The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim

Same, I'm a wood elf also, but it just doesn't feel right for some reason. Unlike in Obvlivion, where no matter what race I was it all felt the same for the most part.

I'm an imperial but I don't really feel out of place or anything. I imagine its all about finding your niche in society. Like those subjugated dark elves in windhelm.

Woot, Destruction level 40 now.
If only I could find some non-novice spells I'd be rockin.

Well it's interesting because they give you the choice of following the Imperials or Rebels despite your position of nearly being decapitated by the Imperials to begin with. Unless you're a total nationalist at heart and follow the background of High Elves or Imperials to heart, it seems most fitting to the story to be a Nord Rebel with axe in hand. However, no doubt the whole war is merely a petty power struggle in comparison to the arrival of dragons.

yay lockpicking 75 :D

Because of (accidentally and finding out too late) following the Imperial supporter when escaping decapitation, I have been handed very many things on behalf of the Imperials. My character is also of the type. I'm just going to side with them and any time I can make good for myself helping the Stormcloaks without shedding Imperial blood I'll take advantage of that as well.

I think the woman outside the mages college sells a few.

Yeah, that place seems to be the only way to really advance as a mage build. Everything else just appears to be happenstance on whether it benefits you as a mage. Scrolls and armor have all been lucky purchases and drops from ransacking random caves and whatnot.

There should be four people of all 4 magic schools inside the school selling spells for their field.

Question..

I've got the quest flagged to join both the legion and the stormcloaks.. Can I actually join both? Or can I only pick one?

only one i think.
joining the stormcloaks myself

In all likelihood, only one at a time. I'm sure you'll eventually be given the option to disband, but this will greatly affect who becomes hostile towards you once you join, and who will give you a place to stay and gifts to bear.

I did the Missing In Action quest that involved freeing a Gray-Mane prisoner way up in Northwatch. I haven't joined any side yet so the guards nearby were fairly passive until I tried sneaking in.

I saw a rebel being taken by some guards, he asked me to free him.
fuk that, learned to mind my business.

ran into another prisoner who gave me a helm for safe keeping and ran way. a ranger followed him and asked where he was. I pointed at him and walked off.
seriously, these ppl have trusting issues :/

Lol, that same thing happened to me but a little differently.

Prisoner runs up to me, says something but gets immediately mauled by the snow sabre following him. I'm all like awwww ***, but thanks to the helm he gave me:

"You are carrying too much weight to run to do *** anything."

Needless to say I had to reload.

Losing 10-15min of gameplay (potentially 30 if you get jipped on auto-save) I feel is much, much better than losing 10% of your lv XP and being warped to your most recent town room.

Thought I'd post this here, as it's still relevant to most games of this type.

If only you had an option to 'throw' in a general direction as opposed to 'drop'. I'd just baseball toss that heavy object making me too heavy to run all the way to Whiterun if necessary.

Is it me, or are there just not enough places that actually buy the crap you want to get rid of? I've got like 30 lbs. in expensive jewelry and such that no merchant will even put in the list to buy. Not earmarked as stolen either.

I notice aside from being based on speech skill, merchants of the relevant item type give more gold for items that support their business. A lot of the armor and weapons I pick up from dead bandits sell a bit more to weapon and armor shops than it would to a general trader.
My issue is there simply aren't many general stores that can buy the random nicknacks that I have, but are still rather valuable.

Okay last question for now >.>
Where the heck can I find an enchanting table? Every one happened to be sheer chance in stumbling upon a Necromancer den.
It's a good skill to take up, and I'm lugging around all these heavy enchanted weapons and armor I need to disenchant and it's becoming quite the burden.

There's one in the Dragonreach.

Not sure how far in the game you are (i'm not very far) But there is a cabin kinda west/northwest of Riverwood, on the opposite side of the river. And old lady lives there, (Anise maybe? or something like that) She has one in the basement.

Snapleg Cave. Beware the Hagraven

Riften inside the main hall just to the left of the Jarl.

so i was attacked by 2 assassins today by decree of the leader of the dark brotherhood.
and i went to find out about it on the wiki, and it seems that it was brought on by me helping cicero earlier near whiterun. it says that she's highly suspicious of cicero and doesnt like him

For people playing on PC, I have a few tweaks to the .ini and you launcher+GPU driver settings that will increase your performance and graphics at the same time.

First off, Skyrim's AA and Anisotropic Filtering are absolutely useless. Disable Antialiasing and Anisotropic Filtering entirely in the Skyrim Launcher. Now you have two options for AA:

1) Enable Skyrim's FXAA. This will remove all jaggies and give you a crisp look to the game, and will have little to no detriment on your performance at all.

2) Enable Skyrim's regular AA to 2x. Next, open up your GPU's driver control panel and edit Skyrim's settings; adjust it so that it enhances or overrides the application's settings, (I don't use ATI, so I don't know if the option to override exists for you, I know it does not for nVidia. If you can override application settings, then you can remove Skyrim's AA2x), and set the AA to whatever you want.

For Anisotropic Filtering, set your GPU drivers to 16x Anisotropic for Skyrim.

Next, shadows. The shadows are very poor in Skyrim from what I suspect to be either a bug or poor coding. Right now, shadows use only two cascades and appear to be "stretched" over a shadow map, which causes them to look very jaggy and even worse when they're in motion (from the sun moving). There are a couple of things that you can do:

1) Open your SkyrimPrefs.ini (My Documents -> My Games -> Skyrim). Make a backup of this file. Now open it up and look for "fInteriorShadowDistance" and "fShadowDistance". Depending on your settings, these values will differ. Essentially, the higher they are, the more jaggy the shadows will be and the further away you will be able to see them. You can choose to lower the settings to, say, fInteriorShadowDistance=1000, fShadowDistance=2000 for very clean, crisp shadows that you can only see 30-40 feet away, or you can keep the settings higher, fInteriorShadowDistance=4000, fShadowDistance=8000 for shadows that are jaggy but you can see them very far away. The choice is yours.

2) Look for bTreesReceiveShadows and bDrawLandShadows. The default value should be 0, change each of these to a 1. These settings control trees and rocks in the environment drawing shadows for leaves and other parts. Enabling them is a minor performance hit that makes the environment look absolutely stunning.

3) In your Skyrim launcher, change your Shadow Detail setting from "Ultra" to "High" if you're on Ultra settings. The difference is incredibly minimal, and is worth a 50~70% performance increase.

A few other minor tweaks that you can make to your .ini file:

1) Add the following to the bottom of your file,

fBlockLoadDistanceLow=50000.0000
fBlockLoadDistance=125000.0000
fHighBlockLoadDistanceLow=20000.0000


bUseWaterReflectionBlur=1
bReflectExplosions=1
iWaterBlurAmount=4
bAutoWaterSilhouetteReflections=0
bForceHighDetailReflections=1


The former will improve distant land and the latter will improve water. Neither are a large FPS hit.

2) Look for "bMouseAcceleration" and change the 1 to 0. This will remove any sort of mouse lag you may have. You'll want to increase your mouse sensitivity in-game after this tweak.

3) Look for "uiMaxSkinnedTreesToRender" and change the 20 to 50. This will improve texture rendering.

4) Look for "iShadowFilter" and change it to 3. This will help with shadow issues, but will not remove the issues by any stretch of the imagination.

5) Look for "iBlurDeferredShadowMask" and change the setting to 1. This will improve the sharpness of your shadows and will not have any effect on FPS. Can be set from 1-4 to adjust sharpness based on personal tastes.

6) Look for "fTreesMidLODSwitchDist" and change it to 10000. This improves tree LOD, or how far away you can see trees.

7) Look for "fGrassMinStartFadeDistance" and change it to anything between 1 and 400. This setting affects how far away you'll see grass, and is very GPU intensive.

8) Look for "bTransparencyMultisampling" and change the 0 to a 1 to enable transparency multisampling. Alternatively, you can enable this using your GPU's driver control panel.

9) Look for "iWaterMultiSamples" and change it from 1 to 4. 4 is the most GPU intensive, 1 is the least. This setting affects water multisampling and slightly increases the visuals of water. Water is already beautiful in Skyrim, so this is entirely optional.

10) Look for "iWaterReflectHeight" and "iWaterReflectWidth" and change them both to 1024. This will double the resolution of reflections in water. You may lower this in order to increase performance. Somewhat GPU intensive.

Finally, you may change your FoV to be more suitable for a PC game rather than a console game. Add the following to your Skyrim.ini file (My Documents -> My Games -> Skyrim):

fDefault1stPersonFOV=120.0000
fDefaultWorldFOV=90.0000
fDefaultFOV=90.0000

You may change these values to whatever you wish. Skyrim's default FoV seems to be between 60 and 75. FoV increases how much you can see around you on the screen at any given time.



Hope this is helpful to some of you, experiment with the settings and change the values around until you find something you like.

some cheeky *** frost dragon jusr randomly appeared in Winterhold while i was trying to enter the college o.O, also had one appear and start attacking a giant camp when i exited a dungeon.

Can someone tell me what the hell "Soul Squeezer" is? The description doesn't make sense to me.. I get confused cuz it says Magicka, does that mean that it takes less gems to fill my depleted weapons?

They have this knack for showing up when you just don't want to deal with them.

Sweet just got Azura's star :O

Me vs. Elder dragon + frost dragon + dragon priest + 2 strong draugrs that can shout= epic fight.

Good thing I was able to summon 2 atronachs to help out D: had to keep running behind a wall to cure myself.

So what is basically the quickest way to skill up alchemy?