Skyrim diehard claims to have the RPG’s strongest unmodded character after grinding to level 1,337 by spamming Illusion spells for 43 hours
Over a decade later, Skyrim players are still pushing Bethesda’s iconic RPG to its limits. Tamriel’s latest absurd accomplishment comes from Pawelos4, who claims to have reached level 1,337 on “the ultimate Skyrim character,” who has apparently done everything that can feasibly be done. And they uploaded a stonking 11 hours of sped up footage to prove it.
Pawelos has a history as a Skyrim completionist; they shared a 100% complete, 527-hour save several years ago. (Their level 1,337 character is also available to download via Nexusmods if you’re interested.) In total, they say they’ve played 1,800 hours of the game – and their Steam profile agrees, with the time split between the original version and the Special Edition – and all of that knowhow has now gone into making the best character possible.
All of their skills are not only maxed out at 100, but also upgraded to Legendary status. All completable quests, barring those with mutually exclusive rewards and outcomes, have been cleared, they claim. All spells, equipment, rare items, and even consumables have been acquired, meaning the armory of their base is really something to see. And all of this, they say, was done without any mods.
The true eyebrow-raiser is the headlining claim of reaching level 1,337. Pawelos wasn’t satisfied with level 1,000 or even 1,111 because they’d been done before, you see. To reach this new and dizzying height, they spent 43 hours and 7 minutes grinding, and then regrinding, and then regrinding their Illusion skill. Almost terrifyingly, all of the footage has been captured and preserved in a near-11-hour video with footage at 4x speed. “You can set the speed to 0.25 to experience it in real time,” the video description reads. Thanks.
The method involved is actually pretty simple. With help from a few accessories, Pawelos reduced the mana cost for Illusion magic to zero, letting them spam spells unreserved. The spell in question, Harmony, has no major effect on targets, meaning they could cast it in the heart of Whiterun, specifically from 9am to 5pm when the city is filled with NPCs, without a fight breaking out.
With too many enhancements to list piled onto their character, Pawelos says it only took a few casts to get back to level 100 after resetting Illusion. This ended up being slower XP than spamming Telekinesis, they explain in the video, but that method risked breaking their game after level 300 or so. And so the cycle began, with the citizens of Whiterun getting Harmonized to all get out. 43 hours later, Pawelos had hit their target.
“It definitely wasn’t the most exciting activity in the world but I had some YouTube videos or Netflix playing on my laptop or phone 99% of the time,” they said in a NexusMods reply. And yes, thankfully they did take breaks, with the Illusion grind “split into around 80 play sessions.”
The obvious question here is, of course, why? The next question would be: is this legitimate? This sort of thing is hard to prove definitively, and many onlookers have asked questions in response to Pawelos’ YouTube and NexusMods posts, pointing out alleged inconsistencies in quests and levels. 11 hours of sped up footage is pretty convincing proof, though, especially looking at their Skyrim stats on steam, and Pawelos has doggedly responded to any and all naysayers to defend their grind. There’s no doubt they’re a Skyrim superfan, and after sifting through all this I’m willing to believe in the 1,337 dream.
What does Pawelos get for all this? Well, among other things, they now have enough HP to survive a fall like this: