My Skills:

• 3DS Max
• 2D art (photoshop and graphics tablet)
• Object Oriented Programming (I make my living through creating web applications on the Rails framework)

However, I am an utter begginer in the field of modding. Utterly. But I want to learn all there is because I really want to get a career in video games.

What I want to be able to soon:

• Import my weapons into Skyrim and disperse them throughout the world
• Build custom quests and NPCs
• Create new creatures with custom AI
• Build huge (province-sized) locations and add them to the world. The reason I say huge is because I want to know of any technical hurdles I may encounter doing this over adding a room or two with the Creation Kit.

What I want to be able to do down the line:

• Create my own custom spells such as transforming an NPC into a rabbit
• Food chains, wolfs hunt deer ect
• Permanent bodies (or at least tweak when the game gets rid of them)
• Rotting corpses. The older a corpse is the more biodegraded they get. Maybe even wildlife carring parts of them off (again not too macarbe)! When you revisit a mine you pillaged months ago, your felled enemies would be clothed skeletons.
• Spell crafting. Something along the lines that to open an oblivion gate you need to enter a location when the moon is high in the sky, have 4 human skulls, arrange them in a circle, cut your wrist over a candle ect. Always wanted more to the magic in Elder Scrolls rather than reading a book and getting glowy hands.
• Custom 'workbenches'. It always jarred me that dead wolfs are 'containers' that contain wolf pelts. I want to see my character preparing a wolf pelt from a kill. Not majorly gory, but you can see them fumbling with a knife.
• Huge agriculture mod where you need to till earth, sew in the right season, rotate crops, sell produce in the nearest town.
• Mod carts so you can actually have a ride and look around rather than fade to a new location.
• An ability to fill empty bottles up from a body of water, Zelda style.
• An ability to dig up the earth with the shovel to look for buried treasure! (Treasure maps would also play a part here)
• Custom menus. This doesn't really excite me at all but I feel its an important skill I'd like to have, especially with my argiculture mod.

However, I don't want to rely heavily on the Creation Kit. I want to learn the code. 2 questions really:

1. How long do you think it'll take me to get up to speed with the first 4 goals and my harder goals? I'm comitted, have the time and prerequisite skills that will help, at least.
2. Where are the tutorials to learn how to do this? It's so odd. A really vibrant modding community and yet googling for tutorials gets me nothing. How to install mods yes, plently, but literally nothing on how to get started modding. Is there a great, maybe official series on how to mod? My first texture, my first custom weapon ect all the way up to AI? Again I want to learn the code rather than the Creation Kit.