Quick Tips #4: Research (Patreon)

The secret to being an Elder Scrolls "loremaster" isn't remembering every factoid, but rather knowing how to find the information you need. This post is a short guide to advanced search across several websites, so that you can spend more time theorizing and less time memorizing. 

The Imperial Library

By default, the search box at the top of the navigation bar looks for the given words in every page on the main site (but excludes the forums, image captions, and news posts). If multiple words are entered, it will look for both words, but not necessarily in the combination that they were entered in ("dark elves" will search for both "dark" and "elves" rather than just the phrase "dark elves"). 

The advances search, accessible as a button at the top of the search results, has several useful options. 

Containing the phrase - if you want to look specifically for "dark elves" rather than "dark" and "elves", put your phrase here. 

Only in the category(s) - this is Drupal's tagging system, which we use for forum categories, themed tags, book type, and game of origin. The most useful one will be the game of origin, found at the very bottom of the list. This is a handy filter for figuring out when an idea originated, or if you sort of remember the book you're looking for and need help narrowing it down. 

Only of the type(s) - a Book Page is anything on the main site. This means books from the games, but also game storylines, interviews, quote pages, articles, etc. Checking the Forum Topic checkbox  will add the forums to the search options. Gallery and Gallery Image will search in image captions. Story is for news posts. 

Click Advanced Search to execute the search with your new parameters. 

Unofficial Elder Scrolls Pages 

By default, UESP's search looks only at content pages, but ignores talk and user pages. While user pages are rarely going to be useful, talk pages can be - after searching, switch to Everything to see both.  

You'll also notice that it prioritizes articles (in this case, specifically redirecting "boiche" to the lore article for Bosmer") over sources. While this is helpful for getting a general overview (in this case, telling you that boiche is another word for bosmer), it's not great for research. 

The advanced search allows you to select which games and spaces you'd like to search inside, and allows you to toggle searching talk pages specifically. 

Toggling individual games is helpful in finding out when an idea first appeared, filtering out games you're not interested in, and ignoring mod and article pages. 

While the articles on UESP's lore pages are generally good for getting an overview of the topic, they should not be used exclusively when researching, and should never be cited as a source. They're synthesis of information, passed through several hands of unknown provenance - information may easily have been misunderstood, misrepresented, forgotten about, etc. (for example, there is no source of the Bosmer actually calling themselves Boiche - both uses of the term are by other races writing about them, not them writing about themselves). Instead, use the list of references at the bottom of each article to read the original sources.

(The same goes for TIL's articles. Use the sources, not the article itself, unless you're citing original research).  

Game Text

Between TIL and UESP, the vast majority of texts found in games - books, journal entries, item descriptions, loading screens, etc. are documented in one way or another. But not all of them, especially for ESO. If you're still not finding what you need, or want to really do a deep dive, looking directly at the game data is best. 

Morrowind, Oblivion, and Skyrim's data can be exported from their respective editors by going to File > Export and selecting what you want to export. Dialog is really the thing you're interested here, so I'd stick to that. It comes out in a big plaintext file, which you can then ctrl+F through for the terms you're interested in. 

For ESO, which doesn't ship with an editor, the process it trickier. You'll need to download and run UESP's EsoExtractData utility. If all you're interested in is the text, you'll only need to copy over eso.mnf, eso0000.dat, and eso0001.dat. The resulting file will be a .csv containing every single bit of text in the game. The downside? They're entirely unlabeled and unattributed, and there's only barely an order (books are all grouped together, for example, but all the dialog belonging to one NPC is not). It's not as useful as the single player game files, but searching through it can still yield interesting tidbits, especially if you know what you're looking for. 

Blade's data files can be extracted using a utility called AssetStudioGUI. To find the text files, open that program and go to your phone and locate the folder named Android/data/com.bethsoft.blade/files/UnityCache/Shared/Common. Open the __data file that's in there, and switch over to the Asset List tab to find the QuestLanguageDatabase listing.  Right click, select Export Selected Assets, and save it somewhere on your computer. The resulting file is a plain text file with every piece of dialog and quest description, sorted by person and quest (as well as enchantment effects, alchemy recipes, UI text, and other strings). 

Google

Last, but not least, ye olde search engine. While for 98% of cases Google is just going to bring you to a site you can go to yourself, it is uniquely helpful in finding really old discussions. 

Once you've searched for your term, click the Tools button below the search bar and click the arrow next to Any Time to select Custom Range. In the resulting popup, set the dates to whatever you want - for example, 1990 to 2002 to get only results from before Morrowind's release. 

Google has also preserved old newsgroups (social media from the 90s, for the youngins), which are a tresuretrove of ancient opinions and discussions. To look through those, type your term into groups.google.com. While it is unlikely to uncover new lore, it's absolutely fascinating to see how opinions on TES have changed (and stayed the same!) over the decades.