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Guide to effectively levelling Smithing, Speech, Enchanting and One-handed/Two-handed

Just thought I would write this guide based on my experience in Skyrim so far. As far as skills go, I certainly found that smithing, speech, enchanting and one handed where quite important as id always want to craft that next best piece of armour and to enchant it to give it that extra boost. So I developed a nice system of levelling them all up at once. For those of you who don't focus on one handed, this guide may be less effective but can still be pulled off using two handed! (magic sort of negates the guide as no smithing or enchanting can occur efficiently)

Requirments
Knowledge of soul trap enchantment, empty soul gems, soul gems, Iron ingots, Leather strips.Make sure you are carrying the bare minimum beforehand.

Step 1 (Smithing Training)
Now I'm sure you have all heard of the old dagger trick, well this guide incorporates the fact that making iron daggers levels your smithing quickly and cheaply! So head on down to your blacksmith and hoard those iron ingots and ore from him. You can attain leather strips from either hunting you have done in your own time (Animal hides can be turned into leather at the hide tanning stand and from there into leather strips) or buy them from the blacksmith. Now that you are making your iron daggers, don't simply sell them back to him as many players do, they serve a much more important job. (We will return to this later)
(If using two-handed just smith an iron great sword (or any other option for two hands))

Step 2 (Enchanting training)
From my own travels in Skyrim, I think we can all agree you amass a large amount of soul gems, primarily the smaller variety and sometimes they are filled with souls. For the huge amount that are not, this is where they serve the key purpose in allowing the cycle of training the four skills (smithing,enchanting, speech,one-handed/two-handed). Now that you have at least a few filled soul gems, head down to your nearest enchanters table and enchant the iron daggers (or great swords) with a soul trap enchantment. You know have the ability to fill your soul gems.

Step 3 (One-handed/Two-handed training)
Now its time to get to the interesting part, heading out into the wilderness to capture your much needed souls. This can be done by either going through a weaker dungeon filled with non-human npc's such as a Draugr burial crypt (as iron weapons can be quite painful in terms of low damage) or by roaming Skyrim and attacking anything you see except large enemies and human npc's. I did this quite easily even at higher levels so it shouldn't be a problem capturing your souls within a reasonable amount of time. You will also hopefully acquire more soul gems in your 'hunting stage' from looting corpses which allows this 4 step process to smoothly run unhindered. As a personal preference I only tend to fill common, petty and lesser soul gems as I don't want to 'waste' the higher 'value' soul gems on the iron weapons.

Step 4 (Speech Skill training)
Now that you have used your iron daggers(or great swords) to capture enough souls to occupy as many soul gems as possible, you have probably run out of charge on these weapons. You should never recharge these as it makes much more sense to sell them to a vendor. Considering the huge price upgrade when you enchant a weapon, this allows you to actually train all four skills and become rich in the process! The traditional iron dagger smithing levelling would just leave you losing cash which can be painful for new characters.

Conclusion and Notes
It will often be necessary to travel to other smiths to buy the iron ingots/ leather strips when repeating these steps because they only refill their stocks every 2 days or so. Dual wielding the iron daggers can also provide a much needed damage boost. Iron daggers/great swords which have been used and you weren't able to sell to the vendor because they had no gold left can simply be discarded or stored in a chest for later sale. Also if you find yourself running low on soul gems and dont want to waste gold buying them, try and find a dwarven ruin as most of the dwemer machines have soul gems as loot!

Rinse and repeat until you reach 100 in all four skills or until you have your desired level in each.
I hope this guide helped :) and appreciate your feedback. Make sure you check out the other guides here as they are all interesting and informative.
 

Khazrihl

Active Member
Very good guide, well written in clear thoughts.
 

Mikk

Article Writer
Fantastic guide, I'll definitely do this next time I begin a fresh character :)
 

Shmaglum

Knee Repair Extraordinaire
To supplement your guide, I'd like to add that if you find yourself lacking soul gems and do not have the money to blow on them, head to a dwarven ruin to fight dwarven spiders, spheres and centurions. They drop soul gems almost 3/4 of the time and half of them are already full. I left one ruin with about 30 filled gems one time.
 
To supplement your guide, I'd like to add that if you find yourself lacking soul gems and do not have the money to blow on them, head to a dwarven ruin to fight dwarven spiders, spheres and centurions. They drop soul gems almost 3/4 of the time and half of them are already full. I left one ruin with about 30 filled gems one time.
Thats a very good idea, do you mind if i edit it into my guide? Thanks.
 

Panthera

Don Gato
I wish I readed before... I alredy have 100 in smithing... now i need to raise skill in enchanting.
 

Dalinuel

New Member
Nice guide I'm starting my third character shes a lvl 12 and im having a hard time finding petty soul gems... I lvld my speech to 100 and maxed it out to where every vendor has a 1,000 more gold so when I do start lvl'n my smithing and enchanting they'll have lots more gold to buy back all my enchanted daggers!
 

renzlawliet

New Member
nice i didnt now this style... i bought dagger and enchant it but it never cross my mind to use them to have exp in 1hand/2hand.. nice dude

quad the xp quad the benifits..
 
Thanks for the comments, I am glad this guide helps you guys! and also thanks PurpleShew for listing my guide in your compilation!
 

Cskokid

New Member
Quick question....I have a LOT of filled petty soul gems (as well as lesser), however, when I want to charge my Elven Bow with frost damage, the ONLY choices it gives me to use is common soul gems...AND it only lists 3 of them. What gives? Can't I select which gem to use, as in "petty"?
 

medabird

New Member
Alright a bit of threadomancy but there is a better and more efficent way of doing this. Even if you are planning on going two-handed just smith daggers. enchant the daggers and then just sell them. Whatever kind of weapon you want, get it as high as you can make (like a superior dwarven warhammer for instance), get a grand soul gem and enchant the weapon with soultrap, setting it to one second. This will give you 1000+ charges and allow you to level up your weapon type of choice easier as trying to kill with 2 unupgraded and unenchanted iron daggers (remember the enchantment is soultrap so you cannot chose another) can be tedious. Your skill levels also go up based on the damage you deal, not the number of swings like in oblivion, so you can also level your one/two handed faster.
Pros:
Greater weapon damage, easier time roaming.
Can aquire souls easily even when doing things (exploring, quests, ect)
1000+ charges means that you probably dont have to recharge it at all, maximum once, and can sell it when you want to upgrade the weapon.
Easier time leveling as you have better equipment
Cons:
1500 cost up front for the soul gem
You cannot have an enchantment on your main weapon, but you can carry around 2, the soultrap one and your favorite
Leveling multiple non-combat skills can artificaly boost difficulty
Using quick attack weapons like daggers or dual wielding will be more expensive and have less lifespan because of the number of hits required to kill something. A single warhammer can kill foes with few hits and last a long time before having to be recharged/sold

A final few notes, one draw for new players is as soon as they get out of Helgen and reach Whiterun, will try and increase your smithing/enchanting as much as possible. This can mean your main mode of damage is weaker. I have hit lvl 6 before even swinging my main weapon, and was hard pressed to be able to survive and do damage with my low weapon skills. Make sure you have at least some combat experience or you could artificially boost the difficulty beyond what you are capable of. This also applies to leveling multiple different skills at once. leveling 2 skills equally with increase your level twice as fast as focusing on a single skill. 4 doubly so. Having enchanting, smithing, speech, one-handed, block, and heavy armour all being increased will mean that your one-handed will be pitiful even if you are wielding a good weapon. If you can use it, a great weapon is the Mace of Molag Bal, from the House of Horrors quest, no prerequisites, great damage, soul trap and a secondary enchantment make it a winner. Its main drawback is its low-ish charges and a need to refill it often. Asuras Star and the Black Star are also great to look into.
 

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