Thought I'd get people to share useful simple gameplay hints/tips they have found out,

For example, realising you can hot key 2 items to left and right on the D-pad by holding left or right in the favourites menu, or realising hours in you have to hold A to "pick up + move items"

(P. S, NO CHEATS, BUGS, GLITCHES ETC, gameplay tips only)

I like to use fast healing on 1 hand and sword on the other also carry a two handed weapon just in case.

One of the first things I would tell a new player is to not underestimate the smithing ability. Powerleveling it with iron daggers (Not a cheat) will not leave your combat skills in the dust when you consider sharpening say, a steel sword. At a high smithing you can effectively double its damage than when you first got it, which will serve you well for a while until you get the materials to craft something stronger.

True, though I wouldn't over do it early, instead, keep it higher then the rest of your skills, it's good to get the right balance.

Tip:Keep garnets and rubys etc. to craft jewelry, then you can level up your smithing and make good gold from it... I now have more gold than I can spend on my lvl 19

Pre-20ish, I usually run out of money (Ingots and straps) before I max it out anyway.

Sounds good, a sort of "paladin" character, throw in some buffs and your rocking!

I would tell someone that using a series of fast shouts is better than one, huge, powerful one. For instance, call dragon might be very powerful but it takes forever to charge up, all the while you can't do anything else while you hope that the dragon can do enough damage.

I prefer faster shouts like Unrelenting Force, Dragonrend, Marked for Death, Disarm, Become Ethereal, and Whirlwind Sprint. Even in battle, these things can be incredibly useful and will usually save your butt well before any Storm Call or Call Dragon will. Plus you can use them every 30-40 seconds.

When using an item like Mace of Molag Bal in conjunction to Azura's Star and you are being attacked by more than 1 lesser creature (white soul, not black) after you kill one and it captures the soul instantly go into your inventory and recharge the mace since Azura's Star only takes one soul at a time. This will allow the charges to stay longer on the mace before having to charge it up big time and will also level enchanting.

Put higher level arrows on your followers and let them use it. They will shoot them without using any of them up and when you go to loot a corpse you get an occasional arrow that they had fired (not technically a glitch as it's more of an oversight or possibly intentional).

When you are smithing on PC and want to burn through your ores faster (since the port for the UI is horrible) first click on what ore you want that has multiple stacks. Then you click on YES but keep your mouse hovered over the YES location. Switch your hands up and keep hitting enter and left click repeatedly and it will remember the locations and you can spam through it fast.

If you create a character that uses block (shield) or even archery make sure to put at least half of your points in stamina so that you can have enough for the abilities that slow down time as they consume stamina rapidly.

If you want to make septims fast then enchanting and mining help a lot. Find a good Gold Mine and get gold ores as well as jewels that allow you to make jewelry at a forge, lots of moneys there.

Good mines to be found are usually in most of the Orc Strongholds, like Gloombound mine.

When mining if you don't want to wait for the slow and annoying mining animation you can equip the pickaxe like a weapon and swing at the mine 9 times before it is empty.

You can harvest Soul Gems in Blackreach from Geodes.

Don't forget to upgrade your armor with a workbench even if it isn't legendary. You can always upgrade it again later it doesn't mean it's stuck there at flawless or epic.

In order to upgrade daedric artifacts or other magical gear you must get the arcane smithing perk and even then flawless is the highest for daedric items. Uncertain for other magical items.

Don't use stormcall with a follower or near anyone who is friendly...

If you see someone in Riften, usually Khajiit, following you everywhere you go it's okay to kill that NPC, you won't get a bounty.

If you want locations of shouts then talk to Arngeir. You may ask him where shouts can be found and he will tell you they have sensed a whisper of a word and marks your map.

I can't say too much about that, haven't got very far yet (job+ kid lol)

Tip: One thing I do know... Guards don't like shouts, don't try below there hats off with the force of a shout lol, don't even shout near them.

I agree with the exception of Unrelenting Force. They recover too quickly from the single word that it's best to put force behind it and blow them away, also blowing them off cliffs is nice as they take fall damage. I know you didn't mention it but elemental fury is amazing on it's third word and it comes back in a decent amount of time.

If you are 2 handed, while holding block, press the attack button, you will bash them with your weapon and stagger them, do this and immediatley follow with a normal attack

Another Tip: When traversing dungeons and they have those swinging axe traps and if you either don't have WW sprint or don't want to use it an easier way to do these traps is to face a side of the wall and move just before the groove where the axe enters and exits from. Wait until it goes into the wall and then move while continuing to look at the wall. I find that if I try to look forward and guess my depth perception is wrong and I get hit by the blades. This way you can avoid the blades easily.

disenchant absorb health as soon as you see a weapon with it. it is one of the most profitable enchants to put on a weapon.

Don't overlook the environment:

Flames is weak, but using it on a puddle oil can be pretty effective.

Lure an enemy near a tripwire and shoot the tripwire with an arrow.

Step on a pressure plate on purpose when an enemy is at the trap.

Shoot a lamp off the ceiling into a puddle of oil, with your bow.

Use Unrelenting Force to knock enemies off of high places

Magic:

Some destruction is useless against some enemies. Some is highly effective. If cold doesn't affect a machine, try something else

Candlelight Spell- fairly useless unless you're like me and turned the brightness down a lot. Suddenly you need some light underground! Don't forget that it's better to see than to fall into a trap

Combat:

It does no good to evenly dole out damage to multiple enemies. Wounded targets can still hurt you. Concentrate attacks on something until it's dead. The damage per second your receive will go down. Don't be afraid to run the f away

@Halthor Yes but at the same time you gotta understand that you are not going to be earning experience towards destruction or anything else by using oil lamps to kill enemies. But using the environment like rocks to avoid dragon attacks is great. I even use the environment when I get overrun. Make one enemy run the long way to get you while to focus on another

Very true, but after all, the oil thing is a one-time deal. I presume that the oil 'resets' after the dungeon respawns, but at best it's once per instance per dungeon crawl

I also don't play necessarily to pinch every bit of experience. I love to hit those things and watch draugr burn

Join the Companions ASAP. The Skyforge Steel weapon you are gifted with can last you the rest of the game if you wish and it's easy to get. Can even use Alchemy-Enchanting-Smithing loop to turn it into a super sword that one-hit kills everything in the game just like Dadric.

Neat huh?

If you prefer the look of katanas, or don't want to join the companions, you can get an equivalent sword by following the main quest until you travel to Deplhine's secret room, where there is a Blade's sword with the same damage as a Skyforged Steel sword on the weapon rack on the wall, next to an orcish greatsword.

Try to always use power attacks with dual wielding and 2handed, even with 1handed weapons, also to be able to unleash power attack after power attack try cooking, the vegetable soup regenerates 1 point of stamina and health every second for 720 seconds(12 minutes) and you can use power attacks even with 1 stamina, to get the ingredients fast just check out all the farms that uve discovered
dont power level non combat abilities early on you'll end up lacking damage and protection,
if you've gotten the armor perks that give you bonus protection when wearing a full set of armor always wear your helmet in combat, just attach it to a hotkey,
when fighting dragon priests with a melee character if they are running away from you alot try to trap them against a wall and alternate attacks and bashes to keep them staggered,
when fighting multiple enemies back away to a door or a tunnel so u can fight them one at a time
dont mix heavy and light armor pieces thats [censored] xD,
its not a good idea to put perks into skills like speech and lockpick before you have leveled up your combat skills,
if you want to level up combat skills faster dont take companions with you,
if your character is not a mage its a good idea to always keep some high level magic scrolls some times they come in real handy,
if you want to stock up on soul gems without buying them go to dwemer ruins
when fighting giants at early levels just circle around them and hit them only while they are recovering from an attack
thats it for now xD

If you manage to make it to sky haven temple there is a dragonbane akiviri katana in one of the side rooms as well. It does extra damage to dragons.

I would tell new players interested in alchemy not to waste time spamming the 'craft' button on simple potions with only 1 effect. Instead try and find ingredient combos that combine 2 or more effects. Mixing potions with 2 or more effects counts higher toward leveling than mixing potions with only 1 effect. Multiple-effect potions with invisibility as one of the effects are particularly XP-heavy in my experience.

Same thing goes for enchanting. I've noticed that enchanting an item using a lower-level soul gem (petty, lesser etc) counts less toward leveling the skill than enchanting the same item with the same enchantment but with a better soul gem (greater, grand, black). Rather, the size of the soul itself is what matters, not the size of the gem. A lesser soul trapped in a greater gem will still only count as much as that same soul but in a lesser gem.

so your tip is to throw away all soul gems smaller than greater and train only with greater, grand and black ones? haha...

Um, no it's not. You can still use smaller gems to recharge your items. Training with smaller souls works at first but once you fight stronger monsters get better gems.

- Always keep a backup weapon or two available incase you get disarmed.
- The Steed Stone is great for people that like to dungeon dive for loot.
- Never stand close to a follower while taking on groups of enemies.
- Using the Relentless Force shout in major towns will sometimes get a courier to reveal locations of Word Walls.
- Dragur are vulnerable to fire.