Giants DO Respawn in Skyrim! Here’s How Long You Need to Wait
It’s hard not to notice all the giants dotting the landscape of Skyrim. The players spend the early portions of the game avoiding them due to their potential to end their adventurer’s career, and the latter portion of the game is spent looting them since the players are finally strong enough to kill them. Still, even though giants are generally quite common, many players are interested in whether they respawn after they are killed.
Giants in Skyrim respawn after ten in-game days if their camp hasn’t been marked as cleared or 30 in-game days if it’s been marked as cleared. The respawn timer of giants is not dependent on the mob. Rather it depends on whether you’ve previously killed the “boss” of a specific giant camp.
Now that we’ve covered the respawn timers for giants, it’s time to analyze the mobs in a bit more detail. If you want to find out more about these interesting creatures, stay with us and keep reading!
Giants can usually be found around their camps
One of the first things players have to make sure of when starting a new game is to avoid giants. You see, giants are different compared to most mobs in Skyrim because they do not level with you; they are, by default, set to level 32, no matter what level you are.
Facing a level 32 giant while you’re merely a level 7 Dragonborn sounds like a surefire recipe to be catapulted into space by their formidable clubs. Still, it’s easy to avoid them once you start noticing the telltale signs of giant activity in the area, and those are tribal markings of the rocks, giant bonfires, mammoths, and giant sacks of mammoth cheese.
There is a correlation between mammoth activity and giant activity in certain areas, as the giants can often be seen herding them and will react aggressively toward the player if the player injures or lingers too long around their mammoths.
Giants are generally not aggressive and will give you a few warning signs before they attack you. If you want to avoid being attacked by a giant at lower levels, you need to take several things into consideration.
- Mammoths are generally not aggressive and will give you a few warning signs before they attack you.
- Don’t linger too long while you’re in the giant’s camp.
- Don’t try to loot things that belong to giants. They will become instantly aggressive and will attack.
- Don’t go too close to mammoths, even if the giant is not around. Also, don’t stick around them for long.
- Don’t injure mammoths. Any attack on mammoths is seen as a sign of aggression toward the giant himself.
- Even if you encounter a giant in the wilderness and you’re not technically in his camp, make sure to move at a safe distance away from him.
If you’re trying to avoid giants at lower levels, it’s best to be careful while you’re exploring Whiterun Hold and Eastmarch Hold. Due to their specific geographical features like mild climate, tall grasses, and the vicinity of volcanic hotspots, giants prefer to make their camps in these holds. Dawnstar Hold is likewise littered with giant camps, but the camps are easy to spot due to the presence of snow.
Giants in Skyrim respawn just like any other mob
Giants respawn every ten days of in-game time if their location hasn’t been marked as cleared on your map. This translates to exactly 12 hours in real life. If you’ve previously killed the “boss” giant and cleared its camp, in that case, it will take at least 30 in-game days for giants to respawn, which equals 36 real-life hours. This, of course, does not take into account fast traveling and waiting, which significantly shortens the duration of Skyrim’s day and night cycle.
Giants, like most other mobs in the game, have respawn cycles tied to their locations; in this case, these are giant camps. Bear in mind, however, that if you visit the giant’s camp before the cell has respawned, the timer will reset, and this will prolong the time needed for giants to respawn, so the times we’ve stated above are the default times if you don’t reset the timers by wandering into certain areas too often.
Mammoths respawn according to the same schedule as giants, as it’s often impossible to engage giants in combat and leave mammoths unharmed and vice versa.
Giant camps are a good source of loot
Most giant camps have at least one leveled boss chest. This chest alone is worth the trouble if you’re stealthy enough to avoid confrontation with giants.
Giants themselves drop valuable loot as well. They drop giant’s toes, valuable alchemical ingredients that are used to create the most expensive potions in the game with the most potent effects and longest duration. They are also a good source of leveled enchanted gear and expensive miscellaneous loot that weighs little but is worth a lot of gold, like gems.
Mammoths themselves are a good source of mammoth parts as each mammoth drops 1x mammoth tusk, most notably used to create Summon Storm Atronach spell tome at the Atronach forge, and mammoth snout, a good source of food.
If you want to maximize your profits from the boss chest alone, I recommend that you use stealth to loot the boss chest in the giant camp and avoid killing the giants. Killing the giants will mark the locations as cleared, and thus it will take a lot longer for all things inside the camp to respawn, including the boss chest. Looting only the chest and leaving giants alive will keep the respawn timer at ten in-game days, and you will be able to loot the chest more often.
