@Dagbiker said:

there is a guy on a cart outside of town, talk to him and he will bring you to each of the 9 holds for a low price.

This is important! You'll get quests that tell you to go to the opposite side of the world, do not waste your time trying to walk there, just take the wagon (usually near the stables outside main cites) for like 20-50 gold, if you have not discovered the city yet.

If you are thinking about becoming a vampire to get the invisibility spell, don't bother. When you complete the Thieves Guild quests, you have an option to choose between 3 spells (which you can pick between, but you can only change your mind daily) and one of them grants you invisibility for 160seconds.

@GiveUpNed said:

If you are thinking about becoming a vampire to get the invisibility spell, don't bother. When you complete the Thieves Guild quests, you have an option to choose between 3 spells (which you can pick between, but you can only change your mind daily) and one of them grants you invisibility for 160seconds.

You can change out which of the three spells you want daily? How easy is it to change them out? What are the other two spells?

@junglistgamer said:

Don't use healing items or food unless you desperately need health right away. Just use your healing spell, it only costs magicka and it'll level up one of your skill trees.

Or if you're out of magicka and waiting for it to recharge. In cases like that, where you're choosing between a fireball and health, I find it's often best to use a potion.

I just noticed something, don't know if it's been brought up yet but it blew my mind (mainly because it took me 40 hours to notice it).

There is a different "logo" treatment for each faction in the quest log.

etc.

@Barrock: You get a Dragon Shout that makes you sprint for a short distance, even if there is nothing to sprint on, as part of the main questline. I've used it in a couple of similar situations, hope this helps.

@daedelus said:

@Dagbiker said:

there is a guy on a cart outside of town, talk to him and he will bring you to each of the 9 holds for a low price.

This is important! You'll get quests that tell you to go to the opposite side of the world, do not waste your time trying to walk there, just take the wagon (usually near the stables outside main cites) for like 20-50 gold, if you have not discovered the city yet.

AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAHhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh

@ViciousReiven said:

Everyone knows the favorites menu, but you can also have two quick equips on d-pad left/right, to do this open the favorites menu and hold left or right on an item, a number will appear by them to indicate it's hot-keyed.

If you like stealth you can get away from enemies that are aggro'd by hiding where they can't see you, after about 30 seconds they'll start saying things like 'where'd he go?!' and the detection eye while sneaking will slowly close, you're safe once the text 'HIDDEN' appears under it, be careful as non-aggro enemies don't have compass pips.

You can pick any lock, perks only make them easier, picking harder locks increases your skill more than easy ones.

You can zoom the third-person camera by moving the left stick up or down while holding the button, zoom out far enough and tilt the camera down and you'll have a isometric view that's impractical but awesome :D

I didn't know about the left and right quick equip thing. I will have to use that at least for my archery/melee switching now. I've been thinking this game needed just that for the whole playthrought oo.

@Ragnarok512 said:

@GetEveryone: As far as I know she'll still be there, so you should probably go back and get her. I ran into the same problem.

Also if you are okay with waiting, if you leave a follower "waiting" in one place for long enough they will eventually get sick of it and go back to their main location (Lydia will go to either Dragonsreach or your house, and so and so forth).

@Ares42: Thank you, I didn't realize that until now. Also, I hate you because I'm now going to go through every single one I've found tonight. :P

@supaman900s said:

According to popular believe, your horse cannot die. However, this is UNTRUE.

Definitely, I believe my first horse died to a giant. If he doesn't come with you after a quick travel to outside a town, chances are he's dead.

This site has some stuff. Be ware there is some spoilers.

@daedelus said:

@Dagbiker said:

there is a guy on a cart outside of town, talk to him and he will bring you to each of the 9 holds for a low price.

This is important! You'll get quests that tell you to go to the opposite side of the world, do not waste your time trying to walk there, just take the wagon (usually near the stables outside main cites) for like 20-50 gold, if you have not discovered the city yet.

Huh, I gotta disagree there. While this tip IS useful, I think walking to the towns yields maximum benefit in both the form of leveling up and discovering new areas. The more areas you've discovered the more useful your fast travel is.

• If you have a companion fallowing you, a fast way to give them orders is to look at them, hold down the E key (or console equivalent) and it'll go into command mode.
• Useful books that level up your skills are more expensive (therefore, you dont have to bother opening all the cheap books hoping for a free level up)
• You create item hot keys on the PC by adding items to your favorites menu, hovering over the item in the fave menu and clicking a numerical key.
• The "force push" shout cancels dragon breath attacks.
• When firing a bow, the arrow tends to fly above the reticle so aim lower then where you intent to hit.

That's all i can think of off the top of my head.

Here are some that I thought of:

1. If you want to know how far away you are from gaining another skill point, open up the skills menu and you'll see a bar under each star group that gives you a rough indication of how close you are to the next skill point. While it might not tell you how many more items you need to sell in a shop to increase your speech skill, you can roughly gauge how close you are.

2. I don't know if this one is still the same as in Oblivion, but never sell items in a group. Sell them one at a time. Your speech skill goes up the same amount if you sell one item or many at once.

3. Be on the lookout for flowers to pick along the main paths. I walked from Whiterun to High Hrothgar, stopping in the town at the bottom of the mountain, and had a huge stack of flowers for alchemy.

4. Eat your alchemy ingredients before using them in potions. You'll discover their first attribute this way. Then, combine ingredients with the same attributes to make potions. You'll often discover secondary attributes through different combinations.

5. Keep a lot of smaller soul gems in your inventory if you are going to soul trap your kills. If you find a greater or grand soul gem, be careful that you don't end up putting a petty soul into it.

6. Once you've bought a home, empty out the extra stuff you pick up into a chest in your house. No matter how "empty" your inventory gets, one trip to a dungeon will fill it up quickly.

7. If you're going up against a couple of tough enemies, use a potion of paralysis on one of them. 7 seconds of paralysis might not seem like a long time, but it makes taking down a couple of hagravens a breeze (I wonder who else has discovered that really unfortunate place that has a couple of them near a word of power).

8. Use your best arrows when stealth sniping guys. Add a potion of damage health to make sure you one shot them.

9. More potion advice. Potions of damage stamina and damage stamina regen are super useful against bandit leaders and tougher enemies that use two handed weapons. No stamina=no power attacks

10. Don't forget your character's racial ability. I love walking into a group of dudes with my dark elf's flame ability and watching them burn.

11. Finally, do some of the easier fetch side quests. They will often give you gold, but some of them give you free skill points. In Whiterun, if you find a sword for a dude, you get a point in block and a point in one handed weapons. If you help a girl get a mammoth tusk (go find one, don't try to kill a mammoth), she gives you a point in speech.

Pro-tip: if you run into a dragon fighting a giant, help the dragon win.

I'd say this is well known, but I'll put it in a spoiler-tab anyway.

@Example1013: Oh indeed, always.

@GetEveryone: Really? When I did it, the gates stayed open, and she followed me through.

With some points in pickpocketing, you can get yourself a -umm, "rebate" from many skill trainers after purchasing training.

Generally I've only been able to take amounts of Gold under 500, so you'll have to dip your slimy little fingers in your trainer's pockets after each skill up. This also means that after level 50, you won't have a chance to steal back your 1500 gold per level or what have you. But it's still a fantastic way to get some free training for lower level skills plus you'll get your pickpocketing to 100 in no time since you get a TON of experience for stealing that much money.

Save (even more) often! I was saving the game every two training attempts just in case I failed I could reload and not lose too much.

use the shield bash if you're playing with a one-handed melee class, it staggers most enemies and can cancel attacks in their start up animations

if your a stealth character when you ride up to a enemies and are preparing to sneak park your horse far away before approaching the enemies - one of two things will happen, your horse will rambo all the mobs or your horse will watch you and stop you from hiding - as stupid as that sounds but yeah, my horse was spotting me lol.

If you give Lydia, or any companion who isn't wearing a hat a hat, they will immediately equip it. For hilarious results, try giving Lydia a chef's cap, or a Falmer helmet. It looks very funny.

If you jump off a cliff while mounted on the oh so magical horse, it will dismount you and you will tumble on down to till you are done falling...and you will get right back up like nothing happened! The same can't be said for the horse, however.

...Or at least that's what happened to me...

I'm not sure, but I think that if you recieve Talos' blessing at any Shrine of Talos (regardless if you're seen or not, and despite it not showing up as an Active Effect in the Magic menu) any Thalmor soldiers will attack you on sight, at least that seemed to happen to me.

Thanks for starting this thread, so many good tips in here, thanks duders!

Your companions can die! Lydia bit the bullet during a dragon fight. Such a shame, but she served me well.

Give 1 gold to a beggar and you get the power of charity. 10+ speechcraft (persuade, intimidate) for one real-time hour. Saved me some gold on persuade dialogs.

@GreatNorthern: Fairly certain Lydia can only die if you do the killing blow. Otherwise she falls down or does that crawl animation until the fight's over.

Not sure about other companions.

the double backstab damage from shrouded gloves DOES stack, so if you are using the 15x dagger perk from the sneak tree, use shrouded gloves to get a 30x sneak attack.

(can be found in the dark brotherhood lair)

There is an archer in Riverwood named Faeldon (Sp?), and he teaches you archery skills for money. If you do his sidequest, you can have him as a companion. If you learn all five levels of archery, you can tell him to come with you and compare inventories. He should have the money you gave him, so you can take it back. You can do this only once per character level up to archery skill 50 (Since Faeldon isn't a master Archer). I'm guessing there's other characters you can do this to, too.

@Redbullet685 said:

There is an archer in Riverwood named Faeldon (Sp?), and he teaches you archery skills for money. If you do his sidequest, you can have him as a companion. If you learn all five levels of archery, you can tell him to come with you and compare inventories. He should have the money you gave him, so you can take it back. You can do this only once per character level up to archery skill 50 (Since Faeldon isn't a master Archer). I'm guessing there's other characters you can do this to, too.

You can do this with any companion that can teach a skill. It is pretty useful.

On the Xbox, if you press the guide button right after pressing A for resting, it speeds up the timer quite a lot. Helpful for refreshing vendors.

I have a question. Does anyone know if you can turn things you are moving. When I am trying to place certain objects on shelves I have to bang them up against stuff to get it in the right position. It's quite annoying.

There is a dude behind the counter in a place called Black-meyer-somthing (that name is probably very wrong, but it does have the word black in the name) in Riften who has a persuasion option that never goes away. Talking to him for about half an hour will get your speech to 100.

There was something else that I came here to post and I totally forgot what it was :(

@SuperWristBands said:

There is a dude behind the counter in a place called Black-meyer-somthing (that name is probably very wrong, but it does have the work black in the name) in Riften who has a persuasion option that never goes away. Talking to him for about half an hour will get your speech to 100.

There was something else that I came here to post and I totally forgot what it was :(

Black-Briar Meadery?

@KingWilly said:

@SuperWristBands said:

There is a dude behind the counter in a place called Black-meyer-somthing (that name is probably very wrong, but it does have the work word black in the name) in Riften who has a persuasion option that never goes away. Talking to him for about half an hour will get your speech to 100.

There was something else that I came here to post and I totally forgot what it was :(

Black-Briar Meadery?

Yes, I am pretty certain that that is the name.

EDIT: Now I remember my purpose here.

I am not sure how many people ran into the same problem I did involving miscellaneous quests. Well it seems that if you go to them in your quest log and set one to track like you would a normal quest, it doesn't show on your map, but if you press x/o on it it should them mark it on your map, or at the very least show you it's general area on your map. About 50 hours into the game before I noticed it said "X Show on map".

@SuperWristBands: I really haven't figured that out yet, is there any rhyme or reason to misc objectives being tracked? Sometimes, a quest arrow shows up (for instance, for the Dark Brotherhood quest where you have to go talk to the boy in Riften), sometimes there's no arrow and you have to find your own way after pressing "Show on map". I've been running around Riften for a while now trying to find Sapphire, the woman who's giving that Redguard stablehand (can't remember his name) shit for not paying his debts. A quest arrow would definitely help.

- Quest items actually don't have weight. They say they do but they don't, until they become "regular" items (read: when you can drop them), then they have weight again.

- The horse you get at the end of the Dark Brotherhood quest line is, unlike in Oblivion, NOT IMMORTAL. It will die if it falls too far. However, it has MASSIVE amounts of life (which is good because it's aggro like crazy; that damn thing goes for Dragons) so you don't really have to worry too much about him.

- If you are paying the Xbox 360 version, there is a limit of numbers of objects on screen before things start getting crazy. I made it a point to pick up every piece of food in the game an dthen drop all I could get (in separate trips, of course) on my house's kitchen table in a massive food mound. Now the framerate drops to about 5 when I step inside and wild glitches (walls disappearing and reappearing, lighting problems) happen CONSTANTLY in there. My house is haunted by food.

- Once you enchant an item it's there for life, so I suggest making sure your alchemy skill is as leveled as possible before putting that spell on your Ebony Mace.

- You can level really fast both smithing and enchanting in Whiterun. Next to your house, make tons of leather stuff (easy to get, levels quick) and if you've been picking up Silver Ingots (you'll get tons on the Companions' quests) you can make two rings at once with each. Make a billion, then head up to the keep and enchant them. I suggest using Petty soul gems as you are just doing this for levels, and using something like Fear or Fortify 2-handed as this has the biggest price boost. Enchant all the crap you have, then go sell it all. You can bump levels fast.

- Pickpocketing is probably the fastest leveling skill in the game, and it also benefits greatly from items that boost it. Pickpocket everybody: Nearly every person has either a ring, a gem, or both on their person. You can go up a whole level by just getting a gem.

- If you get trained by somebody, you can immediately pickpocket the gold back. Great for some free levels.

- Find the Steed Stone ASAP. It really is the best.

- If you are uncertain how you are going to play, hold off on spending points until you are level 10ish. I wasted probably five or six points in trees I ended up abandoning (two-handed and Destruction).

- Don't ever put points in Lockpicking or Pickpocketing. Ever. Trust me, save them for something more useful (especially Pickpocketing, though it IS cool to be able to steal someone's armor and weapon right out of their hands, but if you REALLY want it that bad just kill them and pay the bounty)

- Prioritize actual quests rather than "misc" onces. The "misc" ones are nice but usually have lower payout. The other side of this is some "misc" ones become full-fledged quests after doing the first step, so I suppose my advice is actually pretty crappy. Eh.

- Kill every dragon you see. You'll need the souls.

Oh, there's also a

Sneak is by far the best skill in the game and the Assassin's Blade perk is one of the best perks in the game. Combined with either Jester's/Cicero's Gloves to get 30x damage with a dagger and The Blade of Woe you will absolutely maul anything there is in the game. Right now I'm doing over 750 damage per stealth hit. Dragon Priests can't even stand up to it. The only thing I think that can is a Dragon itself. And if you can get your Illusion stat high enough you can cast Invisibility to further break the game.

Speaking of Invisibility in order to grind out the Illusion stat just get the Muffle spell and continuously cast it everywhere. You can gain levels at an enormous rate since you don't need to be in combat to level Illusion apparently.

And finally regarding Sneak to grind it I used the Fort Greymore strategy. Reason I did it is because while waiting for the eye to close I could level some other magic skills as well, like Illusion, Conjuration, and Alteration since the game goes into combat mode when enemies are searching for you. Went from 30 to 70 Sneak in about 40 minutes and after that just played normally since 70 seems like it's high enough anyway. To see how to do it check out this guys YouTube video on it. I don't take credit for it nor do I know the guy, but it works and works well. As an added advantage is it's right near Whiterun so you can do it reasonably early on. If this might seem too invested there's another way to grind Sneak during the Dark Brotherhood as well and there's a video on YouTube as well showing how to do it. All you'll need is a rubberband or something heavy to hold down W.

@StickNutzman said:

Giving a coin to a beggar will get you "The Gift of Charity", which will give a temporary 10 point boost to speech. Easy way to save some cash if you're on your way to buy/sell anyway.

Thank you SO much. I have been wondering forever what the gift of charity was. I see it proc every time i give a coin to a beggar, but i could never find where the effect was located. I had checked active effects, etc.

@bitterninja said:

So thought we could build a list of things about skyrim that are good to know but wont spoil the game for anyone looking for helpful information before they start. I will start

You learn new spells when your 5 points off the next 'level' in the perk tree - so for instance expert destruction rank is 75 - you get the chance to learn new destruction spells at 70+, adept rank is 50 so new spells 45+.

Hey man, just a question, when you say you learn the spell, do you mean it becomes available for you to buy?

My basic novice level destruction spells are woefully underpowered

yeah so at level 45 in destruction you can see the destruction spell guy and he will have more tomes for you to buy, same with the other types of magic. I found myself constantly checking my skill tree to see what level novice, adept, expert and master were to see when i should head back to update my spells. hang in there with your destruction spells, they do improve especially with perks in the tree - dual casting + stagger is a huge improvement. Also make sure that you vary your spell for the enemy your facing - some enemies are immune to the type of damage they cast - atronachs being the big one. as someone said before (i cant remember who but dont want to be seen as stealing their opinion) shoot lightning at it unless it shoots lightning at you is a good rule of thumb.

@bitterninja said:

yeah so at level 45 in destruction you can see the destruction spell guy and he will have more tomes for you to buy, same with the other types of magic. I found myself constantly checking my skill tree to see what level novice, adept, expert and master were to see when i should head back to update my spells. hang in there with your destruction spells, they do improve especially with perks in the tree - dual casting + stagger is a huge improvement. Also make sure that you vary your spell for the enemy your facing - some enemies are immune to the type of damage they cast - atronachs being the big one. as someone said before (i cant remember who but dont want to be seen as stealing their opinion) shoot lightning at it unless it shoots lightning at you is a good rule of thumb.

Thanks heaps man :)

This may be a silly question, but which destruction spell guy are you talking about?

here is a link to all the trainers in the game (i think) - Faralda is the destruction guy i believe in the college - he can teach you all the way up to master level.

http://uk.ign.com/wikis/the-elder-scrolls-5-skyrim/Trainers

hope that helps bud.

Thankyou you amazing gentleman!!!!

@Dilenger93 said:

@ViciousReiven good sir or lady, if you were in front of me right now id kiss you right on the mouth. Thanks for making everything just a little bit better

sounds like my thoughts exactly :)

just not the kissing part

This might have been mentioned, but for anyone who needs Daedra hearts for crafting:

If you go to the Dawnstar inn and talk to the guy in a robe, you'll get a quest called "Waking Nightmare" that takes place mostly in a castle. At the end of the quest, look in the room of the castle that has a bunch of alchemy ingredients on shelves, and you'll find two Daedra hearts just sitting there. There might be easier ways to get them, but it was the first time I had even seen one.