I’ve noticed that I use horses mainly for climbing mountains. They’re not quite as surefooted as in Oblivion, but they can scrabble up rough surfaces. It’s a lot faster than going all the way around the mountain to look for the path up.
I sample everything first, which gets you a start on being able to brew potions with known effects. Combine two ingredients with that effect, and then some third. You’ll either end up with a potion of the effect you had in mind, or you’ll make a discovery. As you make more discoveries, you get more effects you can try to make potions for. Besides poisons and healing potions, as far as I’m concerned specific potions aren’t the point. I brew until I run out of ingredients, then sell off the products. And I buy out the ingredients from every alchemy shop I visit.
At the moment I’ve been using the Quicksave-Investigate-Carry On/Reload approach. I mean, the thing is, you’re the Dragonborn. Even if you choose to ignore it, your character is capable of using magic and Shouting people off cliffs. I really don’t think it’s a strech to assume your Dragonborn powers should extend to knowing who’s friendly and who needs a smackdown before you’re tripping over them- especially when you consider that the compass does tell you where things like Mammoth hunting grounds, caves, barrows, villages, ruins, and so on are- long before you can see them.
Someone was asking what to do with gems of the non-soulgem variety…
You can use them to create jewelry with smithing if you have gold or silver ore.
I’m around level 23 and the most frantic I’ve been was when battling my 2nd dragon way back when. It was distracted and fighting something I couldn’t see over a rise, and that something turned out to be a giant who had previously flung my body into the stratosphere the first time I tried to get a closer look at him. He was dealing out some good damage to the dragon and it went down fairly quickly between the two of us. Then I got greedy and tried to finish off the giant who was down to about half health after fighting the dragon. But all I did was piss him off which then had me sprinting a long way back to town with his fists zinging right past the back of my head, chugging every last stamina potion I had to along the way. When I reached the town gates I swear he was right on top of me.
I’ve had a few wtf coincidences when raiders attack from the left and two big cats from behind and then some random guy runs up insisting to talk to me about something and prompt a new objective or something, right in the middle of it all.
I did that with a horse I found in the wilderness, and when I got off it to mine some ore it literally flew away and circled around for a while. This game has the most hilarious glitches, and the best part is that the game just keeps on like nothing out of the ordinary happened. “Oh, that’s just a mammoth riding around on a dragon. Move along, nothing to see here.”
found my first ore deposit. Of course I had no pick axe…
Tried alchemy, just randomly threw stuff together. How does this sampling you speak of work? You have a chew of something and it tells you your stamina is better or something?
Yup. Just eat it, and it’ll tell you what it does, at least if you haven’t figured out any properties yet. Not sure if the eating method works once you’ve discovered 1 or 2 properties, but it seems to always work on the first one.
It isn’t, and that’s why there’s a magic spell and, I’ve discovered, a shout (aura whisper), that reveal which nearby entities are friendly and which aren’t.
I’m reading the in-game books that look interesting and have gotten a few decent tips out of them. One details the best way to fight trolls and another contained a poem with hints about an invisibility recipe. I’ll have to give that one a try to see if it’s on the level. I also picked up a scrap of paper with another recipe on it somewhere. It’s a little more rewarding than looking up the answers online, but I still do that a lot.
I’m still switching my hot keys around to find the best combat combo that works for me. Looks like we only get two hot keys on console in Skyrim vs. the eight in Oblivion. I’m talking about using the D pad left and right in Skyrim vs. having all eight directions of the D pad on Oblivion available for key mapping. Skyrim’s reduced number of hot keys looks to make quick-switching a little more cumbersome, but I hope I can find a way to make it work. I gave two staffs to my follower and he was conjuring his familiar (a ghost wolf) and using lightning, which let me concentrate on my sword and bow. The ghost wolf scared off a pack of rats that were attacking us and chased them down a spiral staircase like an 80-pound Jack Russel terrier - that was pretty funny to watch.
The “favorites list” is an OK system, but I just hope it won’t require as much scrolling during combat as I think it might.
I just had an Awww! moment.
I figured I’d find someone to marry, and the housecarl alternatives were out of the question.
Spoiler without much spoiling: I went for Solgja, a miner’s cook or something, who had a troublesome childhood etc. So, we get married and I tell her we’re moving to my house in Solitude. I fast travel there and I can’t find her. Until I check the basement where she’s laid her bedroll down in a storeroom.
Speaking of marriage, is it a bad sign for the relationship when your bride takes off running right after giving her vows, so you have to spit yours out, ditch the priest, and cast whirlwind sprint so you can catch up and talk to her?
They’ll all do that. Yet another bug. People have even tried locking the doors into their basements and their spouses still go there.
I just finished the main storyline, and I have to say that the journey was more rewarding than reaching the destination. On to character #2!
I just finished it, too. Got bored and just followed the main quest. Finished at level 14 – pure mage, no armor, no weapons, no alchemy, no enchantment.
Man, I am loving the fireball spell for the overkill.
Bandit: Who’s there? You better stay back or I’ll KABOOM
Hah, same thing happened with mine! Hilarious and sad.
(although they’re getting quite progressive: you can marry either gender! So my female character married another woman and had a nice little lesbian marriage)
On the subject of mods 90% of them right now seem to be retextures of existing things (environment and objects). Which I guess is neat but not that interesting.
That said there have been some interesting ones trickling out. I’ve been really taken with the smithing and crafting systems in the game and I’ve been monitoring anything that affects that. Some of my favorites so far…
This smelting and fletching mod is really cool. It allows you to craft your own arrows with feathers, firewood and ingots provided you have the requisite perks on the smithing tree. (Steel for steel arrows, Elven for elven arrows etc…) It also allows you break down tons of stuff back into it’s component parts. So if you use iron armor on a smelter it’ll yield iron ingots, if you use an elven weapon it’ll give you moonstone and quicksilver ingots. In practice it seems a little game breaking to be honest, but it makes smithing incredibly versatile even at low levels.
Lost Art of the Blacksmith allows you to upgrade unique weapons and armor. The author seems to have taken great pains to make sure it’s balanced and lore friendly as well. Upgrades take into account smithing skill, perks, enhancements on the weapon itself and base damage/armor rating. It also adds a few new recipes to the smithing menu.
On the same idea this mod allows you take add new enchantments to unique equipment. However a word of warning, the mod does this by removing the base enchantment but keeping the base stats and model, so it might be better saved for a second or third play through.
Having just got the Ebony Sword, it seems that to make the most of it, I have to kill some people. Who is it most painless to kill to strengthen the sword? I woudln’t want to be persona non grata in an important location or have quests cut off.
Eating gives you the FIRST property of the ingredient. There is an IMHO worthless perk that lets you get two properties from eating it. The other 2-3 must be obtained by experimenting with mixing stuff. Some are pretty easy to guess, like how DEATHbell and (deadly) nightshade combine to make: a damage health poison I believe. If you get a few wrong mixes then pick an ingredient, it will gray out the ones you already failed, which I think is really handy. This system seems way more wasteful than Oblivion, but I like it better.
You can also get an occasional note that tells you a recipe.
How do you lock doors?
Does it have to be a named person? If not, just pick some generic NPC like a town guard or one of the Hunters or Bandits you find outdoors. To get away with it in town without a bounty, pick some place indoors and kill all the witnesses; no witness, no bounty. You get a little message announcing if all the witnesses are dead. One spot to pull off something like that is right behind the Jarl’s throne in Dragonreach; there’s a door leading to a large balcony area that often has no one there but generic Whiterun guards.