Gold is a valuable resource in The Elder Scrolls 5: Skyrim. While the best random gear tends to appear in dungeons rather than merchant shops, players can use gold to buy property, pay bribes, acquire raw materials, and so much more.
Players can expect to find plenty of gold by exploring barrows, caves, and other dungeons, but there are much faster ways to gain gold in Skyrim than finding a few coins at a time in burial urns and on bandit bodies. This guide will explain a number of ways for the Dragonborn to get their hands on a lot of gold in a short amount of time.
How to Gain Gold from Exploring
- Grab ingredients while on the go. Picking flowers and mushrooms costs nothing, and while they aren't very valuable on their own, players can use alchemy tables to turn them into expensive potions and poisons.
- Always bring a pickaxe. Ore veins are free to mine, and players can find them in surprising locations. Like ingredients, ore isn't that valuable, but players can smelt ore into ingots and then turn ingots into expensive armor, weapons, and jewelry.
- One useful item to find or craft is a weapon that traps the soul of any enemy it hits. This can quickly fill up all the soul gems in the player's inventory, and full soul gems are essential for enchanting.
- A higher weight limit lets players bring more back from each trip. Choosing Stamina when leveling up also improves the Dragonborn's weight limit by 5, and the Pickpocket perk Extra Pockets boosts the limit by 100 all at once.
- Pay attention to both an item's weight and its value when choosing what loot to bring back. The more value an item has per pound, the better it is to bring back. This means light armor is generally better as loot than heavy armor since it weighs less compared to its value, and it means gems and jewelry are always worth taking.
- All arrows weigh nothing, and so they're always worth grabbing even if players don't invest in archery. Basic iron arrows sell for 0 at first, but with enough Speech every arrow variety will eventually sell for something.
- If players become over encumbered, check the "Misc." Section of the inventory first. It's surprisingly easy to accidentally grab weighty but worthless items like pots, bowls, and baskets and then forget about them.
How to Gain Gold from Staying in Town
- Crafting is the best way to increase item values in Skyrim. Potions and poisons are several times more valuable than basic ingredients. Rare hides are more valuable than leather or leather straps, but much less valuable than the armor pieces players can make with leather and leather strips. On top of that, a decent enchantment can add even more value.
- Players must sacrifice a magic item to learn its enchantment, but this sacrifice is worth the cost. From that point on, players can enchant as many items as they like, and enchantments cost nothing aside from a filled soul gem.
- The value of enchanted items is based on the enchantment more than the value of the base item, so the best items to enchant for selling are iron weapons and leather armor.
- Tempered equipment is worth much more than basic equipment, at least once players have enough Smithing skill and the right perks for the materials.
- While Fortify Speech enchantments are useful, Fortify Barter enchantments are even more valuable when it comes to selling loot to merchants. Players should keep a set of Fortify Barter items they can equip when selling their equipment.
- Stolen items (items with red names) can only be sold to fences, at least until players get the Fence perk from the Speech tree. To access fences, players must join the Thieves Guild. To start the process, players should find Brynjolf in the market square of Riften during the day.
- With access to fences, players can make money in towns by pickpocketing citizens. Gold, gems, and jewelry are the best items to steal since doing so is easy and these items are valuable for their weight. In fact, players can enchant stolen jewelry and sell the result to normal merchants.
- Some Speech perks are more useful for bartering than others. The Merchant perk lets players sell any items to any merchant, Haggling is effectively a Fortify Barter buff, and Investor becomes useful later on when a single item could otherwise clear out a merchant's gold.
- Merchants replenish their gold at the start of each workday, but time also passes when players fast-travel between towns. This means players can travel on a circuit between two or three towns to sell to all their merchants without spending as much time sitting and waiting.
- While players can't create a potion with Fortify Alchemy or an enchanted item with Fortify Enchanting, they can combine both effects to create extremely overpowered items and potions. The easiest ingredients to find for a Fortify Enchanting potion are Blue Butterfly Wings and Snowberries. Drink one, then create an item with the Fortify Alchemy effect. Wear it, then craft an even better Fortify Enchanting potion. Drink that to craft a better Fortify Alchemy item, and so on. Magic items and potions are more valuable the more effective they are, making this loop a great way to make money and not just overpowered equipment.
- Buying alchemy ingredients from apothecaries is more expensive than finding them in the wilderness, but it's also a lot faster and can still turn a significant profit.
- Any player spouse will open a shop after marrying the Dragonborn, and they'll give the player 100 gold for each day that passes.
Players can use some or all of these methods to quickly make money and save up for things like houses, house improvements, and the random (but useful) magic items found in merchant inventories. Make use of some or all of these to maximize gold income, and switch things up now and then so playing Skyrim doesn't turn into a grind.
The Elder Scrolls 5: Skyrim is available now on PC, PS3, PS4, PS5, Switch, Xbox 360, Xbox One, and Xbox Series X/S.