Dear Lord, the amount of cheese types in that game! I sometimes felt I was being trolled. Good thing you couldn't use them for recipes!

The thing about Skyrim is that you don't need to loot much because you don't need much gold. There's no need to buy weapons and armor because the poor implementation of level-scaling will provide you with the best available gear for your level as common loot. There's no need to buy a horse because they are more irritating than useful. A house is the only major investment required, and Breezehome in Whiterun can be obtained for 5,000 gold plus the cost of whatever furnishings you want.

I too spent much of my time in inventory management, a slave to my OCD tendencies, devoting as much time to inventory management and selling loot as questing, cursing the awful interface, but I've started (trying) to slack a bit in that regard now that I have 50,000 gold and nothing to buy except ore, ingots, leather, soul gems, ingredients, etc to grind my skills.

Selling price isn't as important as the ratio between selling price and weight. An item that has a value of 100 gold but weighs 50 units is worth only 2 gold per unit of weight carried. Divide value by weight to get an idea of what is worth looting. A good rule of thumb in general is to loot only items having a value at least 10 times their weight (or perhaps 20 or 30 times their weight as the game progresses).

Iron Armor: value = 125, weight = 30, ratio = 4.17

Iron Helmet: value = 60, weight = 5, ratio = 12

OR

Six Iron Helmets (weight 30) is a better value (360) than one Iron Armor (weight 30, value 125).

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Some general, quick-and-dirty guidelines for looting in Skyrim:

- Light armor pieces and bows tend to have better ratios than heavy armor and melee weapons.

- Helmets tend to have better ratios than other armor pieces of the same material, followed by shields, followed by armor, followed by boots and gauntlets. Prioritize accordingly.

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Avoid looting:
- Iron, Steel, and Orcish melee weapons
- Iron, Banded Iron, & Steel armor pieces (except for helmets & shields early to middle game)
- Long Bows and Hunting Bows
at all levels unless you are headed directly to a market and have unused inventory capacity.

Loot:
- Dwarven melee weapons
- Silver Swords and Silver Greatswords
- Imperial Bows
- Lesser (than Elven) light armors
until you obtain a house, skip afterwards.

Always loot:
- Elven, Glass, Ebony, and Daedric melee weapons
- Orcish, Dwarven, Elven, Glass, Ebony, & Daedric Bows
if possible.

In Fallout 3 and NV I just stored things in containers. It didn't seem to matter if I owned them or not, but I made sure they were out of the way, just to be on the safe side. Never once lost anything that way. That probably works in Skyrim too.

LUTEFISK FOR THE LUTEFISK GOD!

They should have made a "BRIE FOR THE LORD OF CHEESE" with all the cheese lying around.

Actually it's one of the best ways to lose one's stuff. ;) The game's area's reset pretty quickly (a couple of in-game days after you visited them), and the containers which you used for storage will then be filled with regular random loot. The manual explicitly warns you about using containers (that you don't own) for storage.

Have you ever actually experienced that yourself? Because I haven't. I certainly haven't noticed any containers ever having their loot reset either. No matter how long ago I last looked in there or how far I've trekked in the meantime. No contents of any container has ever been reset for me, unless it's owned by a trader that is.

I think it's probably something to do with the console versions of the game that doesn't affect the PC version.

In Skyrim I bought the house because of the chest but haven't really seen any of my stuff disappearing even if I throw them in weird places. I'll propably eventually see for the sixth time some random leather boots rolling down the hill I left behind in the beginning of the game.
I'm using light armor and still I'm always overweighted. Propably too much potions (or too much some grass or mushrooms in my pocket) but I need those to live.

Yes I have experienced it (several times actually), otherwise I would've posted it as speculation, not as a fact. I'm playing on PC, so it can't be a "console only" effect either (the manual I was referring to is the PC manual as well).

The game regularly flushes out old data, otherwise it couldn't manage to keep track of everything. This has been a feature of the engine since Morrowind. It could be modded though, and the specific circumstances have changed between the games.

"How far" you've trekked is not a factor and (AFAIK) has never been one in any game that used this engine. It's very unlikely that it ever becomes a factor because it would be unnecessarily complicated to implement, and it also clashes with the "ease of fast travel" design principle.

I find it a bit hard to believe that _no_ container _ever_ reset its contents for you. That would mean that any containers which you emptied in the first dungeon that you visited are still empty, even if you never visited it in the meantime. Can you check that?

Yeah, I never get new stuff out of old containers. Even if I shove random crap into them just to free up enough space to carry what I do want in there then, when I return, it's still the same random crap in there. I don't know what I've done to make it that way. I'd imagine that replenishing containers is actually quite useful. But it''s not something I've experienced aside from containers owned by others.

That's odd.

I just made a test and went back to Bleak Falls Barrow (the first dungeon most players visit), because I know that I never revisited it, and several in-game weeks have passed by now. As expected, the dungeon had almost completely reset: New enemies, new random loot in chests, new random loot on shelves and tables, doors closed again, chests re-locked, pillar puzzle reset, etc. The only things that had not reset were the guy from which you get the golden claw (no trace of him), and the dragon claw door (still open). This is consistent with the previous Bethesda games, most likely all data pertaining to the dungeon's cells was flushed out completely, and the two things that weren't reset are governed by global quest variables that never get flushed out.

I have no idea why this isn't happening to you. IIRC there was an ini setting in the previous games that partially controlled the flushing mechanism, but I haven't seen such a setting for Skyrim yet (doesn't mean it isn't there though). It may cause problems later on, because if the flushing mechanism doesn't work for you, then the game will eventually accumulate more data than it can handle.

Well I am referring specifically to the Bethesda published Fallout games. Not TES. If I remember rightly Morrowind flushed more regularly than someone on a high fibre diet.

Well, the evidence seems to suggest then that Fallout games don't behave like TES games in that particular regard. Which makes sense since Fallout games are smaller in scope and their setting doesn't lend itself so easily to replenishing containers. I can't really tell though, my experience with Fallout is limited. All I can say is that not-player-owned containers in Skyrim (like Oblivion and Morrowind) do reset and therefore shouldn't be used for storing things one wants to keep.

Add Avadon: The Black Fortress and Sacred Gold to the above list for me :-)

The limited inventory isn't much of an issue in FO:NV so much as the interface. I find myself just about maxed out with nothing to do with all the junk, but finding where all the weight is going is a real pain at times. I know there's plenty of stuff I could dump off in my closet, but figuring out what with the ridiculous inventory system is a pain.

I kind of miss inventories like the ones we had in Diablo where you could see everything and know exactly where your storage was going.