I've started up Skyrim for the first time in a while, but one of the things that really irked me about this game was Smithing. Since I bought the game, I have always levelled Smithing by spamming, first with iron daggers and then jewellery/Dwemer bows post-1.5. Does anyone know of a more "legitimate" way of bringing it up? Stalhrim armour looks properly awesome but it requires Smithing to be 80.

I'm open to using a mod but I'd rather not.

The higher the value of the crafted/improved item, the quicker you level up smithing.
Iron daggers are now the worst thing for leveling smithing.
once you reach level 30 smithing Dwarven bows are really good for leveling smithing for another 20-30 levels because they require 2 dwarven ingots and 1 iron ingot.

just console command it to 100 and focus on something else? Bringing it up "legitimately" takes forever and if you're gonan spam, you might as well use console commands to save you the trouble.

And you may aswell just spawn to your quest markers to save you the trouble of fast traveling or running there. And you may aswell set yourself as the guild leader to save yourself the trouble of doing the quests. Okay no more sarcasm I promise.

A fantastic way to level smithing is to keep hold of all of gems you come across, and smith them into jewelery with the Transmute spell. Another way and a personal favourite of mine, is to smith lots of arrows.

sure, whatever. Whatever floats your boat I suppose.

I guess I've leveled up too many characters too many times to think skill leveling is fun.

This is my first post, so i want to say Hi! to all of you.

Making Nordic carved chestpieces is good method too (if you don't mind spending points on the left side of the smithing tree). Most of the time i make jewelry and leather armor to get to skill lvl 50, then start to mass produce carved armor. Only 1 ebony is needed per chestpiece and quicksilver+steel are common and cheap. From 1 ebony, 2 qs and 6 steel (with the help of some smithing gear/potions) you can produce 3200 septim worth of legendary chestpieces.

I buy a lot of training, and just see making and selling weapons and armour as an occupation. But mostly I buy as much training as possible. The dawnguard guy can train you the highest, I think second highest is the riften smith.

I find even transmuting is a pain and much, much slower than the original iron dagger stuff. It's painful!

I'd say Dwarven stuff is your best bet, honestly.

hearthfire, the items you need to make are cheep and for some reason have higher skill value than most. Also use the workbench/grindstone to constantly improve items to sell (slap a simple enchant on them too)

Use the warrior stone, well rested/spouse, and if you done a certain quest you get an additional bonus to smithing xp.

But jewelry is the fastest way, if you get the materials. I wind up using hearthfire, crafting weapons/armor to decorate with (god do I hate the weapon plague in the bedroom wing...) since the magical weapon sound annoys me when I walk into one (walk in ... fusssh! okay where is the sneaky jedi...)

here's my "legitimate" way of leveling smithing:

if i'm rping a smith merchant, then, i can make and sell goods after I've perked my way to further access of materials, which, i must harvest on my own.

if i'm rping a guy who can improve their armor/weapons i do that after perking my way to the appropriate level and i limit the smithing to owned items and i cannot sell them.

if i'm rping a non-smithing character but i want to gain perks to fill in with the appropriate rp perks, i'll spam smithing and never sell nor use smithing for actual gameplay. it's a rp device only.

At least that's smithing a consumable resource (arrows) If weapons degraded over time, maybe there would be more options of raising smithing other than spamming leather armors > Dwarven bows > Jewelry

I think making smithing jewelry is the quickest way to do so. Once you reach Ebony smithing, you should start smithing some of those, but Ebony ingots cost a lot and they're harder to find, so what I did was every time I walked by an Iron ore vein, I mined it, and then used transmute to convert it to gold; very helpful spell. It also helps to collect gems, for it helps increase your smithing

Does anyone know if they fixed Ancient Knowledge? I hear all kinds of contradicting info on that.

I was going to say training but Tonedog beat me to it. I usually let it naturally progress as I play, with training sessions in-between, and smith a lot of gear for my followers to use.

Also "Hi!" to ErdeiElf. Welcome to the forum.

U can level fast and fair by three ways:

1. Pick the lowest value + lowest resource item (arrows, daggers and leather bracers). Keep in mind that some other items need leather or iron ingots too, so craft those before. Every item will give a base XP, which is why these cheap items will work well.

2. Pick the most valueable item, with keeping in mind the resource cost. The value will have greater effect on XP the higher the value is. Value of 250 gold or more gives nice XP to resource ratio.

3. Improving high value items will always have a very low resource cost, one ingot of some sort. The rise in value will count towards new XP, so check out the value. The value increase by improving items should be 200 gold or more, to make it worthwhile. It is better to make Dwarven bows and improve them all, instead of just making only dwarven bows. Regarding Dwarven ingots, crafting Dwarven arrows is the easiest way to level smithing. You can find hundreds of ingots in dwemer ruins (use wiki to learn how) and make thousands of arrows. Arrows are useful for archers, but also weightless and worth a nice amount of gold.