Skyrim

The recipes I keep coming back to, and the notes that go with them.

Last updated .

Anniversary Edition, Creation Club on, no mods. Rare Curios ingredients are marked CC. Effects on each card are computed from its ingredients rather than typed in, so they cannot drift.

Potions

Canis Root
Hanging Moss
Elves Ear

Excaliboost

  • Fortify One-Handed
  • Fortify Marksman
Notes

Due to a glitch, Fortify Marksman works on all weapons — effectively doubling this potion’s potency.

25 Canis Root on Ivar’s Path. Corkbulb and Stoneflower can replace and boost the other slots: swapping both in keeps Fortify One-Handed and Fortify Marksman and adds Paralysis, because Canis Root and Corkbulb Root share it.

Take Purity before brewing that one. Paralysis is a negative effect, so the perk strips it on the way out — you get the two fortifies without paralysing yourself for the first few seconds of the fight.

Rare Curios swap — brew with Purity

Canis Root
Corkbulb RootCC
Stoneflower PetalsCC
  • Fortify One-Handed
  • Fortify Marksman
  • Paralysis
Fly Amanita
Mora Tapinella
Dragon's Tongue

Nord Blood

  • Resist Fire
  • Fortify Two-Handed
  • Regenerate Stamina
  • Fortify Illusion
Notes

The ideal Nord Power potion. Boosting that fear effect for higher levels comes in handy more often than not. Fire traps and dragons also handled.

Note the fourth chip: Fly Amanita and Mora Tapinella both carry Regenerate Stamina, so this brews as a four-effect potion rather than three.

Hawk Beak
Snowberries
Dragon's Tongue

Elebane

  • Resist Frost
  • Resist Shock
  • Resist Fire
Notes

Kyne’s Peace Shout v2 will just have Hawks fall from the sky. Dupe them though — they’re a pain.

Salmon RoeHF
Garlic
Nordic Barnacle

Liquid Gold

  • Money
  • Waterbreathing
  • Regenerate Magicka
  • Regenerate Health
Notes

Takes 250 with boosts to get to 100. Guardian Stones and Dragonsreach will have what you need.

Builder

What are you making?

Resto loop

Alchemy
Enchanting
Fortify Alchemy gear

25% is the natural cap — what you can enchant without drinking anything. Raise it if your pieces are already bootstrapped. A fifth slot needs the helmet + circlet bug.

The formulae, and why the gear count is the throttle

Alchemy — the magnitude of a potion you brew:

mag = BaseMag × 4 × (1 + Skill/200) × (1 + Gear/100)
              × (1 + Alchemist/100) × (1 + Benefactor/100) × (1 + Seeker/100)

Gear is the summed Fortify Alchemy across everything you are wearing. Fortify Restoration has BaseMag 4 and Fortify Enchanting has BaseMag 1, which is why the restoration potion is always exactly four times the enchanting one.

Enchanting — the magnitude you can place, given a Fortify Enchanting potion:

mag = floor( BaseMag × skillMult × (1 + Enchanter) × (1 + categoryPerk) × (1 + Sorcery) )

skillMult = 1 + x(x − 0.14)/3.4      where  x = Skill × (1 + potion/100) / 100

The load-bearing detail: the potion does not multiply the finished enchantment. It scales your effective skill inside a quadratic, so the enchantment comes out quadratic in potion strength. BaseMag is 8 for Fortify Destruction, 13 for Fortify One-Handed, 15 for the elemental resists, 20 for the attributes — which is what the picker’s groups are.

The loop. Every Fortify <Skill> effect, potion and apparel enchantment alike, is internally school-of-Restoration. So a Fortify Restoration potion boosts them, and re-equipping gear while one is active bakes the larger value in. With x the active fraction and e the summed gear:

x[n+1] = r × (1 + e(1 + x[n])) × (1 + x[n])          x[0] = 0
             \____ brewed ____/   \__ applied __/

Two compounding factors per round — the gear you re-equip is worth more, and the new potion is itself a Restoration effect so drinking it on top of the live one multiplies it again. Growth is quadratic, not geometric. The gear recomputes from its own base each time rather than stacking on itself; all the compounding lives in x.

That recurrence is a derivation, not something published. Solving x[n+1] = x[n] gives a discriminant of (1−r)² − 4re, so “no fixed point” is exactly UESP’s documented divergence condition e > (1−r)²/(4r). It also reproduces all three of UESP’s worked examples.

The throttle. Wearing everything every round overshoots wildly — 121% at three rounds, 9,874% at four. What you control is how many pieces are on your body while you brew. And a piece only takes the boost if it is worn at the re-equip, so one you leave off keeps whatever it was worth last time. The four drift apart in value, which is why plans name pieces rather than counting them, and why round 3 wearing AC is a different move from round 3 wearing AB.

Two ways this is wrong for you. If you run the Unofficial Patch none of it works: USSEP takes the Fortify effects out of the Restoration school and separately turns the enchanting potion into a flat multiplier. And the 0.14 and 3.4 above are UESP’s empirical fit rather than extracted engine values — moving 3.4 to 3.3 shifts a 121% result to 124%, so treat the last digit as soft. Everything upstream of the enchanting step is exact.