Skyrim Sidelines- Mzinchaleft, Mjoll, and Grimsever: Digging In

With all the bandits now dead, you have no need to be cautious and can simply walk or run about the remaining ruins as you like.  The rest of the gateway to Mzinchaleft consists of two guard towers and a series of stone stairways leading down into the midst of the gorge, where a door waits in a stone masonry wall.  Before entering, though, you will want to check both guard towers.  One of them has a locked chest and some food barrels at the top to accompany the abandoned sleep roll and gear below it.  The other, whose ramp leads up from a cooking spit, contains a potentially valuable bow that you may wish to take with you.

With the exterior ruins scoured, prepare yourself and enter the doors to Mzinchaleft.

You will enter the ruins into a cloud of mild steam, caused by the frost from outside encountering the steamworks within the ruin constantly.  Ignore this and proceed carefully down the ramp just within the door.  At the base of the ramp is a large cart, containing and surrounded by a considerable quantity of discarded Dwemer metal bits including the ‘corpse’ of at least one Dwarven Spider.  Be sure to check the remains of the Dwemer automatons, as they are all powered with soul gems that may be either full or empty, and soul gems are an expensive and valuable item in Skyrim, of limited presence and accessibility.  Don’t bother scooping up any of the cogs, though- they aren’t smeltable in the way that Dwarven Scrap Metal items are, and won’t provide any of the ingots you need to craft Dwarven items or refine them after crafting.

Turn right from the carts to see another downslope, leading to the shattered body of a Dwarven Sphere Guardian, also liable to be good for a soul gem.  As you approach, take note of the singing and muttering you can hear off to your left- this is the sign of more bandits nearby.  Thankfully, they are around another corner and won’t see you when you loot the tiny wreckage.  Ignore the already-looted remnants of the Dwarven Spider beside it, and turn to face the singing.

The hallway here begins to be bordered with bars and even more pipes than before, and a pair of bandits wait at a small cookfire just around the corner.  One of them wears heavy armor and uses a shield- the other is an archer.  Take them down in whatever way you see fit, and you can loot not only their corpses but their food, two bottles of poison from the table by the cookfire, and a high-strength healing draught from the small barred area they have left their bedrolls in.