So I'm playing a Relic Hunter character, main motivation being collecting every unique thing that's not nailed down (with some cool mods to back it up). I am using a cool Museum mod (Legacy of the Dragonborn) to store and display it all and I'm now level 43 and.... have barely started the silly game. I have done the Main Quest right up to the beginning of Alduin's Bane (The Time Wound), I've joined the College and completed Saarthal, and joined the Companions, I will join the Thieves Guild too but not til later, and probably will destroy the Dark Brotherhood. Anyway, I've thought of grouping my tasks together by type, and have come up with the following:

• Daedric Quests
• Companions Quests
• Thieves Guild Quests
• College of Winterhold Quests
• Main Quests
• Dawnguard Quests
• Dragonborn Quests
• Dragon Priests
• Civil War

So far I've not done any of these this playthrough, and I'd kind of like to do them in batches (finish one set, before starting on another). I'm not counting side quests, I spent most of the early game doing the small odd jobs in cities and have finished some of the larger city side-quests, but I don't want to jump too much from one thing to another. I also want a bit of a challenge, which is why certain things like finishing the main quest and Dragonborn I want to leave til much later, my character is a "Stealth Conjuration Archer" that mostly fights with a Bound Bow and Summoned Atronachs.

My question: What order (any why) would you recommend doing these Grouped Quests I listed? I know I could do them in any order and be fine but it would seem certain quests might benefit from skills, items, shouts, and such unlocked by other quest chains. As an example I'd like to do the Dawnguard Quests before the Daedric ones but I can see how certain Daedric Artifacts could be very useful in Dawnguard (I plan to side with Dawnguard).

Just asking some advice for making it challenging but interesting!

This is a wonderfully ambitious plan! Good luck. Just out of curiosity, what difficulty are you playing at?

As for your question, I'm not sure you can really do these in the 'wrong' order. I know what you mean about acquiring certain artifacts initially to help with later quests, but vanilla Skyrim is pretty modular. In other words, the quests and quest lines are self-contained and you can do them in any order. In my experience, if you have enough health/magicka/stamina and the appropriate perks, stuff like enchanted items, potions, or artifacts won't make a big difference.

If I was to make a single suggestion, it would be to build up your PC's magic resistance through Alteration perks, the Lord Stone and The Book of Love. Magic resistance goes a long, long, way to ensuring survival.

You'll run into the same cross-linkage issues the rest of us complain about. Having to join some faction, and do a quest or two, just to get access to some place.

For example, to collect the complete set of Dragon Masks requires doing quests in two of the questlines, or you can't into the places where the priests are. One of those is a location you can't get back to after that quest, so you MUST do both at once.

My character pretty much never spends more than one night at a time in any place. She keeps moving in a generally clockwise 'circuit' around Skyrim, getting in to visit Whitrun in the middle at least once each 'circuit'. She lets her travel pattern dictate her questing. As she passes through an area, she may or may not accept a quest. If she does and it requires travel, the objective will get completed next time she happens to pass nearest the required area. Same for completing quests - only when her travel takes her back to the quest giver. I love that the quests do not drive her travel at all. Everytime she visits an area it has been long enough for it to feel 'fresh' and fun instead of boring and repetitive the way letting quest givers dictate your travel can sometimes feel. Just some thoughts on a different approach.

Dragon priests shouldn't be done in one go, you can spread that out actually. Good luck. Doing the same btw, so far I completed companions, college of winterhold, dragon priests, dawnguard, dragonborn and daedric.

Currently I'm on expert but I actually adjust this quite frequently. I have a couple of mods that add new challenging enemies (Immersive Creatures and High Level Enemies) as well as Dragon Difficulty Enhancers (Deadly Dragons and Dragon Combat Overhaul) and I like to keep one companion around me (currently Vilja in Skyrim) add in the various magic and new weapons and armor mods, not all of which are balanced well, difficulty is a huge ordeal I constantly have to tweak to make it feel right. I don't like every random Draugr encounter to be life or death encounters but I also want every dragon, dragon priest, and end dungeon boss to feel like a real fight so yeah, it's a constant effort to tweak things right since every mod makes an impact.

I'm not entirely certain I will stick to the "Grouping" idea, a lot of came from the Museum itself which "groups" items like the unique items you get from the Forgotten Vale, so I feel like when I start Dawnguard for example I want to just focus on it and not do anything else until it's completely done. I feel this is doable, other tasks might not be like the Dragon Priests, especially if I count the Solstheim ones, I'm not going to be doing them all at once, but I do kind of want to save them for later in the game so they'll be even more powerful (I assume this works in theory)

Yeah I kind of knew that I wouldn't get to do ALL of them, but I meant like going to all the non-faction related Dragon Priests, I've intentionally avoided their dungeons thus far with the intent that when I am ready I will do them all at once except for the ones that require specific factions.

I've never really been able to do this level of immersion, I tried a full immersion game once and found it moved too slow for me, especially with the amount of content present in this game. I actually started this playthrough by wandering around, avoiding any map markers EXCEPT for cities, towns, and safe locations (like Eldergleam Sanctuary) and proceeded to pick up quests in them and then spent the first 20 or so levels of the game just doing simple "go here, fetch this, deliver that" type quests and get most of the simple tasks out of the way leaving only the more significant more dungeon related questing for later.

I've never done ALL of the Daedric Quests, ones like Namira, Mehrunes Dagon, and Boethiah being the main ones. Considering the rather evil nature I might just go ahead and join The Dark Brotherhood to totally flesh out my collecting, though I'm unsure what unique items you get from their chain, I do know I have a spot for a set of Assassin Armor and the Emperor's Robes. but I can disregard those for now, DB will probably be a late game decision if I join or not. As for Factions, I've only ever completed College of Winterhold, never joined the Thieves Guild before, and never gotten all the way through The Companions, and I've only barely set foot on Solstheim.

For someone who has 665 hours logged on this game I've got a surprising amount of content I've never experienced, but like always I'm saying this playthrough is going to be "The one".... we'll see if it holds, I finally got Skyrim mostly stable to where I can play several hours with no crashing so that'll help a lot.

Thank you for the tips and suggestions guys!

The Greybeard Words of Power and the Dragon Priest quests tend to overlap. You'll collect quite a few masks while you're looking for the words of power.