Whether you are starting for the first time, coming back after a long hiatus, or about to begin a fresh character, this guide aims to remind you of essential details that serve as a launching-pad for your adventure, and reminds you of certain “traps” and poor habits.
Contents
Five Minutes Of Planning
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Your character will look like this for the rest of the game. All of their shouts/grunts should not be too annoying. Helmets hide most of your work, but shape matters. Bretons, Nords, and Dark Elves stack up best against threats(especially at high levels) of Oblivion from racial traits/bonuses, Imperials and Orcs make excellent melee fighters which excel earlier on and can maintain an advantage with high Endurance, while the rest are perhaps best suited for RP funsies or optimizing sneak/marksman early. Gender traits are intuitive but not consistent per race, so some homework may be required if you really enjoy this planning phase; otherwise, that is all which matters to you at this point.
Five Minutes Of Setup
If you already have a base template at the exit of the sewers you will be loading from, skip this.
Proceed through the game after race/gender/appearance customization, failing to sneak, attack, or do anything to level up. Simply evade your foes on the way to the exit, picking up the rough leather/rusty iron etc. goods available to you – all of them. Manual save as you reach the exit of the sewers, as you are given an opportunity to re-create every aspect of your character through a confirmation menu on the door, instead of wasting time on the tutorial and skills you may not want to progress in for future characters at that point.
By skipping the battles and following the objective marker, you should be done with the tutorial stage and at the exit in five minutes at most.
Five Minutes Of Attributes
Each attribute gets it’s own mini-evaluation and summary:
- Strength will hardly improve your damage output early on – skill-ups and improvements to weapon class overshadow this attribute, and later on, enchantments become more or less required. However, it increases your total carry weight by a factor of 5. That then serves to unburden you, increasing your movement speed, so choose this as a complement to speed whenever possible, and due to the benefits a large carry capacity has in early stages of gameplay.
- Intelligence has two primary benefits, and is more important to a caster than Willpower until high levels. Regardless of specific math or chosen build, this should receive some attention in order to continuously cast Restoration spells, or if a mage, for all of its clear benefits. Magic in this game is busted.
- Willpower along with four other attributes factors in to your total fatigue, and increases magicka regen. If you’re not fond of magic and won’t need it to heal later on, do not level Willpower. If you’re aiming to maximize fatigue and magicka efficiency, you will need this to eventually be quite high. It’s not a priority stat.
- Agility is most important for not being staggered by literally everything that touches you. Playing a Breton/Orc male and getting stunlocked by Clanfear is not a good feeling, so definitely dupe yourself some lockpicks whenever possible, sneak around often, etc. to supplement this stat.
- Speed is speed. High speed is less time in-between stuff happening. Low speed is being unable to evade enemies and often getting swallowed or forced to heal more often. Speed is important. Speed is sad when you travel long distances with your weapon equipped and unsheathed, so make speed happy by putting it away. No matter the build, speed will pay dividends.
- Endurance is likely the highest priority for your character. Neglecting this has repercussions in providing less total HP at a given level vs. a character focusing on this as early as possible. You may want to optimize this stat within creation for this reason, and focus on it from the outset with heavy armor, armorer, and/or block regardless of what you’re building towards.
- Personality is largely unnecessary. Fame and relevant skills are more impactful in general, but high personality can lead to trivializing disposition later on, avoiding conflict/minigames outright. Not a priority.
- Luck only ever improves by 1 per level, and doesn’t have as much of an impact on gameplay as you’d imagine. Fortify with spells/potions, and save your points, since it really just acts as a supplement to Strength/Agility’s damage bonuses, which are themselves quite puny. Has minor and vague other benefits which, even with hundreds of Luck, don’t impact gameplay meaningfully.
Five Minutes Of Major / Minor Balancing
Your results will typically be unique to your playstyle, and not be so strictly a factor of how efficient your choices here are.
Placing skills you cannot avoid leveling into the Major category will nearly always impede “efficient leveling” procedures. They will receive a boost to leveling rate as Major skills, and if your class has “specialty” for it(Combat, Magic, Stealth), so it may be optimal to simply throw everything you don’t need into your custom class to inhibit unwanted level-ups.
Minor skills out of your specialty take ages to grind, usually, but fortunately skills like Light/Heavy Armor, Block, Armorer, Alchemy, Sneak, Speechcraft, and Security have means to very quickly gain “pips” of progress. These are fine as minor skills, and as major skills can be useful for quickly inducing a level-up.
Any of the magic schools, particularly Restoration, are limited by how quickly the effect can be applied to an entity, in other words, how quickly you can cast a spell that impacts a creature/NPC/self. Casting while holding block and timing your cast to the moment your hands/weapon/shield raises up allows the most rapid follow-ups, and spell-creation can customize it to be even more convenient for you. Some advance much faster than others, Conjuration and Alteration in particular, while Restoration seems to advance at a similar rate to Mercantile.
Mercantile, Marksman, and Sneak often don’t get any use depending on your playstyle, so consider these for Major skills.
If melee, any skills you don’t prefer should be Major. If you use Blade often, it should remain minor. If you will use Heavy Armor, set Light as a Major.
Alchemy as a major skill is a difficult choice, as it means maxing out the skill requires efficient leveling in-tandem, or else your level-ups will largely lack the bonuses inferred from skill progress during that level. This also means you won’t be making hyper-busted potions at early levels nor able to boost Intelligence quickly(as the other two skills are Mysticism and Conjuration) through its skill ups unless this is the sole source of experience within that level.
Five Minutes Out Of The Sewers
Dispose of the gear you won’t be taking with you, based on your setup. Head to Vilverin right across the water and memorize its layout; the contents of this dungeon are enough to carry you a great distance, with or without exploits.
This is a fairly simple, moderate-length dungeon that challenges your class/creation as fast as possible in as realistic a setting available at this point. You will notice if you are too slow, what you should not be hauling, and what it feels like to adventure at Level 1. Carry a torch or have illusion as a major skill for a light spell to immerse yourself in the dungeon crawl.
There’s enough low-weight loot here to net you enough gold for your first trip into a market to be fruitful. Reminder that there are many more adventures like this one in the future, and eventually you will not need to loot for selling, instead you’ll be looting/hauling useful equipment with other purposes.
If you know the layout and what you’re looking to grab, and ignore combat for now, this is a five minute escapade.
Five Minutes Of Important Reminders
Sell often, to clear your inventory. If you aren’t using it but don’t want to sell it, dump it in a non-respawning container. The “auto-update leveled items” mod will legitimize this strategy of holding onto certain loot until later on when it is a good version, and not punish you for receiving rewards too early.
You can bounce around with your weapon out to “maximize” your Athletics as relatively soon as possible, since you will crawl at a snails pace anywhere you go, thus artificially prolonging your eventual suffering for having chosen to live like this. You can also unequip armor/weapons to vastly improve the efficiency of the time you’re spending playing, to actually get to locations faster and play the game.
Armor, at the end of the day, is more than a speed encumbrance, but a mental one as well. Do not depend on it too much, as it is easy to level it up at rapid pace later on, and barely reduces incoming damage at early levels/classes. You also must repair it often to maintain effectiveness, meaning Repair Hammer economy/burden becomes relevant. Sneaking is basically impossible until your armor becomes weightless when worn at the respective perk levels.
Weightless clothing items and general nudity(aside from jewelry) should be standard early on if you plan to get things done at a brisk pace. The difference between a character with no regard to their movement speed and one that optimizes it is staggering; it takes several minutes to navigate a city vs a single minute to pop in and out of numerous buildings. Any location they can’t fast travel to is a guaranteed hour+ of fighting every mudcrab/wolf/bear in Cyrodiil on the way to a cave with more mudcrabs/wolves/bears.
Heavy Armor doesn’t need to be your character’s identity. It’s just a skill. Use it like a skill, when it is relevant.
Conclusion
Anything I’ve not touched on is your responsibility to decide. These are informed suggestions that guide your decisions, which ultimately depend on what your plans are.
I often notice in videos from popular(?) channels that they don’t mind moving very…. very…. slowly… everywhere, but they absolutely know every exploit under the sun. They will complain about how long things take to do and how they don’t feel worth doing – It’s a no-brainer why they feel this way. Running for 2 minutes from one chest to another within a dungeon only to find 2-7 gold in each is naturally depressing. If that same run takes about 10 seconds, owing to spells, potions, and being properly outfitted for movement, I’d say it’s no big deal to find nothing of interest, and onto the next part of the adventure.
Focusing too much on exploits and ignoring how base functions of the game work is not recommended. Exploits ought to aid in saving time, not simply defeat the purpose to “playing well.” Use them to save real time and remember what you can do outside of exploits as well, because that’s what this is all about. Playing a game. Anyone can create some busted spell/poison to one shot everything at max difficulty, but not everyone can enjoy the journey to that point. Speeding up is the most natural way to improve efficiency of everything you do in the game, period, so to ignore this is to not understand how to approach this game or any open-world game, for that matter.
If you can’t get to places quickly, you will often feel compelled to not even bother. If it’s a side-quest, you can guarantee it will remain unfinished until it’s all that’s left for completion. You can also forget uncovering the map’s locations efficiently, thereby restricting fast travel convenience. SPEED!
Hence, the Five-Minute Guide. It probably took more than five minutes to get through, but each segment should only take about five minutes of your day to read and process, at most. You have much homework to do as far as technical details are concerned, but if those bore you, this is truly good-enough to not feel crippled by level 15, due to the way difficulty creeps.
Alternatively, you can rely entirely on exploits and minimizing the difficulty with the slider in the options, or finding your fun in other realms of the game’s construction, such as creating mods for others to enjoy, or straight up breaking the game in unique ways. I find that the best mods in existence come from people who want to love Elder Scrolls, but Elder Scrolls is all teeth and snarls unless coddled and given special considerations.
The mods and guides floating around today are representative of the collective coddling and special care given by fans of the game. It is more playable with the mod list at the beginning of the guide than it has any right to be, considering its age, but those mods have continuously been updated nonetheless.
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