MGO releases up to and including 4.0 RC2 included Alternate Start - Live Another Life to provide alternatives to the vanilla Skyrim intro. Here’s the lowdown.
Choose a new life
With the mod Alternate Start - Live Another Life and its various extensions, new games start in a cell in the Abandoned Prison (which is a location in the actual game, not a separate worldspace). Once you’ve created your character, it’s time to choose where—and in what condition—you’d like to start playing.
Straight in front of you, to the right of the table, is a statue of Mara. Activate the statue as though you’re speaking to it.
You’ll be presented with a bunch of options, some of which are specific to the race you’ve chosen. (The options that are available to all races are listed at the bottom of this page.) Some start you with a guild affiliation, or with one of the player homes. Some let you choose a side in the Civil War right from the start. You may or may not start with weapons, armor, powers, or extra spells. Some start you with a specific goal, while others drop you in a location with no particular objective. If you’re brand new to Skyrim and you find the choices overwhelming, you can always give the vanilla start a shot.
If you plan to play through the main quest, but you’re tired of the early quests, “I am Akatosh’s chosen, the Dragonborn!” will start you in High Hrothgar, having already been recognized as the Dragonborn by the Greybeards.
If you choose a different, non-vanilla start, but you’d still like to do the main quest eventually, you can travel to Helgen at any time to pick up the story right after the dragon attack. When you get to what’s left of the village, look for a burnt body, and search it for a note.
Give it a minute
After you finish creating your character and Racemenu closes, wait a bit before choosing your start or fiddling with mod settings. Many mods include an MCM (Mod Configuration Menu), and once you name your character, MGO configures the MCMs for you.
The menus themselves need to be registered, and MCM Recorder needs to apply MGO’s pre-configured settings by automatically opening those menus and clicking through them in the background. If you dig through menus or sleep in the bed while it’s working, you might derail the MCM Recorder playback and leave things in a less-than-ideal state. Wait until the torrent of notifications subsides, and then choose your new life.
Once you’ve made your selection, you just need to sleep in the nearby bed to trigger the actual start of the game (unless you chose “I want to escape this cell,” in which case you just need to escape from the cell).
As promised, here are all of the choices that are available to every race:
- I arrived on board a ship.
- I own property in one of the holds.
- I’m a new member of a guild.
- I’m a patron at a local inn.
- I’m a soldier in the army.
- I got caught crossing the border illegally. [Vanilla Start]
- I want to escape this cell.
- I’m an outlaw in the wilds.
- I am a Vigilant of Stendarr.
- I am camping in the woods.
- I was shipwrecked off the coast!
- I am a vampire in a secluded lair.
- I am a necromancer in a secret location.
- I am a warlock’s thrall.
- I was attacked and left for dead.
- I am Akatosh’s chosen, the Dragonborn!
- I am the Guild Master for the Explorers Society.
- I am in Cyrodiil1.
- Surprise me.
Cydrodiil is actually misspelled as “Cyrodill” in the game, but who notices these things? (I think you know the answer to that.) ↩︎