoned, which should then prevent the summoning from ever happening again.

But since this was on Xbox, there's one thing I could not test: the hint about how to pick up a cursed item without summoning a Dremora Lord in the first place. There's no way within the Xbox inventory screen to manipulate items that are still on the ground. So one remaining possibility would seem to be that in the original PC version of the game, moving an item into your inventory with the inventory screen open did not count as activating the item. Or alternatively, that there are some mods out there that allow you to pick up items in a room without picking up counting as activating. In either case, if the cursed item does not register as being activated, then presumably putting the cursed item down again later would allow the Dremora Lord to appear at that point (still once-only, but just not necessarily when you're at the altar). --Nephele^Talk 17:10, 28 June 2008 (EDT)

No, I definitely got more than one use out of these. My guess is that after a certain length of time, the script on the item that holds the variable saying "done=1" resets and the item now behaves as if it had never been picked up. As for the picking-it-up-without-setting-it-off thing, I guess that would be PC-only if you can't grab objects in the world while your inventory is opened on the XBox - couldn't say, as I've never played on console.

Addendum: It's worth noting that ONLY the Dremora Lord-summoning cursed items seemed to have this property. The ones which summon Ancestral Ghosts or Dwarven Spectres did not. So you might look to see if there's some subtle difference between these scripts. --TheRealLurlock ^Talk 17:22, 28 June 2008 (EDT)