Moonpath to Elsweyr Is a 2012 Time Capsule and It Still Mostly Works

I did not go looking for Moonpath to Elsweyr. It found me the way most of the good stuff in this Nolvus playthrough has found me, which is to say through a museum.

I have been buried in Legacy of the Dragonborn for weeks, and at 70 displays Auryen hands you a quest called By the Light of the Moon pointing at the Staff of Indarys. The catch is that the person donating it lives in Elsweyr.

I have put a genuinely silly number of hours into Elder Scrolls games and had never once set foot in the Khajiit homeland. So I dropped everything and went.

This is the second post in my Nolvus mod series after Sirenroot: Deluge of Deceit, and I will say up front that this is a very different animal.

Finding the caravan is the first boss fight

Every guide online tells you the same thing. Go to Falkreath, find the two Khajiit with the wagon parked across from the carriage driver, talk to them, ride to Elsweyr.

My quest marker said Falkreath and my map agreed. There was nothing in Falkreath.

I burned an embarrassing chunk of an evening before working out why. Nolvus ships Beyond Skyrim: Bruma along with the Beyond Skyrim – Bruma Moonpath to Elsweyr Synergy Patch, which relocates the caravan so the route to Elsweyr makes geographic sense.

The patch moves Ku’rana’s caravan out of Skyrim entirely, into Greenwood, the southernmost settlement in County Bruma. Perfectly logical, and useless when your quest log still insists on Falkreath.

So I combed Bruma itself, because the patch adds no map marker, and only cracked it after digging up one stray Reddit post that named Greenwood. If you run Nolvus or any list with Bruma in it, there is your answer: Greenwood, not Falkreath, and no marker.

The moonpath is a road trip with loading screens

Once you are aboard, the journey to Elsweyr is the best-paced stretch in the mod. You load into a small area, the caravan runs into a problem, you solve it, then you talk to the caravan and it loads the next area.

A bandit camp squatting on the road. A collapsed bridge that sends you hunting for a ford through spider-infested jungle.

It is simple and the seams show, but it works. Each stop is short enough that you stay curious about the next, which is more than plenty of new-lands mods manage in their first hour.

The desert tried to blind me and I just took it

Then I hit the first desert area and could not see anything.

Those cells are locked into permanent blown-out daylight. There is no day-night cycle in there and the sky is a flat white sheet, so everything past about ten feet in front of you dissolves.

The cause is known and so is the fix. The mod bakes an old permanent light source into those cells, and Moonpath to Elsweyr Sky and Lightning fix strips it out, adds proper weather and a day-night cycle, and installs safely mid-playthrough. I’m not sure why this wasn’t already part of the Nolvus mod list to be honest.

I installed none of it. I spent a long time getting Nolvus looking right on my OLED and was not about to bolt plugins onto a working install for twenty minutes of content.

So I squinted, killed what needed killing, and got back on the wagon. There are only two desert sections and both are small, so you can just tank it, though it did cost me the NPC handing out the Ancient Siligonder Chitin Armor at first, who I only found after stealing the spare set off a desk.

Elsweyr looks like 2012 because it is 2012

Elsweyr proper is where my excitement cooled off. Objects are scattered with no real composition, navigation is fussy, and there is about a foot of standing water across most of the walkable ground that slows you to a wade.

Coming straight off Sirenroot, which is assembled with the care of official DLC, this felt amateurish. Then I read up on where it came from and softened.

Moonpath is one of the oldest quest mods Skyrim has. Tomas Sala, better known as muppetpuppet, started it right after the Creation Kit released in 2012, and it was his first mod.

He built it over roughly six months with no design document, uploading pieces the moment they were playable, and he has been openly self-critical since about the haphazard shape that produced. In 2012 it was astonishing, one of the first mods to prove Skyrim could carry a whole new region with custom creatures, terrain and voiced questlines.

Sala went on to solo-develop The Falconeer, which will matter again shortly. The SSE version you download today is maintained by An_Old_Sock and sits north of 24,500 endorsements.

The Zahilisks and the Thalmor carry it

Where the mod holds up is the fighting, specifically the things you are fighting.

Zahilisks are the standouts, blue raptor-looking creatures that come at you in packs, alongside siligonders, oversized jungle spiders, hyenas and mooncows. I went in at level 42 and the encounters landed well, challenging enough that I paid attention, never frustrating enough to make me reload in a huff.

Most of the questing has the Khajiit resistance pushing back a Thalmor invasion, and those fights are reliably the best content here. Killing Thalmor is an evergreen Skyrim pleasure and Moonpath hands you a lot of them.

Mild spoilers for an optional quest in the next few paragraphs.

I also ran The Dinner Guest, which revolves around a sload named Malsato, and I had no idea what a sload was. That is the writing’s one real weakness, and it is not a voice acting problem, because the voice work is decent for a 2012 community project.

The script assumes you are fluent in deep-cut Elder Scrolls lore. Sloads are amphibious slug-people from Thras with an ugly reputation for necromancy and plague, which I learned afterward on a wiki, not ideal for a quest that wants you alarmed by one.

It is still a good quest and it pays out the Thrassian Plaguesword. Desert Style is the other side quest worth your time, if only for that chitin armor and its +50 carry weight.

The airship fight is the best thing in here

Spoilers below for the mod’s standout sequence.

Partway through you come into possession of an airship called the Waning Moon, crewed by Khajiit and levitated by a pilot who treats the magic involved as nothing worth mentioning. It works as a travel system first, since you speak to him to move between regions.

Then it becomes the stage for the best thing in the mod, an airship-to-airship battle with the Thalmor where you fight across your own deck before boarding theirs and finishing their commander below. Knowing the person who staged that went on to build The Falconeer, an entire game about aerial combat, makes it feel like less of an accident.

The other moment that stuck with me was a small oasis tucked into the desert that somehow dodged the lighting bug completely. It is quietly gorgeous and I stood there longer than I needed to.

Liberating the island, then a soft landing

Endgame spoilers ahead.

The back half funnels into Rebuilding the Past, where you take an island in the Topal Sea and hand it over as a base for the Khajiit rebels. That is also where my reason for coming resolves, since the Staff of Indarys donor turns up at the liberated base and hands it over.

He later showed up at the museum in person and donated an airship, now docked outside. I have no idea whether it does anything, but it looks fantastic parked there.

I stayed on and cleared the remaining quests, and they are a noticeable step down. The mod peaks at the airship fight and coasts to the finish.

The verdict

Moonpath to Elsweyr is more Skyrim, and I mean that as an actual recommendation. It ran me four to five hours, the combat was fun the whole way through, and it showed me a corner of Tamriel I had somehow never visited.

It is also, unmistakably, the work of someone learning the Creation Kit in public in 2012. Layouts are messy, water is everywhere, the desert is an unreadable white void until you patch it, and the writing expects lore knowledge it never supplies.

Put it beside Sirenroot and it loses badly, but that is an unfair fight across fourteen years of modding craft. Put it beside what existed when it launched and it is a landmark.

If you want a polished new-lands experience there are better options on Nexus now. If you like Skyrim enough that “several more hours of Skyrim, somewhere new, with raptors and an airship” sounds like a good evening, this earns its download, and I would install the lighting fix first.

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Screenshots were captured by the author and used under Fair Use.