No, cant use soul gem 'fragments' in crafting.... at least not at level 100....

@Xia  yes, the races do look better.   My avatar ran into an npc named masq yada yada.  I think its the same name as the quirky npc in oblivion.  In any case, he said that all the kajids (the cat people from elswehr) 'look so much better since he moved to skyrim.'  I think that was tongue in cheek humor... they do look better than they do in Cyrodiil.... lol.

I'm tempted to go with this just for the voice reco.  It does make it even more clear how god awful the inventory system is.

That video is of the PC version of Skyrim, the controls have just been modified to work with voice/motion gestures. It's a neat demonstration, but I guess I'm just to old school to appreciate fully motion captured games. Getting up and jumping around isn't what I want to do 90% of the time I feel like playing a game.

"Optimize performance for Core 2 Duo CPUs (PC)"

If only that read:

"Optimized performance for the nutjob that played it on an Athlon 64"  

Nice to see them stepping up with the patches. 

Any minute now some hardcore motherfucker will finish it playing only by sound. Or playing without items and skills. On master.

If you haven't seen this one yet, give it a watch.  Just saw it today.

Question for those who have completed the thieves/assassins guild quests.  Please  tell me if there  are playable sewers undr the streets of Solitude.  I hear water flowing when walking over the sewer grates, but have found no way to access them.    Thanks

 If you want to be sure use NCL in the console and clip trough the floor. I personally don't consider that cheating, since it saved me from getting stuck in glaciers many, many times. 

Really I'm Level 45, and the game is much easier now, I can kill sabre tooth cats and bears and all that in like 3 hits and I'm pretty much invincible to alot of them, and I'm playing on "MASTER DIFFICULTY" the hardest difficulty, and when I played on master at level 1, I couldn't kill a bear or sabre cat at all. Pretty much each enemy has their preset level, is that when you level up, harder versions of enemies start coming, but the weaker enemies stay, and none of the enemies level up, except for bosses, and guards (and guards level up with you until LEVEL 50).

And bandits are friggin easy to me now.

And I can finally kill those Draugr Wights without any challenge, and I can kill a Draugr Scourge, they are less challenging, but still a challenge.

AND THEY HIRED 75 VOICE ACTORS, but yet it still seems like 4!!!!

And the AI, helped me alot, well allies, unlike most games your followers are actually helpful. But yeah the AI is much better than oblivion, but still pretty dumb, and the bounty system is better.

And I'm pretty good assassin, I can kill anything one hit with a sneak attack on any difficulty, thanks so much for shrouded gloves that makes backstab do double damage and the daggers do 15x sneak attack perk and two powerful daggers, well that HAVE NOT been improved by a work table. Yeah I cleared an entire Giant and Mammoth camp with no challenge, because of me doing 60x sneak attack, yes I mean 60x because I attack with both daggers at the same time, and originally I do 30x damage. And I was playing on MASTER and all of them died one hit, it WAS SO FRIGGIN AWESOME!!!!

Dragons still are somewhat challenging.

But yeah the loot is terrible I hardly get anything good, I normally just get cheap Ancient Nordic War Axes and crappy weapons. I can't wait until I level up to Level 46, because once your that level you start finding DAEDRIC ARMOR AND WEAPONS as random loot. But I doubt I have enough room in my inventory to carry that.

Too bad, I have the xbox 360 version so I cannot use mods.

In oblivion you could use the prison glitch, but I believe they fixed that little exploit in Skyrim. Oh! and if anyone ever has a question a particular quest/achievement/item, shoot me a pm! A long with getting all the achievements, I do also have the guide. This way you don't have to spend money to buy the guide to find X of Awesomeness.

As a good legit money making trick, make iron daggers and then enchant them with petty soul gems. This is the most efficient way to level blacksmithing (since Iron is cheap and all you gotta do is kill bunnies for soul gems... oh yah I'm that heartless to kill poor rabbits). It doesn't seem like theres a difference in exp between iron and ebony. Also, if you do this with a good enchant (like paralyze) they'll make you 400 gold a pop.

Also to clarify if folks have been on skyrim hiatus, there is an HD texture pack that went live on steam today or yesterday.  I think the mod tools also just went live. 

That said, I haven't played it since the update.  I hope the performance hit you encountered is something easily resolvable. 

clarification, the HD textures I was using, and had to ditch, were downloaed by modders, using the download manager for skyrim, on the tesnexus site.  Many mods there... and all were pre- creation kit made mods.  I'm going to look into the tweeking guides for win 7, pc gaming, and skyrim (nvidia put one out), and see if that lets me run with the HD textures, etc. 

Yes, Beth does offer a HD tex pack along with (not bundled with) the creation kit.  I'm not using the beth HD. 

Will keep you posted if you like...