A Sight For Ore Eyes: Examining the Geology of Skyrim

The folks at GameSpot have wrangled up an interesting piece that outlines the four types of real-world rocks that can be found in Bethesda’s The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim, how they’re positioned throughout the environment, and what the geological evidence tells us about how the land could have been formed (if it was real).

The four types of rock include iron ore, gold ore, malachite (an ore of copper), and moonstone, which is actually what geologists call feldspar. These rocks can be found in different areas across Skyrim, but for ease of mapping I’ve currently only taken into account the locations where they are the most abundant, which is where the most ore veins can be found.

Looking at the map above, you can see the spatial distributions of the four different rocks. The gold colored one indicates where gold is found, red indicates iron, green indicated malachite, and cream indicates moonstone.

By looking at how each ore is made, we can build up a picture of how the world of Skyrim was theoretically formed. For instance, gold ore commonly forms near mountains, where the Earth’s tectonic plates push together, while iron ore is formed by iron in the oceans turning to rust and then being squashed, folded, and stretched over the millennia to form iron ore deposits.

Rocks can be found in specific places not only because of the way they were formed. They can be also be transported to their modern resting places because of erosion or plate tectonic movements that push continents together to form mountain ranges or pull them apart to form oceans.

In the west of Skyrim, the curvy lines with triangles on them mean that the land to the northeast has been pushed on top of the land to the southwest. This type of plate movement builds mountains, and could explain why there are mountains in the west around Markarth.

So did the designers really put this much thought into constructing the landscape, or is the land loosely based on real life surroundings?