Since patch 1.9 there is no maximum level anymore.
If you have a skill at 100 you can make it "Legendary". This resets the skill to 15, gives all perk points invested in that specific tree back. Be warned: You lose all the benefits of having a higher skill level! The advantages of making skills legendary are:
- Difficulty increase, since the enemies don't have their skills reduced.
- You can continue to level up and earn extra skill perks.
It is possible to repeatedly make a skill legendary or to make multiple skills legendary, this allows you to (slowly) unlock all perk points.
Level 81 is the maximum level in Skyrim without making any skill Legendary
There is a linearly constant amount of "experience" required for each level. The formula is simply:
(level-1) * 25 + 100
Where level is your current level.
"Experience" in this case is earned strictly through skill ups. Leveling a skill to X will give you X experience towards your next level. For instance, to level from level 1 to level 2, you require 100 experience. This means you can either raise 5 skills to level 20, one skill to level 21 (assuming it starts at 15), or any other permutation thereof.
Also, and this is important:
There is no soft cap
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Level 81 is just as (relatively) easy to reach as Level 11, it just requires more total experience.
Since all races have +10 to one skill and +5 to five skills, this means there is a total of 88,085 "experience" to earn, and this is constant across the ten races. Level 82 would require 89,100 total experience, and is currently unreachable.
Thus, when your character maxes all of their skills, they will be level 81.
Perhaps this is common knowledge, but it certainly tripped me up on my first foray into thieving.
By default, your character is running. All the time. (This is separate from sprinting, which makes you move even faster and affects your FOV.) Unless you prevent it, you even run while sneaking, and this understandably hinders the effectiveness of your sneak.
On the PC, you can stop running by either holding Shift or pressing Caps Lock (by default). Ceasing to run will cause your character to slow to a crawl (or so it will feel) and dramatically improve your stealthiness.
Best Answer
The
advskillcommand will count towards the character level up. To get your sneak skill up to 100 without triggering level ups, use themodavcommand instead to directly alter the skill:This adds a +/- for the number. So it'll add 100 to whatever sneak currently is. Alternatively use the
setavcommand:To set it to exactly whatever value you'd like, although I'm sure there are some types of upper/lower bounds. Also, the commands are not case sensitive.
For a list of values you can change, see Actor Values.