Skyrim fan only learned after 200 hours in the game that he was supposed to sleep in a bed

Spending hundreds of hours in an open world without noticing an entire mechanic sounds like a bug, but in Skyrim it's just a natural result of how the game treats sleep.

Rest isn't required for survival or progress here, aside from a small experience bonus. That makes it easy to sink two hundred hours into slaying dragons and wiping out entire guilds without ever lying down on a bedroll.

That's exactly what happened to one fan, who spent an entire playthrough convinced he'd botched the Dark Brotherhood questline by killing Astrid in that shack. He had a vivid memory of the whole scene, even though nothing in his completed quest log suggested the storyline had ever started.

The mystery only cleared up once he slept in a bed for the first time and woke up in that familiar hideout.

Turns out Astrid kidnapping only triggers during sleep. After the Dragonborn kills Grelod the Kind, the assassin tracks them down and waits for them to finally lie down and rest.

If the hero never sleeps, the quest just sits frozen, leaving Astrid stuck watching a target she physically can't grab. That's where the joke about a killer slowly losing her mind came from – forced to watch her mark slaughter dragons night after night while somehow never sleeping.

Sleep in Skyrim only matters for a couple of moments across the entire game. Besides the Dark Brotherhood, there's the Old Hroldan Inn, where lying down in Tiber Septim historic bed summons a ghost demanding his sword back.

The Dragonborn DLC hides an even sneakier version of the mechanic – sleeping anywhere on Solstheim before cleansing the Stones lets Miraak seize control of the hero mind, and they wake up already working at an All-Maker Stone.

One player even admitted mistaking this for the intended way to reach the Temple of Miraak.