I didn't know about "dagger trick" until my smithing was well over 80. Til then, I assumed that the higher skill I have, the higher grade items I must create/improve, in order to advance. So I spent all the little gold I could save for expensive higher grade ingots and stuff. So no, my fully leveled smithing definitely is not cheated. Mayhaps lame grinding within "best" MMORPG traditions, yes, but not cheating.

It's not cheating any more than going to Skill Trainers is cheating. Although grinding iron daggers can, to my mind, be a bit OCD. The scope of things to do in Skyrim outside the Crafting tables is rather large. I'd only say that if you spend too much time at the crafting tables that's less time spent out in the world fighting & exploring and leveling up that way instead.

Cheating implies that someone is being cheated. Since this is a single player game, the only possible victim is you, yourself. So, you just have to ask yourself if you feel cheated by doing it that way.

Anything else is just someone's opinion, and has no effect on YOUR game.

So, is it cheating? To some people it is. To others, it isn't. It's completely up to you to decide if you feel cheated or not.

No it's not cheating although it will make the game incredibly easy. It further proves that Smithing is a shallow skill that needs treatment for the next TES.

It's not fun grinding skills, so I don't do it. Simple. Whether or not I feel like it's cheating is irrelevant.

The armor and weapon degradation system is the one thing I don't miss from Oblivion.It was tedious and had no practical purpose other than to bore the player.

Not cheating really. Certainly is abusing a mechanic though. Personally overpowering my character ruins the game for me pretty damn quick, but to each his own.

It's not cheating.

Leveling smithing is a grind. Plain and simple. And not everyone enjoys farming.


Crafting daggers enables you to save a lot of time, and thus have more time to enjoy the world.


I love exploring & doing quest. Not sit around and farm mats just so I can sharpen my Iron sword to be on par with ebony etc.

while there is no such thing as "cheating" in a single player game i thin, i don't think that this was intended. i think it was definitely intended for BS to be OP if you want it to, but i don't think beth intended for people to level up smithing by simply spamming iron daggers, i think that's an oversight on their part and they'll probably patch it in the balance patch coming sometime soon..

First ... I just make Hide Bracers. Leather is easy to find.

Second ... the progression for smithing (and enchanting as well) isn't designed well. You get the same increase no matter what you make. Eventually you will have to make more items to gain a level, but even in the high 90s it only takes 10 or so Hide Bracers to get to the next level. There is no incentive to make any other type of armor. They should have designed it so that making progressively harder items would increase your progress more and more. Then they could have had a smoother curve and really made smithing much more interesting.

Finding the material to make the upper tiers of armor can be pretty interesting. On one play through I was determined to make each set of armor, so I had a heck of a time finding the ore for orc and ebony armor.

I think the next TES game should expand the system. As your skill increases, you should have to make better armor to increase your skill. You should also be able to break down armor into its components. You should also be able to convert lower quality materials into higher quality ones with diminishing returns.

Well, there's a couple ways to look at this:

*If you try to craft a variety of stuff, and especially craft higher level items (dwarven/orcish/ebony), you might view that as less "cheating", but then your character can end up almost absurdly rich (because you need to craft far more items than you're going to use).

So, which is "cheating":

* Smithing Iron Daggers, which raise your skill without making you rich (unless you're also grinding stamina enchantments, then, yeah, you'll get rich on those enchanted iron daggers).
* Smithing all sorts of things to RP that you character is getting more experience with a variety of smithing, then selling the items and making 30,000+ septims.
* Smithing all sorts of things, but just throwing them in a chest, or dropping them on the ground somewhere, so you don't get so rich just from crafting

Personally, I didn't craft that many iron daggers, just because it seemed easier for me to obtain leather than iron, so I crafted a lot of leather armor pieces - I mean, run around in the countryside anywhere for 20 minutes, and you'll get enough hides to make like 20 or 30 or 50 leather. Since I spent that time gathering materials, I did not at all feel bad about "spamming" out leather bracers or helmets, since I'd already put in a bunch of time on resource harvesting.

I think an interesting mod might be to add a perk or two to the smithing tree to enhance your mining, so that you can get more ore from veins. This would help players to craft some of the "rarer" types of equipment. It would be kind of unfair to force players to craft high-level equipment to raise their smithing, if the materials are just very rare and hard to find or buy.

Yes the term "farming" come to mind as well. thanks to the earlier poster. I'd forgotten that term. There a several RPGs that actually require farming. NEER was one that recently came to my attention. The only way to possibly get some of the high end weapons was to farm for hours on end. This was due to the material needed to make the weapons, were based on a random drop from certain enemies. It was a horrible setup.

But grinding is something offered in TES. Like training chests for lockpicking. You even see NPCs practicing all kinds of melee, ranged and magic skills.

This is why I think smithing is fine as it is and doesn't need messing with a in a patch.

I will not cheat in games, but I have no problem with powergaming. That being said, on my current character, I did hardly any smithing until I was level 22. But then I did get 7 points in Smithing, take my skill to 30 and leveling me up, so I could apply a perk. I had some elven weapons, so that added on like 5-6 damage when I went to the grindstone.

I agree. Grinding skills is not fun. Spamming daggers and leather braces feels cheesy. However, I am THIS close to getting my crafting to 100% so I think I can live with myself...