Why a Baker With No Bread Crashes Oblivion



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The NPC Who Must Never Eat

In The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion a minor Skingrad shopkeeper called Salmo the Baker can hard-crash the entire game if he ever manages to take a single bite of bread. Bethesda’s last official PC patch (v 1.2.0416) never addressed the flaw, and hands-on reports confirm it is still reproducible in the 2025 remaster. The root cause seems to be a pair of mis-configured AI delivery packages that collide with the engine’s animation system the moment Salmo runs the “eat bread” idle.

Who Is Salmo?

Salmo is a High-Elf commoner whose sweetrolls supply Skingrad’s Two Sisters Lodge and West Weald Inn, yet his in-game inventory starts completely bread-free so the lethal routine never triggers during ordinary play. Bethesda’s own wiki-style records even warn that “giving Salmo bread will crash the game.”

Under the hood Salmo owns two escort-type AI packages:

If a player reverse-pickpockets (or by using a console command) a loaf into his inventory, Salmo walks to the inn, takes a bite of the bread and the game crashes. Community analysis narrowed it to an “out-of-bounds reference inside the idle animation graph”.

A short capture of the bug can be seen here on YouTube.

Why just.. Removing Bread?

My speculation is that Bethesda probably discovered the bug late in development and realized that rewriting or deleting AI packages risks chain-reactions across Oblivion’s brittle quest logic. The risk-free workaround was to ship Salmo with no bread and hope players never noticed. Even in the final 1.2.0416 patch for Oblivion, the bug is still present.

And the most amazing thing is, in TES: Oblivion Remastered (2025), Salmo still crashes the game exactly as before.

Modding Fixes

There are community fixes for this bug. Mods such as Unofficial Oblivion Patch, Cyrodiil Re-Loaded and Better Cities bundle various fixes for this crash, so Salmo can finally enjoy some bread.

TLDR

Salmo, an NPC in Oblivion, has two broken delivery routines; if he ever gets bread, the first bite crashes the game. Bethesda’s safest 2006-era solution was to spawn him bread-less, a choice that survived every official patch and the 2025 remaster. Unofficial patch mods ultimately fixed the issue, but it just goes to show how some bugs are just easier to circumvent rather than changing completely.