🖥️ PC2011Bethesda Game StudiosVERY HARD

The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim rebuild deck

VERY HARD

Levelled lists only pay out when you leave a place and return to it forty hours later, and those forty hours are fourteen square miles of people placing rocks one at a time.

You will get a good prototype. The product is what comes after.

Read whatever the agent hands back for the levelled lists very carefully, because the default is to multiply enemy health by player level, and that is precisely the mistake Bethesda spent two games walking back. Then notice what you are holding. The mechanism works and the payout does not, because a levelled list only pays when you leave a place and come back to it forty hours later, and there is no forty hours. That is why this is a NO and Half-Life 2 is not: Skyrim's inventions need fourteen square miles underneath them before they do anything, and fourteen square miles is people placing rocks, one at a time, for three years.

Difficulty: VERY HARD · 4 of 5
First playable: A project
The original: 300 team-years
Released: 2011 · PC
Genre: Open-World RPG

The one-shot build prompt

Build one dungeon from an open-world RPG plus the progression underneath it. three.js, first person, one twelve-room dungeon. Not the province.

Requirements:
- Levelled lists, not level scaling. Every spawn and every chest resolves through an ordered table of entries, each with a minimum player level; take the highest entry at or below the player's level. Give each list an optional cap and a flag keeping lower entries in the pool. Scaling enemy stats directly to the player is the failure mode that makes forty levels feel like none, and an agent will write it that way unless told otherwise.
- Give some regions a low cap so they go trivial, and one no cap so it stays lethal at every level. That asymmetry is why a world feels like a place rather than a treadmill.
- Skills level by use, character level derives from skill levels, each level grants a choice of health, stamina or magicka plus a perk point. Perk trees as JSON with prerequisite edges.
- Melee with a stamina-gated power attack, a blocking window, and windups long enough to read.
- The dungeon is a hand-authored room graph with a shortcut back to the entrance, because nobody should walk out the way they came.
- Weight-limited inventory, a lockpicking minigame, and quest state as a stage machine the journal reads.

Definition of done: I clear it at level 3, return at level 25, and the same lists give harder enemies and better loot everywhere except the capped region, which gives what it gave the first time.

Before you start🧰 The toolkit — models, MCP servers, art and 3D

What you lose

About fourteen square miles placed by hand rather than by noise, plus roughly 150 authored dungeons that each had a person assigned to them
Tens of thousands of voiced lines across seventy-odd actors, and the barks that make a town sound inhabited
The Creation Kit and a modding ecosystem that has kept the game alive longer than most studios stay open
AI packages: every NPC with a shift, an owned bed, a route home and an opinion about you

What to steal

Radiant quests — a template with typed slots, bound at runtime to real places and people the player has not used recently.

It turns a finite world into an unbounded supply of errands, and it drops into anything with named entities: a delivery game, a detective game, a support-ticket sim. The templates are the boring half; the exclusion rules that stop it repeating are the actual craft.

ScopeAbout a week— build just this, not the game

Build a radiant quest binder as a single self-contained HTML file, DOM or Canvas 2D, no build step.

Requirements:
- A small world as JSON: twelve locations and fifteen NPCs, each tagged (cave, bandit_camp, settlement, merchant, guard, faction), plus a hop-distance graph between locations.
- Four quest templates with typed slots, for example retrieve <item> from <hostile_location> for <questgiver>.
- A binder that picks a template and solves its slots against world state under constraints: the location must match the slot tag, sit within three hops of the questgiver, and not appear in the last five quests, and no NPC may hold two open quests. When a template cannot be satisfied, fail cleanly and try the next.
- Log every rejected candidate with the constraint that rejected it. That log is the point of the toy.
- Quests appear in a journal with real names; completing one marks the location used.

Definition of done: twenty quests in a row, no location repeating inside five, and the log tells me why every skipped candidate was skipped.

Make it different

Not a clone — The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim re-themed and cut down to something you can finish. The angle is the important reel: it is what turns a project into a weekend. 24,360 ways to land.

On Demand Play By Mail

The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim, but asynchronous multiplayer — no live server, set in gig economy streets. Rendered in hand-drawn ink on paper.

Themegig economy streets

Angleasynchronous multiplayer — no live server

Lookhand-drawn ink on paper

Build a browser game called "On Demand Play By Mail".

The pitch in one line: a open-world rpg in the spirit of The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim, but asynchronous multiplayer — no live server, set in gig economy streets.

WHAT THIS IS
Take the SHAPE of The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim — its core loop, and whatever makes that loop good — and rebuild it as your own game in a different world at a smaller scope. Use your own names, art and audio, which you want anyway: a reskin of somebody else's game is less interesting than a new one that works the same way.

THE ANGLE — this is the important constraint, honour it above everything else
Asynchronous multiplayer — no live server. Players take turns hours apart against stored state. You get real multiplayer with none of the real-time netcode.
This is what makes the project finishable. If a decision would push the scope back towards the original's, take the smaller option every time.

THE THEME
Gig economy streets. Ratings, tips and routing under a harsh clock. The city is a delivery graph and the player is the last mile.
The theme is not a coat of paint. Let it change what the mechanics mean — a reload, a health pack and a locked door should all be things that make sense in this world and nowhere else.

LOOK
Hand-drawn ink on paper. Rough stroked outlines with per-frame jitter so lines boil, a paper-grain texture over everything, and ink-bleed on impacts.

REQUIREMENTS
- Runs in a browser with no build step. Canvas 2D unless the angle genuinely requires 3D, in which case three.js.
- Fixed-timestep update loop with interpolated rendering, so it behaves the same at 60Hz and 144Hz.
- Every tuning constant in one CONFIG object at the top, exposed as live sliders in a debug panel. You will find the feel by dragging those, not by prompting.
- All content — levels, entities, balance numbers — in JSON or plain data files, never inline in the logic.
- Audio generated with the Web Audio API rather than asset files.
- Respect prefers-reduced-motion: keep the fades, drop the shake and the parallax.

BUILD ORDER
1. The core loop with placeholder rectangles, at the reduced scope the angle demands. No theme, no art, no audio. Make it fun as rectangles first.
2. The angle's consequences. Cutting to bots, or to turn-based, or to one level changes the design rather than just shrinking it — find out how and rewrite step 1.
3. The theme, as content and data.
4. The look, applied last as a rendering layer over a game that already works.

Start by writing a one-page plan: the core loop, what the angle removes and what that frees you to do properly, and what you are deliberately leaving out. Wait for me to approve it before writing code.

Prior art — read before you build

Half the time one of these already does what you wanted, and the other half it saves you a week of solving a problem someone documented in 1997.

Did you build it?

0Share on X

One count per game. No account — it is tied to a salted hash of your IP, which is not stored in a form anyone can reverse. Every build adds 300 team-years to the counter on the homepage.

Then try these

Or roll something nobody has built yet →

Questions

How hard is The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim to rebuild with an AI agent?

Yes — every game is buildable at some scope. The question is how hard, and The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim is VERY HARD (4 of 5). You will get a good prototype. The product is what comes after. Levelled lists only pay out when you leave a place and return to it forty hours later, and those forty hours are fourteen square miles of people placing rocks one at a time. Reckon on a project to something you can actually play — not to something that matches the 300 team-years Bethesda Game Studios spent.

What makes The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim hard to rebuild?

Levelled lists only pay out when you leave a place and return to it forty hours later, and those forty hours are fourteen square miles of people placing rocks one at a time. That is why it sits at VERY HARD rather than a tier either side of it. If you want the idea without the project, the transferable part is radiant quests — a template with typed slots, bound at runtime to real places and people the player has not used recently. — about a week of work.

How long does it take to build a The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim clone?

Wrong question, and it is worth saying why. Nobody rebuilds The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim — the original took Bethesda Game Studios on the order of 300 team-years, released in 2011 on PC. What you can do is reach something playable and genuinely yours in about a project, and then keep going for as long as it stays interesting. Any figure that claims otherwise is measuring a prototype and calling it a game.

What do I lose by building my own The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim?

About fourteen square miles placed by hand rather than by noise, plus roughly 150 authored dungeons that each had a person assigned to them. Tens of thousands of voiced lines across seventy-odd actors, and the barks that make a town sound inhabited. The Creation Kit and a modding ecosystem that has kept the game alive longer than most studios stay open. Those are the parts a prompt will not hand you.

Which AI coding agent should I use to build it?

Any of Claude Code, Codex or Cursor will handle this prompt. Paste it as your first message, let the agent scaffold the project, then iterate on feel — the second, third and tenth prompts are where a game actually gets good. Work in an empty folder or a fresh git branch so you can throw it away cheaply.

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