Skyrim playthrough chronicle

Come back to a save after three months and the first twenty minutes is archaeology: who is this character, where was I going, why is there a bounty in Riften? This recipe wires The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim Special Edition into Memory Layer so the playthrough chronicles itself, and

memory query --project skyrim --question "Where did I leave off and what was I doing?"

answers with citations into your own play history. Because activation decays, what you ask about most stays hot — the same reinforcement model your code memories use, applied to a save game.

Everything ships in the repository under integrations/skyrim/: a tiny quest mod, a bridge daemon, and build/install scripts that work on Linux (Steam/Proton) using the game's own Papyrus toolchain under mono/wine.

How it works

Two data channels feed one project:

1. Save files (no mod required). Every .ess save header already contains the character name, level, location display name, and in-game date. The bridge watches the Saves/ folder and turns each new save into a checkpoint memory, deduplicated by save number.

2. The Chronicle mod (live events). MemoryLayerChronicle.esp is a 327-byte plugin carrying one start-game-enabled quest with a vanilla Papyrus script. Every 10 seconds it polls the player and traces structured events — session starts, location changes, level-ups, large gold swings, combat — to a dedicated Papyrus user log. The bridge tails that log and stores the interesting ones: session starts, level milestones, and first visits to each location.

No SKSE required: location identity comes from Papyrus debug strings, which retain editor IDs for location records (WhiterunBanneredMareLocation → "Whiterun Bannered Mare" after the bridge prettifies them). Everything stays on your machine.

Install

Prerequisites: Skyrim SE via Steam on Linux, the (free) Creation Kit installed once via Steam (it provides the Papyrus compiler and script sources), plus mono, wine, python3.

cd integrations/skyrim
./mod/build.sh     # compile the Papyrus script, generate the .esp + SEQ
./install.sh       # copy into the game, enable Papyrus logging, activate plugin

The installer is additive and idempotent; ./install.sh --uninstall removes it. If your Steam library lives elsewhere, set SKYRIM_DIR and SKYRIM_PFX.

Then start the bridge (against your running Memory Layer service):

python3 bridge/skyrim_memory_bridge.py --project skyrim

It uses the Python client from clients/python straight out of the repo and reads the service API token from MEMORY_API_TOKEN or your provisioned memory-layer.env. Add --base-url http://127.0.0.1:4250 if you run the dev stack.

Play, then ask

Launch the game, play a while, save. The bridge prints each memory as it lands:

  + Skyrim session started at Bleak Falls Barrow
  + Skyrim: first visit to Riverwood
  + Skyrim: reached level 18
  + Skyrim checkpoint: Sigrid at Whiterun

Then:

memory query --project skyrim --question "Where did I leave off in Skyrim and what level am I?"

You last left off around Riverwood after resuming at Bleak Falls Barrow. Your most recently recorded level is 18. [2][3]

Other queries that work well: "Which places have I discovered?", "When did I last make real money?", "How far along is this character?" — and the graph view shows your travels warming up as you ask.

Verify the mod is running

After loading a save, check the user log the quest writes:

tail -f "<prefix>/drive_c/users/steamuser/Documents/My Games/Skyrim Special Edition/Logs/Script/User/MemoryLayer.0.log"

You should see ML1|session|... within ~15 seconds of gameplay.

Troubleshooting:

• No log at all — Papyrus logging is off: the installer appends [Papyrus] bEnableLogging=1 / bEnableTrace=1 to SkyrimCustom.ini; make sure a launcher run didn't remove the file.
• Log exists but no ML1|session — the plugin isn't active. The in-game Mods menu can rewrite Plugins.txt; re-run ./install.sh (it re-adds the *MemoryLayerChronicle.esp line) or enable it in the Mods menu.
• Quest never starts on an existing save — the SEQ file registers start-game-enabled quests; confirm Data/SEQ/MemoryLayerChronicle.seq exists.

Notes on design

• The quest script is deliberately vanilla-only Papyrus (no SKSE, no Creation-Kit-filled properties): Game.GetPlayer() instead of a PlayerRef property, and new-session detection via Utility.GetCurrentRealTime() running backwards after a game restart.
• Combat events are traced but not stored one-by-one — a dungeon crawl would drown the chronicle. Save checkpoints get importance 3, exploration 2, gold swings 1, so retrieval naturally prefers the milestones.
• The mod's events are episodic; the memory system's curation, decay, and consolidation do the rest. A long playthrough consolidates the same way a long-running codebase does.