What it actually costs to raise a skill from nothing to 100: hours at the anvil, days on the calendar, the trades that move faster, and the four things that quietly cut your rate.
The short answer
Progress is measured in hours of validated work on that one skill, not hours logged in. Wandering, talking and travelling are worth nothing. These are the numbers for work you actually do, at the usual rate:
| Level | Hours of work | 1 h/day | 2 h/day | 4 h/day |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 — Novice | 0.5 | 1 day | 1 day | 1 day |
| 10 | 5 | 5 days | 3 days | 2 days |
| 25 — Apprentice | 12.5 | 13 days | 7 days | 4 days |
| 50 — Adept | 37.5 | 38 days | 19 days | 10 days |
| 75 — Expert | 87.5 | 88 days | 44 days | 22 days |
| 90 — Master | 147.5 | 148 days | 74 days | 37 days |
| 95 | 197.5 | 198 days | 99 days | 62 days |
| 100 | 297.5 | 298 days | 149 days | 112 days |
Read the last two rows carefully: the 4 h/day column stops pulling ahead near the top, because past level 90 a skill accepts only two hours of work a day and ignores the rest. Nothing you do buys that down.
Since 3 October every skill rises at two thirds of its old pace: each hour and each day holds two thirds of the work it used to. Every level earned before then was kept.
What one hour of work actually holds
Each skill carries its own bucket that fills at 20 units an hour and holds 13 at most. Every act you perform spends from that bucket, and when it is empty the work still happens — the sword still swings, the ingot still comes out — it just stops counting until the bucket refills. Since 13 October the game tells you when a skill has learned all it can for the hour or the day, and how long until it counts again.
- Refill
- 20units per hour, per skill
- Stored
- 13units waiting when you log in
- Small acts
- 0.5units each
- A worked vein
- 1–2units, by ore
- To saturate
- 40small acts an hour, one every 90 seconds
Two consequences worth knowing. First, the bucket is per skill, so alternating between the forge and the mine costs neither one anything — two skills can run at full rate in the same hour. Second, because it holds 13 units, a player who logs in after a break has nearly forty minutes of stored progress waiting; short sessions are not punished. Coming back once a day, an hour's work really counts 33 units, not 20.
Bigger work is worth more than 0.5. A finished mining round is worth 1.0 for copper and up to 2.0 for ebony, and a skinned hide 1.0 to 2.0 by the value of the pelt. A finished chopping round, a finished reading, a finished prayer and a picked lock are worth 1.0 each. A craft is worth 0.5 to 3.0 by the value of what you make, a brewed potion 1.0 to 3.0 by your Alchemist tier, a spell 0.5 to 1.5 by its magicka cost, and a blow you take in armour 0.5 to 2.0 by how hard it hit. A cooked dish is worth more the more goes into it, from 0.75 for a one-ingredient dish up to 3.0 for one of six ingredients. A soul captured with Soul Trap trains Enchanter 0.4 to 0.8 by its size, for up to 10 souls an hour. A blow you land or a plant you pick stays at 0.5, and eating teaches nothing. Heavier work does not raise the 20 an hour; it fills the hour with fewer acts. So, before any trade bonus, a Novice miner needs ten copper veins a level rather than twenty small acts, and the better the seam the fewer it takes.
Faster for some trades
Some skills were rising too slowly for the work they ask, so their work now counts for more:
| Skill | What counts for more | Worth |
|---|---|---|
| Miner | Every vein you work | ×2 |
| Blacksmith | Iron-tier smithing and smelting | ×2.5 |
| Alchemist | Every potion you brew | ×2 |
| Cook | Every dish you cook | ×2 |
| Woodcutter | Chopping wood and work at a lumber mill | ×1.5 |
| Skinner | Skinning and tanning | ×1.5 |
| Priest | Casting Restoration and Alteration, and prayer | ×1.25 |
Iron-tier smithing is iron, copper and leather gear, horseshoes and fittings, and smelting iron, copper, corundum and tin ore; higher tiers count as usual. Skinner now learns from skinning and tanning only, not from the kill.
Your people’s skill
Every people also learns one skill 15% faster: Altmer and Dunmer Arcane Arts, Argonians Harvesting, Bosmer Archery, Bretons Priest, Imperials Defense, Khajiit Martial Arts, Nords, Redguards and Maormer Blade, and Orcs Blacksmith. It multiplies with the trade rates above, so an Orc’s iron-tier smithing counts ×2.5 and then 15% more, nearly three times the usual. Like them, it moves you further for the same work and never lets more work through. It counts on the work you do in that skill, not on what the Study Magic shelves and classes pay toward Arcane Arts before your first spell, nor on what a book on smithing adds to a Blacksmith. The Racial Guide has the rest of what each people carries.
Making something new
The first time you make an item you have never made before, it counts three times. That holds for Cook, Blacksmith, Alchemist and Tailor, each skill on its own, for your first 25 different items in it. After that the bonus shrinks a little with each new item (about double for the 50th, one and a half for the 100th) but never quite goes away, so trying a new recipe always pays more than repeating an old one. Tempering makes nothing new and earns no bonus, and a first craft made while the hour or the day is already spent keeps its bonus for next time. Trade, race and first-time bonuses all multiply together, but never past five times the usual: among your first 25, a new iron-tier piece at the forge or a new dish already reaches that ceiling. Crafting and Trades has the recipes.
A bonus moves you further for the same work; it never lets more work through. The hourly bucket and the daily ceilings measure your work before any bonus is applied, and neither one rises. A Master miner still stops after two hours of mining a day; those two hours simply count double, so each level from 90 to 95 comes every two and a half days instead of five.
The four things that slow you down
1. Doing the same thing over and over
Repeating the same recipe, the same ore vein or the same target is worth less each time: the ninth in an hour is worth half, and it bottoms out at a third. Logging out does not reset it. Grinding one iron dagger over and over needs roughly 120 acts an hour to fill the same bucket that 40 varied acts fill. Move between veins, vary what you forge, hunt different beasts. Remaking an item you broke down in the last hour counts for nothing at all.
2. Starving
At hunger 90 your work counts for a quarter until you eat. Hunger climbs 12 an hour online (more slowly while you are Well Fed), so a long unbroken session reaches starving in under eight hours. Carry food; it is the cheapest rate increase in the game.
3. Not having taken up the trade
Eight trades open at their own station: a forge, an alchemy table, a chopping block, an ore vein, a loom, a tanning rack, an arcane enchanter or a cooking pot. The first time you use one, that trade opens for one point from your pool. Until it is open, nothing you do for that trade counts.
The other ten skills (the six combat skills, Priest, Scholar, Lockpicking and Harvesting) keep a tally of your work instead. Once you have done a level's worth, your skills menu (K) offers the skill, and taking it up costs one point and gives it a head start from the work you banked. Priest also opens when you read a Novice Restoration or Alteration tome at a spell study point, and Arcane Arts at your first sitting at a Study Magic shelf (see Schools of Magic).
If your pool is already full, the point comes from a skill you have set to Lower. With nothing set to Lower that can give a point, the new skill stays closed until you set one.
4. The daily ceiling, once you are high
Below 75 the ceiling is 240 units, which needs twelve hours on one skill to reach — effectively no limit. From 75 it drops to 120 (six hours), and from 90 to 40 (two hours). That is the wall, and it is deliberate. The day turns over at midnight UTC. A character also has a daily total across all skills together, 720 units (36 hours of work), which only matters if you work several skills all day.
One more, for groups: a group of more than six is a raid (it holds up to twelve), and while it lasts every member's work counts for half, except inside a raid ruin (see Dungeons and Expeditions). And nothing done in werewolf or Vampire Lord form trains a skill at all.
Mages have one more meter to watch: casting a spell of one of your schools of magic also raises that school, which takes in only so much casting a day: it takes at least two hundred casts to fill (a hundred for Conjuration, whose casts count double). At that limit, casting alone takes a school from 25 to 50 in about 13 days, and once the day's casting is spent, a class at a Class Lectern still counts. The Schools of Magic guide explains the schools.
What a single level costs
| Levels | Work | Varied acts | Same thing repeated | Fastest possible |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 – 24 | 30 min | 20 | 60 | — |
| 25 – 49 | 1 h | 40 | 120 | — |
| 50 – 74 | 2 h | 80 | 240 | — |
| 75 – 89 | 4 h | 160 | 480 | 1½ a day |
| 90 – 94 | 10 h | 400 | 1,200 | 1 per 5 days |
| 95 – 99 | 20 h | 800 | 2,400 | 1 per 10 days |
90 to 100 takes seventy-five days, minimum, at the usual rate. Three thousand units of work against a ceiling of forty a day. Played perfectly, with no wasted act and no day missed, that is nearly eleven weeks. A masterwork smith is a person the server watched become one.
Breadth or depth
You hold 300 points across all eighteen skills, one point per level. Since the buckets are separate, the only real question is where you spend your hours. Counting only what the hour refills, as the tables above do, two hours a day for a month buys either of these:
| How you spend it | After 30 days |
|---|---|
| All 2 h on one skill | That skill at 61 — Adept |
| 30 min each on four skills | Four skills at 27 — all Apprentice, none notable |
Played once a day, each skill also brings its 13 stored units to the sitting, and four short sittings bring four of them: the one skill then reaches 71 and the four reach 47 each. Spreading out buys more levels in all; only depth buys the skill other players come to you for.
Only three skills may sit above 75, and only one of those may pass 90. In practice the pool binds first: a Seat at 100 with two Experts at 89 already spends 278 of your 300, leaving 22 points for everything else you touch. Choose the trade you want to be known for before you spend a hundred hours on it.
Points only ever leave a skill when a gain would push you past 300, and you choose which skills give way by setting each one to Raise, Hold or Lower in your skills menu (K). Skills set to Lower give way first, highest first, and can fall all the way to 0, which gives back every point: the skill leaves your Wheel, and taking it up again costs a point as before. Arcane Arts and Priest stop at 1. A skill set to Lower does not rise while it is set so. Once nothing set to Lower can give more, your lowest skill set to Raise gives way instead, but never below 25. A skill set to Hold neither rises nor falls: its work earns nothing, and reading and study refuse to raise it, so set it to Raise to train it. Nothing decays while you are offline, and if nothing can give way the gain is refused with a notice rather than taken silently. The Wheel of Skills has the rest.
Working it efficiently
- Eat first. A quarter rate is worse than any other mistake on this list.
- Bring variety, not volume. Forty different acts count for as much as a hundred and twenty identical ones.
- Make something new. Your first 25 different items in a craft count three times.
- Work two trades in the same session. Separate buckets, no penalty — smelt while the mine respawns.
- An hour a day beats seven hours on Sunday once you pass 75, because the ceiling resets daily and unspent days are simply gone.
- Stop at the ceiling. Past 90, two hours is the whole day's allowance; the third hour is for roleplay, not progress. A book, Study Magic and Priest Studies tell you before you start when a skill cannot rise, and when it can again.