Couple of tidbits off the top of my head...
Try not to spend all your money on weapons and armour. All major cities have a house that you can purchase. They are expensive but very worth it as you can store things in them and give yourself a base.
Destruction magic is pretty weak in this game especially at higher difficulty. Conjuration and illusion magics are a lot more beneficial IMO.
With melee characters, a shield is your best friend! Learn to shield bash to disrupt the enemy attack, than attack with your weapon.
Levelling up restores your health/stamina/magic so use that to your advantage if you are going into a hard fight.
Level up at least one crafting tree (smithing, enchanting, alchemy), they might be daunting in the beginning to try, but they are what eventually makes the game easy. Maxing all 3 will turn your character into a God even on legendary difficulty.
Have fun and try to explore on foot if you have the time! Such a huge game with many secret and interesting things to witness.
Okay! I have 4.6k gold right now so I can almost afford Breezehome (whiterun). I'd like to get the one in Windhelm too, but that one quest kinda puts it off for me. (Blood on the Ice)
If your character isn't averse to getting his hands dirty, have a look at the Abandoned House in Markarth. There's a Vigilant of Stendarr standing outside quizzing people about it, so you'll know it when you see it.
I won't spoil the quest for you, but once you've finished it, the house becomes a safe place to store things (though it doesn't count towards the 'houses owned' stat). And it's free!
Tips, tips, tips. I've been playing Skyrim on and off since it was released. I nearly lost my job the next day as I hadn't slept for very long! And now the Special Edition has come out to ruin my life all over again.
Anyway, tips!
Levelling-up tips
- The combat skills (marksman, one-handed, and two-handed) only take the base damage of the weapons in question into account. The game ignores any enhancements you make to your weapons and gives you experience based on the base damage, but if you smith or enchant them you'll still kill your enemies faster - so in effect, you'll level-up slower by making your weapons more powerful, as there are fewer opportunities to hit your opponents. This also counts for power attacks with melee weapons; it counts as a regular hit, while still doing damage.
- The marksman skill doesn't take the strength of your arrows into account. As mentioned above, when it comes to levelling the game only takes the base damage of your bow into account. It doesn't factor arrows into the equation at all. So if you want maximum skill gain, use weak arrows with a strong bow. This one kept me wondering for ages before I figured it out.
- The above is true of armour skills too; however, there is absolutely no harm in enhancing your armour, as all it does is make you live longer. And if you live longer, you take more hits, and you gain more experience! It's backwards, I know.
- Levelling alteration is easy when you have mage armour! Just keep a mage armour spell active all of the time; as soon as you aggro enemies, it will give you experience just for having one up! The same goes for conjuration; keep an atronach/thrall alive at all times, and you gain experience whenever enemies engage you. And as always, the more powerful the spell, the more experience you'll gain.
- Destruction seems like a tricky one to level up at first. It crawls. In some ways it is similar to the combat skills - you have to directly hit your opponents, and the more damage you do with a spell, the more experience you gain. There's a trick I discovered on my second mage character though - runes! Runes seem to give you dramatically more experience for a hit than regular attack spells. They are more costly, but they are definitely worth using. When trying to level a mage character, I try and use runes almost exclusively. Simply cast them on the floor near an enemy (preferably directly in front of them) and watch the fireworks and skill points pop!
- Smithing is an important one to level for most characters. There are two things to consider - what materials are readily available, and whether it is worth using them purely to level up. Leather is by far the most abundant resource, and it's useful for nearly all smithing recipes anyway, so collect it wherever you can. Deer are a good source, particularly outside of Whiterun. And if you have an excess of the stuff - craft leather bracers! Hundreds of them! All you need is two leather strips and one piece of leather, so it's easy to work out in your head when you're tanning the leather (each time you make leather strips out of one piece of leather, you get two bracers' worth of strips - so just count up in twos in your head, and make sure the amount of normal leather you have left matches that figure).
Additionally, save any gems you get. Crafting jewellery is incredibly beneficial to smithing, because experience is based on the value of the item crafted, so whenever you get gold or silver ingots, combine them with gems to make the most valuable jewellery you can. Markarth is a good place to get gold and silver ore/ingots - there is a gold mine just down the road from the city, and a silver mine in Karthwasten just a little further still. And Markarth itself has a silver mine too, though you'll need to do a quest to get to keep any ore you mine. And gems are found on various enemies, and will frequently pop up when mining ore - especially silver and gold ore veins.
Finally - dwarven bows. Dwemer (the 'official' title of the dwarves) metal is insanely abundant whenever you go into a dwarven ruin, and dwarven bows require only dwarven metal ingots and iron ingots to make. You can tell which bits of dwemer metal can be smelted into dwarven metal ingots based on the name of the item - they always have an adjective before the word 'dwemer' in their title. For example, an item called 'Dwemer scrap metal' cannot be smelted, but an item called 'bent Dwemer scrap metal' can. Collect as much as you can, then go nuts with bows at the forge. You'll level up very quickly, and have a lot of bows to sell afterwards.
As a bonus, you can then enchant everything you've smithed to level that skill up too!
- Speaking of enchanting... buy up all the empty soul gems you can find, and get yourself (or make yourself) a weapon with a soul trap enchantment. You'll have more soul gems than you know what to do with, and you can use them all to level up your enchanting skill. Again, the more valuable, the more experience, so enchant the more expensive loot first. Also, before you go to the store to sell all of your hard-earned loot, stop by an enchanting table first and see if you've got anything you can disenchant, and enchant whatever you can while you're there. You'll be swimming in septims before long.
- Stealth levels up bizarre quickly when you stealth-kill people, particularly with a dagger (which your stealthy character should be doing anyway, because of that sweet 15x damage perk). Don't rely on simply moving stealthily around people, but stealth-kill whenever you can. It adds a huge chunk of experience each time you slit somebody's throat. Who knew assassination could be so rewarding?? Stealth attacks are especially effective on sleeping draugr; an effective sneaker can take out entire dungeons of draugr without attracting attention, as their awareness seems to be quite low.
Fighting tips
- Be mobile, especially on higher difficulties. Melee characters should dodge blows when they can, unless you're specifically levelling up your armour or block skills. Archers should never get hit in the first place. And pure mages can't get hit, as a rule, because they can't take it. Move around a lot. Use the terrain to your advantage. Take cover when fighting ranged opponents. Just... move! Once you can get the perks that allow archers to move faster with a drawn bow and shield users can move faster when blocking, in the marksman and block skill trees respectively, you should have no excuse to get hit!
- Don't be afraid to mix and match your skills. Skyrim doesn't have classes, and you can use that to your advantage. There's no reason you can't have a battlemage, or a greatsword-wielding barbarian that's also good at archery. Mix it up!
- I once heard somebody say that blocking is pointless. It absolutely isn't! In fact it's essential on higher difficulties! Melee characters should block whenever they see an incoming blow. When fighting more than one opponent, if you combine it with the mobile point above, you should be able to either dodge or block nearly every hit by keeping an eye on what your opponents are doing and not letting them crowd you. And if you can successfully deflect an attack, that usually leaves your opponent open to a counter-attack. Invest in the block perk that slows down time when an opponent uses a power attack, and you can nearly always counter-attack them before they hit you, too.
- Wear good armour and use good weapons. Obviously.
- If you're a mage, it helps to have a damage sponge along for the ride. Either Lydia (that's what you get for the sarcasm!) or a conjured thrall should be taking the heat off you while you lay down the pain. If your attacks anger some opponents into coming after you, move out of their way until they lose interest again. You can't get hit too often as a mage.
- Don't be afraid of potions! They are really useful, and I don't just mean health potions! Stealthy characters, particularly early on when their damage output isn't great, benefit hugely from poisons - a decent poison can mean the difference between a one-hit-kill and a difficult, close-quarters fight. Archers, particularly, benefit from the slow poison, as it keeps opponents from getting too close (combine with mobility, above) and allows them to pick people off at range, as they should be doing. And any potion that bolsters your chosen combat abilities is obviously a good thing. They even help with mundane skills - you can improve your smithing abilities temporarily with a potion, for example.
Roleplaying tips
I personally like to roleplay my characters. It gives them a depth and purpose that keeps me engaged for far longer than a min/maxed character ever could. You may not like to do this, though, so feel free to ignore.
- Before you make a character, think about what kind of person it would be. Are you making a Khajit caravan guard who failed to protect his caravan, and now seeks to make amends by helping people? Are you making a Nord woman who hates civilisation and lives off the land, only entering cities when necessary? Think about the overall kind of character you're going to make, and give them a backstory to explain why they are the way they are. It will help you decide on their motivations and what kind of decisions they will make.
- Give them quirks. I once made an Argonian shadowscale who came to Skyrim to find the last of the Dark Brotherhood. He had an odd quirk, though - he refused to own any weapons. He had to kill people with their own weapons. So, in order to kill anybody, he would first have to pick-pocket their weapon from their inventory, then killed them with that. He'd subsequently drop it and move on. Another character I made was terrified of fire; it made certain dungeons interesting, to say the least. On one occasion, she simply ran out of it and refused to go back. And the character I'm playing now is an optimistic, aspiring mage who wants to learn everything, and will study everything, often to her detriment; she and Brelyna once stood in Candlehearth Hall for an hour trying to figure out what makes the candle burn for so long. And Divines help you if she gets into a Dwarven ruin! Quirks like these add a whole new dimension to the game as well as your character, and force you to approach certain quests differently than you might otherwise.
- Consider what kinds of quests your character would do. I made one character who was an Imperial woman, of the 'eschewing-civilisation-in-all-its-forms' type. I had so much fun with her, just wandering the countryside and exploring ruins, and discovered a lot. But she never did any quests. She hated people, all people, and refused to do anything to help them. I had another character that was fairly hedonistic, a little bit cruel, and a lot narcissistic, and would undertake certain quests only if she could find a way to turn it around on its head and make life more difficult for people, purely for her own amusement. There is one ruin where you stumble upon a man in a ruin looking for his kidnapped wife - she resolved it by telling him that she was still out there somewhere, damning him to search for his wife forever more. She found it hilarious. Others still have been very altruistic and helped everybody they can, and refused to undertake quests that are morally ambiguous. Like the above, it makes you think a bit more.
- Don't power-level. Your character can pick up new skills as appropriate, but they should really only have a specialised skill-set consummate with their abilities. Your roaming deer hunter may be good at marksmanship, stealth, and perhaps one-handed for when the bow fails, but they're unlikely to be adept at conjuring, heavy armour, and smithing too. Ideally, thanks to the way levelling in TES works, the skills you use the most will just level up naturally anyway.
- When it comes to gear, try and only wear equipment that you've bought in a store or made yourself. Armour on fallen opponents a) probably wouldn't fit you anyway, and b) would be icky, holey, and covered in blood! Unless your character is a psychopath that gets off on wearing the apparel of their fallen enemies, anyway...
- Don't fast travel! Aside from being immersion-breaking, fast travel really takes away from the sense of discovery. I first abandoned fast travel on my second playthrough of Skyrim, and it was such a rewarding experience that I refuse to use it in any game from now on. It makes the world feel more like a place, and you discover things that you never would have found otherwise!
- Make time to eat and sleep. Walk when you're indoors. The little things!
Sorry, that went on longer than I meant it to. I hope there's something in there that helps you out, anyway. Above all, have fun! We are all jealous of you for entering Skyrim for the first time!