Crafting to the limit

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Everyone looking for advice in Skyrim must have seen it by now: "Just craft 500+ (or quite a few more after the patch) Iron Daggers to get to max Smithing, craft your ultimate weapon and armor, ???, profit." While certainly true, that's both extremely dull and totally misses the point of crafting.

I'm building upon the idea coined by Aldeth about Pickpocket training, ie. retaking the funds used to train low-level skills (up to 50 with minimal perk investment) by pickpocketing them back and in the process leveling the pickpocket skill leading to a level-up so that you can start training & pickpocketing all again without leaving the side of your trainer for a second. Namely, you can do something similar with crafting skills. The trick is to level ALL of them at the same time, everything feeding into each other, creating an ever-increasing profit loop while leveling your character like crazy.

Prerequisites
- You need to be able to refresh the inventory of merchants so that you can buy certain key ingredients in large quantities. Especially noteworthy ones are Iron Ore (transmutes into Gold jewelry), filled Petty Soulgems (maximun yield from weapon enchants) and pretty much all Alchemy reagents except for the most expensive ones (Fire Salt, Daedra Heart). You could just wait for 48 hours, but I find fast traveling between cities takes care of this in a much more elegant way.
- Transmute spell, available via a short hike to Halted Stream Camp just a bit north of Whiterun.
- At least one decently valued weapon enchant. Damage Magicka is probably the earliest you can find, followed by Absorb <anything>, Paralyze from character level 22 onwards and finally Banish, also at clvl 22. Check the availability of such enchants from blacksmiths wherever you go as the investment in buying them pays off very quickly.
- Your character build needs to have enough slack points to divert at least 3 into Pickpocket (Cutpurse) to be able to keep pickpocket training going on while you do this. Another highly recommended perk is Merchant (Speech) to be able to actually sell all the potions you'll be making in within a reasonable time and to make more alchemy reagents available for purchase. Also, this guide assumes you'll want to invest heavily in both Alchemy and Enchanting - this is a crafting guide, so it would be kinda strange if it didn't, right?
- A wide selection of skills available for pickpocket training. Or more specifically, skills that are below 50, you have immediate access to a trainer for it, you need the skill either straight away (especially Speech and your main damage skill should qualify here) or later (especially the ones you're NOT going to use yourself, ever) and not something you can train easily yourself (especially pickpocket, all crafting skills and your armor skill, if any). In effect, this is best performed with a fresh newbie character, especially before reading any skill books/quest rewards you're going to stumble upon your journeys later.

Skills used during the process
Pickpocket: This is the only part of this guide that is timing crucial. You need to keep constant eye for your character level and stop whatever else you're doing when you reach a new level so that you can pickpocket train something else. Especially during the early levels of training, this practically means that you don't get much, if any, chances to advance your crafting skills but you'll have much more headroom for them as soon as you've maxed Pickpocketing skill as you don't gain level-ups from both PP and the skill you're training at the same time.

Alchemy: Takes ages to level if you rely on self-acquired ingredients, even more so if you skimp on the perks for it. Not very much so when you realize you can just buy everything an alchemist merchant has to offer, create potions out of them and sell them right back for a profit from the word go. Finally, the profits really soar once you start investing perks into Alchemist, which directly translates into more expensive potions created out of the same ingredients, and reach stratosphere once you craft an +alchemy set via enchanting.

Smithing: Do not just create Iron Daggers, that's stupid in so many ways. The ingredients cost more than the end result and your skill levels up very slowly with them. Rather, buy Iron Ore, transmute it (twice) into Gold Ore, smelt them into Gold Bars and craft golden jewelry out of that. Should you have a stack of gems you don't know what do with, punch them into the jewels while you're at it. This might require some Silver as well, which you can create by Transmuting once, ditching the newly transmuted Silver Ore to the ground and repeating until you have a great pile of Silver Ore at your feet.

Once you're feeling comfortable in how much profit you're making and are just looking for more throughput (ie. there's only a few Iron Ore available for sale each time), invest a perk into Steel Smithing (prereq for everything else in the tree) and start churning out Steel Daggers. The ingredients for it are quite a bit more expensive than for Iron Dagger, but since you have the perk for it, the real cash and skill experience comes from improving them, much more so than you could for Iron Daggers as there's no perk affecting them. Just as with Alchemy, look forward to enchanting a complete set of +smithing apparel to further compound the profits. EDIT: Scratch the item improvement idea, with or without the perk, the value increase delta is not even worth the ingot used in improving until you can craft more expensive items. It's seemingly based on the item's base value, NOT in how much the item was improved as I thought before. Steel Armor is probably the first item that doesn't actually turn into a financial loss once improved, but you can't exactly craft those by the hundreds either.

Enchanting: The only real limiting factor to your enchanting is the amount of filled soul gems you can get your hands on. Petty gems give by far the most bang for the buck once you turn them into a juicy weapon enchant (remember those Steel Daggers?), but expect to buy Grand ones as well when it's time to (re-)create your +alchemy and +smithing apparel. While the investment seems huge early on, it quickly pays off once you realize you can easily get +50% or more out of everything you craft with them from that point on. Just don't go overboard in recreating them for every little percent increase.

Speech: While you're not training this on purpose (except maybe to reach Merchant ASAP), you will go through such huge amounts of merchandise in this process that your Speech skill is going to end up rather high whether you intended or not.

The procedure
I'm not going to make this prettier than it is: This is going to require quite a bit of IRL time. The payoff comes in that you can pretty much concentrate on actually playing the game after you're done, rather than going back to e.g. raising money for training all too often.

Included in every step: Whenever you reach a new level, do your pickpocket training routine and resume.
1) The procedure starts once you reach Whiterun and after the prerequisites have been taken care of, see above.
2) Place a perk point into Haggling 1/5, if you haven't already. Sell off pretty much everything you own, including your armor and weapon(s) as you won't need to do combat for quite a while anyway, to raise a nest egg and even more importantly, allowing you to not end up encumbered all too easily. Stash away the rest if you can.
3) Place as many perk points as you can into Alchemist, and keep it maxed at all times, only diverting for Physician and Benefactor when you can. Pay a visit to the alchemist, buy all the ingredients (except the most expensive ones), craft them into potions, sell them.
4) Go through all three Blacksmiths and the General store in search for Iron Ore, ingredients for Steel daggers (once you have the perk) and any weapon enchants that are more valuable than the ones you already have. Transmute, smelt, craft, improve.
5) Place as many perk points as you can into Enchanter (lower prio than Alchemist) and Insightful Enchanter when it becomes available. Buy all the filled Petty soul gems you can (court wizard, general store) and enchant Steel Daggers with whatever brings in the most cash. Sell off the daggers. Once you have the cash for it, buy a Grand stone and enchant a piece of +alchemy apparel, or if you already have all four, make +smithing ones. Craft another round of both once you get Insightful Enchanter.
6) Travel to another city and restart from 3) until you have 100 in all trade skills.

In the end, you'll end up at character level 40+ from the five skills involved alone, plus whatever you pickpocket train for. Even after deducting the perks you need for the procedure itself (PP 3, Speech 3, Alchemy 7, Smithing 1 and Enchanting 6) you have an excess of 20 points to put into whatever you please.

Edit: Further tweaks include always making a donation to a beggar prior to doing any business involving money, and should you find the Haggling/Bartering enchant, you can get another considerable boost in all trading. Everything you do in this process is already generating a profit, it's just a matter of exactly how big of a pile of cash you end up at the end. Several hundreds of thousands shouldn't be all that far-fetched, actually, as you train for free during the whole process and you don't have to buy anything that doesn't turn a profit.

 

3? Or are you counting War Maidens as two, because you can buy outside and inside?

 

Yes, War Maiden's has two merchants. However, they share their inventory AND gold if they're both inside the house, so make sure you only trade with the female outside.

 

I'm playtesting this at the moment, and just a quick note: You cannot possibly start pickpocket training in Riverwood, because you'll soar in levels by just training Archery with Faendal in the early going. However, since he's a follower, you can just ask your money back. I tried pickpocketing him first and missed two complete levels since I couldn't train enough times AND pickpocket him without gaining almost two whole levels' worth of exp for every level's worth of training.

Pickpocket levels so stupendously fast that you can't really expect to be able to do much of anything involving leveling while pickpocket training until you reach level 20 or so without running the risk of overshooting your next level.

---------- Added 9 hours, 15 minutes and 8 seconds later... ----------

Another scratch from the list: Seems like item improvement cost increase delta is relative to the base item cost. Improving Steel Armor with minimal Smithing skill (16 to be exact, including perk) gives +25 gold to the value, while Steel dagger only gets +3, both less than what the Steel Ingot used in improving costs to buy. Therefore, you need to be making top quality stuff (Ebony+) before item improvement becomes a major consideration into what creates the biggest bucks with least amount of ingredients.

In other words: A whole lot of Iron Daggers for enchanting and jewelry for actually leveling Smithing, both doable without any perks. Oh well, hope for good rolls on the 1-6 Iron Ore available at blacksmiths.. you'll need a metric ton of them.

 

This is absolutely true. The first 5-7 levels (depending on your archery skill) you just want to get free training as opposed to pickpocket training. There's no reason to start pickpocket training prior to maxing what you can get out of Faendal. In fact, you have to be the most careful in the 10-15 character level range, as the increases in clvl from pickpocket come SO fast. Once you start leveling pickpocket to higher levels, that's a TON of experience for a low level character.

To minimize the rate at which you level (when did you ever think you'd hear that) switch around who you train with. I'll just stick to Whiterun, as it's the easiest example. Say you're going to want to specialize in one-handed weapons, so you figure that Althis (the Companion who trains One Handed) should be your first stop. Do NOT train One Handed from 20 all the way to 50. That's a good way to bust through your experience point cap and gain a second level up. It's best to train 5 times with Althis one level, and then pick someone else, like Vilkas for the next level up, and train Two Handed five times (even if you don't intend to use that type of weapon). It also helps that on the higher pickpocket levels, you'll need to successfully pickpocket twice to level up pickpocketing if you're pickpocketing smaller amounts of gold.

The general rule of thumb when trying to prevent over-training is to train the lowest skill level from the available choices. No matter what race you pick, there should be at least one skill choice available that's at 15, and that's the one you should train first. This might seem like a small point, as the bulk of the experience gain you get from pickpocket training comes from pickpocket - not the actual skill you're training. But remember that character experience awarded is equal to the level of the skill that increases. So raising a skill from 15 to 16 gives your character 16 experience points, whereas raising a skill from 45 to 46 gives 46 experience points. So training from level 45-50 offers 150 MORE experience points as compared to training levels 15-20. And in the early levels those 150 experience points might make the difference of not over leveling.

Yeah, the increase in sale price of iron, steel, elven, and dwarven items is LESS than what you'll pay for the ingot to improve them. (Note: this is not true for magical versions of these items. Improving a magical piece of equipment is almost always worth it. So if you plan on enchanting that steel dagger, it's OK to go and improve it first - although I don't know if the net gain is greater than just enchanting that iron dagger.)

I tested this with my last character. On the heavy armor side, assuming you have the relevant perk, orcish and everything higher gives a positive return on investment, and on the light side, it's advanced on up. Once you get to ebony, improving those items (again, with the perk) can close to double the value of the item. But jewelry is absolutely the best option for improving your smithing skill until you get the perks to improve the better weapons and armor.

Finally, there is a trainer for every single skill in the game, most of which are available from just visiting the towns of Whiterun, Riften, and Winterhold.

Whiterun - All six of the warrior skills has a companion that will train it.

Aela - Archery (although you'll use Faendal prior to level 50)
Njada - Block
Althis - One Handed
Vilkas - Two Handed
Farkas - Heavy Armor
Eorlund - Smithing (although you should NEVER train smithing)

Also Danica, usually found by the tree outside the temple trains restoration, and she can be worked into your training network if you risk leveling too fast.

Arcadia can train alchemy, but like smithing, you should never train it.

Winterhold - All six of the mage skills can be trained here:

Tolfdir - Alteration
Phinis - Conjuration
Faralda - Destruction
Drevis - Illusion
Colette - Restoration
Sergius - Enchanting (again, don't level crafting skills)

Riften - Four of the five thief skills (you'll never train alchemy) can be trained here:

Vex - Lockpicking
Delvin - Sneak
Vipir - Pickpocket (not that you'd EVER train pickpocket)
Grelka - Light Armor (she's in the Riften marketplace, not the thieves guild.)

So the only one not covered is Speech, and there's an easy option there too. Ogmund in Markarth is the Bard at the inn, right in front of you after you arrive in town.

Some other potentially useful advice - take a carriage to Riften as soon as you get to the Whiterun stables, so you can join the Thieves Guild, and get the boots that improve your pickpocket chances. Trust me, the little bit of extra time you'll spend joining the Thieves Guild you'll more than make up for with far fewer re-loads from failed pickpocket attempts.

EDIT: And you'll never run out of things to train for free if you are only interested in training things up to level 50. Discounting the 3 crafting skills, as well as pickpocket, sneak, and lockpicking which are easy enough to level up to 50 on your own, there's still 12 skills, most of which start at skill level 15. Even if you pick a race that only specializes in those skills (like an agronian who has specialties in those particular skills and has 15 in just about all the ones you would train), you're looking at about 70 levels worth of training for the skills up to skill level 50 Granted you'll level up some on your own through use, but there's no way you should run out of free training options prior to character level 50. And you'll eventually reach a point where you'll have enough excess cash to pay for your training.

 

Further notes from playtesting...

The pickpocket skill levels all too fast for you to be able to do much of anything else involving potential skill gains until you've maxed it. Even up to and including having to throttle the level gains by training new, fresh low-level skills instead of pushing ahead with just one all the way to 50 so that you actually manage to squeeze 5 training sessions per level without overleveling, just as Aldeth noted. As a very last resort, you might consider NOT pickpocketing your gold back for a few trained levels and come back for the gold once you've maxed pickpocket elsewhere first.

This kinda removes the connection between pickpocket leveling and doing the crafting routine, to the point of making them at best consecutive events. However, there are some very good reasons in why you would actually WANT to have a lengthy pause in between, rather than doing both end to end.

1) You WILL run out of skills you actually WANT to train early on. Sure, you want your main early damage skill and especially Speech to 50 ASAP, right after you're done with Faendal and Archery since you HAVE to do it with him or pretty much forfeit at least a couple level's worth of training to get to Whiterun. In the specific case of having Destruction as your early dps skill, remember that while you don't get much from the skill itself (just a piddly mana cost reduction), you do need a decent skill level to unlock some of the key feats, most notably Impact at skill level 40 if you actually aim to kill something with it. After that, you pretty much only have those never-to-be-used skills that you can get to 50 now, but those bring no advantage to your early game - quite the opposite in fact due to you only getting to meet tougher opponents. Fine if you can handle the extra challenge, but buyer beware!

2) Any skill in the 15-50 range is best trained yourself, as long as you consider those skills as part of your build. It goes fast and saves you ginormous amounts of training points you could be using pushing the slowest levelers from the longwinded 60s and 70s to 90 later on. You can snipe the easy sub-50 pickpocket training sessions in the meanwhile so you don't even need gazillion gold pieces from crafting to be able to keep the training going on as you go.

3) It takes a whole lot of time to gather a large enough stockpile of Iron Ore (read: 1000+) since no merchant in game carries huge stacks of it. Since you pretty much want to buy a house as soon as you can afford it anyway, you don't even have to carry it around weighing you down. The more meaningful stuff you can do while racking up the city visit count to the required 100++ to be able to buy a large enough stockpile, the better IMHO. Also, actually transmuting it all to Gold takes no small amount of time/magicka, adding to the "in the meanwhile" part while strolling the city streets. (Of course you could just buy all Iron and Leather from every Blacksmith you come across and turn them into Leather Bracers and Iron Daggers, but that way you will actually LOSE money at every step as you can't possibly get enough soul gems to enchant them all.)

4) It can be challenging enough to tackle the level 20+ mobs the game throws at you after your initial pickpocket training, since you are (per definition) at best mediocre in your main dps skill and quite likely total newbie in your armor skills (as they're so easy to level on your own so why waste training points on them). Trying the same against level 40+ mobs after maxing all three trade skills and gaining a whole slew of other, just as irrelevant skills in their 50s is nothing short of suicide. Which you need to tackle by creating a set of ultimate items that remove any incentive whatsoever in trying to find better loot from mobs or quests, creating a really nasty Catch 22 situation in terms of game satisfaction.

5) Pickpocket training gives you instant access to all the early perk points you're ever going to need, no matter which character build you're trying, including Gimpus and FMT. Even more so if you don't have the instant push to pour them all into Alchemy and Enchanting as you can do those whenever it suits you.

---------- Added 2 hours, 22 minutes and 6 seconds later... ----------

Conclusions:
My playtest clearly showed that you only need an extremely small nest egg to start the process, to the point of being able to afford it pretty much straight out of Helgen. Just Alchemy alone makes it possible to buy all the ingredients you need to get going with both Smithing AND Enchanting as long as you keep it to Iron Ore and Petty Stones, and pretty much anything goes as soon as you can get your hands on Banish enchant. So the only reason to NOT have maxed trade skills as soon as you get to Whiterun is laziness.. or any number of RP reasons ranging from being able to enjoy the thrill of FINDING your stuff as loot to not enjoying being a literal demigod straight away.

Also, the level 20+ mobs you meet after just the pickpocket train routine feel like a nice balance between giving enough "kill exp" to put your dps skill(s) on a fast lane from the word go while still not being one-shotting nightmares, but hitting hard enough to turbo boost your armor skills into meaningful figures in no time at all.

And no, blindly following this guide to the letter is probably NOT a good way of actually enjoying the game. It does get repetitive whether you do it straight away or later on when you need the money for those extremely expensive training sessions, so in terms of your own enjoyment, better to sprinkle it around the best you can.

 

And even then it's tough. Like I said, the toughest part is around level 15. When you start raising your pickpocket skill in the 60s and higher. In the beginning, when you're only gaining 20 somthing experience points towards your next level from pickpocket, and the same from the skill you're training, it's not too bad. It's all that pickpocket experience that causes you to over-level.

Of course, if you don't want to come back much later to pickpocket back you gold (and keep in mind that coming back later means you may not have the early cash flow to do all that other training if you're leaving 300-500 gold at each trainer), you can at times settle for 4 training sessions on a given level. I had to do that a few times. Since you save after each training session, if you find out you gained two levels, simply reload and level up after the 4th training session, and proceed from there. Losing one training opportunity is certainly preferable to missing out on the whole 5.

Oh, most definitely. I pointed this out in the Gimpus guide. You actually have to delay your work on your crafting skills early on. You're already earning more experience than what you need to get to the next level simply by training. If you go and then heap crafting experience on top of it, you're going to be blowing WAAAAY past the experience point cap for the next level.

However, that's not to say that you can't train and craft at the same time. You generally break free of the training/level loop when you hit about level 22 or so. It's at that point that you start crafting. You craft enough to hit the next level, then train 5 times, craft again for a bit, train 5 more times. That process can be continued virtually indefinitely - at least until you finish off your crafting skills, which will take a while.

Well, there's a difference between running out of skills that you really want, and running out of skills that you really need. You never want to willfully pass on a training session, as there's always SOMETHING that you can train. Assuming you got Speech to 50 very early, then every other skill in the game can be trained at Winterhold, Riften, or Whiterun. In fact, training a skill that you will never use (and thus by definition don't need) might be the optimal decision at this point. Experience is experience, and training stuff you won't use yourself is the only way those skills will EVER level. So you never run out of stuff you'd want to train.

One can argue that you don't necessarily need to train a bunch of skills past 50 at all. Most skills obtain a functional level with perks invested at 50. All of the warrior skills can give you 3 points in overdraw/armsman/barbarian, as well as a few bonus perks that make you at least capable in combat. Same thing goes with many of the casting skills. While not optimal, you can get by and actually kill stuff if you have a 50 skill and have perks invested (except Destruction, which sucks).

OTOH, you'll NEVER run out of skills to train that you don't intend to use much, if at all. Most of your skills start at 15, meaning you need a full 7 levels worth of training to get them to 50. And there are several such skills with any build. At a minimum, there is one handed versus two handed and light versus heavy armor. So even training something you'll never use is well worth it.

Why in the world would you stockpile iron? In the early going, you can literally have dozens of iron ore in your inventory without running out of space. You can get to level 20-something with just three or four stops at cities, and at that point, you've only bought about 20 units of ore. After that point, you get out of the endless loop and would want to start ctafting, so why would you NOT start to transmute the stuff and use it for smithing?

OK, a couple of points. If you actually intend to pick up perks in one of the armor skills (as you do in your build), then I think training them early on makes some sense. While the armor skills are suboptimal choices to train late in the game, it will take you forever to actually get them all the way to 100 if you never train them and only start to use them after you're level 40 - or whatever.

Also, I don't see why waiting until you're level 40 and have maxed all the trade skills is suicide. Per definition, you've been training SOMETHING all those extra levels, and why would you not gear up with better equipment after maxing the trade skills - wasn't that one of two purposes of leveling them to begin with? (With the other purpose being raising money for training.)

Well, you can't pour all the early ones into the crafting skills, as you can't work on crafting in the early going. At best you'll be able to get two in Enchanter, two in Alchemist, and one in steel smithing until you're well into the 20-something in levels.

I'd put it this way - it's terrible to do on your first play of the game. If you already have explored the game, doing it on a subsequent playthrough means if you're willing to put in a few hours of development time on your character, you can set off for the dragonstone at level 40+ without having killed anything since leaving Helgen. (And yes, Bleak Falls Barrow is a leveled area, so if you do that, you'll be running into Draugr Deathlords in what would be your first dungeon.)

 

True, but there's so much you could do at that point rather than going into the craft-everything-to-max routine straight away. Like, you know, taking your sweet time to actually play the game while the free training period with sub-50 skills still lasts? Especially since you just endured through a longdrawn clickfest standing beside a handfull of trainers?

True as well, but I'm talking in a larger perspective. Would you rather use your training points RIGHT NOW to boost a whole lot of skills up to 50 when you could be using them to push those same skills through the really slow 60s, 70s and 80s after you trained them to 50 yourself first? Pickpocket training alone will see you to 50 in Speech, Archery and a dps skill of your choice plus a few stray points for whatever else. The skills you never use nor need can wait to get to 90 just as long as it takes, there's no rush to level them at any point.

Yes you do, if you intend to reach the upper 70s in character level without resorting to powerleveling exploits and/or extremely prolonged playthroughs. But in the sense of NEEDING those skills (or levels for that matter), you're right.

Not only worth it, but the very reason to think ahead where you want to use those training points. Assuming, again, you actually care about reaching clvl 70+. Seems like we're talking about two different things here.

Oh, stockpiling was a bad word choice. I mean you're going to want to go through such huge amounts during your playthrough as a whole and transmute it as you go. Only if you decide to postpone leveling your smithing AND want to do it as economically as possible should you actually consider gathering such a pile.. and still not as Iron but as ready-transmuted Gold waiting for that infamous rainy day when you boost your smithing to 100 in one fell swoop. Divided only by the occasional training session in between crafting the hundreds of Gold Rings, of course.

Wrong, actually. The tougher the monsters you meet, the faster you're going to take damage and the faster your armor skills are going to level. By the time you're up against Mammoth-level mobs, you only need to fight a few of them to zip past the first 20, 30 or even 50 skill levels so it's not really something you ought to be devoting training points to, neither in the beginning, in the middle nor in the end. Edit: For this very reason, it's also possible to skip perks in armor skills altogether and craft your ultimate gear as a mix of heavy and light armor. That way you get both armor skills (and the leveling exp) for the price of one.

You missed the point. By having absolutely nothing in the way of actual dps and/or survival skills trained yourself on your way to clvl 40+ FORCES you to craft ultimate gear just to survive the onslaught, making any sort of adventuring past that point lose a big part of its appeal since loot becomes just cash. Unless, of course, you wasted a whole lot of training points on the very same dps/survival skills you were going to train yourself but couldn't since the opposition was so tough?

Yeah, if this is your first playthrough, I'd steer clear of anything like this.

If all you want is a good level 40+ headstart with around 200 skill points' worth of skills you never even laid your fingers on so far AND god mode gear pretty much straight out of Helgen, by all means.

 

Well yes, but I'm only pointing out that since you're never using them, they can only be leveled by training, and so train them now, or train them later. You cannot put off leveling indefinitely - or risk missing a training session - and I'd rather pick something I don't necessarily need right now, rather than risk missing out on the training opportunity. Sure, the funds are easy enough to raise through alchemy, but you might just earn another level while making the potions.

I'm saying you don't need to train much past 50 for many skills. You pick two or three that you really need. Once you get them to a point where they are good enough to use effectively, then you'll level them by using them. For example, I stopped training one-handed on my last character when I got to about level 60. At that point he was doing enough damage with his sword that he was earning levels at a decent rate. It was at that point I switched over to Alteration to get magic resistance.

Or perhaps saying the same thing, but employing different philosophies.

Armor (heavy or light) is a low-priority training skill for me in all of my builds. I agree with what you're saying - I even advocated for that very philosophy in the last Gimpus guide. All I'm saying is if picking up armor perks is a major consideration for your character, then I can see some sense in considering training armor at some point. If you aren't investing ANY perks in light or heavy armor, then indeed you just get the experience through wear and tear.

 

Phew, took a while to actually playtest this.. not to mention it was pretty repetitive to boot. But at least I don't have to pay attention to my trade skills training from now on.

My Female Altmer FMT Assassin, Ashlee Bane, has done a grand total of 3 quests now - Helgen, intro quest to gain access to the mage college and I managed to get a bounty quest to Halted Stream Camp when I visited it. She's level 48, maxed in all three trade skills and Pickpocket, almost 80 in Speech and trained to 50 in Two-handed & Block & Archery and 60+ in both Conjuration and Destruction. I ended up with "only" 180k gold surplus as I leveled Smithing with a whole lot of other crafts besides just jewelry, but on the other hand I found both Fortify Barter and Banish enchants fairly early. I've also bought all Soul Stones up to Common to level Enchanting faster, and ended up with a surplus of 60 filled Grand Stones as well. Also, I have Alchemy materials for at least 100k worth of potions just collecting dust in my pocket at the moment.

Next stop: Bleak Falls Barrow to get the Dragon Stone and get 'em lizards roaming the skies. Ashlee's prepared for them now.

If you actually powerlevel your trade skills with nothing but store-bought materials traveling from city to city, the Warrior stone is my recommended pick. That way you don't have to go through a metric ton of low-level Smithing ingredients straight from the merchant into crafting and back just to keep up with the two others. Or you still do, but not quite as much. Especially Soul Stones are plentiful once you include mage college into your city rotation - every trainer there sells a full payload of soul gems.

 

Some minor tweaks from further playtesting.

Item improvement for the sole purpose of increasing the value of items is NOT something you should be using precious perk points for. Stick to your plan, and remember that smithing improvement between something you have the perk for vs everything else far surpass any difference in base materials. Value improvements, however, only differ by a little. The standard 100 smithing together with +100% smithing apparel doubles the base value of items without perk, but only triples the value if you also have the perk. Yes, that's a +50% difference, but unless you're improving Ebony-level items, the difference of having "only" Paralyze on your weapons rather than Banish is much bigger difference already.

In terms of Smithing leveling, crafting the most expensive thing you can isn't worthwhile if you only craft it, but once you consider you can more than double the exp gain with just one extra ingot, it's still a good idea to do it. In other words, Steel Armor is most likely the best out of Steel items since the most expensive weapon (Warhammer) isn't worth even half as much. If you go Heavy armors side on the Smithing tree, Dwarven Warhammer is the best choice - it only takes 2 of the expensive Dwarven ingots rather than 3 you need for the Armor and you can enchant it for profit. On the Light side, Elven Warhammer is the obvious best value, although Elven Bow gets an honorary mention for being so much lighter and not requiring Iron or Leather to craft. If you're still stuck at Iron or just want to utilize the multitude of Ingots you can find/buy for it, Banded Iron armor is by far the best bang for the buck already in terms of straigh value vs raw materials required, and only becomes better once improved. The only advantage Iron daggers has is the fact that you can create and possibly even carry hundreds of them with ease, putting the flat exp bonus of "gratz, you just created something" into best use.

Also, I'd rather recommend having the Mage stone active all the way until you have 100 in Enchanting, if you want to stick with just one for a while rather than switch for every step. That way you can get the best improvements to level both Alchemy and Smithing as fast as possible. If you also stockpile your resources for both, you can zoom past them with considerably less materials (compared to doing them as you go) by getting the Thief/Warrior stone, getting Well Rested bonus and having the newly created set of +100% to both boosting it all up.

 

And that's why I still will craft iron daggers. Especially if I need to raise cash in a hurry to train. (Not necessarily needing the money to pay for the training - that typically isn't a problem - but bringing 20,000 gold worth of stuff with me to the trainer to get the money I spent back.) Armors are great and all, but the high-end value enchantments are on weapons, and, as you said, you can easily carry 20 banish iron daggers with you to Winterhold to pay for your training, but you can't carry 20 banish war hammers or enchanted sets of steel armor with you.

To be a bit more precise, I should really say that I craft a lot of daggers of all types. It's not at all unusual for me to go to a blacksmith, and purchase all of the materials for which I have perks for, and then start crafting, starting with the most expensive materials first. Invariably, you end up with a LOT of spare iron ingots, unless you had an uncharacteristically high number of dwarven, elven, steel, and/or oricholcum ingots, where all recipes include the use of an iron ingot. So I'll make some iron daggers.

 

Yeah, the best thing an Iron Dagger has is its low weight. Rather than thinking them as weapons, consider them portable carriers for those extremely valuable enchants you're making and it makes much more sense to craft them in the first place.