Complete early-game story quests and side quests. Not only do these have cash rewards, but they also afford the opportunity to pick up sellable items. Spend as little money as possible. You shouldn’t have to buy anything during the early stages of the game; enemies will provide the bulk of your weaponry and armor options. Pick up every moderately valuable item you can carry. This includes extra weapons, armor, gems, and so on. If you get close to reaching your maximum carry weight, you can always fast travel back to town to get rid of your surplus items. Sell anything you don’t absolutely need. You can do this at any General Store, or you can sell style-specific items at relevant stores (for example, weapons and armor at armory shops).
To craft Dragon armor (including a shield), you’ll need a total of 12 dragon scales and 6 dragon bones; this figure goes up if you decide you want to make weapons or scaled armor as well. Dragons drop 1 to 3 of both scales and bones when they die. Since one of the early story missions entails killing a dragon, do the first few story quests. Dragons tend to appear as you wander through the world, so refrain from fast-traveling to distant objectives. Provoke every dragon you see. Use sporadic ranged attacks to weaken dragons; attacking them head-on early in the game will get you killed.
You can also set the game’s difficulty to “Novice” in the “Gameplay” tab of the Settings menu to make it easier.
One iron ingot One leather strip
It has an easily-accessible smithing and crafting station. You can purchase a home right next to the smithing area for 5000 gold. Whiterun is relatively safe from dragon attacks (especially early in the game). Your smithing station is part of an armor and weapons store that stocks new iron and leather every 48 in-game hours. You can purchase a pickaxe and use it to gather iron ore from deposits scattered around Whiterun’s outer wall.
Assuming you exclusively purchase iron ingots and leather, the wholesale value of the resources needed to craft 550 daggers comes out to about 9,763 gold. You can lower this number by purchasing/smelting ore as often as possible and mining when ore veins replenish. Economically-speaking, it’s better to purchase leather in its whole form, not strips. You can use the tanning station next to the smithing station to convert leather into large quantities of strips. When buying iron, purchase both ingots and ore; you can smelt one iron ore (using the smelting station right next to the smithing station) to create an iron ingot. The bulk of the iron and leather you purchase will probably come from the store next to the smithing station; however, Belethor’s General Store occasionally stocks iron and leather. To get stores to refresh their inventory, you’ll need to wait (or sleep) for 48 hours in-game. To do this, press your designated “Wait” button and move the slider to “24 hours”, allow the timer to count down, and then repeat the process again. There are iron ore deposits all around Whiterun’s outer walls; taking a pickaxe to these will afford you some ore that you can smelt. Keep in mind that iron ore veins only replenish themselves once every 30 in-game days. If you encountered the Embershard Mine when emerging from Skyrim’s opening act (it’s a ways to your right as you leave the cave), you can fast travel there to mine ore and pick up leather. Doing so will also kill some in-game time, meaning stores will refresh sooner.
The action on Xbox 360, for example, is A. If you bought leather, you’ll want to use the tanning rack to create leather strips before using the forge; this is located to the left of the forge, closest to the street.
After you’ve depleted your iron supply, you’ll need to wait for 48 in-game hours to resupply from shops in the area. You can sell your crafted iron daggers to the owner of the store next to the smithing area.
As your Smithing level increases, your overall level will gradually increase–thereby earning you a perk point for every level gained. Do not spend these points until you reach Smithing level 100, since you’ll likely need all of them to reach the Dragon Smithing perk.
If you go up the left side of the perk tree (which covers light armor and weapons rather than heaver armor and weapons), you will only need 5 perk points.
While being able to craft the heavier armors on the right might cater to your playing style, the “Advanced Armors” perk on the left will allow you to make heavier versions of any armor.
Orcish, Ebony, and Daedric Smithing (right side of the tree) Advanced Armors and Glass Smithing (left side of the tree)
If you’re crafting Dragonplate armor, you’ll need to have iron ingots in addition to the other prerequisites.
