So basically, I'm lvl 26; I don't fast travel, I've walked everywhere and so I pick every flower I see, and have picked up ever other ingredient I've found in dungeons and such. for the 25 hours I"ve played this character, have eaten every ingredient I didn't know an effect for to learn it, and crafted every available potion when I can.

However, after 25 hours of play and 26 levels, my Alchemy has gone up twice, maybe.. My enchanting is 43, just from disenchanting weapons and armor I don't need, it goes up like one point every time I do something. Is there a feature of Alchemy I'm not using?

You have to make expensive potions to raise it reliably, you can't just randomly make whatever and eat whatever or it really won't go up. Check the Alchemy Tips section of the wiki, there's some guides and even a site or two that can find you things to make that are expensive with the materials you have.

you dont get experience from picking stuff(i dont think) you get it from making potions and tasting ingredients for the first time i believe. your right though it move very very slow, i actually paid the women in whiterun to increase my level to 60.

ahh okay.. thank you, I guess I'll have a look at it.. hope it's not too spoilery.

The three E's of Alchemy as I like to say;

Expensive Experiments equal more Experience!

Basically, the more expensive the potion (even if its useless) the more experience you get. I posted a guide not long ago with a few recipes that will level you quickly but apparently no one found it useful. Check my topics if you'd like a glimpse

Alchemy is actually one of the easiest skills to raise if you know what you're doing.

awesome, I'll do that right now! thank you

Oh wow, I read your guide, minusthedrifter, and yeah...I didn't even realize you could experiment to be honest. When I go to the alchemy table I just scrolled down the list and each potion would only let me put in certain ingredients... obviously there's some function of it I didn't know, I'll go check that out when I get back on the game. Yeah, I knew I must have been doing something wrong.

Yep common mistake that. Even I didn't notice the feature until I accidentally left an ingredient selected when moving to a different potion type. While it lists all your ingredients right there at the top the list of known potions throws many people off including myself.

Glad to of helped! Happy gathering and enjoy experimenting!

Yeah but experimenting doesn't yield much experience. You would think that discovering an item's properties would give you some, but it doesn't. Only creating expensive potions will do it. It's pretty lame.

experimentings key. when you know most the effects for most the stuff you find its absurdly easy. especially when you walk everywhere. i play that way too. i never fast travel. travel around gathering ingrediants. hunting animals with parts that can be used for alchemy.

also alchemy traders that can train you are very useful. when you have more potions that you want to sell than they have gold to buy, which is very often for me. you can sell them potions for all their gold, pay them to train you, then sell more potions to get that gold back, and repeat. its just like trading goods for services.

Since more expensive potions yield more experience, if you enchant clothing/jewlery with fortify Alchemy enchantments, will that make your potions more expensive, and thus increase your alchemy faster? If so, it might be advantageous to co-level enchanting and alchemy together - use enchanting to fortify alchemy, then use your fortified alchemy to create better fortify enchant potions, then go do more enchanting, lather, rinse, repeat?

While you don't get a whole or of experience for experiments and you'll often end up with a lot of failures and cheap potions its the only way to quickly and effectively discovery effects. Unless you're keen on spending 3 perk points on the perk that has to do with eating. While it'd be easier I have other uses for those points.

One thing that I like however is that if you test an ingredient with another and its useless, that ingredient is greyed out if you select the other. That way you don't make the mistake of continually mixing useless things together. Rather handy and makes "going down the list" quite easy.


*edit*


Negative. I'm pretty sure there is a "base" price somewhere that the experience is based off of. One potion I make was worth about 1500 gold however after leveling up a few times and finding some Alchemy gear (I don't enchant much) that same potion was worth nearly 3000. I however still received the same amount of experience I had prior.

I've noticed that. One thing I haven't figured out yet. . . if all the effects for two ingredients are already known, but you've never combined them, will it still be smart enough to grey that combination out? The reason I ask is that there's something like 40 ingredients in the game. To combine every single ingredient with every other ingredient represents an astronomical number of combinations.

Let N = the number of ingredients (let's say 40)

Then the number of combinations is N * (N -1) * (N - 2). . . * ( 2 )

That is, you keep subtracting one and multiplying until you reach 2. This operation is called the "factorial" operation, and the usual notation to express this operation is:

n!

Well, 40! ~= 8.16 * 10^47.

If the game greys things out once you've discovered all 4 properties on each ingredient, though, you could shorten the number of tests up a LOT (but it would still probably require hundreds of tests).