What are your "Skill Increase" methods? Looking for tips!

[mruncreated]

A kind of "How to Power Level Each Skill In The Game" guide... except it's more like a list of notes from my moldy brain.

I'm hoping others who know more than I do about this game (very likely all of you, here) will add their own tips? Asking for a friend, of course...

- Social/Language Skills -

Etiquette & Streetwise

Talk to any citizen of a town. The folks who walk about outside seem to work best for this, since people indoors (especially those in an inn) can sometimes just up and decide that they don't like you, and hence refuse to speak to you ever again (not sure why this happens: maybe it's reputation or something else?). People in interior locations can also dump a quest on you out of the blue when you speak to them, and it kind of messes with the flow of training up these skills.
Talk to the person. Choose "Blunt" to train Streetwise, and "Polite" to train Etiquette.
Ask "Where am I?" and "Any news?" and then click on "Goodbye" to end the conversation.
You can talk to the same person over and over, or find someone else walking around. But the higher each skill is, the more times you will have to do this. I simply save before I sleep for 8 hours in an inn to see if the skill goes up; if not, then I keep at it for a bit until it does.

- Physical Fitness Skills -

Climbing

This might be the easiest one of all. Just climb any wall and move up and down a bit. The higher the skill gets, the more you'll have to move around on a wall, but it seems the least troublesome to me of all the skills. Walls are plentiful in towns and dungeons.

Jumping

Just walk around hitting the space bar. It's also easy to count your jumps.

Running

Run around in town like a crazy person.
I actually hate this one. Even after approaching 25 skill, this one seems to require me to drain my entire stamina bar for one skill increase. The other physical skills don't take nearly as much effort for some reason. Just don't do this in a dungeon or you will pass out from exhaustion and die.

Swimming

Swim in a waist-deep puddle. Not all towns have a waist-deep puddle, though, which can make swimming in towns more cumbersome than the others. The bigger towns usually have them. I haven't seen a walled-in town that didn't have at least one of these. Once you have swam in a few of them you will learn to recognize what to look for. Some puddles just make splash noises when you walk over them, but you will sink down to your chest in others...

- Thieving Skills -

Lockpicking

At night in a town, when everyone is sleeping and no one is walking around outside, press F1 and try to unlock every door you see. Make a separate save in case the guards come... though personally I haven't seen this happen yet.

Pickpocket

This one is hell in a town. You will definitely need to save before you make each attempt. If the guards come, reload or run like heck...
I know you can also practice this on humanoid enemies, like thieves, bards, nightblades, etc. I just don't know a place where you will run into these enough to make it convenient.
Most people have told me that this skill is pretty much worthless anyway. It certainly doesn't seem like it's worth the trouble.

[Ralzar]

Seeing as I play with travel mods, I handle training like this mostly after having rented a room for the evening. I talk to all the bar patrons, asking them about Any News. Jump a bit and climb a wall a bit (I imagine this like doing a workout routine before bed ).

For the rest of the skills I used to to stuff like you describe but it felt too game-y so I made the Skill Books mod. So what I do instead now is always bring along a book or two about skills I want to train. Then I read for a couple of hours before going to bed.


Oh yeah, and before I modded the combat system: to train weapons at high level I switched to a lower material weapon. Because with a, for example, daedric weapon fights were over so fast I barely got any training.

[billyloist]

That's a good topic! I've got some techniques I'm using in every playthrough to quickly gain levels as it really makes you powerful, and unlike Morrowind or Oblivion there's no drawbacks to it, you're not forced to train in a specific way in order to minmax.
First I'd recommend installing Viewable Skill Progress mod to have an idea how long you must train. It's indispensable, really.
Second, if you're using a gaming mouse, set up two buttons - one for sending right click and another to send left click in quick succession. This is good for spamming use, attack or spells.
Note that wearing skill-boosting enchanted items does not influence the speed of your training or even your ceiling, so you don't need to unequip those.

Spoiler!

Leveling magic skills is very easy. Just make a few cantrip spells and spam them whenever you have magicka in town. The slowest skills to raise here are Restoration and Thaumaturgy, they will be chugging along if they're not your main skills.
First cantrip spell should include Jumping or Water Breathing, Minimal Damage Health Spell and Light. This will go towards your Alteration, Destruction and Illusion. Make sure to cast this away from town folk because of the damage health spell which may target them up close.
Second cantrip spell should include Open, Free Action and Water Walking. This will level up your Mysticism, Restoration and Thaumaturgy.
You can mix and match all of these to choose skills you want to level up. Reminder that you want to make these spells as cheap as possible by increasing level scaling. The minimum amount of spell points a spell may consume when cast is 5.
I suppose this can be a bit more difficult if you have an Atronach-type disadvantage because you won't be able to regenerate your magick freely.

Raising combat stats can be very easy too. For maximum efficiency, find any ghost, and whack away with a disposable iron/steel weapon of your choice with the autoclicker (you need click to attack option for that). If you have Create spell and can use steel weapons, then it's even better because you can make a training sword any time you want. Plus, if you make yourself invisible with True Invisibility, you can also train Backstab. Your hit will count towards the skill progress, but you will do no damage because of their immunity. Therefore you have an immortal punching bag. Kill them afterwards to get your arrows back if you train Archery.
Training Backstab without True Invisibility and very high Stealth is almost impossible. Unless you manage to spin and stunlock your opponent, you're not going to have a good time. So getting that spell is essential. The training is pretty easy, though at high levels your punching bags will die in one-two hits, so you'll have to ask your new best friend Ghost to teach you again.
Critical Strike will level up naturally alongside your weapon skills, it requires a lot more investment though, so I don't think you should target it specifically.

Climbing, like you said, is easy. It levels up naturally when you explore dungeons, but you can speed up the process. While in any building, you can target a wall you can climb easily (usually taverns and Fighter's Guild have those), and just stick your head into the ceiling while holding forward. After a minute you should be done. The skill levels up as long as you hold any directional button, if you just hang on the wall it won't count.

Jumping is super easy. Stand in a doorway so you land faster, or stand on a chair with a sufficiently low ceiling and crouch jump. It'll be over in no time. Additionally you can bunnyhop everywhere like you said, classic TES gameplay right there (curse you Skyrim...).

Lockpicking is easy with the city walls. Just run around the town and click on every door once. Make sure you don't click on any door you've failed to open before because that might alert the guards. If you manage to open the door, exit, try to open that same door again, it still counts.

Pickpocket can be a pain. If you make sure to try and pickpocket every humanoid enemy you come across, you can make some progress, but it's still slow. You can travel to some backwater province and make your attempts with impunity there for a training session. Alternatively, I like to barge into the Daggerfall palace and pickpocket the guards there. They'll aggro, sure, but who cares? No one will blame you for anything. When you're done, re-enter the palace and repeat. Unfortunately Pickpocket is largely garbage, as you have more chances to pull random trash out of the pockets of your targets, and rarely some pocket change you can't even afford an inn room with.

Medical is ridiculously slow. I think the game expects you to rest after every single encounter, so the values are jacked up to 200 and more. That's the amount of hours you must sleep. To train it, I guess you'll need to sleep a few years away. Even on my level cap characters I never raised it beyond 40 naturally. Get Skill Books or ask trainers to assist you.

Running, Dodging and Stealth are skills that should be trained naturally. You can try holding your run key whenever you walk to speed up the process, have an enemy whack at you for Dodging, and Stealth, well, it's uhh... Get a trainer. Using a horse will impede your Running training, keep that in mind.

Mercantile only cares about the number of transactions you made. So make it a rule to never sell or buy in bulk. It's tedious, but gets the job done. Speaking of tedious, selling/buying one separate arrow is the best training strategy. Hold Ctrl to choose one item from the stack.

Swimming in outdoor puddles can sometimes raise your skill, but it's inconsistent and very slow. This skill is pretty much worthless imo, so I never target it much.

Racial speech skills are a pain without Archaeologists mod, as it decreases the training required. Get Skill Books or train them yourself. At high levels (30 is a good value already) + with Tongues spell, any dungeon becomes trivial because you can pacify enemies through walls (make sure you sheathed your weapon for a bonus), giving you a chance to strike first, which usually results in their swift and easy death.

Speech skills like Streetwise/Etiquette level up only once per conversation each, and ANY topic will do, no matter if it succeeded or not. I only figured this out recently myself, so you were right on the money there. I made an AHK script that does it automatically, just stand in front of the NPC, press space and wait for a bit. When you're done, press END. (note that this is for Uncanny Interface mod, I don't think vanilla buttons are located in the same spot).

To optimize the process, you can combine your training; For example run, jump and cast cantrips, or climb and cast cantrips.

[MrFlibble]

I've always felt that Daggerfall's skill system was designed so that skill advancement would occur as naturally as possible, so essentially you train your skills by playing the game, not going an extra mile to do odd stuff that feels out of character. So I generally try to pursue skill advancement so that it would be consistent with roleplaying the character, and try to avoid things like bunny-hopping, spamming questions at a single NPC, or pickpocketing enemies while fighting (yup, you can pickpocket anyone including animals in vanilla DF).

I do find it acceptable to rent a room and practice spells there to quickly regain magicka by resting. Selling items one by one also feels more realistic than doing that in bulk, especially since haggling is done automatically.

My favourite guidelines on skill-building come from The Lost Chapters of Daggerfall Chronicles:

BUILDING YOUR SKILLS: TIP 1
Never do anything normal in Daggerfall, because it doesn't build any skills. Daggerfall is designed so that when you use a skill more often, the better you get at it. Even simple things like exploring a town and dungeon can become training grounds. When in a town, always run around. This builds your running skill. When in a dungeon, sneak around since this builds your stealth skill.

BUILDING YOUR SKILLS: TIP 2
Always try to build your primary and major skills. Your advancement in level directly depends upon how quickly you build up your entire group of primary and major skills. There is a specific formula that is used, but to go into detail of how it works is like math class. However, what I can tell you is that since skills advance at a decreasing rate as you become more proficient at that skill, it will take more effort into building that skill. However, there are certain skills which you do not use often and will naturally be lower. Train in guilds to build these skills. They will initially advance faster, and the faster you advance in overall primary and major skills, the faster your level advances. Remember, it is the sum of skill points in the primary and major skill categories that advance your level.

Also IIRC it says somewhere in the manual that the player is advised not to focus too much on levelling up and let it happen naturally as the skills increase.

So the general advice for levelling up/building skills is to get random quests and/or poke around random dungeons as much as possible, and make full use of your skills as you do so.

[Flylighter]

Note: To skill up, you only need to rest for 6 hours! Only a smidge of a difference between 6 and 8 as OP posted, but it does allow you to squeeze in 3 (almost 4) skill-ups per day, instead of just 2!

Etiquette & Streetwise

I usually find a tavern with the little boy NPC in them. They never give quests, and if you didn't go full negative reputation with commoners at character creation, they'll never tell you to shove off. Even on my character with like 13 personality, I've never had the little bud turn me down.

Mercantile

Each transaction counts as 'xp', so if you have a dozen items to sell, you're best off doing 12 transactions of 1 item apiece, instead of one bulk transaction! You'll get better prices at worse-quality shops; check out Gothpath, Daggerfall for a trash-tier alchemist, and Bubyrydata, Alik'r Desert for a trash-tier Pawn Shop (for basically all non-alchemy items).

Alternately, just go to weaponsmiths/armorsmiths in whatever town, buy up their leather armor pieces one at a time, then sell them back one at a time. You'll take a small loss on the practice, but leather is dirt cheap so you may find it worth saving the hassle.

Fun fact: in Vanilla Daggerfall, you could grind this skill easily by going to Identify Item NPCs and repeatedly identifying 0 items for 0 gold!
Last I checked, this doesn't work in Unity.

Backstabbing, Critical Strike, Weapon Skills

Inside Daggerfall Castle in Daggerfall City, after the guard opens the doors for you, there's a room full of attackable guards. Attacking these NPCs does not count as a crime. For backstabbing, the NPC right inside the doors on the right is always facing away from you, so spam a few attacks on them before they turn around, then run out of the castle. Rinse and repeat! For weapon skills and critical strike, stick around after your initial backstab frenzy and harvest the blood of the royal guardship.

Restoration, Illusion, Mysticism

At a spell maker, create the following self-targeted spell:

• Mage Light, duration 1 + 1 per 2 levels
• Heal Fatigue, 1 + 1 per 2 levels
• Open, chance 1 + 1 per 2 levels

The casting cost should be obscenely low, as low as 5 once you work your way up the skills. Spam-cast it for xp!

Pickpocket

Pickpocketing enemies inside a dungeon doesn't count as a crime! Do it during your normal dungeon runs, or head to Daggerfall Castle for a more plentiful, town-available source (see above).
I could be wrong about this, but I think pickpocket is useful in that it increases your chances to successfully steal items right off the shelf in an open shop. So, here's a way to level it up worry-free! You know, outside of the castle guard rearranging your face.