Skyrim- On Enchanting Effectively (Part One)

Enchanting in Skyrim stands out amongst the crafting options as being both the most powerful and the most expensive for various reasons.  I would like to take some of your time to go over why this is so and what can be done to mitigate the costs and improve the benefits of doing so as much as possible.

In order to enchant an item in Skyrim, you are going to need four things: the object you wish enchanted (something worn or wielded), a soul gem containing a soul, knowledge of the enchantment to be used, and an enchanting table.

By far the easiest of these things to come across is the enchanting table.  Most villages and cities that have wizards in them have enchanting tables somewhere, and in many of the capitals this ‘somewhere’ is the palace or longhouse of the hold’s Jarl.  You can also run across enchanting tables in some dungeons, which can prove extremely convenient for reducing your carried load so that you can haul more treasure out.  It should be a general practice for anyone interested in improving their Enchanting skill (which ought to be everyone) to go to an Enchanting table any time they have looted magic items from anywhere before approaching vendors to sell treasure.

The reason for this is that you can only apply an enchantment to an item if you have disenchanted that enchantment from another item.  Don’t panic just yet, though- you only need to disenchant a particular enchantment once, and then you can reapply it to other objects as long as you have the resources and appropriate gear to place the enchantment on.  This is why you should approach an Enchanting table before you approach a merchant with your spoils- while enchanted treasure is considerably rarer than plain treasure, and some enchantments are very hard to come by, the majority of enchantments will pop up plenty of times as you adventure through Skyrim.  This will allow you to quickly aggregate a wide knowledge of enchantments to apply and then start selling items that bear enchantments you already know.  Doing so also lets you use the merchant system in Skyrim better, as merchants tend to have more money to spend buying your goods the later in the game you are, and selling enchanted items to a merchant will often run them out of money quite quickly.