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So I have always wanted to know how you people raised enchanting and smithing, do you run through a place and take everyone's armor after you kill them? And where do you get all the soul gems? Grr, them level 81 1/2 guys in Daedric Armor make it look like a cake walk. HOW?
 

rittz

Member
Improve your enchanting skill by: Every time you come across an enchanted item, take it and learn the enchantment as soon as possible, by taking it to a station and disenchanting it.
(edit) Oh, and pick up whatever useless crap you come across, too, and use petty and lesser soul gems to enchant them. I've never had a problem finding these gems, they're always laying around in dungeons. Exploring is definitely your friend. If you've got the money to spare, too, buy them from the Jarl's mages or in the college of Winterhold.

Improve your smithing skill by: Creating as many iron daggers as you can hold. There has been a patch which reduces the amount of experience you get per dagger, so it's not as easy as it used to be. It is, however, still the cheapest and most effective way to level up your smithing skill.

Now, mix them together by: A - Finding the banish and paralyze enchantments, and B - Enchanting your iron daggers with paralyze and banish in order to C - sell them off and level up your speechcraft (whether you intend to put perks in it is up to you, but I wouldn't, it's kind of a waste imo) and make mad amounts of money.

I hope this helps. :)
 

DrunkenMage

Intoxicated Arch-Mage
I normally just turn iron ore into gold and make gold bars, then create jewelry since I find all these gems. Smithing is based on value now I believe or something.

Then enchant the jewelry and sell them.

But if you're more of a Warrior I suppose you could enchant your sword with Fiery Soul Trap and get the Black star, then just kill, recharge, kill, recharge etc.
 

ShenziSixaxis

Article Writer
Creating as many iron daggers as you can hold. There has been a patch which reduces the amount of experience you get per dagger, so it's not as easy as it used to be.

I very seriously doubt that if one were to buy the materials. Cheap, maybe, considering that iron and leather is abundant in Skyrim, but effective? No way. It's very slow and tedious. Making jewelry is likely the fastest way.

Another good way would be to make dragonbone armors and weapons. The weapons are obviously good, so making them and upgrading to use or give to followers would be a clear good choice.

For enchanting, make enchanted items often and use some enchanted weapons. Refilling charges on weapons helps in leveling. Try reading over my article on soul gems and enchanting and see if it helps; I haven't updated it so it's a bit off, but the basics are still good.
 

JoeReese

Well-Known Member
It takes a while, and some planning. In the beginning, cart back every single piece of everything you can find in a dungeon. I tend to backtrack when I get close to my weight limits and leave it in a pile outside the front door, then go back in. This lets me retrieve the rest later. As you reach higher levels, that isn't as important, but in the beginning it can be very tough to keep any amount of gold on you.

When you get back, try to plan your gold so you can buy a few iron/steel ingots and improve everything worthwhile, before you sell it. Daggers may only rise a couple of gold when they're improved, but something like steel or elven armor will change considerably. If you're going the heavy route, take the Dwarven armor perk and raid a few Dwemer dungeons. Bring back all the Dwarven metal you can, and smelt it down into ingots, then make bows...lots of bows. Remember to save enough ingots to improve your bows so they sell for more. Take a follower, who can carry a lot of gear as well, and always keep a potion of strength on hand. If you're role playing and don't fast-travel, leaving your stuff near a discovered location will still make it easier to come back and find later. If you're close enough to a hold capital, leaving it somewhere nearby allows you to take a carriage to the capital and then a short walk to find the rest of your gear.

Look for boots of brawn or things that change your carry capacity as well. As someone else said, disenchant as many unique items as you can, but if you have a helmet worth 500 and a sword worth 300 with the same enchantment, sell the more expensive one and disenchant the cheaper one. Once you know the secret, especially with things like smithing, you can enchant four pieces of gear, so you get quadruple the smithing bonus. Don't be alarmed if you disenchant a 20% smithing item and can only enchant 12%, because doing it four times gives you 48. On top of that, drink a blacksmith's potion before doing your improvements, for better results. (I do this for carried weapons/armor, not just for sale stuff)

As soon as you can get a soul trap item, you're off to market. Empty soul gems are considerably less cost than full, and you can fill them pretty quickly. Sneak and the backstab perk help a lot with this, because you get quicker kills with your soul trap. For arms/armor, I wound up buying grand soul gems because I was too low/weak to kill anything with a grand soul quick enough to fill the gem. That will change as you get stronger, and your enchanting skill will be better. You'll kill more quickly and have more time on your soul trap enchantments.

If you find muffle or water breathing gear, immediately disenchant them. They are hard to come by and easy to lose or accidentally sell (resulting in a controller through the nearest window). Muffle is muffle, so even with a petty soul gem, the enchantment is the same. It allows you to retain the secret, even if you lose that one piece of gear. It also allows you to enchant a lot of items cheaply, because petty gems are easy to get. Enchanting your boots with muffle also helps with your sneak, which helps you fill more gems, etc.

Drunken Mage has the transmute spell. If you find that, you're on easy street. You can buy ore for a few gold, transmute it, and crank out jewelry like nobody's business. Keep your found gems on hand, and try to make a little silver too, and you can make some pretty high dollar jewelry.

If you haven't bought a house yet, go and discover the Alchemist's shack. There's a safe storage point in the night stand, and you have a bed and alchemy lab available to you. It's SE of Ivarstead.
 

Dagmar

Defender of the Bunnies of Skyrim
Improve your smithing skill by: Creating as many iron daggers as you can hold. There has been a patch which reduces the amount of experience you get per dagger, so it's not as easy as it used to be. It is, however, still the cheapest and most effective way to level up your smithing skill.
This is simply not true. It's neither the cheapest nor the most effective way to level your Smithing skill. It's arguably the most inefficient way to level Smithing skill as you would have to forge over 2,300 iron daggers to get to 100 Smithing skill. The amount of Smithing xp you get for a forged item is directly proportional to the forged items value and iron daggers have among the lowest value of any item you can forge.

One of the most optimal ways to level Smithing is as follows:

1. Get the Transmute spell tome from Halted Stream Camp and use it to learn the spell
2. Transmute iron ore into silver ore and the silver ore into gold ore
3. Smelt the gold ore into gold ingots and forge gold rings.

Even if you buy the ore rather than mine it you'll turn over a profit making it cheaper than forging iron daggers. You can also transmute the iron ore into silver ore and smelt the silver ore into silver ingots to forge jewelry with gemstones in them. In general you always want to use any jewels you find to forge jewelry rather than sell them outright.
 

ShadowGambit

Active Member
As Dagmar said, Jewellery is the fastest way to increase smithing.

The second one is to make Dwarven bows, from dwarven scraps in dwemer ruins.

Loot all you can in the Markath ruins and with teh scrap metal, make the bows. That should take you pretty high in smithing already.
 

Doomy

Member
Be carefull with transmits, gems got gold items are rare, I only keep a couple of gold bars, normally do silver.

Daggers with a petty gem are the best for enchanting. Save the bigger gems for jewelry and recharging, biggest git your own kit. Big weapons are too heavy to carry bag as loot IMHO

Sent from my HTC Hero using Tapatalk 2
 

Cherry

Farfetch'd is judging you!
When I'm playing with a character who wants to max out both, I simply raid dwarven ruins to get as many dwarven metal ingots as possible, buy a lot of iron ingots and make dwarven bows out of them. Then I enchant them with absorb health or something. After this you can sell those bows for a hefty sum of gold.

ShenziSixaxis, I'm sorry, but I found what you said to be hilarious. Level smithing by creating dragon armor/weapons? I'm sure the xp helps when your smithing is already maxed out.
 

ShenziSixaxis

Article Writer
if you have a helmet worth 500 and a sword worth 300 with the same enchantment, sell the more expensive one and disenchant the cheaper one.

If you find muffle or water breathing gear, immediately disenchant them. They are hard to come by and easy to lose or accidentally sell (resulting in a controller through the nearest window).

Well, disenchanting the more expensive one would actually raise your enchanting level more, so you gotta decide if you want that or more gold. Just a pro-tip.

DEFINITELY agree with this though. I'm at level 73 on my PS3 character and have only found one item enchanted with waterbreathing. I've found a few items with muffle, but not many.

ShenziSixaxis, I'm sorry, but I found what you said to be hilarious. Level smithing by creating dragon armor/weapons? I'm sure the xp helps when your smithing is already maxed out.
I may or may not be getting over a flu and have been very tired and high on cold medicine when I wrote that. XD
 

Soloquendi

Pastor of Muppets
Dwemer ruins are a great source of Soul Gems too.
 

JoeReese

Well-Known Member
I think the court wizard in Morthal and the greasy thieves guild wizard up at the college can sell you black soul gems. I found it easier to fill a black soul gem with a bandit soul than to try to kill a mammoth or something for a regular soul gem.
 

Dagmar

Defender of the Bunnies of Skyrim
If you're going the heavy route, take the Dwarven armor perk and raid a few Dwemer dungeons. Bring back all the Dwarven metal you can, and smelt it down into ingots, then make bows...lots of bows. Remember to save enough ingots to improve your bows so they sell for more. Take a follower, who can carry a lot of gear as well, and always keep a potion of strength on hand.
When I'm playing with a character who wants to max out both, I simply raid dwarven ruins to get as many dwarven metal ingots as possible.
Just for clarification in case the OP doesn't know exactly what to look for, they're metal objects of the same color as Dwarven armor and Dwarven Metal Ingots with the word Dwemer in them, specifically from heaviest weight to lightest weight:
  1. Solid Dwemer Metal
  2. Large Dwemer Strut
  3. Large Decorative Dwemer Strut
  4. Bent Dwemer Scrap Metal
  5. Large Dwemer Plate Metal
  6. Small Dwemer Plate Metal
Do not pick up any Dwemer metal that's name begins with the word "Dwemer" or any Small Dwemer Levers. They can't be smelted into Dwarven Metal Ingots and will only take up carrying capacity. In general the metal pieces can get quite heavy (Solid Dwemer Metal is 25) which is why JoeReese advised to bring a follower to use as a mule so you can get as much of it as you can in a Dwemer ruin. If you have to prioritize in terms of which Dwemer metal objects to take and which to drop as your collective carrying capacity peaks out, you should dump Large Dwemer Struts first as they weigh 10 times as much as other Dwemer metal that give the same number of Dwarven Metal Ingots at the smelter, then Large Decorative Dwemer Struts for similar reasons, and then Large Dwemer Metal (even though quite heavy they yield 2 more ingots than the smaller pieces).
Then I enchant them with absorb health or something. After this you can sell those bows for a hefty sum of gold.
Be wary about enchanting bows to enhance their sale value. Many, including the Dwarven Bow, are bugged so that their base value drops when they're enchanted with a generic enchantment. The Dwarven Bows base value drops by over 60% so depending on the type and strength of enchantment you put on the bow it can actually drop in value.
 

Cherry

Farfetch'd is judging you!
Thanks Dagmar, didn't know that about enchanting bows. I myself used Absorb Health and it did increase the value of the bows by quite a bit.
 

Urzek

Active Member
I just followed a guide here about mining. I just mined the 4 places then learned the transmute spell. I turned all my ores into gold ores then into gold ingots. Then make gold jewelries, voila! easy level.

For enchanting, i didn't notice that it levels up. I just use the soul gems in my dawnbreaker.
 
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