Where Do Skyrim's Rivers Come From?

I'm standing here kneed deep in digital water from the hit 2011 video game Skyrim and I'm confused where did this River come from I mean it's flowing right so it's flowing from somewhere and it's flowing to somewhere but where and where we getting all this water from does it just uh shrink and expand at the whim of Todd Howard's mind or are there other water sources in the game that feed into these Rivers like they do on Earth if so where do those water sources come from in order to find the answers to these questions I have to myself a simple challenge starting in Riverwood I'm going to follow the river all the way to its end point and if any other rivers connect to it along the way I'm going to follow those all the way back to their Source points let's begin so as you can see standing on the bridge and Riverwood the river is very clearly flowing this way which I believe is North so wherever we're headed is that way so that's what we're going to do we're going to follow this here River all the way to wherever it ends and I'm sure it's going to take a while but that's okay now immediately something interesting has happened look at this this Creek feeds into the river and this waterfall feeds into the creek but what feeds the waterfall well I'm going to find out maybe we get just to the old classic Skyrim jump almost okay so check this out this is the start point at first glance this spontaneous water generation coming out of a nondescript side of a mountain seems unrealistic it seems very video gamey but it turns out this actually isn't that uncommon in the real world now obviously the visual Fidelity of Earth is a lot higher than the visual Fidelity of a game like Skyrim but because of things like a groundwater seepage underwater channels can form which can become underwater streams which will then find the path of lease resistance and then that water will come out the side and create a waterfall and in fact one of the most common causes of this type of seepage is glacial melting snow melt we know that Skyrim has lots of snow we even know that this mountain if you go up it is covered in snow so it actually kind of makes sense that's pretty neat it is fun that there's a little bit of thought put into the fact that the water you know obviously it turns into sort of white water when it goes over a waterfall but also you can see the tops of the water splitting when they hit the Rocks which is fun it's also that weird little whatever the that is just like a little little splurt so we've come all the way down here and now we have hit a split in the river we have another pretty big uh River Creek thing that is now also contributing okay this this is going to be more complicated than I thought so I'm going to make a diagram this line is going to represent the river that we're on it's just going to be one straight line like a metro line or some sort of train situation you guys might be familiar with that if you're from Europe This dot represents Riverwood where we started and then these little blue lines are going to represent uh small tributaries like streams and Creeks we'll also use big thicker blue lines to represent other rivers that connect and a variety of other symbols as we need them I just want you to know that this diagram is what's making this video take so long if you want want to see more diagrams like this support me on patreon now back to the journey it's white runs sewage Creek all this or maybe just drainage I shouldn't assume it's sewage but it continues further back here it gets a lot lighter and it looks like the source of that whole thing is white runs drainage sewage system so that whole Creek is man-made it's a totally artificial feature of the land that's interesting in addition to all of this if you actually go inside of uh White Run which is a walled City you can find the source of that water all the way up at the uh top of the mountain where the castle is the castle is surrounded by this big moat which then flows down all of these water features into a variety of fountains and eventually out of these drainage tunnels now all of that is to say that all the times you've played Skyrim and you've walked near this little creek and you've thought to yourself wow what a beautiful Creek there uh that it's all runoff it's all like sewage probably from White Run that you're just admiring that then flows into that River you'll notice as we continue walking we're actually going down in elevation a lot and that's not uncommon when it comes to Rivers because it tends to be that things melt and gravity pulls them down so it's probably the case that we're going to continue going lower and lower in elevation but I'm curious because this is a video game if they ever sort of screwed that up you know if they ever accidentally made a river go uphill but whatever I don't know I'm not a hydrologist holy crap this is a large waterfall here oh dear look at that that's that's pretty amazing amazing we have a really large uh River combining with it right here my God I don't even know if I want to know where that comes from just kidding yes I do following this particular tributary back to its source was uh very difficult well I mean it wasn't very difficult I was playing a video game so you know I'm not working on an oil rig uh but I had to jump a lot is basically what I'm saying we had to climb up a mountain past a bunch of very beautiful waterfalls and cliffs and things like that and eventually it leads here to this unassuming tiny little spot with another one of these water Falls that just generates an infinite amount of water that then spills down and creates all of those cascading effects I'm honestly not totally sure what I find so interesting about all of this I was trying to think of it while writing the sort of loose outline of the script for this video and obviously there's a piece of it that it's I just like looking at things in games that we weren't supposed to look at but I do play games normally I do enjoy games like a normal person enjoys them please believe me but there's something about looking at a river and knowing that that River starts somewhere and ends somewhere that gives me this really interesting feeling maybe it's because I struggle with like visualizing other places that aren't in front of my face it's like I don't I'm still working on object permanence in a way emotionally but if you also think it's interesting tell me why maybe it will help me figure it out but in the meantime I have a river to follow all right we've come to another joining River got a big waterfall that feeds it coming down so this is this has got to be coming from either mult multiple smaller rivers or it's coming directly from like some kind of big lake or something like that ah Christ okay so it's actually coming from multiple bigger Rivers okay all right okay I feel like this is going to be the shorter one to go look at so let's go see this hike was also extremely long and annoying and the river also split up again now one of these paths does go thousands of feet up into a tiny spot on the mountains where uh once again you find just another one of these little generating points so that's always fun but the other path is a much larger River and if you follow that back you actually end up in the town of iorad or ivarstead whatever it's called so that was a fun surprise okay well here we are now in iorad this river is powering this wheel it's cool to to think that this River this body of water ah God damn it I hate this game I love this game but I hate this game okay what was I saying anyway I think it's really cool to think that this River this body of water is connected to the same body of water that is rotating the lumber mill in Riverwood that's pretty cool to think that like at the end of the day these two locations are interlined in that way and also something interesting about this is check this out right here right here in iorad the river splits on the left side the water calmly flows to the left and on the right side it rapidly starts flowing to the right and then it turns into this gigantic torrent this exact thing this exact moment is one of the reasons why I was so interested in making this video video the idea that if you really dig in eventually you're going to find the spot that the game gives up on trying to be the world that it's trying to be and instead it has to admit to you that it's just a video game this is the video game telling us that it's that it's a video game for all the effort that they put into having these tributaries and these combining rivers and these water features that make sense at the end of the day eventually they just had to go it just make it make water it's fine so in that way it kind of feels like having a a secret little handshake with the developer but it also feels like having a secret handshake directly with the video game I can't believe we found the generative source of one of the rivers in Skyrim that's crazy like they didn't even put one of those little handwavy explanation waterfalls out of the side of the mountain here it just starts right in this spot I'm in awe of the power of video games anyway if you follow this new Downstream path it eventually ends up into a gigantic Lake and very cool thing happens if you stand on this bridge you'll see this small Creek suddenly get huge and gigantic for no explicable reason another way that the game just admits that it can't justify everything and sometimes it just has to make a big river and that's just the way it goes all of this water just comes from that one little spot now that does beg the question is there any way that this can make sense from a hydrological perspective well it's kind of a tough question to answer this is a good thing we don't need there to be an underlying gravity model that interacts with a liquid physics engine it's a piece of three-dimensional art so the rivers don't have to have sensible beginnings and sensible ends but they do have to have beginnings and ends so where's the end of this River well this big giant Lake drains in two places one of them goes off the side and ends up being its own separate river that goes all the way to the city of rifton we're not doing that right now that's a whole other hydrological exploration but the other path turns into a few waterfalls that eventually reconnect and combine with the original River that we were following so now we're back on course thankfully things got a little bit simpler from here on out there weren't any more uh tributaries that we had to keep track of our explore and we even got to see a man who had recently been eaten by a bear damn a bear got in this person's home and ate them alive I just killed the bear as we get further into the northern latitudes despite the descending elevation ice begins to form along the river things start to get much colder and we arrive at the city of Windhelm this city is surrounded by a giant moat which is largely just the river that we've been following but it's also joined by another separate river which means we need to figure out where this River comes from now thankfully we don't have to go too far because just a few minutes Upstream we find this gigantic lake that is surrounded by snowy mountains and has no other contributing tributaries so we can surmise that the snow from these surrounding mountains melts into this little Valley and then flows down towards uh Windhelm as a river now once you're at Windhelm you're pretty close to the coast of Skyrim so all you have to do from this point is is just walk a little ways North and eventually you get to sort of a River delta type area and the strength of the flow of the river gets swallowed up by just the volume of water outside in the sea of dead souls or whatever I think it has a name so this is where the river ends that humble Little Creek from Riverwood that created cascading waterfalls and brought us so much joyan Adventure that had so many uh contributing water Partners it all ends here and just join s the giant singular mass that is the ocean which is like what happens to us when we die which is a good thing probably hopefully I guess we'll see so great we made it but we still have no idea where this River begins well thankfully that's not a very hard question to answer we just have to head back to Riverwood and you know it turns out that not too far uh Upstream of Riverwood is a gigantic Lake which begs the question is this it is this the start of all that water all of that huboo that happens Downstream is it all just the fault of this Lake well that really depends if there are any rivers feeding into this lake or if it's just its own thing and the only way to find that out is to walk around the whole thing in a circle so let's do that really quick I'll just speed it up for you I'll save you some time and tell you that uh no there is nothing else feeding into this Lake however the lake does split off into another River but it is itself the source for that River now the question becomes where does that River go I think I will leave that one to you following these Rivers has been one of the most reinvigorating experiences I've had with Skyrim in a long time it has been so fun and so grounding to do something so explorative and arbitrary that I don't really want to ruin the fun by putting it in a YouTube video so if you want to know where this river goes boot up your copy of Skyrim meet me by this Sawmill oh my God you're already here you look exactly like how I imagined all my fans would look the heart of what I wanted to get to with this video is uh is this I love video games thanks for watching money and I something more doing in my favorite places at the grocery store at 3 a.m. and I know what I'm talking about

Channel: Any Austin

Views: 1,309,759

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Id: 69u_Pxb_8zI

Length: 12min 52sec (772 seconds)

Published: Mon May 06 2024