A game like The Elder Scrolls 5: Skyrim needs no introduction. Originally released in 2011 to the PC, PlayStation 3, and Xbox 360 by Bethesda Softworks, the game's massive amount of content and hidden secrets still captivates players to this day.
Being an Open-World RPG in the truest sense of the term, Skyrim allows players to experiment with their builds to suit their playstyle. Furthermore, Skyrim's open nature can lead to players using items in unique ways that the developers never intended. In this case, crafty players have found a way to completely negate fall damage.
A video post on Reddit by user Alibium has shown the useful trick to Reddit's Skyrim community, with other users fleshing out how exactly the whole thing works. A particular item in Skyrim, called netch jelly, causes the player character to become afflicted with a paralysis status effect lasting for one second. This leads to the character amusingly collapsing into a ragdoll state. Interestingly, ragdolls in Skyrim do not take fall damage in any capacity. As such, if a player were to consume netch jelly while falling to the ground, when they collide with the earth they will be in a ragdoll state and therefore would not receive any fall damage. Players can use this as another way to quickly travel around Skyrim's world.
Unfortunately, netch jelly is not particularly easy to obtain. No merchants in the game reliably stock it, although it is possible to buy some from shops if players can time it right. Netch jelly can also be looted from a netch, a large jellyfish-like creature that is peaceful until it is attacked, but netches can be surprisingly hard to kill. Players that don’t care too much about serious playthroughs can use Skyrim’s infamous item duplication techniques to get as many netch jellys as they’d like, however.
It’s easy to poke fun at the fact that Bethesda Softworks has released so many different versions of Skyrim spanning everything from the Nintendo Switch to PlayStation VR, not to mention the several different releases on PC alone, but the bottom line is the game’s breadth of content, dynamic world, and excellent mod support keeps Skyrim players coming back. The game has achieved nearly legendary status at this point, and if it keeps selling, Bethesda will keep releasing it.
Still, as great as Skyrim is, The Elder Scrolls’ fans eagerly await the sixth entry in the series. Very little is known about the next installment, despite Bethesda releasing its first teaser back in 2018. With Microsoft having finalized its purchase of Bethesda’s parent company, ZeniMax Media, this spring, it is expected that the new title will only be released on Microsoft platforms like Windows and Xbox.
The Elder Scrolls 5: Skyrim is available on PC, PS3, PS4, Switch, Xbox 360, and Xbox One.