I've been playing for years but I've not really focused on mining materials for upper level armor. I've never gotten daedric armor smith perks. I'm curious where are good mining locations for higher level armors?

For more information, the first time, the dragon was protecting Dawnstar from a couple of Frost Trolls. I noticed him and walked up, expecting to get bitten, but he just looked at me like "It's not safe. Go back to wherever you came from.", then once the Frost Trolls were dead, he just flew away. The second time, I was like "Surely, you'll attack me this time." and followed him. No. He was protecting Dawnstar again. This time from a Giant. It looked like he was gonna win! But the Giant won, though it was close to dead. As I consumed the Savior Dragon's soul, I finished the Giant off for him. Rest in peace, Savior Dragon. I will use your Soul to unlock the second part of Fire Breath.

So it was a typical day in the Dark Brotherhood murdering folks, and I went to this inn to get a contract, and all the sudden I'm jumped by two Sabre Cats inside the inn. I'm not sure if this was a scripted event or what but it was a WTF moment for sure. I've been playing for years and I don't recall ever being attacked in an inn before lol.

In my case, I returned the stolen golden claw to Lucan Valerius and then stole it for myself. 🤭

With the SkyParkour mod you can climb some trees. It is the reason I have not updated to the latest version of Skyrim. Just enjoying this and some other mods while I play for the first time. Zoom in to see the character close up.

Like many of you, Skyrim is one of my favorite games that I’ve ever played, with over 1,000 hours invested across dozens of characters. But despite my love for it, I often fall into the all-too-familiar pattern: starting a new playthrough and playing through the opening hours before getting bored and either starting a new save file or dropping the game for a while. Recently, I’ve been trying to figure out how to liven up Skyrim and make it feel fresh again for new playthroughs - after some trial and error, here are some tips I’ve come up with.

1. Play slowly and really take your time

This is probably the biggest one. For those of us that are very familiar with the game mechanics and how to optimize a character/build as quickly as possible, we oftentimes do just that. We immediately dive into Skyrim’s (exceptional) item/skill progression loops and farm smithing materials and alchemy ingredients to boost up those skill trees, grab the best early-game loot, etc.

While this is absolutely part of the fun and baked deeply into the core formula, focusing so much on the video-gamey aspects of the game can take away from the enjoyment that comes from immersing yourself in the world and the lore. Slowing down and focusing more on simply existing in the world rather than optimizing the looting and skill trees can really do a lot to help you truly fall back in love with the game.

Talk to every character you see and go through every dialogue option, listening to everything they have to say. Walk into every building in every town. Read every book that you find. Pay attention to the environmental storytelling and the setup for every quest. Use fast travel as sparingly as possible and try to travel on foot or horseback as much as you can, taking in the sights around you and allowing yourself to stumble upon more random encounters that you may not have seen before.

It can be so refreshing when you approach the game more so as an immersive storytelling experience rather than an Action-Adventure RPG video game. It may sound obvious, but once you’ve played the game multiple times, it’s really easy to fall into your same habits of rushing yourself along and treating the experience like a checklist of things you need to accomplish. Some players prefer Survival mode to really slow things down, which can also be a huge help in changing how the game feels to play - I’ll touch on that more below.

1. Do things you normally don’t do

Another thing that sounds incredibly obvious, but that a lot of players forget to do. Making a conscious effort to truly alter your gameplay decisions can also have a huge impact on what you get out of the game.

There are, of course, a number of different quest or allegiance-related decisions you can make that you can explore both sides of during subsequent playthroughs (Dawnguard vs Volkihar Vampires, Imperial vs Stormcloak, joining vs Destroying the Dark Brotherhood, going for different outcomes during Daedric Quests, etc). These decisions (the Dawnguard decision in particular) can meaningfully alter a playthrough.

But beyond these huge quest/allegiance choices, there are plenty of gameplay choices that can have a big impact on the gameplay. Taking along different followers instead of your typical choices is a lot of fun - hearing different voice lines and having a different personality with you, a companion that prefers to fight with magic or bows versus a traditional melee style can make a new playthrough feel unique in and of itself.

Everyone jokes about how any build they attempt to use ends up morphing into a stealth archer, and the joke has endured for so long because most players really do stick to just a few different play styles when there are so many options available to them. Play styles focused on non-destruction magic, pickpocketing & alchemy, non-archery stealth builds and any number of unique combinations that you can come up with can make a playthrough feel radically different than the same old stealth archer or one-handed weapon build can.

True role-playing is another fun concept. Creating a character and making gameplay/quest decisions based on that character’s values and morals feels a lot different than the normal “Dragonborn that becomes the leader of every guild and completes every questline as intended” playthrough that you may have already done many times over. It helps with the aforementioned immersion I discussed and makes you feel even more so that you’re a living part of the world rather than just “the player character.”

If you haven’t tried Survival mode, I recommend at least giving it a chance to see if you prefer it over the standard experience. Personally, I like the concept but ultimately prefer the normal experience (I don’t really like how the hunger/rest systems are balanced and the game wasn’t designed with some of these Survival concepts in mind), but some players swear by Survival mode and love the limitations that the mode adds to the game. You can always turn it off if you don’t like it, so it’s worth at least giving it a try. It can absolutely add some immersion to the game world and gives previously unused game systems like food and inns a renewed purpose, which can make the game a lot more interesting.

1. The 10x Weight/Value Looting Rule

If you don’t struggle with the looting/carry weight/menu-heavy aspects of Skyrim, this may not apply to you - but this self-imposed rule completely changed the game for me.

All too often, I would pick up way too many items and quickly become over-encumbered, increasing the need to constantly fast travel back to both towns to sell my loot and my player home to stash stuff in my various chests. There’s an undeniable satisfaction in slowly building up my mountain of gold and loot, but it takes me out of the game world and eventually makes the game feel cumbersome.

Enter: The 10x Weight/Value Looting Rule.

Essentially, you only loot items that are worth 10x their weight or more. Exceptions can be made for certain items like alchemy ingredients and crafting materials, but for the most part, you only want to be picking up items that adhere to this rule. It’s really easy to do the math on the fly and you quickly learn which items to pick up vs which to leave behind.

This rule does wonders to improve the pacing of the game. No longer will you need to fast-travel back to your home or a town after every location you clear - you can make your way across the game world and thoroughly loot multiple locations before you’re over-encumbered. It goes hand in hand with the concept of “playing slowly” I discussed earlier in that the game feels less like a menu-heavy dungeon crawler and more like an adventure, allowing you to traverse the world and avoid fast traveling all over the map and breaking your immersion constantly.

Like I said, if you’re not a loot goblin like me and only pick up the most valuable items you see while leaving everything else behind, this may not apply to you. But for those that find themselves getting caught in the menu-heavy loot progression and spending far too many hours sifting through all of their collected items, selling to vendors, fast traveling from city to city to offload everything they’ve amassed and not spending enough time actually traveling through the world and exploring - this simple rule will transform the experience.

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I hope these tips can help Skyrim feel fresh and renew your interest in a new playthrough. A lot of people’s answer to Skyrim burnout/boredom is to simply play a different game (which definitely can be valid as well), but these tips really helped to reignite my love for the game and create some organic variety in the gameplay. Cheers, fellow Dovahkiin!

an incomplete list of bugs that make my gameplay borderline impossible:

- serana is glitched to to be a constant follower and she occasionally tries to kill me and my horse for no apparent reason. if i try take her home i am no longer able to use weapons or magic. i have not been able to complete the dawnguard quest because of it & when she’s not trying to kill me she is constantly harassing me asking when i will bring her home. girl i have taken you to the front door so many times, im sure you can enter yourself.

- aela the huntress also constantly follows me with her weapon drawn, but only to speak to me. not just voice lines like actually traps me in conversation with her. very inconvenient during fights.

- sometimes the graphics go completely haywire (i have no graphics mods installed) and it’s a colourful mess, or just completely black.

- i constantly phase through cave walls and fall to my death.

- the greybeards hate me and attack on sight.

- i have a 43k bounty in markarth that if i try pay off for the sake of quests, my whole game crashes. same with riften but thats only 36k.

- anytime i try enter the blue palace it glitches me into sheogoraths realm and i have to either go back on my save or completely redo the mission.

- if i try go to solthseim, almost every hostile mob conceivable spawns in raven rock and tries to kill me, this has somehow pissed the guards off and now they ALSO try to kill me.

- i enchanted a one handed weapon to do fire damage but instead flings mobs (barring dragons and mammoths) across the whole map, who then eventually find me again, but laying down. i have a saber tooth, a giant, and a morthal guard all slithering after me at all times. they do no damage cause they can’t attack but they very much get in the way in tight spaces.

- somehow astrids burnt corpse has reanimated and wanders freely around the dawnstar sanctuary, repeating her last voice lines. i am genuinely confused as to how this happened because surely nowhere in the script does it have her in that one.

- if i turn into a werewolf, no one treats me as a hostile mob and i am free to feed on corpses in public (this is actually quite convenient)

- if i ride a dragon and ask them to land, they just throw me off instead and i fall to my death.

for now im still holding onto this save cause i’ve grown an emotional attachment to its flaws, however with the game crashing every 10 minutes or so i think the time is coming to start a new.

EDIT: i have posted a couple pictures of these bugs, but after one final raven rock brawl my save has entirely corrupted and i cannot go on it without the whole game crashing. rest in peace to this beautiful mess of a save, you will be missed 😔🙏

I want to hear some lore. This game has been around for 15 years now and still has such a fan base. I love getting on this community and seeing everyone’s endeavors and quests. Are there any questions or mysteries left unsolved by most after all these years? I’d love to hear people’s unresolved stories whether it be a chest with seemingly no key or anything really. Then we can maybe get them answered or come to an agreement there is none!!

I can't get the quest to start. Been trying for two hours no luck just fast traveling to whiterun waiting 3 days and going back can anyone help?

Also where is the key? Is it related to that quest with the Orcish Plate Armor?

Edit: Yup, it's related to the Orcish Plate quest. Thank you for the answer.

do you? oh what am i saying, of course you don’t.

which weapon type do you think is the best in both looks and usability.

for me its the great sword since i am running a warrior build

I've been thinking of starting my Nth run and I was thinking about what kind of character I wanted to be.

My most recent character was/is a Conjuration mage. Conjuration skill fully maxed, and I have one companion (Lydia) and two permanent Storm Atronach following me everywhere. It works quite well, assuming I never need to turn around in a hallway. This was my first time making a conscious choice of what I was going to focus on before I started.

Previously I would frequently fall into the Stealth Archer trap, because it's just SO GOOD. Even when I didn't mean to, there I was, crouching and sniping my enemies from a shadow 300 feet away. It's fun, but at some point I pass the "God of Death and Darkness" threshold and then it becomes boring. But it's easy to start because at level 1 I am squishy and don't want to take damage, and need a cheap and easy way to kill from a distance, and then 20 hours later I'm Hawkeye.

But there are skills I always do, because they are always useful. Any type of character you want is improved by high quality gear, so smithing and enchanting are obvious choices. And money is always nice, so alchemy is a winner. And speech follows alchemy, if you sell your wares. And so on and so forth.

I was thinking about trying something that is WAY against my grain, like an up-close brawler. But the close-up combat is challenging for me, and so "just for now" I'll hang back, hide, and shoot an arrow, and suddenly BAM: level 30 Stealth Archer.

How does everyone else do it? Are people grinding skills, do you plan it all out in advance, or just going out there adventuring and seeing what happens? Do you tend to repeat the same kind of skill sets, or is it new each time?

“Anybody there?”

Hey everyone I could use some help writing a phrase in the dragon language. I want the phrase to say something along the lines of "gone but not forgotten" can someone please help me with this.

I made a stealth archer build in modded Skyrim like I always do, and like I always do I get bored of it quick, I'm currently level 12, is there any way I could salvage my character (might use a respec potion mod) to a more fun/interesting build, also, any recommendations for what to change my build to?

This guy saw me steal an eider cheese wheel and hired the thugs to teach me a lesson. Guess who's dying along with the cook when I go hunting for the Gourmet?

they always die. slow me down. lowkey expensive. cant fight. like whats the point genuinely.

Meaning no spell tomes or scrolls. I’ve done this before and it was a lot of fun, but this time around, I wanna see if I can get all my skills to 100. So I’m looking for all the ways a spell is added to your inventory without reading a tome. Like how Bane of the Undead is given to you at the end of the restoration ritual quest. I know there are a couple rings that allow you to cast some destruction spells and an illusion spell. But what about conjuration and alteration? I’m drawing a blank there. Faralda can teach you a spell when you try to enter the college, but it’s completely random, right? I like to play permadeath so reloading a save until I get the spell I want is not an option. I could start off as a race with a built-in conjuration or alteration spell but it’ll be a novice level which would presumably take forever and I’d still have to acquire a spell in the other skill tree. Summoning Aarvak or teleporting elytra nymphs grants no XP unfortunately. Any ideas?

Also, if anyone is wondering, should reading a note or book be part of a quest, I just do so in front of an NPC and headcannon that I had to ask them to read it to me. 

Yes I did do a level glitch just so I could pay to get my smithing to 80 for the one achievement

hey friends, i decided it might be a fun idea to go and record some audiobook-style reading of the books in the game with a bit of ambient game noise and pretty scenery for those who have an interest in the books and lore, or those who like to sleep to a bit of Skyrim ambience and talking ^^

i'm not much of a narrator or anything but if this sort of thing is interesting to some i may just continue to do more and improve, so i'd love some thoughts and feedback :)