Few RPGs can compare to the massive scale of Skyrim, one of the best games Bethesda has made in the past decade. Its large variety of NPCs, locations, and items help immerse players into this vast and unique world.
Because Skyrim is so large in scale, the developers need to find efficient ways to test everything. That is where developer rooms come in, including thousands of items and various NPCs to test everything imaginable. Players can enter this room themselves in Skyrim by typing coc QASmoke into the developer’s console. Here are 10 things you never noticed about this hidden Skyrim dev room.
10 Houses Every Item in Skyrim
Considering how vast Skyrim is, it’s hard to imagine how many items exist in the game to make that variety and breadth possible. Well, you don’t have to wonder. Visit the dev room!
The QASmoke dev room, named after its console command, is an area dedicated to testing every item in the game. Every chest in this room includes items of a particular category. Since these chests cover everything in Skyrim from weapons to questing items, you are effectively browsing every item in the game when in that room. Be careful taking everything, however, as it’s very easy to crash your game doing so.
9 All Vanilla Items stored in Dwemer dressers
This isn’t true with the DLC items added, but all of the items introduced in the vanilla game are always included in multiple Dwemer dressers.
They are categorized to make them easier to sort through, but every storage unit you’ll find in the main hallway is a Dwemer dresser. There has never been an explanation for this, but the Dwemer chests likely took the least amount of space to put items into, or it could be because they were the first storage objects finished in development. Whatever the case, having every storage item be a Dwemer dresser sure is strange.
8 DLC alters the room
Mentioned briefly earlier, DLCs that you purchase for Skyrim alter this hidden developer room. Dawnguard adds a massive room and hallway to one end, while Dragonborn adds two new rooms to toy with.
The area added with Dawnguard includes a small hallway, followed with a massive room with only two Dwemer dresser chests inside—which contain every Dawnguard item introduced in that DLC. Dragonborn adds new items in typical dungeon chests instead of Dwemer dressers, and it also includes a room to spawn NPCs and creatures to test AI behavior.
7 Has Every Crafting Station
From enchanting to making new armor, the dev room contains every crafting station you could ever ask for. Similar to the Dwemer dresser items, this was likely to test the functionality of these interactable objects.
For some reason, Staff tables introduced in Dragonbornto alter or modify Staves are completely missing here. There is only one in the game, so Bethesda might have simply forgotten or figured it wasn’t important enough. Besides that, everything else is in here to allow for unlimited crafting potential with all of the resources available.
6 Room Uses Occlusion Culling
If you have the Dawnguard DLC installed when entering this room, you might notice the hallway connecting the vanilla game’s items with Dawnguards looks rather odd. That’s likely intentional.
Bethesda seemed to have been testing Occlusion Culling with those two separate rooms. Occlusion Culling is a technique developers can use to stop rendering, or cull, certain sections of levels players can’t actively see in order to save on performance. That door connecting the two will never show the opposite room for this very reason. Try it yourself! Turn off collisions and fly outside of the room and you’ll see that the adjacent rooms stop rendering.
5 coc QASmoke’s Meaning
The command to enter Skyrim’s hidden dev room seems almost random in name. What does coc QASmoke even mean?
Command coc is short for center on cell, with cells being the various areas and levels in Skyrim. The cell needs a name, though, which is QASmoke in this case. The dev room was likely called QASmoke because it was a place quality assurance testers would test every item’s functionality and make sure the game’s lighting was rendering properly, hence the Smoke part of the name.
4 Three Ladles
The lightning test theory makes more sense when you consider the three random wooden ladles laying on a table in the dev hall. One is random enough, but three ladles seem even stranger.
The table and ladles are positioned in an area where the lighting is slowing falling off. One ladle is closest to the room’s light, while the other two get further away from it. Those wooden ladles are likely in the room to test lighting and make sure that objects would receive light and cast shadows properly.
3 Contains Cut Content
Since the dev room contains every item in Skyrim, you would expect all of those items to be obtainable somehow throughout the game. Sadly, this is not the case.
Fortunately, we can still view some of this cut content present within the dev room. The most notable example of cut content are the Nord Hero Arrows, a unique arrow type that is not in the game. They look finished, complete with stats and textures. The Dragonborn DLC also added some unique weapons that can’t be obtained in the DLC at any point.
2 Multiple Dev Rooms
While coc QASmoke is the most notorious dev room within Skyrim, this certainly isn’t the only one. Plenty of developer rooms exist in Skyrim that test different things.
There is a room that tests dialogue, one that tests the main menu, and one that stores DLC creatures like spiders. The most interesting one, however, is coc WIDeadBodyCleanupCell, or clean up cell for short. This area contains every named NPC you have ever killed in that playthrough. Be careful, though; entering this cell on a character that has lots of playtime can cause your game to crash because of the sheer amount of corpses spawning.
1 Existed Since Morrowind
Dev rooms are not exclusive to Skyrim. If you have played any of the Fallout games, you might remember similar developer rooms being found in those games.
This dates back all the way back to Morrowind. Funny enough, the developer room for that game was called ToddTest, referencing Todd Howard and his involvement with developing Morrowind. Similar to QASmoke, most items exist in this room along with NPC AI testing.
NEXT: Skyrim: How To Get The Deathbrand Armor (& 9 Things You Didn’t Know About It)
