Crafting Gear Guide

To maximise both the smithing of your armour and the magnitude of the enchantments on your gear a set of crafting gear will be needed. The crafting gear has both the Forify Alchemy and Fortify Smithing on the gear. You therefore have to find items with these enchantments so that you can dienchant the items to learn how to apply them to other gear. Radiant Raiment in Solitude has a good selection of enchanted gear available for sale and you will be able to get the vast majority of your enchantments here.

The numbers below are based on having the Unofficial Skyrim Special Edition Patch installed which changes some of the mathematics when Enchanting as one of it's fixes. Without the mod the values in each loop will be lower.

Skill and Perk Requirements

There is a minimum requirement for skills and perks that are needed to make crafting gear.

Required Items

There are several items that are needed to make the crafting gear as you need to basically create 4 progressively stronger sets of crafting gear to make your final set.

You also need to have disenchanted items with the Fortify Alchemy and Fortify Smithing enchantments. The Dreugh Wax, Stoneflower Petals and Gold Kanet ingredients can be purchased from Khajiit caravans. Remember you can quicksave, attack and quickload to reset a merchants inventory until you get as many ingredients as you need.

Making the Crafting Gear

First Crafting Gear

Make the following potion:

Do a quick save, drink the Potion of Fortify Enchanting and enchant the following items as below:

If you are quick enough all the items will be enchanted correctly and if not then do a quick load an try again. Equip the crafted gear.

Second Crafting Gear

Make the following potion:

Do a quick save, drink the Potion of Fortify Enchanting and enchant the following items as below:

Equip the crafted gear.

Third Crafting Gear

Make the following potion:

Do a quick save, drink the Potion of Fortify Enchanting and enchant the following items as below:

Equip the crafted gear.

Fourth Crafting Gear

Make the following potion or maybe 2 depending how quick you are at enchanting:

This is the final crafting gear and as such we are also adding Fortify Smithing onto some of the items. Do a quick save, drink the Potion of Fortify Enchanting and enchant the following items as below:

The crafting gear is now complete and can be used to improve the weapons and armour you will be using for combat.

If the build you are playing doesn't need the Arcane Blacksmith perk from Smithing then remember to improve your weapons and armour before enchanting them. If you enchant your equipment first then you will not be able to improve your armour on a workbench or your weapon on a grindstone without getting the perk. The details for a potion of smithing can be found below.

Then make the following potions in enough quanties to enchant your gear. How many you need depends on weather or not you are applying custom names to your items

Further Improvements

There are additional ways to improve your crafting skills beyond what can be achieved as indicated above.

Using any of the improvements above means that additional stages will be added to the crafting loop with 6 rather than 5 needed when using the Sallow Regent Black Book and/or Ahzidal's Genius. Using all of them is 11 loops rather than 5.

Sallow Regent Black Book

Inside White Ridge Barrow on Solstheim is the Black Book called the Sallow Regent. This allows you to pick from 3 lesser powers which improve either uour mage skills, warrior skills or rogue skills by 10%. Therefore, the Seeker of Sorcery is for Enchanting, the Seeker of Might is for Smithing and the Seeker of Shadows is for Alchemy.

To get the maximum magnitude in your enchantments you need to switch to the correct lesser power depending which crafting activity you are doing. However, you can only use the Black Books on Solstheim. It's very handy to complete the quest chain in Raven Rock to get Severin Manor as a player home so you make your crafting gear there because you can only switch powers in the Black Book while on Solstheim.

Ahzidal's Genius

In Kolbjorn Barrow on Solstheim there is a Dragon Priest called Ahzidal and eveyr few days you get to unearth another section of the dungeon for a fee. Each new area gives you an item of Ahzidal's gear to find. While wearing 4 pieces of this gear grants the Ahzidal's Genius lesser power, which grants a 10 point increase in enchanting. Therefore, before you drink your Potion of Fortify Enchanting you can equip 4 pieces and then enchant your crafting gear and also your combat gear.

Necromage Vampire

This is what some consider a bug and others an exploit in the base game where if you become a Vampire and have the Necromage perk from Restoration then various perks and powers get improved in either their magnitude, duration or both. This therefore allows for your Fortify Alchemy enchantments and your Potions of Fortify Enchanting to be a lot stronger than usual.

Please note that if you play with the unoffical Skyrim Special Edition Patch (USSEP) then this bug/exploit is fixed, although you can change this by installing a mod which restores this particular fix in USSEP back to it's former state.