I have just finished the main quest line, and now every few hours I will fast-travel somewhere and a dragon corpse will drop out of the sky in front of me. It's always dead, the corpse is always empty, and it never decays to a skeleton or performs the Absorb Soul animation. So far I have been rained on by an ancient dragon in Whiterun, two elder ones in Riften and Sky Haven Temple, and other dragons at random times.
What has not happened yet, since I finished the main quest, is a random encounter with a living dragon. I don't know if this is related, but it seems odd. I don't remember this happening on my previous play-throughs. I have Dawnguard and Hearthfire installed, but otherwise the mods I am running are the same as I have been running for months.
Has anyone else encountered this particular problem and/or know how to stop it?
Best Answer
The Base Skyrim game has a bug in that the random encounter dragons respawn but they do not reset. This means that the corpse gets moved to the random encounter position without being resurrected, and you either get a live dragon with no loot / dragon soul, or a dead dragon corpse instead of an actual, you know, dragon.
While there's no way to handle this in the base game, this is one of the many things fixed by the Unofficial Skyrim Patch, which you can download and apply through Steam.
If you're playing on the xbox or ps3, however, you're out of luck.