I will be purchasing Skyrim on PC ,and I'm new to the platform and I'm just wondering does anyone know what the creation kit is all about?
cheers

It will allow you the ability to create mods.

Well look at some mods here:
http://www.tesnexus.com/
And here is the wiki on how to use it from beginner to advanced:
http://cs.elderscrolls.com/constwiki/index.php/Main_Page


:turtle:

It's akin to the Construction Set or the G.E.C.K. for Morrowind/Oblivion and Fallout 3/NV respectively.

And what those do, in case you didn't know, is allow you to create mods for the game. Whether they be for personal use, or if you want to share your creation with the world.

It's basically an ingame mod starter kit/Mod storage.

AFAIK, It's not in-game, and it's not a starter kit. It's a separate, full program that doesn't store your mods, it's what you use to create them. So, to answer the question in the title: With enough patience and practice, it will let you do almost anything a Bethesda developer would be able to do.

Do not think of it as some pick-up-and-use tool akin to a map editor or some kind of simple program like that. It's basically the exact same tool Bethesda used to create the core game, and, while I'm sure Beth will try to make the mod-making process as least frustrating as possible for the modders, it is still a complicated tool that takes patience and dedication to learn.

If you want to learn more about it, I suggest downloading the http://cs.elderscrolls.com/constwiki/index.php/The_Elder_Scrolls_Construction_Set (If you don't have Oblivion, just read around on the wiki I linked to) and messing around with it a bit. It should give you a good idea of what to expect in the Creation Kit.

It will enable you to lose all sense of time as you discover there is no end to modding or collecting mods - best not to touch it until you have at least completed a play through

Yeah it's a pretty complex program that will require modding skills like scripting, texturing and modeling. That is if you want to create a mod that's more than adding in a custom item created using vanilla resources or changing the stats of items/npcs/creatures, or building a simple house etc.(those can be equally satisying mods too though)

Well I wanted to play through quite a bit first too. But there are a number of mods and chagnes I have planned for the game as soon as I get it. But using the CC will pretty much spoil it for me.