Other Crafting Activities

Cooking

Throw the meat, plants, and other ingredients (often mead-related) into a pot. Stir and stave off the hunger pangs.

Cooking allows you to transform meat, vegetables, and other ingredients into better-tasting, higher-quality food. Cooking is a rudimentary method of living off the land and is far surpassed by alchemy (which is a skill and creates potions that are much more potent).

Cooking requires a cooking pot or cooking spit, which can easily be found in every town and village across Skyrim—almost every house has one by the fireplace. You can also find them in other inhabited locations like forts or bandit camps.

Interact with a cooking pot (or cooking spit) to bring up the Cooking menu, which lists the food you can cook. All of the cooking recipes are readily available at any cooking pot or spit, as long as you have the ingredients for them. If you’re missing ingredients, the recipe is still shown but grayed out.

Most of the food you can cook isn’t all that helpful, typically restoring 5 to 10 points of Health or Stamina—less than you’d receive from even the cheapest of potions. Moreover, the ingredients are often the same price or more expensive than the resulting food and can often be put to better use in alchemy instead.

However, for a new adventurer embarking on their travels across the realm and scrabbling to get by, cooked food is a way to recover a little health in a pinch. For those who wish to live as the Nords do, killing their own meats, harvesting their own vegetables, and cooking the resulting ingredients into a somewhat murky-looking stew, this is an authentic way to satiate hunger and fatigue. But for everyone else, alchemy is a better bet, as it helps to advance your level and makes significantly better restorative items...with one delicious exception: the Elsweyr Fondue is excellent.

Hearthfire and Dragonborn: Cooking

Recipes

Hearthfire adds the following additions to your cooking:

• Cooking Recipes: There are two new recipes (Steamed Mudcrab Legs and Clam Chowder) that can be made at any cookpot.
• Baking Recipes: When you build your own house, you can construct a kitchen in the east wing addition. One of its unique furnishings is an oven. This allows you to bake any of these recipes (including the delicious apple pie and the ubiquitous sweetroll). The oven is the only place you can bake. The only way you can gain access to one is to build it.
• Milling Recipes: If you purchase land in the Pale and build Heljarchen Hall, you can construct the unique mill outbuilding. The mill allows you to convert wheat into a sack of flour. Flour is required for most baking recipes, so you might want to add a kitchen (and oven) to Heljarchen Hall and make it the epicenter of your pastry-based antics.

Cooking Recipes

The following tables show every recipe you can make, including the ingredients and the effects of the food once mixed together. After that is a table of baking recipes (requiring the Hearthfire Oven) and the single milling recipe (requiring the Hearthfire Flour Mill).

Baking Recipes (Requires Hearthfire Oven)

Milling Recipes (Requires Hearthfire Flour Mill)

Construct an Oven in your Hearthfire abode and bake some delicious treats!

Mining

Assaulting an ore vein with dual-wielded pickaxes is the quickest (and craziest) way to mine.

Throughout Skyrim, there are a variety of natural mineral deposits, concentrated in ore veins. Extracting minerals and gems from these veins can make you a small amount of gold, but more importantly, it helps you gather raw materials for smithing (which can save you a huge amount of money if you aim to craft your own items). To extract the ore, you first need a pickaxe. You can purchase one from almost any Blacksmith or general store merchant, or find them (for free) in any mine.

To mine ore, approach an ore vein with a pickaxe in your inventory and interact with it. Typically, a vein produces around three pieces of ore before becoming depleted. Along with each piece of ore, you also have a 10% chance of extracting a (random) gemstone.

Once mined, ore can be sold for a (generally small) amount of gold, or smelted down to make ingots (a slightly better way to earn money from your digging).

Where to Mine?

You can look for minerals in the wilderness of Skyrim’s windswept Holds, though the best and most reliable sources can be found inside the realm’s many mines. A few general tips if you plan to delve into mining:

• Keep a pickaxe handy. You never know where you might run into some valuable ore, whether out in the wilds or in the depths of a dungeon.
• Look for mines. Many settlements have mines, which give you easy access to a specific type of ore. When you befriend the Orc strongholds, you also get access to their rich Orichalcum and Ebony mines.
• Plan your return trip. Every in-game month or so, ore veins that have been depleted will replenish. Check back occasionally to strip them of their new ore.

The Holds of Skyrim and Beyond

If you’re scouring the landscape, here are some general tips for finding ore deposits:

• Falkreath Hold (near Helgen and Riverwood) has a slightly higher concentration of iron ore veins than usual.
• The central tundra of Whiterun Hold is a good place to look for Corundum ore.
• More valuable ores (Gold, Silver, Moonstone, Oricalchum, and Quicksilver) are most often found in more extreme environments, such as deep in the mountains or along the northern coast.

The Forgotten Vale has deposits of rarer minerals (such as Gold and Quicksilver), as well as Shellbugs (Falmer beasts bred for their hard coatings). Check the Atlas for further information.

Dragonborn: Mining

Dragonborn adds several new types of materials to mine:

• Geodes are a special type of ore vein that produces gems of a particular type. You can find Amethyst, Emerald, Ruby, and Sapphire Geodes on Solstheim.
• Heart Stone is a rare material used in Staff Enchanting (see above) and as a reagent for the Ash Guardian spell.

Stalhrim is a type of elemental ice found in the tombs of the ancient Nords buried on Solstheim. The Skaal of northern Solstheim use it in crafting weapons and armor.

In order to mine it, you need an Ancient Nord Pickaxe—normal pickaxes won’t work. These can be found randomly in chests or obtained as part of Solstheim Regional Activity: Take Your Pick* (which sends you to fetch one) or Solstheim Side Quest: Unearthed (Ralis’s unique pickaxe, Hoarfrost, is one).

The Minerals of Skyrim and Solstheim

The following tables reveal locations where minerals can be mined from veins, as well as where ore appears (having already been mined). Only the major locations, usually with two or more deposits, are shown. Note that some veins may be in the immediate vicinity of the location, and may require you to search for them.

Minerals

Iron Veins and Ore

Orichalcum Veins and Ore

Silver Veins and Ore

Corundum Veins and Ore

Ebony Veins and Ore

Gold Veins and Ore

Heart Stone Deposits (Solstheim only)

Malachite Veins and Ore

Moonstone Veins and Ore

Quicksilver Veins and Ore

Shellbugs (Dawnguard only)

Gem Geodes (Solstheim only)

Stalhrim Deposits (Solstheim only)

Smelting

Approach the domed smelter, withstand the great heat, and transform your ore into ingots.

You can purchase ore from most Blacksmiths, or mine it yourself if money is a concern. But what do you do with the ore?

Raw ore isn’t useful on its own and doesn’t sell for many gold pieces. However, if you bring your ore to a smelter, you can smelt it into metal ingots, which you can then sell for more gold pieces or use it to smith your own weapons and armor.

An Ebony Ingot, smelted from two clumps of Ebony Ore.

Smelting Recipes

The following table lists all of the available smelting recipes and the type of ingots produced by each. All of these recipes are available to you immediately; you just need the ore or scrap metal required for them.

Tanning

Approach a tanning rack and transform a wild animal hide into leather or leather strips.

Tanning is a simple process; it allows you to transform animal hides into leather or leather strips. These can then be sold or used in your own smithing. Larger pelts produce more leather...but are often more valuable as pelts, rather than broken down into their leather components. Therefore, it is wise to think twice before tanning everything you’ve skinned!

Tanning Recipes

The following table lists all of the available tanning recipes. All of these recipes are available to you immediately; you just need the hides for them.

Wood Chopping

Swing a woodcutter’s axe, cleaving a small log in twain. Now repeat until you’ve had enough.

There are several wood-chopping blocks throughout Skyrim, which allow you to execute this most simple of all crafting exercises: chopping wood. For this, you need a woodcutter’s axe, which you can purchase from almost any general store merchant or find (for free) at any lumber mill. Simply approach the wood-chopping block, interact with it, and you begin chopping. For each chop, two pieces of firewood are added to your Misc Inventory. When you’re finished, sell the firewood to any lumber foreman for 5 gold per piece of wood. You won’t get a better deal from any merchant.

Lumber Mill Locations

If you’re determined to sell your firewood for the best possible prices, do so at the following locations, where you can speak to (and obtain payment from) the lumber mill owner or operator. Note that not all of these lumber mills have a wood-chopping block.