Locate dropped item?

[Zaphida]

I dropped a propylon index and thought not much of it, since in all of my playthroughs I never found very many just like this time where I've found only 2. Now I've learned about the official addon quest Master Index and I want to do it in preparation for becoming a vampire. But I can't remember which daedric ruin I left the index in. I would like to avoid making a duplicate by using the console, it feels too much like cheating. Is there any way I could inspect the save game data to find where the propylon index lies? This won't feel too much like cheating to me, since it would only be making up for my bad memory and not manipulating the game in any way.

TL;DR: How do you inspect an OpenMW save to find where a dropped item is?

Reddit post: https://www.reddit.com/r/OpenMW/comment ... pped_item/

[akortunov]

It will be much simpler to add a missing propylon mark via the `additem` console command.

[silentthief]

While it is an interesting question and I'm also now wondering if there is any method to pull info out of a save, Akortunov has the right idea. I don't know for sure if the "72 hour" cell reset situation applies in OpenMW but it is possible that the item is missing from its original location (marked as changed) and also gone from wherever you happened to drop it.

I'm all for the role play of role playing games, but I think you have no other choice than script

ST

[Zaphida]

It will be much simpler to add a missing propylon mark via the `additem` console command.

Of course, but....

I don't know for sure if the "72 hour" cell reset situation applies in OpenMW but it is possible that the item is missing from its original location (marked as changed) and also gone from wherever you happened to drop it.

I came back to a daedric ruin I hadn't been to in weeks of in-game time and some items I dropped inside were still there. So I'm hopeful, to find it manually I only need to check a few ruin interiors.

[Zaphida]

YES, you can locate a dropped item by looking in the save file.

cc9cii kindly offered to examine my OMWSave for me and gave me the cell name and coordinates of my missing Andasreth Propylon Index.

I will post a how-to using a hex editor tomorrow.

For now, here is my reaction to finding the missing index upon warping to the coordinates that cc9cii gave me. (screen cut off PEBKAC)
https://clips.twitch.tv/CloudyFunJuiceB ... Vo_3zMZ7MO

[AnyOldName3]

Remember this? viewtopic.php?p=72843#p72843

[Zaphida]

Remember this? viewtopic.php?p=72843#p72843

Yes, I've been trying to avoid editing posts that aren't still in the moderation queue. But I couldn't help myself with the first post. Looks like the forum software has decided I'm a real human now and I can edit posts without them going back into the moderation queue.

[Zaphida]

I have done my best to replicate cc9cci's technique using HxD. As promised, here is a how-to.

Open the save file


Open Find with Ctrl+F, enter the item's id into Search for, click Search All


Select the result that has .INTV


Here you see that we have FRMR appearing before the item id. FRMR is a marker for an object reference.

Open Find again, enter SPAC into Search for, change Search direction to Backward, click OK



SPAC denotes the name of the cell. Since index_andra is under this, Ald Daedroth, Left Wing is the name of the cell that index_andra is in.
Now you know which cell your item is in.
For small items, it might be hard to find exactly where the item was dropped. In my case, I didn't find the propylon index in my manual search of Al Daedroth because it is so small, blends in with the colour of the floor, is under the water and was sticking up vertically. To solve this, we can find the exact xyz coordinates of the item's location.

In HxD or which ever hex editor you use, go back to item_id.INTV
Just after item_id.INTV is DATA and POS_. You can see in the Hex section that the data under both DATA and POS_ here is the same, though the decoded text might not be exactly the same.

The highlighted data here are the xyz coordinates of the item's location. Each coordinate is a 4 byte floating-point number. So we need to use a Hex to Float converter. For this example I will use https://gregstoll.com/~gregstoll/floattohex/
Copy the Hex coordinate into the converter and remove any whitespaces. Since the save file is in little-endian format, ensure Swap to use big-endian is enabled.

Do this for each coordinate and voila, you now have both the cell name and the exact xyz coordinates within that cell of your item's location.

Now to see where this actually is in game, load the save in OpenMW and open the console by pressing tilde ( ` ), just above the Tab key on your keyboard.
Enter Player->PositionCell, x, y, z, 0, "Cell Name" into the console, adding any required capitalization and comma. For this example, the exact command is Player->PositionCell, 1550.82, 95.881, -27.5, 0, "Ald Daedroth, Left Wing"

Hit enter, look down at the floor and congratulations, you have located the dropped item.



Now of course, as akortunov pointed out, it would be much simpler to simply spawn a copy of the lost item using the additem command in the console. But then you have a game in which there is two copies of a unique item when there should be only one. In my case, I did the Master Index quest where you give each Propylon Index to Folms Mirel at the Guild of Mages in Caldera. If I were to give myself another with additem index_andra, the original would still be sitting in Ald Daedroth, Left Wing when it should not be present in the game anymore after converting all the indices into a single Master Index. I could not accept this other than as a last resort and I am very glad cc9cii came forward and taught me how to pull this info out of a save file.

Now that we know that this is possible and it is quite easy to interpret the data hopefully somebody writes a tool to make it even easier and lay the foundation for an editor of .omwsave files which can be worked on once the format is frozen.

[polynomial]

That's awesome! Thank you for making the follow-up post. Pretty darn cool

[AnyOldName3]

Remember this? viewtopic.php?p=72843#p72843

Yes, I've been trying to avoid editing posts that aren't still in the moderation queue. But I couldn't help myself with the first post. Looks like the forum software has decided I'm a real human now and I can edit posts without them going back into the moderation queue.

I literally had to re-approve every single one of your posts except two because you'd edited all of them, hence writing that message. If I'm looking at the right thing, it was that massive flurry of manual approvals that made the forum trust you.