Magic Skills

Note that Magical skills don't really have set benefits or extra powers based on your Mastery Level. Instead, the ability to use new and more powerful spells is dictated by your Master Level. When you're a Novice in Alteration, for instance, you might be able to cast a spell that lets you open Very Easy locks; you'll have to rank up to Apprentice before you can cast a spell that opens Easy locks.

Almost everyone can use magic for simple effects, but although you can definitely increase your skill in a school of magic by simply casting low-level spells over and over again, the higher-level spells will eventually become prohibitively expensive for anyone but magic specialists, since most warriors and stealth characters probably won't have been heavily investing in Intelligence, which is required to obtain enough magicka to actually cast the high-level spells.

Alchemy

Relevant Attribute: Intelligence
Low Trainers: Felen Relas, Anvil Mages Guild; S'drassa, Leyawiin Mages Guild
Medium Trainers: Ardaline, Bravil Mages Guild; Brotch Calus, Bruma
High Trainer: Sinderion, West Weald Inn in Skingrad

Note that much of this information is repeated in our Alchemy Tips chapter. Refer to that for even more information.

First off, alchemy should never be a Major Skill, unless you plan to use it solely for the purpose of levelling up, and never intend to actually make potions. The reason for this is that you simply level up too quickly if you actually use Alchemy a lot; you're going to wind up with a lot of ingredients if you pick up whatever you find in your travels, and if you save them up and use a bunch of them at one go, then you can often gain four or five points in alchemy in one sitting, which can cause you to level up before you've managed to gain any points in your primary attributes. This warning can be tempered somewhat for character

Weynon Priory has a good set of novice alchemy equipment, if you can find a quiet time to lift it.

We'll explain the reasoning behind this shortly, but first, a description of what Alchemy is...to begin with, here's a list of what you get for increasing your skill level in Alchemy. Of course, increasing your skill level will also make your potions more effective: they'll have bigger effects that last longer, and so on and so forth.

Alchemy is essentially the art of taking ingredients and making them into potions of various effects. In order to perform alchemy, you'll need, at a bare minimum, a mortar and pestle (which counts as one item) and two ingredients which have the same alchemical effect. That'll net you a potion, although it might not be a very good one. If you want to make better potions, you'll want to add more equipment, including an alembic, a calcinator, and a retort. Although it's possible to make a potion with any combination of these equipment pieces (the mortar and pestle is always required, however), it's not too difficult to acquire all of them, and having them all while you make your potions will definitely improve their quality. Unfortunately they can be cumbersome to lug around, with a full set weighing around twenty pounds, so if you intend to partake of alchemical goodness, you'll want to buy a house early on with a storage unit so you can store your equipment there and use it when you've collected a bunch of ingredients.

Collecting Ingredients

Speaking of ingredients, there are a lot of them. A LOT of them. As you wander around Cyrodiil's beautiful landscapes, you'll find plenty of plants and mushrooms lining the roads or located under the trees. If you look at these ingredients, you'll see a hand icon indicating that you can interact with them; if you do, you'll usually pick up some kind of ingredient from it. (Sometimes you'll be told that you can't find anything when searching a plant; your chance at being successful depends on the plant, apparently.) Ingredients grow back a few days after you search a plant, so you don't have to worry about deforesting Cyrodiil and running out of ingredients.

Other sources for ingredients are creatures and shops. Many creatures will drop ingredients, such as rat meat from rats, bonemeal from skeletons, and daedra hearts from dead Daedra. (Eww!) Shops, such as The Finest Ingredient in the Imperial Market District, will also sell ingredients, sometimes rare ones. You can also find huge amounts of normal food (which acts as a good low-level ingredient for practicing alchemy), such as wheat, bread, fruit, and rice, throughout every city and town in Cyrodiil, especially in storehouses and people's basements. Pick up all of this that you can, make a bunch of potions to increase your Alchemy skill, then sell all of the potions; you win in every way imaginable.

In your travels, you're going to be picking up a lot of ingredients; check your encumbrance every so often. When you're about to stop moving because you have so much stuff in your bag, head back to your house and indulge in a little alchemy to convert everything into potions, then sell off the potions you don't actually want or need.

Making Potions

In order to increase your Alchemy skill, you'll want to make as many potions as you possibly can. At low levels of skill, the easiest potions to make are Restore Fatigue potions. Almost every kind of household food, such as onions, bread, lettuce, and so on, will have Restore Fatigue as their first property, allowing you to loot kitchens all across town and convert your proceeds into Restore Fatigue potions. They won't be particularly good potions, but they'll definitely help increase your skill, and you'll be making so many of them that you'll gain a good amount of money from selling them.

Multiple ingredients means multiple potion effects!

Note that all ingredients that you find will have more than one alchemical property. As you increase your skill in Alchemy, you'll be able to see more of the hidden properties of your potions. At low levels of Alchemy skill, your ingredients basically only have the properties that you can see, so if you want to be able to use a more diverse array of ingredients in your potions, you'll have to rank yourself up, but doing so will help ensure that you'll be able to make the kinds of potions that you want with the ingredients that you actually have. Unlocking more effects will also allow you to use more ingredients in your poisons, adding multiple effects that occur simultaneously.

Note that a lot of ingredients actually have negative effects, such as Damage Health (always popular). Making a potion with a negative effect actually turns it into a poison (which appear in your inventory as green bottles instead of the purplish color of potions). Poisons can't be ingested, so they can't really hurt you. Instead, they can be activated in your inventory and applied to a weapon, allowing you to spread the love to the next enemy you hit, giving you a bit more oomph when facing off against boss-level enemies.