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When the Greybeards invite you to High Hrothgar in Skyrim, you have to climb a mountain to reach them. There’s a messenger called Klimmek waiting in the village of Ivarstead at the bottom to warn you what an arduous journey this is going to be. To get to the top of the Throat of the World, he says, you have to work your way up The 7,000 Steps.
It’s well-documented that there aren’t actually 7,000 steps carved into the side of the mountain. Some of them are buried under the snow, making an exact count impossible, but the actual number is closer to 700. And even if you argue that The 7,000 Steps refers to the number of footsteps it takes to ascend the mountain, according to the dedicated researchers at the Ultimate Elder Scrolls Portal it only takes “approximately 2,400 footsteps” to get there.
As part of Bethesda’s 40th anniversary, which included the reveal of The Elder Scrolls 6’s subtitle, the studio reminisced about their previous work, which is how we know they really did try to get 7,000 steps into the side of the mountain.
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Dan Lee
Associate art director, Bethesda
While not responsible for the rough layout of Skyrim’s terrain, I was responsible for refining the shapes of High Hrothgar. I would look at the mountain from various viewpoints and tried to keep the shape interesting. My work on the “Throat of the World” was not limited to sculpting the mountain, but also included cluttering and dressing the mountain with visual effects, plants, and objects. This of course, included the infamous 7,000 steps. Now, I love trying to be as faithful to lore or real-life as possible and I did my darndest to find a way to fit all 7,000 steps into the storied path. However, my best attempt to do so included extending far past Ivartstead, wrapping around the mountain and ending near Whiterun in the frozen tundra. It turns out, 7,000 is quite a lot! By the way, my work did NOT include enemy encounters, so I take no responsibility for the Frost Troll that was the woe of many players.
Of course, like most open world games, Skyrim isn’t designed to scale—otherwise the capital city of Solitude would have a population of less than 100 people. But in the same way that for every named NPC we should assume there are a bunch of people off-camera, distances are compressed so that it doesn’t take a week to get anywhere. For every step we watched the Dragonborn climb there are another nine implied steps we don’t see, and even more frost trolls.