You can literally wear and build the best armor, without even once picking up a pic axe and taking 1 swing.

You should only be able to buy a weakened piece of the ore, while having to mine it to get the full ore.


On my 2nd player build i have been hitting the mines for ore, but reallistically, there is no need to ever go there, but to kill bandits.

why make it so complicated? Why do ores sold by merchants have less value than stuff you dig up?

WHat they should do is make higher end armor require special rare ingredients. these ingredients can only be found in dungeons or stolen from people, etc.
These ingredients would be more common than finding the armor itself, but rare enough where you can't just sit around grinding iron daggers, buy some ebony ore and make mega gear.

The mining is just an extra, it shouldn't be required. It's just an alternate way to get ore if you don't want to buy it.

With my current Warrior I've restricted myself with ore/ingots. I can only smith things with ore I've found myself, making Smithing a lot harder to increase. It actually makes the game a lot more enjoyable for me, I just found my first Ebony mine and it was great. I easily have enough gold to fast travel to all the sellers and buy all stock and craft what I like, but it's so much more enjoyable finding my own. Even at the start when I was getting Smithing going, finding an Iron mine was awesome because I knew I needed it to make better gear and improve the gear I had.

Is self-mined ore known to have superior qualities to ore that someone else mined for you?

Edit: And how many blacksmiths are also miners?

Next patch is going to fix the Iron Dagger grinding exploit.

For PC users there's already mods available that make smithing more interesting. I recommend this one: http://skyrim.nexusmods.com/downloads/file.php?id=4429. In there you've to buy Schematics before you can build stuff. Also there's things like melting weapons and armor into scrap metal you can put to use.

Perhaps it would be better to make materials more rare or scarce in Merchants (as it doesn't really make sense that their ores are worse) and to make armor require more ignots to build.

It wont happen as they want to sell to mass market of the I want all the cool stuff in the game and I want it now without having to work for it crowd. People used to cod are not going to want to locate mines extract ore smelt it and smith it. You can say well let them play something else but the casual gamer is a huge market of $$$.

Please explain:

How do you think that not adding a completely unrealistic and superfluous mechanic to the game is catering to those evil casual players?

Keep in mind that you have to justify your position that self-mined ore should naturally be better than ore someone else mined, because that's just how ore works.

TES isn't Runescape.

I dont necessarily fully agree with the op what Im pointing out is how unlikely it is that they will do what he wants. As for self mined ore being better if they really wanted to implement that and I cant see them doing so. They could use the justification that not all ore has the same mineral content and the poor blacksmiths in villages cant afford the good stuff. TBH the whole skyrim economy seems a tacked on mess why are mine owners happy for me to pop into there mines and run off with all the ore ?. Yet if I kill a chicken the whole place wants to chop my head off.

The best ways to increase mining's importance is to:

1. Remove or make rare, the availablity of higher grade ores/ingots in the stores.

2. Make armor/weapon creation chance based with failure costing all or half the components.

3. Make armor/weapon upgrading a chanced range so you need to upgrade a few times to get the upper range upgrade.

This would make an effective time/money sink that is very familiar to those who played MMORPGs.

oh please, not more time spent underground

Maybe they could have certain items require an active production source to restock, so you wouldn't be able to buy ore until you clear the Renegade Conjurers out of the mine and deal with the bandit fort hitting the trade caravans. That could make mines have more of a use and make it more challenging to obtain ore, but not necessarily making you mine it yourself. Mines could occasionally be overtaken again, but if you're a high rank in some orgainization you could assign some guards.

Also Ebony's coveted stuff and the city rulers would want to reserve it for their own military, so maybe you'd need to be a Thane (or the equivalent) to be allowed to buy the best materials, otherwise you'd be getting the leftovers.

to be honest it doesn't need to be more important because you can just buy them from vendors, that have mined it. But in general smithing should be taken out of the game or at least as a skill.

Well yes, they could use that justification. Except that it makes no sense, since all ore has to be refined before it can be smithed, and you then have to go off the assumption that blacksmiths are unnecessarily cheap, or that miners are unnecessarily incompetent at their jobs.

I agree that being able to "steal" ore from a mine seems odd, but that's an unrelated issue. There's no sensible reason that someone should have to mine their own ore in order to make higher quality weapons.

I agree its the op that wants that not me I would though make the rare minerals more expensive. Then you ether pay through the nose for something that is rare and expensive or you mine it smelt it and make it yourself.

Once again, players ask that all others be forced to enjoy the activity they enjoy. Sigh.

this is stupid, everyone has their price if someone finds moonstoon or w.e i'm sure it will be sold.
what i rather see is dynamic economies, if i start buying up all the iron ore the price should go up tenfold, which in turn could make everything go up in price and cause inflation.

how about they get the writing and AI better first? Mining is just an extra.

1.5 is making Smithing more similar to Alchemy in that the amount the skill is increased is based on the value of the item that you craft.

Some old-school RPGs actually did things like this, however they shot themselves in the foot at the same time as there were only ever a handful of uses worth bothering with for said rare resources. It's an age-old problem that doesn't really have any good solution(s).

More OT: while I prefer mining to buying for collecting smithing resources, I often end up doing both as it's the only way to actually sell all the items I craft, so I wouldn't want to see the 'purchase' avenue closed off.

@wtflag: some older games had the 'chance to fail when crafting' mechanic, which worked well to prevent excesses at low(er) skill, however I'm not sure it would work in this instance. In older games, failing a craft meant you had just burned a decent portion of your supply of the rare resource said item required, which served as a brake on 'spam' tactics because it was hard to get more; when said item is limitless, however, you don't care how many times you fail because you can always go mine and/or buy more.

Additionally, given that money is meaningless in Skyrim beyond use in the purchase of more materials and occasional training, there's no real financial cost either as a handful of well-enchanted items will more than cover the losses incurred by the failures. Basically, all such a system would do is screw over those doing their low-skill crafting 'normally', which won't please anyone. Which is, honestly, unfortunate, as there's real merit in such systems.

To the OP, I disagree. I think more times needs to be spent on catching buterflies; that's the critical skill.


{sigh}