Improving Skills: Skill Use

In The Elder Scrolls, you are what you play. In Skyrim, your skill growth and level progression are determined by Skill Uses, a system that tracks the actions you perform and increases your skills accordingly.

You don’t have to understand how this works—just play the way you want to play, and you’ll get better at it. But if you’re the kind of adventurer who wants to know everything you can to maximize your potential, read on.

What are Skill Uses?

Each of the 18 Skills is “watching” for particular events to occur in the game. When one of those events occurs, the Skill gains points based on the magnitude of the event. What magnitude actually means varies by event, and is explained in more detail below.

When the number of points in a Skill passes a threshold, the skill increases. These thresholds are ever-increasing, so raising a Skill from 40 to 41 takes more uses, and/or higher-magnitude uses, than raising that same Skill from 20 to 21...

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