I was wondering, if I start a new character, and play patchless just until I get to Riverwood and level up my smithing skill, would that be too dangerous?

I am pretty leary about leaving Helgen for the first time without any patches installed.

I am on 360, and I have the option of downloading the patch straight away, or waiting just until I spend a few hours in Riverwood smithing some iron daggers.

Would it be too risky?

The reason I ask, is because I am not really sure what triggers the bugs which patch 1.5 fixed.

I know going from Helgen to Riverwood means passing through several cells, but I don't know if simply entering a cell is enough to risk triggering a bug, or if you actually have to be in the middle of an active quest for the bug to flare up.

Advice requested.

You should be good I'm on 360 as well just make sure you don't save a game with patches then delete them it wont let you use the save until you update.

I was planning on playing patchless from the disc from the very beginning, through character creation, all the way to Riverwood, smith a few daggers for a few skill increases early on, then patch. Probably 10 hours patchless.

I just don't want to make a fatal mistake by doing that, whereby some NPC gets glitched or dies within the first 10 hours, and I never even realize it until 100 hours in, patch 1.5 installed too late...

Like I said you should be good on bare bones Skyrim the patches fixed glitched npcs for me.

Even if they were dead or missing from the game?

Not sure on that I know if fixed the companions for me. Never had any dead/missing npcs.

Cool. Thank you for the assurance.

I wasn't sure if I wanted to update to 1.5 prior to creating my current character, due to the smithing changes, but the slower xp with iron daggers isn't that bad. You can still level smithing at a reasonable pace off of iron daggers, just not as fast as before.

Why don't you just play the game instead of worrying about power levelling skills, trust me it's far more enjoyable.

My post smithing patch character has 89 smithing in around 35 hours play time, this is by using transmute ore to turn all iron ores into gold ingots then into gold rings + smithing iron daggers to enchant and sell for training. You can train with eorland greymane all the way up to 90 to so its a bit naff to delete patches just to cheese your way to high smithing quick when its not exactly difficult now.

This. I "power leveled" my pure mages enchanting, conjuration and illusion skills. He now rocks everything, it's really, really boring. So I i rerolled and now I won't even do enchanting and I only level skills by normal usage; MUCH. MORE. ENJOJABLE.

Besides, I find it alot more fun to find/loot better gear then making it.

Let him play however he wants, guys. No need to convert others to your (and accidentally also mine in this case) 'religion'. He didn't ask for that.

Instead of just going "they said grind daggers. must grind daggers", you could adapt to the new leveling and actually look at the recipes and find new "easy to grind" things to make. There's still plenty of items with low materials cost and higher-than-daggers value.

Helmets, for instance.

Show some initiative, show that you're actually thinking about how to play, don't just follow guides by rote. (i.e., sure go ahead and exploit/powerlevel. But why not try to find new and improved exploits? )