Welcome to UESP's 2024 Retrospective! This is the second year in a row we've done this, and just like last time, we're going to take a look back at some of the things we've done over this past year.

WikiStats shows UESP has grown relative to the other wikis out there once again, but we don't have anything quite as interesting to point out like last year where we reached over 100K total articles. Still, we have seen substantial growth on that front, taking the 209th rank at the current time of writing with 107,883 articles. In total we have 32,555 new pages, which is pretty close to the number from last year.

Wiki Spotlight

The UESP is a constantly growing entity, with over 100,000 content pages! This retrospective can't go over everything that was added to the UESP last year, so we're going to try something a bit different this year.

We've reached out to some of our community editors, and asked them about some of the best updated or new pages on the wiki, and we wanted to spotlight them for you here!

Featured Articles

The following are a selection of this year's Featured Articles, which are articles the UESP's users deem to be of the highest quality and should be held up as an example for other articles. These articles help push the standards for the UESP further.

Chrysamere
Chrysamere (also called the Chrysamere Blade, or the Chrysamere) is an ancient adamantium claymore artifact with offensive capabilities only surpassed by its defenses. It has magical properties which, unlike most weapons, are defensive in nature: it heals the wielder, grants them resistance to fire, and reflects hostile spells. It is unaligned, and is not a Daedric artifact. Chrysamere was forged in the late Merethic Era by the Breton swordsmith Asterie Bedel, who delighted in using the techniques of both man and mer in her creations.
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Ayleid Empire
The Ayleid Empire (or imperatum saliache) was the original dominant power in Cyrod. It was composed of multiple city-states, ruled by the Ayleid sorcerer-kings. The empire's roots began in the Middle Merethic Era, when established Ayleid settlements flourished in the Heartlands. Though they were ostensibly a tribute-land to the High King of Alinor, the distance between Cyrodiil and Summerset's communication lines led to the Ayleids' isolation and eventual detachment. Their fall is attributed to their arrogant pride of their achievements and smug self-assurance that their empire would last forever, which doomed them to fail and fade into obscurity.
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Molag Bal
Molag Bal is the Daedric Prince of Domination and the Enslavement of Mortals. He is the main antagonist of ESO, and is attempting to pull Nirn into his realm of Oblivion, Coldharbour, in an event known as the Planemeld. Molag Bal has stolen the soul of the player, forbidding them to die. To reclaim your soul, you must save Tamriel from the Prince's clutches.
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Gold Road

With the release of ESO's Gold Road Chapter, hundreds of pages for Scions of Ithelia, Gold Road, New Battlegrounds & Companions-related topics were created. Here were the main ones.

Gold Road
Gold Road is the eighth Chapter for The Elder Scrolls Online. The expansion is set in the Colovian region of the West Weald, and was released on June 3rd, 2024 for PC/Mac, and June 18th, 2024 for Xbox and Playstation.
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Ithelia
Ithelia is the Daedric Prince of Paths and Mistress of the Untraveled Road. She had been sealed away by the combined efforts of Hermaeus Mora and several other Princes, due to her perceived threat on the fabric of reality, and all memory of her was wiped from the Aurbis.
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Mirrormoor
Mirrormoor was the realm of the Daedric Prince Ithelia, Mistress of the Untraveled Road. Mirrormoor is a large desert wasteland filled with gargantuan skeletons and surrounded by an auroral sky. While Ithelia is active, it is filled by shattered mirrors and crystalline structures and the sky is fractured by cracks. Those elements were not present in Fargrave before Ithelia's return.
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Rare Merchandise

Merchandise is an aspect of TES that we didn't really document that well for the longest time. We're starting to turn that around. Here are some very rare pieces of Elder Scrolls memorabilia that are basically impossible to find in the real world, but are available for your perusal on the wiki.

Arena Deluxe Edition Mousepad
The Arena Deluxe Edition Mousepad is a map of Tamriel printed on a mousepad, included in the Deluxe Edition. It is the first piece of merchandise ever produced for The Elder Scrolls franchise.
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Daggerfall Letter Opener
The Daggerfall Letter Opener is an exclusive metal letter opener with fashioned into the logo of Daggerfall. These limited promotional items were manufactured by Virgin Interactive Entertainment and were granted to certain employees in the 1990s. Only three are confirmed to exist, one of which is on display at Bethesda's offices.
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Morrowind Elder Scroll Keychain
Morrowind Elder Scroll Keychain is a rectangular metal keychain. It features the The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind logo and is in the shape of an Elder Scroll. It was distributed was part of a tin version of Morrowind given to the press in the UK and Europe during a promo in 2002.
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Major Events

25th March 2024

Thirtieth TES Anniversary

2024 was the 30th anniversary of The Elder Scrolls. On March 25th, we celebrated this milestone for the series, although it is a bit more complicated than that. March 25th is the official anniversary for the release of Arena, but there isn't truly an official release date.

Game release dates were not as set in stone in the past as they are now, and our research suggests that the game may have actually been out in February, with at least one person back then claiming that a patch for the game had already been distributed.

29th March 2024

Imperial Library Revamp Launched

Our friends over at The Imperial Library, the site for hosting rare Elder Scrolls texts, got an updated facelift. Go check them out!

6th April 2024

ESO Tenth Anniversary

This year was also the tenth anniversary of the release of Elder Scrolls Online. In early April, ZOS hosted the official ESO Tenth Anniversary Celebration Event in Amsterdam. A lot of us from UESP got a chance to meetup whilst there! It was a lot of fun meeting the devs and fellow community members. Baratron from UESP recorded her experience of the event here.

3rd June 2024

ESO Gold Road Released

The Elder Scrolls Online concludes the story of Ithelia.

The UESP has begun the documentation process of the incredibly large amount of new content that Gold Road brought to The Elder Scrolls. ESO has an almost staggering amount of content, and working through it all to get it into a readable format is always a challenge. But we've made gigantic strides.

19th July 2024

Bethesda Unionization

In July of this year very surprising news came out of Bethesda.

OneBGS USA announced a "wall to wall" union of every one of Bethesda's sites, following the previous successful unionization of QA workers for Zenimax. This follows years of brutal job cuts from studios across the gaming industry as a whole.

10th September 2024

TES: Castles Released

This year saw the release of The Elder Scrolls: Castles, a game that aims at a slightly different market than traditional TES. It does bring us the first definitive models of the babies and youth of each race in a single game, a trait that was heavily featured in its marketing.

We've done a lot to cover this game, being some of the first people to notice that it existed when it's surprise beta showed up on the Google Play store without any official announcement. We have some really difficult bits already getting decent coverage on the wiki, like the Rulings. There's still more to do, but we have a decent leg up on this game so far.

17th September 2024

New TES Cookbook

A new physical Elder Scrolls book has been released. The Elder Scrolls: The Official Cookbook Vol. 2 is a followup to the first volume, but with a much heavier focus on lore. We aren't culinary experts, but we were still surprised to find such a heavy amount of lore flavor in a cookbook. This book also offers us one of the few glimpses into life across Tamriel in the Fourth Era, with some very surprising little details included. It really makes us hungry for the continuation of the Fourth Era storyline with TESVI.

The Elder Scrolls has a growing number of various companion books, but only two actual novels. We'd really love to see that change...

30th September 2023

Shattered Space Released

The first major expansion to Starfield was released. It takes you to Va'ruun'kai, the hidden homeworld of House Va'ruun. There you find its capital city largely destroyed after a disaster, and its political leadership thrown into disarray. While discovering the mysteries that led this city to ruin you will learn about the Va'ruun way of life, navigate its politics, and choose a course for Va'ruun's future.

You can find our coverage on our sister site, Starfield Wiki, here.

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4th October 2024

New Patrollers!

The UESP, nearing its thirtieth anniversary, has had a lot of hands steering the ship over its voyage. Although there are many notable editors, old and new, contributing to UESP's development, it is fantastic that we can say that five people have stepped up to join the ranks of UESP's Patrollers! Wolfborn, UnknownG, Mikeprichard, Tarponpet, and Erorah have taken on the duties of patrolling the UESP Wiki, and we wish them many, many red exclamation points in their futures!

1st November 2024

TES: Legends Shutdown Announced

2024 brought us perhaps the most worrisome news for a group like our own. The Elder Scrolls: Legends announced it would be taken offline, and it would become the first truly unplayable Elder Scrolls game in the series history.

19th November 2024

ESO Build Editor Updated With Scribing Tools

We've continued our support for ESO builds, with our latest addition being coverage of the new scribing skills from Gold Road. These skills have a degree of customization previously unseen, and if you see anything off with our models, please let us know!

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9th December 2024

2024 UESP Charity Drive

In 2024 we proudly hosted two charity events raising a combined total of $5,031 USD for worthy causes. Our Annual Patreon Charity Drive contributed $3,031 to 13 different charities chosen by our Patrons. Additionally, we supported LotusOfDoom's Tales of Tamriel Extra Life Marathon by donating rewards and matching $2,000 in donations.

A heartfelt thank-you to everyone who participated and helped make these campaigns a success!

Traffic & Outages

On the server side, we've had a relatively uneventful 2024, although with a few more outages than last year, resulting in a couple of hours of downtime for one or more servers overall.

Besides planned maintenance, all outages were the result of overzealous and poorly implemented bots/crawlers who either requested pages too quickly or requested CPU heavy content (like article diffs) that caused server load issues and either slow page loads or outright server outages.

For now, these bots/crawlers have been dealt with by IP blocks. Most of them have been from China so large IP range blocks shouldn't affect our actual users.

We've also disabled article diffs for anonymous users temporarily. In 2025 we want to look at better automatic protections that would prevent a poorly implemented crawler or malicious user from causing site slowdowns or outages.

Additional Highlights

Lots of major work for ESO pages, including work for the mounts and all furniture. Some future plans include working on the books.

Setting up the Verified Creations page. Figuring out a proper way to document this material took a lot of consideration.

Douglas Goodall, one of the designers behind Morrowind, has recently begun working on mods and some additional writings based off of The Elder Scrolls. We've covered a lot of it here.

Our templates are the oft unsung heroes of the site, forming the framework that makes up all of our pages. We've had many new ones made over the last year like Lore Orc Culture.

Tamriel may be where we spend most of our time, but there's more to the Aurbis. We've had a lot of effort put in this direction recently.

There are many different types of beings across Tamriel and beyond. Our documentation on this front will likely never stop expanding as long as the series continues. Here are just some of our new entries!

Exploring the roles of heroes in the lore has been a notable gap in our coverage for a while. Although they have appeared on numerous articles in lorespace, such as Lore:Hero, many didn't have their own page. In the last year we've made standalone pages for:

The lore of The Elder Scrolls is enormous. It is constantly expanding, and our understanding and documentation of it increases similarly. We can't list every single we've added to our lore catalog, but here are a few more new ones!

Thank You!

Once again, we want to thank you for joining us in exploring Tamriel and beyond over the last year.

2024 brought us the 30th anniversary of The Elder Scrolls, and 2025 will bring the 30th anniversary of the UESP. We've been walking this path from the earliest days of this series, and we've had literal generations of Elder Scrolls fans brought together in our community. It's an incredible privilege and opportunity, and we cannot thank you all enough for giving it to us.

We do have some incredible plans for the UESP's future, but wherever those plans take us, we are happy that we get to work through our path with all of you. See you in Year 30!