So you'd say Hearthfire is actually worth getting? I thought it was kinda gimmicky.
Sent from my iPhone at a Tijuana donkey show.
For $5? Fuck yeah, it's worth it. Because you can plant your own Alchemy Ingredients, it changes the gameplay strategy dramatically...which is exactly what I'm doing. Every house you build automatically has a Garden, which will allow you to plant 11 plants outside. Each one of these plants will yield between 3-5 samples of the type planted. For instance: if I plant a Glowing Mushroom in one spot, it will yield
5 glowing mushrooms in that spot, every two game days or so.
This means that a) you never have to worry about running out of Blisterwort & Glowing Mushrooms (for Smithing Potions) and Snowberries (for Enchanting potions).
Additionally, you can choose to build a greenhouse, which will give you an additional 18 spots to plant things indoors, making a total of
29 spots for that house, each one of those spots yielding 4 plants every few days. Early on, I plant Canis Root and Imp Stool, which combined make a potion of Paralysis....it's also the second most expensive plant-based Potion you can make.
This means a) you've got basically unlimited Paralysis potions to poison your weapons with (very helpful early in the game), b) since those potions are expensive, you're able to level Alchemy like a motherfucker, and c) since they are expensive, you can sell them.
One other benefit of the Greenhouse is that it will regularly populate with Bees, Monarch Butterflies, and most importantly....Blue Butterflies.
Having "Hearthfire" is like having a license to print money via making potions, and you level Alchemy much quicker, and it permanently ends the pain in the ass of looking around for the ingredients to make Smithing and Enchanting potions.
One final thing: if you take the "Merchant" perk in the Speechcraft tree, you'll be able to sell potions to any merchant. This means that you can get training from any Trainer who is also a merchant (ie: every single instructor at the College of Winterhold), and then pay them back in potions! This is enormously handy when training gets expensive at the higher levels. For instance, if I want to buff out Enchanting by getting training from Sergius Tyranus at the College of Winterhold, but I'm already at level 60, each training session is going to be at least 2000 gold or more. He'll have at least 10,000 of my money at the end of the session, and I want that shit back.
I take a bunch of the potions I made from ingredients in my gardens, usually Paralysis, and sell them to him after I've trained...getting my gold back.
