Skyrim: Here Is How To Reset Skill Points

Skills govern everything you do in Skyrim. From crafting, and interacting with NPCs, to combat itself. All activities that allow you to progress through the game are in one way or another tied to your skills. We’ve covered the mechanics of skills in our previous guides extensively. We’ve mostly talked about legendary skills and resetting your perk points. Today’s guide is going to be similar, and before we start analyzing the details, let’s cover the basics first. How to reset your skill points in Skyrim?
How many skills are there in Skyrim?
There are 18 skills in total in Skyrim. The skills are divided into three specializations, mage, warrior, and rogue. You’re free to choose what you want to focus on the most. You can play a “pure class” leveling only skills governed by magicka, or you can mix and match, and select which skills you would like to improve from all three specializations. In any way, you have the total freedom to play as you like.
Skills are increased by using them, but you’re probably aware of that. Skills also affect your level. Every time you level up you will earn a single perk point that you can spend in various perk trees.
There are 18 perk trees in total corresponding to 18 skills available, each perk unlocks a special bonus. Some of the perks are not available for unlocking until you’ve reached a certain level in that skill. Such is the case with the best perks in various skills tress.
Can you reset a skill in Skyrim?
You can reset skills in Skyrim in several ways, and in the rest of the post, we’re going to explain them all.
You can reset your skills by making them legendary
One of the ways to reset your skills is to make them legendary. As soon as you’ve reached level 100 in certain skills you can make that skill “legendary”. This will cause the skills to be reset to their starting levels of 15 and all perk points that you’ve invested in that skill will be refunded. However, keep in mind that resetting important skills in Skyrim, such as your main combat skill, might result in your becoming incredibly weak and you might struggle against end-game content. In that case, it’s always a good idea to have a follower with you.
You can make skills legendary in Skyrim as many times as you want. Making skills legendary multiple times will allow you to unlock all perk points.
You can reset your skills in Skyrim by changing your race
This tactic is weird but it works. Before the legendary skill mechanic was introduced you could reset your Skyrim skills by changing your race through showracemenu command. Using the showracemenu command will open the same editing menu for your character that you have seen at the beginning of the game at Helgen. If you decide to change your race, all your skills will be reset to their default values (usually 15) as well as all attributes.
This is not the most convenient way, but it works if you want to reset all your skills at once. Always make sure to save your game before you use this command since it can cause your game to crash and weird glitches and bugs with your character’s body.
How to reset perk points in Skyrim?
When it comes to resetting perk points you have several ways to do that as well. You can reset perk points by making specific skills legendary or by using the Black Book: Waking Dreams.
Resetting your perk points by making a skill legendary
We’ve already explained how this works, once your skill is legendary all perk points that you’ve invested in that skill will return to you and you are free to spend them on any other skill.
Resetting your perk points with the Black Book: Waking Dreams
This method of resetting your perk points will not reset your skill at the same time but it might be difficult to obtain this power.
The ability to reset your perk points through Black Book is one of the rewards for finishing the main story of Dragonborn DLC. Once you’ve wrapped that up the ability to reset your perk points once a day will become available to you. To do that follow these steps:
- Read the Black Book: Waking Dreams
- You will be teleported to the realm of Apocrypha to a special area filled with glowing symbols representing specific skills.
- Interact with the specific skills to reset the perk points of that skill
- A prompt should appear asking you to confirm your choice
- Confirming your choice will refund all perk points to you and will remove one dragon soul from you.
- Re-read the Black Book: Waking Dreams to leave Apocrypha.
Do keep in mind for this power to work, you need to be in Solstheim, reading the Black Book in Skyrim will not teleport you to Apocrypha
And that’s about it. As you can see there are several ways to reset your skills and your perk points. Some ways are convenient some not so much, such is the case with showracemenu command.
The important thing is to allocate your perk points wisely to eliminate the need to reset them often. However, making skills legendary is a must if you plan on unlocking all perks in the game. Have something to add? Let us know in the comments below!