My throat hurt this morning.
Which made me wonder: Is the Throat of the world the tallest mountain in Skyrim?
Come with me on a long and exciting adventure to find out!
Turns out the Throat of the World is the tallest in Skyrim.
According to my BOOK OF HEIGHTS, this here is at an elevation of 39,535 units.
But what’s a unit?
Looking over on the Creationkit website, they have a handy guide.
128 units in Skyrim is approximately 6 feet.
Or 1.83 metres.
Almost everywhere in the world the average height of a person is just below this, despite
what everybody claims to be on dating sites.
But this guy on the chart appears to be taller than average.
Let’s just put that down to Skyrim being based around a Scandanavian country where
everybody’s tall.
Assuming that 128 units as 6 feet, Skyrim’s tallest mountain becomes…
...well, we can’t work it out yet, because I’m going to be measuring from water level,
which for some reason isn’t at the 0 unit level.
When I have my face like THIS, the magical BOOK OF HEIGHTS reads -14,120 units!
This makes the Throat of the World 53,655 units tall, which is 2515 feet or 766 metres.
Or just over 4,000 bananas, strung together like a big yellow necklace.
This makes it reach about this far up the world’s tallest building.
And mountain-wise….
It’s about as tall as ‘Great Rigg’, found in the Lake District.
Not a particularly noteable peak, and not even the tallest in England, a place that
doesn’t even have big mountains!
I know, right.
You’d think Skyrim’s tallest mountain would be bigger than that.
But cheer up- it’s not all bad!
Firstly, the Skyrim mountains are clearly better than Great Rigg -no offense, England.
They look less like an obese hill and more like the impressive snow-dusted peaks you’d
find in the Alps or… in Tibet.
It’s just that being as big as these wouldn’t work in Skyrim, which has had its gameplay
designed around a smaller, more compact scale!
Blow it up to real-life proportions and you’d be left with miles of nothingness between
each location.
It would sound cool at first but would quickly become boring and even the biggest haters
of quicktravelling would end up using it everywhere.
It may surprise you to know that there are several other mountains in Skyrim that come
close to the Throat of the World in height!
They’re all situated in THIS direction, each a bit smaller than the last.
Almost as though they’ve been copy-pasted.
These are nowhere near as big-looking, nor do they look as tall since they aren’t surrounded
by low-land.
But technically, they’re almost as tall as the Throat of the World.
All of these are situated beyond Skyrim’s limits!
Luckily, getting past this is as easy as adding a line to Skyrim’s config file.
The second tallest mountain in the whole of Skyrim is the one with the hut on it with
the old man who tells you to hunt and kill ghost creatures.
It’s kind of hard to get a good look at it from up-close, but believe it or not it’s
96% as tall as the Throat of the world.
That’s like, only 4% shorter.
The third is 5% smaller than the Throat of the world, and is next along the ridge from
the last.
Darklight Tower at the bottom of it.
You know, that one with the evil witch where you team up with her daughter.
Honestly, this is getting a bit boring now.
I was kind of hoping they’d be dotted all over the world and were harder to find, but
they’re not.
I don’t even think these mountains are the most impressive looking within Skyrim!
This all comes down to topographic prominence, something that nobody understands.
NOT EVEN TOM SCOTT!
I mean, where do you draw the line between the SAME mountain, and another?
In a way, since everything in Skyrim is connected above water, couldn’t you argue they’re
all just lower bits of the Throat of the World?!
That sounds stupid, doesn’t it.
But where do you draw the line?
I know you all wanted a definitive, exciting video concluding the tallest mountains in
Skyrim once and for all.
But even Wikipedia makes it look boring by saying that a mountain in FRANCE still has
Mount Everest as its parent!
So let’s forget all about it and go look at some other cool stuff instead.
DID YOU KNOW that the lake near the beginning of the game is further above sea-level than
the peak of Markarth’s tower?!
I would never have known that.
Always thought that Markarth was high up in the mountains.
If you’ve ever climbed up to Riften’s plateau from the hot springs then you may
have figured that it’s a long way up.
And it is!
The lake itself is twice as high above sealevel as Whiterun’s castle’s courtyard is.
It’s by far the highest-up city in Skyrim that I bothered to measure.
Now I know I’ve just gone on about how you can’t compare Skyrim to real-life… but
I’m going to any way!
The tallest point of the Blue Palace in Solitude is 109 metres above sealevel, which is only
slightly below the height of the tallest tree in the world, Hyperion, which is a type of
redwood.
You remember those really tall trees in Oblivion?
Yup, those were redwoods as well.
I got to see some myself last month, got to say they’re ugly looking things.
They’re the t-rex of the tree world, huge trunks with stumpy looking branches poking
out that look as though they’re going to drop off at any moment.
Now although I say that Hyperion is the tallest, there’s a chance there are even taller ones
we haven’t discovered yet!
For example, we only recently discovered a new grove that are home to some RIDICULOUS
looking redwoods like these, known as the Screaming Titans.
If you couldn’t tell, I really do love tall trees, it’s one of the reasons I hope the
next Elder Scrolls game will be set in the Black Marsh, with cities built into giant
trees and stuff.
ANY WAY.
Back to reality.
The College of Winterhold is an impressive 138 metres tall!
This is ALMOST as big as the tallest rollercoaster in the world, the Kingda Ka.
But still 20 metres below the streets of Falkreath, right across the other side of the map.
How do these places compare to the White Gold Tower from Oblivion?
I quickly dashed into Cyrodil to check.
It actually floats off the ground and gets shy if you’re too close, but from ground
level to the top, it’s 278 metres tall!
That makes it the same height as the top floor of the Eiffel Tower, just over half the height
of the One Trade Centre in New York, and as luck would have it, exactly the same height
as the second tallest building in London, though it’s not finished being built just
yet.
Now if you think I’ve forgotten about the RED MOUNTAIN from Morrowind, I haven’t.
But you’ll be sad to know that it’s a disappointing height.
At 454 metres tall it’s just 60% the height of the Throat of the World!
And it’s got even less detail than the Morrowind version did!
But that’s if we’re in Skyrim.
If we travel to Solstheim in the Dragonborn expansion, it looks a lot more impressive!
Bet you thought I was going to forget about this one as well.
BUT I HAVEN’T!
But the question is: is this close-up version of the volcano big enough to beat the Throat
of the World?
To find out, I flew through a volcano just for you.
FOR SCIENCE.
I hope you’re happy.
And, from sea-level to peak, it’s… …50,619 units.
Which is 723 metres and puts it 4th behind the first 3 peaks I covered in this video.
Sorry.
But wait!
I hate to finish the video on such a mildly disappointing note!
So what about… the highest point of…
Solstheim?
Yeah no that’s only 200 metres, and is this peak here and not the one with the flag on
top, in case you ever wondered.
And on that very disappointing note, g