It might be wise to understand that not everybody is in the same place in life...Especially if you are of a mind to judge others.

For instance, I'm retired, approaching 70, and gaming is my "hobby." I'm free to do it for a lot of hours a day, if I want.

All I want to know from the OP is........how the hell do you get to Smithing 90 in just 20 hours

If you are that good.......you would make an excellent adversary/competitor in our DiD competitions

You want to end the boredom?

A worthy challenge for your heavy armoured Orc perhaps?

Enter this round and prepare to be entertained

Or die gloriously in the attempt

In that case, what you need is not a different build or new ideas -but a break. Pushing yourself to go through not just this, but any game, defeats the purpose of playing in the first place, which is to have fun.

For the first few hundred hours, it was just trying different flavors of characters, and then I was interrupted by other games llike Fallout 3, FONV, and I can never seem to pick up a character once I've left them alone for any period of time. I don't remember where there were, who they were, or why I liked them, so I end up restarting. Then there are numbers that I lost to various bugs, some at very high levels.

The biggest reason I have so much playing time is simply that after that first few hundred hours, I started playing "Dead is Dead". That forces restarts anywhere from 5 to 300 hours in. The fun part is that I try to play each character in a different direction, so I still find new content with almost every character.

I have half a dozen games I've bought sitting on my computer that I've never played, others that I've never even installed that include Witcher, TombRaider (new version), Sid Meier's Pirates, Witcher 2, Torchlight 2, etc. Just think, I've got enough games to last me two lifetimes at this rate...

I have a job but you wouldn't believe it if I told you about it.

But to elaborate on what I was saying, I think that Skyrim has more to offer than killing and reaching the next level but it's all up to individual prerogative.

Ive spent an hour maybe longer just catching butterflies because they give good alchemy.

Hoo-Boy...Tell me about it...

I just looked at my GoG library to check. I have 190 games, just from GoG.

Some of them are old games that I played years ago, and plan to replay (like Baldur's Gate, Icewind Dale, PsT), some of them I've played through once (like the first Witcher game.) Many of them I've started, and then left to try something else. A lot of them are one-time-play games (typically Adventure or Detective type games.)

I hope to get around to playing all of them. Someday. When I have time.

I don't know about you, but I grew to hate the Helgen intro after about three runs - could that be adding to your boredom / frustration? If you're playing on PC, there are "alternate start" mods that plunk you down in different places and let you avoid Helgen altogether. I use "Live Another Life," which lets you choose between multiple starts (including being an Orc in a stronghold), but there are others out there.

I've also learned to "compartmentalize" quest choices for different characters, which helps a lot with replayability. For example, my Imperial mage did the College of Winterhold, the Civil War, the Solitude quests, and the main quest, but not much else. My mage/thief is all about the Thieves' Guild and all the seemingly petty local quests. My mercenary archer did mostly bounty quests, some of the Companions quests, and otherwise wandered about exploring random dungeons and keeping the roads clear. And so on.

It's not so much about specific goals with any of my characters - rather, it's what the characters are likely to do (and likely to avoid). By having a group of characters doing different things, I can rotate through them and keep the game relatively fresh. The characters may visit the same places over and over again, but they're likely to do different things, which lends a different feel to each area.

You have got me beat. I've only got about a dozen games in my steam library waiting to be downloaded, plus Baldur's Gate, Icewind Dale, PsT that I bought on disc a few years ago in a boxed set ready to work on a modern OS that I have never gotten around to installing. Not to mention a stack of PS2 games that I never got around to taking out of their shrink wrap. But I've got nowhere close to 190 unplayed games. Probably closer to 19.

Role-playing.

My character is only done with Skyrim once she has done X. But to do X, she needs to do a lot of things before she can achieve that. Add to that the many distractions that the game offers, and after 15 hours, I'm no closer to my character's goal.

She's intentionally OP because she's my Oblivion character as well. But despite the fact that she can one-shot any enemy easily, there are still challenges for her to face, believe it or not.

Here's a lovely thing... you can do almost the same thing on the console... not exact, but it will save some grief and errrr Helgen hating.

In the spoiler tag is the way to have a console version of an Alternate Start... but it IS a SPOILER, if you have not played enough before to get to a certain someone in the Ragged Flaggon or heard a rumor about that person..... so read it if ya want to.

Pretty much your imagination is the only limit you have in Skyrim... if you think about it for a minute or two.

Well, for accuracy's sake, I think at least 50 or 60 of them are games I've played, either in the past, or since I bought them. And quite a few are ancient games from the 80s and 90s that I bought more for nostalgia's sake than anything else.

With GoG, the games stay listed in the library after they're played. One is free to download them again, play them on a different machine, or even download a second copy for a family member. They're completely DRM-free.

It's possible you're just burnt out by it? Playing the same character over and over again is bound to make anyone go frickin' berserk. Said character a frickin' demigod five minutes after exiting Helgen? Yeah, no wonder! You didn't give him/her the chance to grow, to evolve!

See if you can't step out of your comfort zone by playing as another character style. Maybe an Argonian mage or a Redguard assassin/spellsword?

Limit yourself as others said. Don't do every single quest in the game. Limit yourself only to what your character would reasonably do.

Don't make your character stupidly powerful stupidly fast. The whole point of leveling is that you watch your character grow from a pitiful level one character who runs away from mudcrabs to a badass level 50+ character that can take down a Legendary dragon without even batting his/her eyes.

Think about what your character can do, what he/she can't do. What does he like/dislike? Is there a favored drink he/she likes to have? What are his/her friends? Enemies (that don't count bandits and the like)?

The first summer I got Skyrim, I think it was 2012, I know for a fact I played it for like 700 hours. It was between semesters and I didn't have anything else pressing and I must have played an average of 6 hours per day for the whole summer . . . actually the math isn't that hard . . . 700 /90 (days) . . . Holy crap 7.7778 hours!A combination of burning out, feeling somewhat 'guilty' for having played so much, and getting busy with school led to a brief hiatus. But if memory serves I was back again for another shorter late fall or Xmas binge, maybe 400 hours. Over the years since then I've gone through active and inactive spells of playing and have played in "offline mode" more often so not sure if my actual total number of hours is available (not to mention a reinstall on a new machine, but maybe that doesn't matter.So even though I have played it 'continuously since first starting in May 2012, I've probably managed to play it something like 2000 hours. Maybe even as many as 3000, my memory is just too fuzzy to say.Despite that large amount of playing over the years, here is a list of things I have still never done:1. Never even started Dawnguard.2. Never finished MQ (until recently had never even been to High Hrothgar)3. Never finished Thieves Guild (though my current playthrough is hell-bent to finish that one first before even starting any others and I'm only one or two 'episodes' from being made Guildmaster)4. Never finished any of the other 'Guild or faction quest lines' indeed most of them never went past about 4 episodes. Wizards guild I MIGHT have got as far as 6 episodes.5. Never used up any of the available side, or radiant or 'ancillary' or 'secondary' quest lines.6. For a long time I basically only played around White Run, River Wood and Rorikstead. I am almost certain I did not ever make it to Riften till I had played the game for like 500 hours, Windhelm probably 600, Winterhold might have been a bit earlier at maybe 300. Falkreath, I'd guess 700, the the farther west and north even later still. I still have done nothing more than ride into Morthall and see what it looked like.You might be asking: if there is so much I haven't finished, what have I been doing with those hundreds of hours of play? Well PLAYING of course! Hunting, Camping, Roaming aimlessly, watching Giants herd their Mammoths while listening to Soule's music, geting a wild hair and raiding a bandit camp, just because, killing everyone in it, looting everything that wasn't bolted down, hauling it off to sell it . . . must have repeated the opening stages of the Dragon Quests (just enough to get Breezehome) 50 times. I like doing a lot of alchemy . . . MODS! OMG MODS! I presently have about 110 installed, and my more previous adjustment was to delete about 5 which had some 10 plugins associated with them. In the past I've gotten up to 120 mods, but after playing for a while readjusted. The modding community, the game and my understanding of it now is sufficiently 'mature' that I may never go through the 'agony' of the early game mod-trying binges I used to get caught up in. I can remember a time when it seemed like I'd spend 3 hours shopping, reading about, isntalling and configuring mods for every 2 hours spent playing the game.I'm a power gamer and I like to get more powerful. I just do it in a relaxed way!

If you play on PC I suggest learning how to install mods. With mods you can change almost anything and make the game much more immersive, challenging, and exciting.

I didn't enjoy the game unmodded at all. When the game was released I forced myself to play it as long as possible to find out what to fix with mods. At about 80 hours I was completely bored and had to stop. With mods though I have now played the game over 1000 hours and I still play it. Thanks to mods it's one of the best games I have ever played.

The unmodded game wasn't immersive and challenging enough for me. Once I made the game much more immersive by greatly improving the graphics (better textures, models, lighting, wider 90 degrees field of view) and by disabling handholding features (compass icons and enemy dots, sneak icon, quest arrows) my jaw now drops every time I start the game. My game is now so immersive it's like I'm there. Even just slowly walking up high hrothgar is an awesome experience. Also things like more numerous enemies with better AI, deadlier traps, dark nights and dungeons, weather that matters (Frostfall mod), etc. have made the game much more exciting.

tbh i could do it way faster it just that i dint look for daedric armour straight away and also i wasnt really super grinding for it.i took breaks and did bits of the main quest whatever. truelly i could do it a lot faster

Really? We might beg to differ!

Insane maybe, but not berserk

Time spent together fosters understanding, respect and love.....Isn't that right honey ?

Absolutely darling, we're practically married

again thanks for everyones feedback

It may have been a typo, but you may have your answer here. Go bare.

Don't wear any armour at all. That may mean playing as a sneaky archer, or a mage, or it might mean working on offense alone, so you can kill before you get hurt. In any case, it will be the opposite of your "Daedric armour is my goal" character. Even if it's a bust, you'll learn something from the attempt, that will guide the next character build.

I also didn't play the main quest most of the time really - I finished it maybe 2x times. I enjoy mostly small funny mods like https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=151842047. Also if you want to have some lead, maybe start with Aretino boy in Windhelm. If you didn't try that yet. Also thieves guild in Riften could be good for some sneaking character. You will have to go there because of that boy anyway. I'm not sure about an orc warrior, so maybe in another playthrough. But I know someone who created an orc in heavy armor and while sneaking he was bashing his enemies with two handed weapon from behind - so even that is possible. Or if your orc is an outcast trying to get some money, he would have reason to join thieves

I don't really try to finish most of misc quests too or side quests. I'm glad they are there, but I do just some of them if they are on my way. I really like guilds and factions and mods. If you would search in Steam workshop for quests/adventures - there are some interensting dungeons or even horror like quests - I'm not sure what you would prefer, but maybe there will be something for you. Or there is a mod where you can be a bandit and just take prisoners