Skyrim has been out for so long now that players are constantly itching to find new ways to play whenever something new is added. Take, for instance, this person who beat the game with just a fishing rod only a handful of days after the Anniversary Edition of the game launched. There are probably thousands of challenge runs players can undertake, but you probably won't find a challenge as tedious to try as the one this Skyrim player attempted.
Sharing their challenge with the Skyrim subreddit, u/skimm set out to completely max out each skill in the skill tree without ever stepping foot outside of the walls of Whiterun. In their Reddit post, they detail how long certain skils took to max out and how much of a pain they were, with skills such as Blacksmithing and Speech the easiest and the Lockpicking skill ranked as the hardest. There are only so many locked items in one city after all.
There's even a YouTube video of the player explaining how they went about accomplishing their task, revealing that they began by warping to Whiterun from the start of the game to refrain from accidentally levelling up on the way there. Everything else has been done completely mod free, as showcased by the moment in which the player desperately forages for food and flowers around Whiterun in an attempt to raise funds.
What follows is a showcase of just how busted Skyrim can be if you know what you're doing. Through a mixture of alchemy and game exploits, the player quickly gets their Speech, Alchemy, Smithing, and Enchantment skills maxed out in almost no time at all. They also steal almost everything not pinned down to increase their Pickpocketing skill, before paying people for training in other skills just to pickpocket that money too.
Lockpicking turned out to be the most troublesome skill, taking the player 2 whole days to max out completely. In the end, they managed to amass 25,000 lockpicks and continually broke them on a difficult lock to get there, a level of creativity and patience that even the Dovakhiin does not possess.