UESP Forums

Okay, I made a new character with the intention of maxing every stat (and nearly every skill, but screw athletics/mercantile) so I was careful not to carelessly level things other than what I required for my leveling plans.

Before I had picked my class from Baurus, I had leveled:
destruction by 6
heavy armor by 10
security by 2
athletics by 3

and I picked the major skills:
destruction
restoration
light armor
marksman
blade
blunt
hand to hand

... and from this information, I should be 6/10 to leveling, right?

It says I'm 1/10 of the way.

I would assume this is a product of slightly shoddy programming that assumes information after picking your class after dividing by 5.

Is this a known bug or is there a known work-around?

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Also I have Bound Dagger for some reason even though I never picked conjuration... Quite certain that didn't happen on my last character.

I try not to use my major skills on the sewers...
But it's just speculation (probably a stupid one, but I can't help it!).

If you edit you race in sewers exit it will reset all skills.
If you edit your race, instead of clicking "done" when you are done, leave the race menu open and save your game and then reload and your skills will not change.
And spell you have will stay becouse wen you get it you hero probably have high level of that skill. (...Breton)

Yeah. Majors drive levelling progress, but before you choose your class (which determines which skills are Major), ALL 21 skills are Minor so there's NO Majors to drive levelling. This means the levelling system doesn't start to work until AFTER you choose your class, so any skill increases before that point are wasted. The odd 10% levelling progress will have been gained afterwards by increasing a Major skill by 1 point. It was probably very close to increasing anyway.

It's impossible to get through the Tutorial to reach Baurus without increasing SOME skills, as you have to get through the Rat and Goblin infested cave system first and that requires some fighting. Even avoiding fighting means sneaking or running/jumping which will increase Sneak, Athletics or Acrobatics. You could walk to avoid Athletics increasing, but the Goblins and Rats would pursue and kill you easily. The best you can hope for is to pre-plan which skills you want as Majors before even starting the game and DON'T use them until after you choose your class and they actually BECOME Major. That way, you have the maximum possible remaining Major increases to allow you to "top out" at the highest possible Level for your character. The only wastage is on Minors, and there are plenty of increases available to still max out all 7 governing attributes.

I wondered why my last character would only "top out" at Level 49 when I'd figured out from my starting Major skills that I should top out at Level 50. The Tutorial skill wastage was the cause of the discrepancy. Some of the skills I chose as Majors were skills I'd increased during the Tutorial, which reduced my top-out Level.

To figure out your top-out Level at the start of the game, the formula is...

TopOutLevel = 1 + (700-SumOfMajorSkills)/10

That's the Level you'll be at when ALL 7 Majors reach 100. You can increase it further to a MaxLevel by repeatedly going to jail so a random skill is reduced 1 point and you can train it back up again. If it's a Major skill, you can continue to drive levelling "slowly" until all 8 attributes are maxed out. At that point, you CAN'T level up any further even by going to jail. The "ready to level up" icon will appear, but when you sleep to TAKE the level-up, you just get the message "Perfection cannot be improved upon".

Hope this helps.

Uh, I know this response is late but it seems like no one understood what my problem was...

I leveled up destruction 6 times in the tutorial, picked it as a major skill then it said my level progress was 1/10...

In other words, this is a pretty clear-cut bug.

OK, there are two possible bugs here. Level-up progress is 10% (1 Destruction increase) rather than either A. 0% (none) or B. 60% (6). I've already explained A but your response indicates you either haven't read my post or I've wasted my time going down the wrong alley. It would help if you made it clear WHICH alley you're talking about (A or B).

Technically, the game should record ALL skill increases during the Tutorial as counting towards level-up progress if those skills are chosen AS Majors, and towards attribute bonuses anyway. You're right. Any way you look at it, it's a bug. The game is as full of them as the windshield of a rally car doing 100mph through a plague of mosquitos. Bethesda haven't bothered to fix them. We just have to live with that.

The UESP states that the game keeps track of "experience points" gained during the tutorial, not skill level increases. So the same experience points that got you 6 levels in Destruction starting at skill level 5, only give you 1 level starting with skill level 30 (or whatever it is, depending on racial bonuses). This is because you need more and more "experience points" for each successive level up (i.e. skills increase ever more slowly).

If you increased Destruction by 6, then later chose Destruction as a Major, there are two possibilities...

A. The game doesn't count them as Major increases (because they weren't Major at the time), therefore 0% progress.
B. The game counts them as 6 Major increases, therefore 60% progress.

How you ended up with 1 Major increase (10%) is anyone's guess. Maybe it came from a Major which was about to reach the threshold experience to trigger an increase, did so after you talked to Baurus and you missed the message? Choosing Athletics as a Major could do this, as experience is added per full second spent running or swimming. You could have Always Run enabled, 0.1 seconds to go before the next experience amount is added, move very slightly and trigger an Athletics increase. Maybe it's due to the game rounding off experience to the nearest threshold, giving you an erroneous increase? I don't know, but the way you describe it DOES look like it's a bug.

If you have a savegame from immediately before or after talking to Baurus, you may want to load it and use console commands TDT (ToggleDebugText) followed by SDT 10 (SetDebugText to page 10, which lists skill usage). This page lists all 21 skills, showing their current value, whether they're Major, number of increases since last level-up, current and threshold experience values. Whichever skill shows 1 increase is the one that increased after you talked to Baurus. If you haven't spoken to Baurus, any skill that has it's current experience VERY close to it's threshold will likely increase next time you use it. That skill might be Destruction, then again maybe not.

No problem. Being of a technical turn of mind (ex PC Engineer, see?), I love to give the old grey matter a bit of exercise, even if it's only speculative theorising.

Major skills increase faster than Minor. Also skills that fall in your Specialisation increase faster than normal. Skills which are both Major AND Specialisation increase the fastest.

The game adjusts for Major/Specialisation by adjusting the mathematical formula that controls the threshold amount of experience required to trigger the NEXT skill increase. The amount of experience added per skill use doesn't change (for Blade, it's 0.5 experience per use), but the threshold gets higher with each skill increase, which means more skill uses are required for the NEXT skill increase. This is why skills take LONGER to increase the higher they get. For Minor skills, the threshold grows normally. Major/Specialisation skills cause the growth to be reduced, so you reach the next threshold in less skill uses, hence faster skill increases.

Without putting it into programming terms or getting TOO mathematical, that's the best way I can explain how the skill progress system works. For PC users, it's easier to understand by enabling debug page 10 (console commands TDT then SDT 10) to list ALL 21 skills and WATCH the system in action AS you use skills. Since the same debug page also keeps a count of skill increases per attribute, you can also use it to track your current level-up progress, especially if you're going the "efficient levelling" route.