User blog:Sneak+stab/Grinding on Alchemy

So, back from a weekend vacation, I had no idea what I was up to. So, I checked my questlog and found no quests active. I checked my skills and found nothing outstanding. Finally, I checked my active effects and saw the Thief stone active. I remembered something about grinding Alchemy.

In order to grind Alchemy, I needed to make lots of expensive potions, ideally invisibility. That meant I needed Vampire Dust, Chaurus Eggs, and Luna Moth Wings.

I knew I had buckets of Chaurus Eggs sitting around, and I didn’t want to tangle with any nasty Vampire types. That left the Wings. I traveled to Riften and waited until 8, then I set off down the road.

I caught two moths immidiatly, but then no more. I headed back to Whiterun to see what I could catch there. Since it was morning when I arrived, I thought I’d see if the merchants had more gold for my potions. I found that the Khajit caravan had arrived, and I sold them a number of my potions. Sadly, I have many, many more potions than they can buy in one go. I hit Arcadia’s and Belethor’s, picking up quite a lot of gold. My Speechcraft leveled up twice. Finally, I went to the road and waited until 8 pm.

Like clockwork, the moths came from everywhere the second it was eight. I merrily grabbed them all until the dragon attacked. The Dragon was almost less of a problem than the Giant was, but both were dead soon enough. Fighting with Mehrunes Razor is really odd, things drop dead when you don’t think they should.

So, more moth collecting. That session I got 50 wings even. That means 50 more potions, each worth about 200 ea. 10,000 gold for three hours work, not bad. Now if I could just find a buyer!

Determined to offload some potions, I started making the rounds to every merchant around. I hit every town in Skyrim, buying all the Restore Health potions I could find, then selling all the Invisibility potions they had gold for. I went to all the general goods stores too. There, I bought all the Grand Soul Gems they had, as well as any enchanted things they had that I thought I didn’t. I was looking for an enchantment in particular, a Soul Trap enchantment. Bloodthorn had served me well, but it simply was not giving me the damage I needed.

I also found some new stores, for instance, Niranye is a High Elf who runs a stall in Windhelm, in the market near the smith. She deals in every variety of goods.

One trip round Skyrim, and I’d sold off all my potions. I realized that I’m not going to be able to amass a fortune in gold alone, I’m going to need to buy up some of the NPC goods so that they will have enough liquid assets to buy things from me.

Now, as a result of all that trading, I had nine empty Grand Soul Gems. That meant I needed to kill nine Mammoths. As you can imagine, Mammoth hunting is really fun. Some prefer to sneak, shoot arrows, and not be seen. I enjoy using my sword to hunt mammoth and giant alike.

The best thing about hunting mammoths and killing giants is that more often than not, you end up with some more Grand Soul Gems than you started! I found three on dead giants, which meant that I needed to kill even more Mammoths. I killed all the Mammoths I needed, then I sorted my inventory at my house in Whiterun. Now it is time to end this blog and eat lunch.