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.

Explanation

General knowledge of Class Reset and Skill Underflowing will be essential to understanding this section.

Our general strategy throughout this process is to acquire as many temporary skill boosts as possible that affect the base values of our skills, then Class Reset to lower our skill values to be smaller than those skill boosts (which are still active on our character), resulting in all the boosted skills underflowing to an absurdly high value when the bonuses are removed.

Here are the boosts we will be acquiring:

Boost	Skill Bonuses
Skeleton Key	+40 Security
Vampirism	+20 Acrobatics, Athletics, Destruction, Hand to Hand, Illusion, Mysticism, and Sneak

Note that for all instances of Race/Class Resetting, we will be using the Repeatable Sewer Reset variation since it is our only available option at this point in the route logic.

Phase 1 – Vampirism Setup

The Skeleton Key is acquired in order to Underflow the Security skill later, and Oghma Infinium is needed to further boost skills after performing a Class Reset later, so we obtain these beforehand.

We perform the Race Reset (a Class Reset where we change our race instead) at the start of this section because it will remove our Vampirism if we do it later, and we'll need to have Vampirism at the time of the Class Reset (which will not remove our Vampirism). The Female Orc is our chosen race because of the skills it gets bonuses to. The gender is not important in this case. We chose Female simply because our character was already Female at this point in the run. Further explanation of the math for Class Reset will be provided later when relevant. For now, all that needs to be understood is that we can't Race Reset after getting Vampirism later, so we do it now.

Now that we can safely get Vampirism, we go to any nearby Vampire cave and get hit repeatedly by Vampires until we contract Porphyric Hemophilia. We need to develop it into actual Vampirism (by taking advantage of Vampirism mechanics) in order to start the Vampire Cure quest that will give us a potion we need. We want Vampirism to be at the lowest stage (25) possible so that we are not susceptible to Sun Damage while completing this quest. We then rush to get Vampire Cure done before Vampirism develops further, acquiring the Cure for Vampirism potion in the process, which will be used to remove Vampirism later and cause skill underflowing.

Now that we have the potion we need to remove Vampirism, we need to get our Vampirism to stage 100 in order to get the highest skill boosts possible from it. We once again take advantage of Vampirism mechanics to develop it as quickly as possible.

Phase 2 – Power Leveling

We now have all of the skill boosts and the items we need to remove those skill boosts for underflowing, as well as the extra items we need for raising other skills later. The next step is to get to level 145. Class Reset scales your character's stats based on the character level, so getting to 145 will guarantee a few things:

• Any major skills will in the custom class will be boosted to 100.
• Any specialized skills in the custom class will be boosted to 96.
• Any minor skills in the custom class will be boosted to 19.

If we level up any further, minor skills with reach level 20, making them impossible to Underflow, so we can't quite level up high enough to guarantee specialized skills are at level 100. Keep these values in mind for the next section, as it will become more clear why Female Orc was chosen.

The master plan for Class Reset, Underflow, and final skill grinding. Refer to this to understand Phase 3 and 4 of the explanation. Red text indicates values that are updated during that phase.

Phase 3 – Underflowing

This is where the bulk of the technical aspects occur. To the right is a chart that will aid in explaining the character build and where the stat values are at during each part. The phases mentioned on this chart are separate from the phases of the overall instructions.

The routing for this is essentially a big logic puzzle:

1. As per the previous section, all major skills start at 100, all specialized skills start at 96, all minor skills start at 19.
   • A custom class has a group of 7 of the same type of skill (Combat, Magic, Stealth) as specialized, and 7 major skills. A specialized skill can also be a major skill.
   • Due to how specialized skills work (an entire category of skills gets boosted to 96), we need to sacrifice all the underflow boosts from one category (Combat, Magic, Stealth).
2. The chosen Race will add +5/+10 to a handful of skills AFTER the Class Reset has adjusted the skills according to the rules in the first step. (See all race bonuses here.)
3. Athletics, Hand to Hand, Destruction, Illusion, Mysticism, Acrobatics, Sneak, and Security all need to be 19 or less after all of the above bonuses in order to underflow properly, so we need to keep as many of these as possible as minor skills.
4. After all underflowing has occurred, further skill boosts (in this case just Oghma Infinium) need to be applied to get more skills to be 100+.
5. After all free skill boosts have occurred, any skills under 100 still need to be boosted to 100 manually, either through buying training or actually grinding the skill.

With all of this in mind, what is the combination of Race and Class that yields the least leftover skills to have to farm manually?

The first thing we can notice is that our Underflow boosts affect 3 Magic and 3 Stealth skills, but only 2 Combat skills. We know we have to choose one specialized set of skills to be boosted to 96 that prevents all of that type of skill from underflowing, so Combat seems like the best choice since it sacrifices less skills than the other two options. We can use this as a jumping off point to figure out the rest of the puzzle.

Taking a look at the Reset State column in the chart, we have just solved the blue Specialized skills, and now we can solve the major/minor skills. You need to pick 7 major skills, which will instantly be boosted to level 100. Making a specialized skill a major skill is a waste since it would only increase those skills by another 4 points, whereas other skills will increase by 81 points if we select those. Continuing with the logic that we need our Underflow skills to be minor skills, that leaves us with 8 potential skills, with only 7 that we can allocate as major skills to boost to level 100. To determine which one to leave as a minor skill, we first need to realize that all 8 of these remaining skills have no easy way to boost them up to 100 otherwise, so whichever skill we leave as a minor skill will have to be manually farmed or trained. Alchemy is one of the shortest manual skill farms in the game (even faster than buying training), so we'll pick Alchemy. All of the Reset State column is now filled in.

It is at this point that we can finally understand why we chose the Orc as our Race. Each race gets +5/+10 to various skills, which is enough to bump any specialized skill up to 100+, so we need to eliminate races from consideration that would boost our 5 remaining underflow skills and pick one of the remaining races that boosts the most other skills that aren't already at 100. There are 10 races to pick from. Below is an analysis of their bonuses and viability. Any race with at least one underflow skill bonus is automatically not viable, and any that put too many skill bonuses into wasted skills that are already at 100+ are sub-optimal:

Race	Underflow Skill Bonuses (✘)	Wasted Skill Bonuses (Sub-Optimal)	Useful Skill Bonuses (Good)	Viable
Altmer	+5 Destruction, +5 Illusion, +10 Mysticism	+10 Alteration, +5 Conjuration	+5 Alchemy	✘
Argonian	+5 Illusion, +5 Mysticism, +10 Security	-	+5 Alchemy, +10 Athletics, +5 Blade, +5 Hand to Hand	✘
Bosmer	+5 Acrobatics, +10 Sneak	+5 Alteration, +5 Light Armor, +10 Marksman	+10 Alchemy	✘
Breton	+5 Illusion, +10 Mysticism	+5 Alteration, +10 Conjuration, +10 Restoration	+5 Alchemy	✘
Dunmer	+10 Destruction, +5 Mysticism	+5 Light Armor, +5 Marksman	+5 Athletics, +10 Blade, +10 Blunt,	✘
Imperial	-	+10 Mercantile, +10 Speechcraft	+5 Blade, +5 Blunt, +5 Hand to Hand, +10 Heavy Armor	✔
Khajiit	+10 Acrobatics, +5 Security, +5 Sneak	+5 Light Armor	+5 Athletics, +5 Blade, +10 Hand to Hand,	✘
Nord	-	+5 Restoration	+5 Armorer, +10 Blade, +5 Block, +10 Blunt, +10 Heavy Armor	✔
Orc	-	-	+10 Armorer, +10 Block, +10 Blunt, +5 Hand to Hand, +10 Heavy Armor	✔
Redguard	-	+5 Light Armor, +5 Mercantile	+10 Athletics, +10 Blade, +10 Blunt, +5 Heavy Armor	✔

As you can see, Imperial, Orc, Nord, and Redguard are the Races we can pick from since all the others would prevent skills from underflowing. In order to pick one of these, we need to look ahead and see what other skill boosts we will have after we do underflowing, which in this case is just Oghma Infinium. The combination of Race bonuses and Oghma Infinium bonuses will show us our maximum potential skill values before manually grinding/training.

First, let's select the Oghma Infinium boost we want (this table ignores Attribute bonuses since they are irrelevant):

Oghma Path	Bonuses
The Path of Steel	+10 Blade, +10 Blunt, +10 Heavy Armor
The Path of Shadow	+10 Light Armor, +10 Security, +10 Sneak
The Path of Spirit	+10 Conjuration, +10 Destruction, +10 Restoration

In this case, the Path of Steel is optimal because it doesn't boost any underflow skills, and it boosts only skills that are not already at 100+, so no bonuses are wasted. Now picking a Race is simply a matter of picking the one that has the most unique bonuses with Oghma Infinium for skills under 100. Combining Oghma Infinium and Race bonuses will yield the following: Imperial +4, the Nord +6, the Orc +7, and the Redguard +4. This means the Orc is the clear choice to start with the most skills +100 after underflowing and boosting.

Here is a complete summary of the character build using everything we have learned:

• Race — Orc since it gets the most unique bonuses in conjunction with the Oghma Infinium.
• Gender — Female is unchanged since gender has no effect.
• Birthsign — The Steed is unchanged since it has no effect. We cannot change this from within this instance of the Class Rese anyway.
• Class — A custom class is created with the following:
  • Specialization — Combat to minimize loss of Underflow skills.
  • Favored Attributes — Strength and Speed are unchanged since they have no effect.
  • Major Skills — Alteration, Conjuration, Light Armor, Marksman, Mercantile, Restoration, and Speechcraft since these are all harder to farm than Alchemy.

At last, we can run through the actual steps of the route logic for this section. We first Class Reset with the above class build, resulting in the values seem in Phase 1 of the chart above. At this point, the Vampirism and Skeleton Key bonuses are still active on the character despite the base values of the skills be set to 19. Next, we Drink the Cure for Vampirism potion and drop the Skeleton Key to lower all of the associated skills by 20 (or 40 in the case of the Skeleton Key), which makes all of these stats underflow to a higher number again. The result per item used can see in the Phase 2 and Phase 3 columns. Next, we read the Oghma Infinium and choose the Path of Steel, resulting in the Blade skill now being above 100 (since the Orc race bonuses already raised the other two affected stats), leaving us with the values in the Phase 4 column. All that is left is to raise Athletics and Hand to Hand (which have been lowered significantly due to removing Vampirism, along with manually grinding Alchemy.

Phase 4 – Manual Skill Farming

The final phase is the only remaining part of the logic that utilizes actual skill grind tech from previous routes. First we buy training for Athletics and Hand to Hand, which need to be drained using Drain Skill spells before talking to the trainers in order to get training easily from any skill level of trainer (and for cheaper). When the character has used up their 5 training sessions for the current level, the Infinite Level-Up glitch is used to get another 5 training sessions over and over until both skills are at 100. In the case of the Version 4 route, our Athletics has too many Perma Enchants on it, requiring two active Drain 100 Athletics spells at once in order to lower it enough to buy training.

The final step is to farm Alchemy, using the same strategy since the very first version of the run. Restore fatigue ingredients are duped until about 2,000 of each have been acquired, and then a Restore Fatigue potion is spam crafted repeatedly until the player's Alchemy reaches level 100. This is the point where the skill grind is finally over.

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.
• We could try dropping the Skeleton Key, then doing a Stealth specialized Class Reset, then pick up the Skeleton Key to go from 96 Security to well over 100. This is similar to sacrificing the Combat skills from Vampirism (effectively still 2 underflow skills wasted since Skeleton still gets 100+ without underflowing) and could potentially lead to a new Race/Class combo that has slightly less grinding since Security not needing to be grinded would replace the Alchemy grind.

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