The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim Hints

Item-Crafting Tips

• 1 of 9: Creating and improving your own armor, weapons, and potions is the key to making a truly powerful character who can easily handle the increased combat difficulty that comes with higher levels and higher difficulty settings.
• 2 of 9: The three skills that have to do with crafting are Smithing from the combat category, Alchemy from the stealth category, and Enchanting from the magic category. The first thing to do is get all three of those skills up to 100 by practicing them, buying training, etc. See the Skill Practicing Tips.
• 3 of 9: After that, it'll be time to spend some perk points on your crafting skills, starting with Enchanting. Get all five ranks of the Enchanter perk, plus the Fire Enchanter, Frost Enchanter, Storm Enchanter, Insightful Enchanter, and Corpus Enchanter perks. Also get the Extra Effect perk if you want to be able to put two enchantments on items. (Note that you'll have to put both enchantments on at once -- you can't put one on, then put the other one on later.)
  • What if all I care about is maximizing skill-related enchantments on apparel?
• 4 of 9: You'll want to always use grand souls when enchanting, since that's the most powerful kind. Fortunately, many merchants will sell grand soul gems with grand souls in them, even if you're low-level. If you get the Black Star instead of Azura's Star on the "The Black Star" Daedric quest, you can soul-trap bandits and other NPCs to get grand souls for free. (If you got Azura's Star, you'd have to find and soul-trap creatures who have grand-level souls, which would be pretty much impossible unless you're fairly high-level.)
• 5 of 9: Another thing you'll want are potions that increase your enchantments' power. Drink one right before doing your enchanting, then hurry up and do the enchantments before the potion wears off. (Note that this really rushes you, and you probably won't have time to rename your enchanted items unless you're only doing one item per potion.)
• 6 of 9: After you get the Alchemy skill's Alchemist (five ranks) and Benefactor perks, you'll be able to mix up some fairly powerful Fortify Enchanting potions. Make the strongest ones you can, then use them (and grand souls) while enchanting a helmet, a pair of gauntlets, a ring, and a necklace with the Fortify Alchemy effect. Wear those four items while mixing up some new Fortify Enchanting potions to make them a bit stronger than the last batch, then use those potions to create a new set of alchemy-fortifying apparel that's a bit stronger than the previous set. You can then use it while making new potions, and so on.
• 7 of 9: If you push that back-and-forth crafting gimmick to the limit, you'll find that you can get up to +29% on each Alchemy-enhancing apparel item and +32% on Enchant-fortifying potions. Use those items for all future enchanting and potion-making sessions to maximize your results.
  • Glitch Notes
• 8 of 9: As for the Smithing skill, get all of its perks except Arcane Blacksmith. It only lets you improve already-enchanted equipment, but all of the other perks increase how far you can improve each type of craftable equipment as well as letting you forge it yourself.
  • What if all I care about is making and improving Daedric equipment?
• 9 of 9: Right before using a workbench or grindstone, equip apparel items that increase how much you can improve items, then drink a potion that'll increase the improvements even more. If you've already maxed your potion-making and enchanting potential as described above, you'll be able to make four apparel items (chest armor, gauntlets, ring, necklace) that each add 29% to smithing improvements, plus Fortify Smithing potions that add an additional 130%. With those, you'll be able to create some *truly* legendary equipment!

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