I don't think this is RNG. It has been going on for a very long time and this character never gets empty soul gems, ever. This is what makes me think I may be missing a setting somewhere.

If there is a setting to stop receiving these, I'd sure like to know it so I can turn it off on all my characters.

Are your enchanting levels the same on both? Are you not actually receiving the gems, or do you just not have any in inventory? If an addon is opening boxes for you, then check the junk tab and any auto junk/sell etc rules

You don't have an add on like dustman that can auto sell? Are you opening rewards containers manually or via addon?

It turns out they were going to my junk tab, but I wasn't seeing them.

I checked the junk tab and it was empty, so I went to the Mage's Guild and bought one empty soul gem and when I checked my inventory it wasn't there. So I checked the junk tab again after the purchase and found 147 there.

I don't know why I couldn't see them until I bought one but the mystery is solved!

Thanks to everyone for the troubleshooting tips!

SilverBride wrote: »

It turns out they were going to my junk tab, but I wasn't seeing them.

I checked the junk tab and it was empty, so I went to the Mage's Guild and bought one empty soul gem and when I checked my inventory it wasn't there. So I checked the junk tab again after the purchase and found 147 there.

I don't know why I couldn't see them until I bought one but the mystery is solved!

Thanks to everyone for the troubleshooting tips!

I've noticed this type of strange behavior when something is marked "junk."

I recently started marking recipes, blueprints, and other "learnable" items-- even motif pages that don't require certain crafting levels to learn-- as "junk" so they'll all be together on a tab by themselves to make it easier for my alts to check through them. Anything that all of my alts already know then gets put into a guild bank.

When I'm ready to put them into a guild bank, I first withdraw any identical recipes and so forth in order to stack mine with the existing ones from the guild bank. If I haven't already unmarked my item as "junk," it seems to get unmarked automatically by withdrawing the identical items from the guild bank. Except at least one time I think an item vanished even though it was still in my inventory (I looked everywhere but couldn't find it, then it seemed to reappear by itself later).

I remember a thread some months ago from a player who said items went missing from their character's inventory, although if they were looking at an identical item in the bank they could tell that the items were still in the inventory because of the count in the corner of the item's window that shows how many are in the bank and how many are in your pack. As I recall, after a while the items showed up again.

I'd have to do some testing to verify the exact behavior, but it's puzzling and confusing whenever it happens to you, unless you had experienced it before and are aware of the quirky behavior.