So, Skyrim's out 11/11/11

[Treesh]

Well, apparently what I sold back to him wasn't what I stole from him in the first place because he's not buying my stolen goods now. Bugger.

Edit: Even the stuff I pickpocketed from folks in the inn he won't take. Guess I'll just have to find the thieves guild. *shakes her fist at Bethesda*

There's two Perks in the Speech tree that allow you to sell stolen items to almost anyone. The first is Investor, which allows you to invest gold in shops in order to increase the available funds they have. The other is Fence, which allows you to sell stolen goods to any Merchant you've invested in. Both are pretty high in the Speech tree (70 and 90 respectively), so unless you really plan on making a fortune thieving you may want to hold off until the late game (post level 50), or bypass such Perks entirely.

Blasphemy! Holding off on thievery?! Unthinkable! I just pass things off to Lydia to hold until I can get back to the house. Although I have found out that we can both end up overloaded. She does sigh so whenever I ask her to carry things for me though. I bet she wishes I'd just buy a mule and wagon.

I am loving this game so far. BTW - have you tried out Cooking yet? In addition to Smithing and Alchemy (be sure to catch the fish in the rivers / lakes, and the dragonflies above the water, and the butterflies on the land - they're all ingredients! Oh, and bees in beehives), there's also Cooking, Woodcutting (mostly used to sell Firewood to certain NPCs for about 5 gold a pop), Mining (for ores and gems), and there's grindstones to use for milling, but I have yet to figure out how they work.

Yes, I catch everything since I saw that I could catch that first butterfly that was right outside where you come out from escaping. =) It was a pretty little thing so I just got closer to look at it and saw the "Capture butterfly". Now I basically drop whatever I'm doing to go catch the lightning bugs, sorry, Torch bugs or moths or whatever little thing flits across my view. Which is how I ended up straying too close to an encampment of giants.

Also, there's an Enchanter's Table in a cave nearby the starting area - I forget if it's closer to Riverdell or Whiterun, but it's not far off. There's also one in a secret room in the Riverdell tavern, but you'll find that soon enough. Raising your Smithing level allows you to improve the quality of your arms and armor (if you hit a new tier, you can improve them to the next tier, as well) - but you probably knew that. Also of note is that certain ingredients react better together than others when making potions, so be sure to look at the output values before combining! Oh, and experimentation is good! You can unlock other known affects of items simply by combining two together that share properties - even if they aren't known! Combining Wheat & Blue Mountain Flower, for example, leads to a potion that not only restores Health, but also Fortifies it! And there's a Resist Frost combination that also fortifies Heavy Armor.

I just end up using the one in the castle in Whiterun. I'm already making the Elven stuff. About the alchemy stuff, I'm so very glad they went back to more of a Morrowind like system than the craptacular Oblivion system. It's much more fun to be able to actually discover, through experimentation, just what effects each thing has. I hated it in Oblivion that you couldn't make a potion using the tertiary/quaternary effects until you got your skill high enough. This is so much more realistic and natural.

The best new improvement they've made (or at least the one I was the MOST excited about when I discovered it) was that you can actually USE the weapon racks as weapon racks. You can actually put books on the shelves, properly standing up and with spines facing out, without having to drop, drag, curse when you knock over a book next to it. Plus, each shelf in a bookcase is separate so you can REALLY organize your books. If I had known this fact before, I would have saved all my books. I'll just have to have this girl be the experimenter and then bring up another one later to do things "right". =D

I swear, at work, I'm a walking advertising campaign for this game. Love it. Can't wait until they bring out the Creation Kit again so I can fiddle with that and see what improvements they've made for that too. =)