Carved Brink Is Gorgeous, Frustrating, and Worth It Anyway

Every big quest mod in this Nolvus playthrough has given me at least one moment where I forgot I was playing a mod. Carved Brink gave me about a dozen of them, and then it gave me the moment where I gave up and opened the console.

This is the next entry in my ongoing series on the DLC-sized mods I keep tripping over in Nolvus. Sirenroot: Deluge of Deceit is still the one to beat, but Carved Brink is right behind it.

It is also the strangest and one of the most interesting looking things I have seen in an Elder Scrolls game, which counts for a lot when the game in question is almost fifteen years old.

What Carved Brink actually is

Carved Brink comes from Haem Projects, the two-person team of Dimonoider and gkalian who also built Project AHO. It released in March 2019 and it is huge.

The mod adds two realms. The Pits belongs to Peryite, and the Faceted Stones is a pocket plane of Oblivion nobody knew was there.

Between them you get more than 40 locations, over 50 fully voiced NPCs, and a 14-track original score by ForhirMusic. You start the whole thing at the Abandoned Grotto near Hillgrund’s Tomb, with a level 10 requirement on paper.

Hold onto that “on paper,” because we are coming back to it.

The Faceted Stones look like nowhere else in Skyrim

The Faceted Stones is a field of floating rock islands hanging in an endless sky, and it belonged to the Snow Elves before the goblins moved in. That premise gives the team license to build things Skyrim’s normal geography would never allow.

The high point is Abamath, a sunken Snow Elf residential district where you pull handles to raise the houses back out of the ground. The notes the dead residents left behind are better environmental storytelling than most of the base game manages.

Blackreach is the obvious comparison and I think this beats it. Blackreach is one enormous room, while the Faceted Stones asks you to think in three dimensions the entire time you are there.

If you have played The Wheels of Lull or spent time in Apocrypha, you know the feeling of a mod using Oblivion as an excuse to get properly weird. This is that, with much better art direction.

The True Path spell is brilliant for about an hour

Getting around the Faceted Stones runs on a spell called True Path. You aim at a big glowing crystal on a distant island, fire, and appear over there.

The first ten minutes are fantastic. It feels like a traversal mechanic lifted out of a much newer game, and it makes the vertical layout of the realm click.

Then the loop sets in. Equip the spell, teleport, land on an island, get immediately jumped by something, swap to your weapons, fight, heal, swap back to the spell, aim, repeat.

Skyrim’s favorites menu was never designed for that kind of rapid switching. Doing it a hundred times in a row is where the shine came off for me.

The aiming is worse. Those crystals are large and obvious and you mostly cannot hit them by aiming at them.

You have to aim slightly below the crystal, and sometimes slightly above it instead. I spent an embarrassing stretch of time convinced the spell was broken before I figured that out.

The real killer is that True Path cannot be aimed in third person. I play in third person, so every single teleport meant switching to first person, lining up the shot, firing, and switching back.

It is a great idea that the encounter design fights at every step. I wanted to love it and by the end I was just tired of it.

Imp is a talking clam and he is the best part

Early on you pick up Imp, a sentient talking clam who tags along and never shuts up. He is voiced with a fast, loud, unmistakably Jack Sparrow-flavored delivery, and it should not work at all.

It works completely. The performance is committed enough that the goofiness becomes the whole point.

He stays with you through the entire adventure and becomes a proper follower at the end if you want to keep him, which I did.

The rest of the cast holds up too. Geleada, an ancient toad-like Argonian, has the kind of deep croaking read you would expect from a paid production, and the goblins get a full spread of actors doing chattering, broken, Riekling-adjacent speech.

For a free mod from two people, the voice work is ridiculous in the best way.

The goblins, twenty gold ore, and a mine full of mages

I fell into Carved Brink very early in my playthrough at a low level, which I would not recommend but do not entirely regret.

The first goblin village, Blue Horn, hands you sidequests that send you through portals to fetch things. One of them is a simple errand: bring back 20 gold ore.

The mine they point you at is full of mages who deleted me instantly. That level 10 requirement is a polite suggestion, and the difficulty inside the realm has nothing to do with Skyrim’s normal curve.

So I left, played the rest of the game for a good while, and came back somewhere in the level 30 to 40 range with real magic resistance. It was fine then, and the quests went down without much trouble.

Backing out and coming back later was the right move here.

Where it broke for me

Light spoilers for the middle of the questline below.

After clearing the Blue Horn sidequests I lost a long stretch of time to not knowing where to go next. Navigating a realm of floating islands by teleporting through three dimensions is disorienting, and the mod does not hold your hand about it.

When I finally reached the second goblin village, not a single goblin would talk to me. No dialogue options anywhere, from anyone.

While I wandered around trying to shake it loose, I got a message telling me a sidequest they were supposed to give me had failed, despite my never having started it.

Reloading older saves did not help. That village is where the game asks you to spare the goblins or kill them, and with dialogue dead I could not pick the peaceful option.

So I killed them. The quest ticked over as complete and that was the end of that particular moral dilemma.

To get moving again I used the console command tcl to turn off collision and flew around the Faceted Stones freely. It also made the entire area far more pleasant to explore.

Flying around eventually dropped me into a later stage of the main quest, and from there everything ran normally to the end. I missed a couple of quests on the way through, which stings, but the rest of the playthrough was smooth.

What Nolvus changes about it

Nolvus Ascension ships Carved Brink already patched, which is worth knowing before you go hunting for fixes yourself. The Carved Brink Unofficial Patch by LordMala is in the list, cleaning up broken meshes that can crash the game, fixing the boss music so it keeps playing through the fight, and repairing the Overseer eyeball creatures.

You also get Modpocalypse NPCs – Carved Brink, so the faces line up with the rest of your overhauled Skyrim instead of looking like 2019.

One thing to flag: the authors have always warned that Carved Brink and ENB do not get along and recommend adjusting your config. I never touched mine and the realm still looked incredible, but if anything looks blown out or too dark, that is your culprit.

The dialogue bug I hit is not on the unofficial patch’s fix list. If you run into it, the console is your friend.

The verdict

Carved Brink is the second best thing I have found in this Nolvus playthrough, and the gap between it and Sirenroot is small. Sirenroot is a tightly designed dungeon built around one clean idea, while Carved Brink is a sprawling, weird, occasionally broken place with more to look at than anything else I have played in Skyrim.

The environments alone justify the download. Abamath and the floating islands do things with Elder Scrolls space I have not seen anywhere else, official or modded.

What you have to accept is friction. True Path is a cool idea bolted to a tedious loop, third person players get punished for using it, and the quest scripting is fragile enough that a console command may be the difference between finishing and quitting.

If that trade sounds acceptable, go play it. If you want a quest mod that runs clean start to finish with no fiddling, this is not the one, and I would send you to Sirenroot first.

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Images were captured by the author from their playthrough and are used under Fair Use.