Oblivion:Negative Inventory Duping
Negative Inventory Duping is a glitch where NPCs that are erroneously programmed to have a negative amount of an item will give unlimited copies of that item when pickpocketed.
Instructions
- Find an NPC with a negative quantity of items in their inventory. See the Additional Notes below for a list of NPCs.
- Use the Easy Pickpocket Glitch on the NPC.
- Locate the negative stacked item in their inventory, and take it. Depending on the quantity they were programmed to have, you may need to place the item back in their inventory or add more copies of the item to them before the infinite effect works.
- Repeatedly pickpocket the item to get as many of it as you want.
Additional Notes
- Here is a list of all NPCs in the vanilla game. There are over 150 NPCs with negative items.
- The most notable NPC that can be exploited using this glitch is Dorian, who can be pickpocketed for infinite Gold. This glitch is commonly referred to as the Dorian Glitch.
- Other notable NPCs are Lucien Lachance's negative stack of Lockpicks and Delphine Jend's negative stack of PonderItem.
Mechanics
This glitch requires further research to fully understand its mechanics. Some information in this section is currently speculation.
The negative inventory value is used in containers to indicate respawning or persistent items. It appears that NPCs were not intended to ever have negative stacks of items since merchants pull their respawning inventory from hidden containers, so applying a negative stack value to an NPCs actual inventory results in unintended behavior. It is unknown exactly why NPC inventory behave this way when set to negative values.