Oblivion:The Great Skill Grind

The Great Skill Grind is the section of route logic where the player gets the base value of every skill 100+ in order to fulfill the 21 Master Skills statistic requriement in the Accomplishments Tab.

Overview

For 100% Completion, the Master Skills stat needs to be at 21, indicating that all 21 skills have reached a base value of 100 or greater. The Great Skill Grind has historically been one of the most tedious and time-consuming portions of the 100% speedrun, requiring an extensive variety of tech and strategies to tackle it correctly.

The Master Skills accomplishment increments once per skill that is currently at a base value of 100 or greater, and will decrease when skills are lowered below 100. Since this stat only accounts for the base value of skills, things like magic effects that fortify a skill will not count towards this accomplishment.

There are several options for reaching 100+ in a skill:

• Manually farming a skill — This is the most obvious option. This is the most time-consuming option, with some skills taking several hours to grind. Each skill grind method also requires a different setup, which adds additional time and route logic complexity to acquire the necessary items.
• Buying training — This option is faster than manually farming, but slower than other options. By utilizing the Infinite Level-Up Glitch, the player can repeatedly buy training until they have max Attributes. Each skill takes approximately 15-20 minutes to train this way, depending on starting values.
• Glitching skill values — This is the current fastest strategy, albeit with a few setbacks that make route logic much more complex. Glitches like Class Reset and Underflowing allow the player to reach high skill levels without having to grind or buy training, opting instead to use complex setups that glitch the skill value to 100+.

In addition to the grinding/training/glitching of each skill, timing when to activate certain free skill boosts such as the Oghma Infinium has been a crucial aspect to optimizing this section.

The Great Skill Grind specifically refers to the section of the run where all remaining skills are farmed up to 100+, but there is another element of the skill grind that occurs throughout the entire run. In current route logic, we have skills that can be passively farmed while playing the rest of the route. These are Acrobatics and the six Magic spell skills. New glitches that have been discovered may make this aspect of the grind obsolete.

A sub-task of the skill grind is to optimize Attribute Allocation to maximize how many character level-ups and therefore training levels we can acquire using the Infinite Level-Up Glitch.

Previous Methods

Version 1

In V1, there were no known glitches to affect skill values, so a combination of training and manually farming was done. The original system was to take advantage of the character build, passive skill farming, and training based on a tier list of the most tedious skills to manually farm. The original tier list is lost, but this is an approximation:

Tier	Skills
High Tedium	Athletics, Marksman, Mercantile, Speechcraft
Medium Tedium	Armorer, Blade, Blunt, Block, Hand to Hand, Restoration
Low Tedium	Alchemy, Alteration, Conjuration, Destruction, Illusion, Mysticism, Acrobatics, Light Armor, Heavy Armor, Security, Sneak

High tedium skills were determined to have too long of manual skill grinds to ever be worth doing. Training was allocated to these skills first. Leftover training was put into Medium tedium skills, which had fairly long manual grinds, but were still bearable. Low tedium skills were short grinds or grinds that were passively farmed throughout the run. Restoration is the only passive skill that was considered a Medium tedium due to it taking 17,000 casts to max out vs the other magic skills that each took ~1,700-8,500 casts.

Using this tier list, the "optimal" character build was selected as follows:

• Race — Imperial was selected due to them having +10 to Mercantile and Speechcraft (two high tedium skills), as well as +5 to Blade, Blunt, Hand to Hand, and Heavy Armor, most of which were medium tedium skills. This makes Imperial the race with the most bonuses to the most tedious skills.
• Gender — Male Imperial has 10 more Speed than Female Imperial, so Male was chosen.
• Birthsign — The Steed was chosen for additional movement speed.
• Class — A custom class was created with the following:
  • Specialization — Combat was chosen since it would give a bonus to one high tedium skill, and five medium tedium skills. Since specialization makes the grind for those skills faster, this was determined to be best since it would make all of the weapon/armor grinds much shorter.
  • Favored Attributes — Strength and Speed were chosen to speed up combat and movement throughout the run.
  • Major Skills — Armorer, Athletics, Blade, Blunt, Marksman, Mercantile, and Speechcraft were chosen. These are the four high tedium skills, and several of the worst medium tedium skills. Getting +20 bonuses to each of these made the amount of training required for each much lower, making it possible to never have to grind any of the high tedium skills, with stats left over to put into medium tedium skills.

At the time, it was not known that glitches could be used to increase the player's level higher than normal, resulting in a max player level of 42 with the character build. Each level, the player gets 5 levels of training for a total of 210 training purchases in V1, and the rest manually farmed.

The methods for farming each skill were very basic in the original run:

• For passive farming, Magic spells were single effect spells with minimum magnitude/duration on self that were farmed repeatedly. It was brought to our attention mid-run that Animation Cancelling could be used to speed this up further, at which point it was implemented.
• Armorer was farmed by repeatly hotkeying enchanted Wrist Irons that had a Disintegrate Armor effect on them to drain armor health. Repair hammers were duped and used each cycle. The Broken Ayleid Crown of Lindai was exploited at 75+ Armorer.
• Shadowmere was attacked repeatedly for increasing Blade/Blunt/Hand to Hand. Due to a routing error, the Club was used for Blunt despite it having a slower attack speed than a War Axe.
• Block/Light Armor/Heavy Armor were farmed in Haunted Mine by letting Rats attack the player repeatedly.
• Sneak was farmed off of a Khajiit in the Skooma Den, spawning the running joke of "Petting the Cat" in reference to grinding Sneak.

The Great Skill Grind took 17:51:30 in the V1 run.

Version 2

V2 focused very little on improving the Skill Grind. Optimizing training to avoid more tedious skills was still the main strategy, and the character build and most farming methods remained the same, with a few notable improvements:

• Magic spells for passive farming were greatly improving, taking advantage of Spell Chaining and several other in-depth mechanics to utilize the much faster On Touch casting animation while still keeping each spell infinitely castable, all while still not requiring a target.
• Armorer was drastically improved, utilizing a new spell that disintegrated the armor repeatedly when chain casted. More in-depth mechanics about Armorer were utilized to make the armor damaging and armor repairing cycles as optimal as possible, including draining armorer before repairing to maximize how many repairs could be gained per cycle.
• The Rusty Iron War Axe replaced the Club, making the Blunt grind shorter.
• The timing of several free skill boosts was improved to allow each skill to be farmed less before reading skill books.
• Block was overlapped with Heavy Armor/Light Armor by blocking without a weapon, allowing the gauntlets to give armor and Block experience when hit.
• Due to slightly better Attribute Allocation, a few additional player levels were earned, allowing for more training to be purchased.

The Great Skill Grind took 11:41:40 in the V2 run.

Version 3

V3 had several massive improvements to the Skill Grind, most notably utilizing the Infinite Level-Up Glitch to extend the player's level from ~50 to ~170. This gave us over 800 levels of training to allocate, resulting in the vast majority of skills being trained entirely instead of manually farmed. Due to the drastic shift in Skill Grind duration, it was determined that the new strategy should be to maximize the amount of passive skill farming done throughout the run since the manual grind would now be less time-consuming. For every five times the player levels up a skill passively, it saves ~20 seconds having to perform another cycle of the Infinite Level-Up Glitch and training purchases. Passive skills remain unchanged, with the six Magic spell skills and Acrobatics being the most easy to farm while performing other actions throughout.

This resulted in a complete overhaul of the character build:

• Race — Altmer was now optimal for several reasons. Most notably, all of their skill bonuses were in passive skills aside from Alchemy, making them tied with Breton for the most bonuses to these. Altmer is more optimal than Breton for reasons independent of the Skill Grind. The extra character height makes them 10% faster automatically, and their automatic 100 pts of Fortify Magicka prevents diseases from affect Spell Chaining.
• Gender — Female Altmer has 10 more Speed than Male Altmer, so Female was chosen.
• Birthsign — The Steed was chosen for additional movement speed.
• Class — A custom class was created with the following:
  • Specialization — Magic was chosen since it boosts the farming speed of every magic skill.
  • Favored Attributes — Strength and Speed were chosen to improve movement speed and carry weight.
  • Major Skills — Acrobatics, Alteration, Conjuration, Destruction, Illusion, Mysticism, and Restoration were chosen since these are the seven skills that are most easily farmed passively.

Several other improvements were implemented as well:

• Attribute Allocation became very important for V3, since we now needed to avoid maxing out our Attributes for as long as possible. This was optimized too late in the route revision to fully implement, so a less risky but similar strategy was utilized to reach a much higher player level.
• A shield exploit was discovered in which Light Armor/Heavy Armor could be farmed much easier and faster by sheathing your shield and weapon while being attacked. The location was also changed to the Bruma Barracks for a much higher frequency of hits landed on the player compared to the Rats in previous versions.
• Skill books were now read throughout the run instead of after each skill reached a high enough value, resulting in much less backtracking during this section.
• Sneak was improved by changing the NPC to the Adoring Fan, who is much easier to find than the Khajiit in the locked Skooma Den. Sneak was only partially farmed now, with training being purchased after several easy level-ups were earned.
• Armorer was planned to be manually farmed, but ended up being able to be trained instead due to the Attribute Allocation optimizations.
• The Skeleton Key was used to finish Security grinding much earlier.

V3 marks the first time that the passive skill farming was at risk of taking longer than the entire rest of the run up to the Skill Grind.

The Great Skill Grind took 2:10:09 in the V3 run, making it the single largest time save of the revision.

Current Method

The latest improvement to the skill grind is incredibly complicated due to the implementation of the recently discovered Class Reset and Skill Underflowing glitches, which completely changed how the skill grind works. Here is a simplified route logic structure, followed by a lengthy explanation of why it all works:

Logic Structure

Phase 1 – Vampirism Setup:

1. Acquire the Skeleton Key and Oghma Infinium from doing Daedric Shrine quests.
2. Race Reset to be a Female Orc.
3. Acquire Porphyric Hemophilia and develop it into stage 25 Vampirism.
4. Complete the entire Vampire Cure quest to acquire the Cure for Vampirism potion, but do not drink it.
5. Develop your Vampirism to stage 100.

Phase 2 – Power Leveling:

1. Use the Infinite Level-Up glitch to get your character to level 145. (This value needs to be exact.)
2. If you run out of Attributes, you need to go perform a Class Reset to reset your Luck to 50, and then continue leveling up again.

Phase 3 – Underflowing:

1. Perform a Class Reset to have a specialization in Combat, favored attributes as Strength and Speed, and major skills as Alteration, Conjuration, Light Armor, Marksman, Mercantile, Restoration, and Speechcraft.
2. Drink the Cure for Vampirism potion, drop the Skeleton Key, and read the Oghma Infinium Path of Steel.
3. All your stats are now underflowed or reset to be 100+ except for Athletics, Hand to Hand, and Alchemy.

Phase 4 – Manual Skill Farming:

1. Use the Infinite Level-Up glitch and drain spells (you'll need to at once for Athletics) to buy training for Athletics and Hand to Hand until they are at level 100.
2. Manually farm Alchemy to level 100 using duped restore fatigue ingredients.

Potential Improvements

• The top priority is to find a way to improve the actual character leveling process. The bulk of the skill grind is now the power leveling from 24 up to 145, which is extremely tedious and takes about half an hour.
  • Although unlikely, there may be a way to underflow the character's level somehow, or at least glitch it out in one shot rather than repeatedly performing a glitch over and over.
• Vampirism doesn't consistently develop to stage 100 with the setup we use, even though code analysis suggests it should always work. We need to investigate this further to streamline the setup.
• Despite our best efforts to Underflow and Class Reset every skill to 100+, there are a few remaining skills that were unable to be optimized in order to save another 10 minutes:
  • There is still one manually farmed skill in the run, which is Alchemy. Ideally, we should find a way to avoid having to do this since it takes 4-5 minutes and is physically taxing on the player.
  • We still have to buy training repeatedly for Hand to Hand and Athletics as well.

It is entirely possible that there is no better way mathematically to Class Reset and Underflow our skills, but this is unlikely give that Version 4 was our first attempt at harnessing these glitches.