I attempted a Skyrim: Nuzlocke Survival Challenge (Legendary difficulty)

Nuzlocking has become a very popular way to play pokemon games, the idea of death being permanent along with banning cheap overpowered strategies really adds a lot of tension, stakes and decision making to your runs. But can we apply this method of playing to other games? Absolutely, dark souls and fallout 4 are great examples of doing a ‘nuzlocke’ or what some might call an ironman challenge or survival mode run, todays video will be showcasing a nuzlocke run on skyrim, you’ve probably heard of this game, came out 12 years ago and people still can’t shut up about it, I have tried many, many 1 death reset challenges on this game on the PS3 but for the first time ever I’ll be doing this on the special edition with all the dlc included which will be a fresh experience.

So first of all the ruleset needs to be clarified. This is a survival challenge, meaning most importantly, death is permanent and you cannot reload a save, so if you die, you die, yikes. The difficulty must be set to legendary as anything below is trivial, hell even legendary can be trivialised but thats another bag of worms.

This is the basic template but in the spirit of hardcore challenges I will be adding in a lot of extra rules to make this challenge actually interesting.

Followers are NOT allowed, honestly they just felt cheap and abusable to me, especially as the AI is so dumb as is, followers allow you to just pay others to beat your challenge for you and thats lame, especially when theyre immortal followers, obviously important quests where theyre mandatory is allowed like serana but youre only allowed to utilise her during those specific quests, conjuration will be allowed tho, for now anyways as damn that was strong.


Putting perks into alchemy and enchanting is NOT allowed, yeah everyone points to this as the easy scapegoat, you probably know just how abusable these skills are when invested into and allow you to become godly, not to mention the ludicrous bugs that allow you to literally break the game, you can still enchant items yourself but the enchantments wont be too strong, this also incentivises you to having to buy good enchanted gear from stores, making you have to work for your best gear, also honestly Im too lazy to grind enchanting anyways, oh and speaking of potions…


You CANNOT consume potions normally, honestly potions feel a bit dumb and cheap, the way you can freee time mid combat and instantaneously chug 20 different potions like your the flash to bail yourself out of any situation, yeah not here, this also cheapens having to keep your distance and the use of restoration, it’s alright to use a potion or two outside combat like one fortify smithing potion but honestly this never came up in my runs anyways, potions were just a way for me to make money so they were effectively banned.


NO stupid sneak abuse, look sneak is game breakingly ludicrous, need I say more than 100 sneak with 30 times damage bonus, with the fact that you can literally make yourself invisible, well not in this run you cant, sneaking as a skill will be allowed but I didn’t allow myself to invest in it as a skill, 2x bow damage is alright, just dont go wild with this.



That’s pretty much it for the rules, I might have missed out one or two details, so with this, the goal of the run is to simply survive, play, do what you want, there is no arbitrary end point. So let’s get into what went down in my particular run…