I have figured out that I need to recharge my magical weapons from time to time, and that I need a filled Soul Gem to do so. Up to now, I have used the Soul Gems that were in my inventory. I have no idea how they got filled, but my guess is that they were already filled (or partially so) when I found them. Now I have used up all the filled ones, and so I need to get some more. If I understanding this correctly, I can either buy them already filled, or fill them myself. If I choose the latter, I have to learn the Soul Trap spell and cast it on a mob or NPC, then kill it, which fills the Soul Gem.

Is this correct ?

Am I missing anything ?

Thanks !!!!

Cast the Soul Trap -spell on the enemy and kill it before the effect wears off. Simple really.

Sneaky characters enchant their weapons with soul trap, just a little hint.

When you get a few levels, head for Ironbind Barrow. The boss has a battleaxe that has the "Fiery Soul Trap" spell - burns for 10 pts, and auto soul traps if you have empty soul gems. You can do this one of two ways: use the axe yourself if it fits your character's abilities; or disenchant it to learn the spell and that will allow you to enchant a weapon of your choice with that same spell - you'll need a full soul gem for that too - and I advise you use the largest one you can afford.

That axe is the reason Ironbind is the first dungeon I hit after I get out of Bleak Falls.

Just as an aside, seeing as it has not been mentioned yet, every creature has a certain size of soul (i.e all mammoths have grand, etc)

A "common" size soul will fit into a greater or grand soul gem (think a glass of water being put in a 2 litre bottle), though it is not filled to maximum capacity a soul gem can only hold a single soul (so can't top it up with a petty soul)

As you mentioned NPCs....all enemies that take the form of playable races (breton, etc.) have BLACK souls and these can only be trapped in BLACK soul gems.

Final note, I believe soul trap spell counts as a hostile act and will incur a bounty if cast on a non-hostile npc in a town/with a witness. (as does calm, as I found out to my surprise)

Creatures fill regular soul gems, people fill black soul gems. black soul gems are on par with grand soul gems. use soul trap either as a spell with a duration and kill them before the duration ends or on a weapon. Even on weapons you'd likely want to put a couple seconds on the duration as IIRC having it at one second tends to be rather hit or miss with whether it will trap or not. Having a few seconds also helps if you have a companion as they could kill it and you'd still trap the soul if it's still up.

Also to expand a bit on AccidentalNinja's first statement, if you end up only partially filling a gem, like putting a common size soul in a grand soul gem, you can drop the soul gem and pick it back up and the gem will be empty. Something to look out for also if you plan on dropping a gem for whatever reason. It won't have a soul when you pick it back up so only do it will gems you want empty.

First off, thanks for all the replies !!!

So I'm thinking that for my use (I have been playing for about 5 days - I just hit level 10), should I just sell the empty Lesser and Petty gems that have piled up in my inventory and just keep and fill the Common size ? Will they handle my needs until I get a good deal higher level ?

I'd fill them if you can - you get a fair bit more gold selling them....

Lesser and petty soul gems will be the quickest to fill with skeevers and wolves and such, i'd say certainly for the time being keep hold of them and if you sell them, sell them full (worth more that way)

A stockpile of smaller gems can come in handy when you want to save your greater/grand souls for enchanting but you still need to recharge the enchantment on your regularly used weapon/staff.

Armour enchantments do not require recharging

You can also sometimes find filled gems in dungeons.

Depending on what quests you've done, some creatures such as dwarven spiders and dwarven spheres or centurions have filled gems if you loot them after killing them. This applies to other creatures such as magical anomalies too.

Once you get a quest to go to the Soul Cairn, there are plenty of the full and empty gems around. Also there are soul fissures that will fill an empty gem but these can only be used once each.

Always check the dust left when some enemies die because this can have them, too.

The soul cairn has a few useful lightning conductors that you can pop a grand soul gem into to convert it to a black soul gem, which is handy because they're harder to get hold of.

You can also enchant weapons to svck souls into empty gems, if you've got the right enchanting perk.

Once you get Azura's star that can be emptied and re-filled without ever being destroyed using your soul trap weapons or soul trap spell.

Hope this helps.

I'd keep the lesser and petty gems myself, especially if you're going to enchant items for yourself, in which case you'll need to build the skill. You can use these to create weak effects on "junk" items that you won't use yourself, to increase your enchanting skill. You can then sell this stuff for more gold than you'd get for the unenchanted items themselves.

Another tip that hasn't been covered - if you're going to use bound weapons (which you conjure with a spell), there is a perk in the Conjuration tree (Soul Stealer) that causes bound weapons to cast Soul Trap for you.

Also, some enchantments have only 1 power level (IE: Muffle). These enchants are still useful. But don't waste a Grand Soul Gem filled with a Grand Soul on them. You get nothing more than the petty.

Otherwise, Filled and empty gems are usually sold by Jarl's court magicians, General Traders, and most of the Merchants in the College.

If you have Dawnguard, one place in there also can fill gems.

If you're early on, save those filled Common gems. Lesser and Petty gems are easy enough to fill, and are great for grinding up Conjuration: Soul Trap is an Apprentice-level spell, and unless you have the Conjuration Apprentice perk, Soul Trap will hit your magicka bar up pretty hard. Petty and Lesser are great refill fodder, and come from baddies who usually aren't much challenge. At low-level, Common might be a good "My First Enchantment" gem (to make an enchantment, not just refill a weapon enchantment). After a while, you'll graduate to Greater souls for enchantment creation, and then the top-grade Grand gems. Often times, it may be less hassle to simply buy such gems pre-filled from mages of the Jarls' courts (who double as magic goodies vendors) or College of Winterhold instructors, or (less commonly) from general goods vendors (which includes the Khajiit caravans).

Black gems? There's some caveats on their use. Basically, they're inferior to Grand Gems in every way except one: they're easier to maximally fill. Grand Souls usually are in big beasts that will stomp you flat. Black gems? Any pissant bandit will do, and you'll get a Grand-size soul. Beyond that, they're rare to find, aren't sold by reputable vendors, weigh twice as much as a Grand gem, and are technically contraband... and for a very good reason: nasty horrible things happen to those souls. If you have Dawnguard, you'll find out the details in the course of the Dawnguard main quest.

And on the subject of making your own enchantments, you'll need to find an enchantment altar and have an enchanted item you just found. You'll have to "break" that item to learn the enchantment, but after that you can apply that effect as many times as you have gems. Higher enchantment skill and perk advancement will yield higher maximum effect magnitude and higher charge capacity. If you want to smith up that weapon, you'll need to do that first, as enchanted weapons require special care via a mid-high level Smithing perk to do after enchanting.

If you're early on and can only get 5-magnitude elemental destruction enchantment items out of loot, you definitely will be interested in a DIY enchant: the lowest maximum enchantment magnitude for novices at the start is 10. You can lower that from the max to increase the number of discharges it can hold (as would using a bigger gem). The nearest enchantment table along the early path of the Main Quest is http://www.uesp.net/wiki/Skyrim:Farengar_Secret-Fire's at the beginning... or if you're okay with breaking and entering cellars and killing old ladies who are witches, there's a little hut west of Riverwood with one too.

A beneficial side effect of grinding up Conjuration with Soul Trap is the Summon Atronach spells. Raise Undead spells take too long for the corpse to get up on its feet and fighting, and requires the presence of dead bodies. Atros? Flick your wrist at a spot near you, and you get an elemental daedra (temporarily) on your side.

This doesn't work for Black soul gems, in my experience. They stay filled regardless.There is also a mod or two that will only only fill a gem with the right sized soul, my preferred option.

Well, with black souls gems it really doesn't matter. I believe the emptying of soul gems was intentional. With black souls gems you can only trap one level of soul anyway.

Huh. Didn't know that. Going to have to get one of those.

This discussion reminds me of yet another thing I miss in the later games that existed in Morrowind. One very fun thing to do in Morrwind was to make a filled soul gem collection of all the various creatures and named entities in the game, so you might have a lesser soul gem labelled with kagouti and a set of grand soul gems containing the named Dagoth Ur followers. When you hovered over the gem, it actually showed the name too, so it was a real collection.

Can't remember if Oblivion kept the labeling, but Skyrim kind of took away that fun by just showing something like grand (grand) and then losing the soul entirely if you try to display the gem.

Don't ever buy filled soul gems. That's super expensive and absolutely unnecessary

Go mess around in some dwarven ruins for 20 minutes and you'll walk out with 15-20 filled soul gems of all sizes easy

I frequently have my character go get the Steel Battleaxe of Fiery Souls from Ironbind Barrow, but I find that if you put the enchantment onto a faster weapon such as a dagger, then you only need a short duration for the Soul Trap, and the Fire Damage isn't adjustable. So even at low skill levels, a modest soul gem is enough for a lot of use between recharges, which you can do after every fight with such a weapon. Since re-charging advances Enchantment skill, it's a fun way to grind that up in regular combat.

Those characters have never needed to buy soul gems. There's always a huge supply to find. The only gotcha in the scheme is that the boss guarding the initial Axe is rather tough.

My current character won't be buying all the houses, and has plenty of gold, so at this time she has no issue with buying the common and lesser filled soul gems to charge weapons. All depends on your character and rp. Works for some and not for others.

Why all this love for the Steel Battleaxe of Fiery Souls? It's a really basic enchantment with a fire enchant that you can match in magnitude with basic enchanting skills I just go for the first soultrap weapon I find (be it loot or purchased), and then that's soon dispensed if I'm going Mage and get the Soul Trap spell.

I disenchant the first item with soul trap that I find and then enchant a much lighter one, such as a dagger, with the effect so that my character can easily carry it as a spare.

That axe looks so nice on a weapon rack. I usually have a soul trap weapon by the time I get the battleaxe, so I can look at it all I want.

It's a hand placed double enchant weapon available at level one with two useful enchants to have on a weapon. It will be a long, long time until you can double enchant items yourself with both fire damage and soul trap on a single weapon. And once you can create such an item, you can double enchant it with a 3rd effect such as an additional damage type or absorb health or paralyze or whatever strikes your fancy.

It's also useful to give such an enchanted weapon to followers along with all your empty soul gems. Give the enchant a short 3 sec duration for the soul trap portion plus the base 10 fire damage and it will last for ages before you have to recharge it yourself. If you use follower mods such as AFT you never will as they will recharge their own items as needed from their constantly increasing supply of filled soul gems.

Hi JaggedOne - welcome to the Forums (in case nobody already welcomed you) - here's your http://images.uesp.net/c/c4/Fishystick.jpg(it's a forum tradition)

You can also use filled soul gems to enchant apparel and weapons at an Arcane Enchanting table (there's one in the market of Windhelm if you're not sure what they look like). This is also where you dis-enchant magical items. When you dis-enchant an item, it is destroyed but your enchanting skill increases. The higher your skill and the higher quality soul gem you use, the more powerful your enchantment becomes (though some enchantments are yes/no types - like waterbreathing, either you can or can't, there's no 'I can really, really, really breathe underwater instead of just 'I can breath underwater).

Good luck!

That's how I see it. Besides, in all the games I've played, I've only had another Soul Trap enchanted weapon before getting that axe a handful of times. There are things I get FAR more often: Fortify Carry Weight, Muffle, Waterbreathing - really weird.