Backpack Glitch in Legacy of the Dragonborn on Steam Deck

Breaking out of Kendeshel’s playthrough posts to write up a brief issue I noted while playing her. Legacy’s official Discord says they can’t answer support requests from me because I’m playing on the Steam Deck and that’s not included in their official supported platforms. So investigation of problems has to be on me.

I’m okay with that! Because as I know very well from my day job, it’s impossible for a development team to provide support for a problem if they cannot repro the problem. And if they don’t have access to the same platform a user sees a problem on, by definition, they can’t support investigating that problem properly.

But that does mean I need to keep track of issues I see, so that I know what to do about them or other similar issues in the future.

So here’s a post about what I found while trying to add Anniversary Edition backpacks to the displays in the museum. I’ll do similar writeups for any other problems I find, not only for my benefit, but for anybody else who might want to do a modded Skyrim run on the Steam Deck that includes Legacy. Or, for that matter, anybody on the PC side who might stumble across a similar problem.

The basic problem

I attempted to make an Adventurer’s Backpack at the forge in the Safehouse, so that I could add it to the displays in the museum. But when I sent that backpack through the Display Prep Bench in the museum’s office, the backpack actually duplicated itself. I saw it show up on the correct display in the Hall of Wonders. But I also still had one in my inventory, and I had not had two of them before.

Possible relevant things impacting this issue:

1. Again, I’m on the Steam Deck. And while I am running the PC build of Skyrim, it’s still having to go through Steam’s Proton translation layer to work at all on the Deck, so that’s a whole extra layer of potential things that could cause weird behavior.
2. I’m running a total of 89 mods in this playthrough, any one of which might cause issues. (Though the only things I’m running that might impact behavior of the CC backpacks, as far as I know, are Campfire and the Legacy CC patches.)
3. At the time, I was wearing a Campfire backpack because I was switching things up a bit for variety’s sake.
4. I am running the Anniversary Edition. And even though there are official Legacy CC patches, which I am running, the impression I have here is that the most recommended way to run Legacy is not with the AE. By my own prior playthroughs with the AE, every one of those creations are a potential vector for bugs.

What I did to investigate the issue

A couple of questions stood out for me:

1. Would the issue reproduce with a different kind of CC backpack?
2. Would the issue reproduce if I placed a backpack manually, versus sending it through the prep station?

Since I had a couple more corundum ingots and enough leather, I made a Dark Leather Backpack and a Fine Leather Backpack. I was able to successfully place both of these manually, vs. sending them through the prep station. And I saw the display count in the Curator’s Guide book update correctly.

Conclusions

The immediate workaround for this, therefore, is clearly to just place the rest of the backpacks for the Camping Creation manually.

I’ll need to watch for any similar flaky behavior from other CC items. But so far, I’ve only seen this issue in regards to backpacks. It doesn’t seem to be applicable to other types of CC items I’ve dealt with in this playthrough to date. For example, I made a set of Leather Scout Armor and a set of Steel Soldier Armor, both of which went correctly through the prep station.

Possible other things to check, because I am an SDET and these are the things I can think of to investigate the problem as thoroughly as possible:

1. Does the issue repro if I try to send just a backpack through the prep station?
2. Does it repro if I take the Adventurer’s Backpack off the display and then try to send it through the station? I.e., does this repro in all attempts, or just the first one? And in this scenario, what happens to the Adventurer’s Backpack still in my inventory? Will I suddenly have two of them?
3. Does it repro with the Adventurer’s Backpack if I’m not wearing a Campfire backpack?
4. Does it repro for an Adventurer’s Backpack With Bedroll?
5. Does it repro if I send any other kind of CC backpack through the prep station?
6. Does it repro if I fire up the same load order on my Win11 VM?

Let me be clear: now that I know how to find the backpack display in the Hall of Wonders, placing the rest of the backpack set manually isn’t that big a deal!

But I want to know the answers to these questions anyway, and will update this post with additional findings when I have them. Because SDET, and I’m not satisfied with a bug investigation until I get as much info as I can. ;D

(If I’m feeling extra special crunchy ambitious, I could even attempt to put this load order on my actual PC laptop–though since that thing is a potato, there are no guarantees whatsoever that I could even run the load order on that box. Which is why I haven’t tried to run Skyrim on it since I got the Deck! Still though I’m curious and may poke at that anyway.)

Editing to add

Some additional findings as promised above.

1. Removed the Adventurer Backpack from the backpack display in the Hall of Wonders. Result: Can confirm that this left me with two Adventurer Backpacks in my inventory, so yeah, the original backpack was duplicated. However, the display count in the book did decrement as expected.
2. Attempted to remove anything from my inventory that moreHUD was showing as displayable. Then tried to send one of the Adventurer Backpacks through the station. Result: it wouldn’t actually do it, at least if that was the only thing I had in my inventory. When I picked up the other stuff, though, it accepted the backpack along with the other new things I had in my inventory (a couple of fishing maps). Note also that this was without my wearing the Campfire backpack.
3. Retrieved the Dark Leather and Fine Leather backpacks from the display, and then sent them one at a time through the prep station. Result: each one worked as expected. They were taken out of my inventory and sent to the display.
4. Made a Leather Backpack and an Adventurer Backpack With Bedroll, and sent those through the prep station. Result: the Leather Backpack was taken, but the Adventurer Backpack with Bedroll was not. I don’t think the display accounts for the bedroll version? (Which is weird because moreHUD thinks the bedroll versions are displayable, at least if I look at the UI at the forge?)
5. Sent a Fur Backpack successfully through the station.

This suggests to me that this was maybe a one-time glitch. May or may not be a situation where the issue happens just when you send a backpack through the prep station for the first time? Or it could have been a matter of what else I sent through the station at the time, because the backpack wasn’t the only thing.