Afternoon, gents.

I was hoping some of you guys could suggest ways to quickly attain gold, without cheating or glitching. I'm on the PC GOTY version, level 23, I've done the Arena, Fighters Guild, and about half the Mages Guild, and have not yet finished the main quest (I can make the whenever I want to). I also have SI installed, but haven't touched it.

Fighting in the Arena (a laborious process, might I add) each weak gives a decent sum of gold, but I can't go everyday.

What are some of your favored means of getting gold? Thanks in advance.

There's a cave between Leyawiin and Bravil, Rockmilk Cavern I believe. Clear that out a few times and you'll have plenty of gold.

Head to a dungeon with bandits / vampires in vanilla, or Amazons, bandits, uber vamps and special factions in a modded game.
Kill everyone and take the high price light goods and arrows back to a store and sell them.
This is the fastest way to earn imo, brewing, stealing and mercantile practices are good for more of a urban / courtesan / noble.. etc roleplayer however.

Alchemy! As long as you don't mind leveling too quickly, or waiting to level your other skills first, Alchemy is a brilliant way to make money. I used the tomato farm and graqe farms near Skingrad - as they both have restore fatigue properties. Sell the potions to Sinderon as he
Use this in conjunction with the other ways mentioned, and you'll have plenty of cash in no time!

I usually loot Vivleran for its Weklynd Stones, then collect alchemy ingrediants and sell the potions for profit. You can also do the arena. ALl are solid ways to build cash.

Personally I find Alchemy great early but at later levels (such as the OP's lvl 23) weapons and armor easily surpass it.

Thanks for all the suggestions guys! Yeah, picking up a few Daedric daggers from bandits fetch 1200 each, which is great. However, much of the sellable loot I find in caves is worth well over 3000 gold, and no one's able to purchase them for their "full" price. Is there any way to remedy that?

I'll try to alchemy now; even if it's not that profitable, I'd welcome a higher alchemy level..

You need to raise your Mercantile skill, which takes... FOREVER. The best way is to sell high quanities of items 1 by 1 instead of in bulk. (100arrows sold one by one counts as 100 practices of the skill, where as one selling of 100arrows just counts as 1 practice.



Its a bit time consuming, but what I do is go to the ARcane university garden and just collect everything there and make as many potions as I can from it then sell them. It makes easy money (especially at lower levels) the potions are low weight, as opposed to carrying and selling armors, and you also boost your alchemy skill, which at Master level is damn near game breaking.

I've got plenty of ways to make gold

The Glarthir quest can net you any where from 1200 to 2200 gold depending on what you do during the quest

The Collectors quest can net you 10000 gold thats not counting loot, welkynd stones, or Varla Stones that you will find in the 10 alyeid ruins

You can sell up to 80% or more to the Khajitt in the dark brotherhood, 400 gold is his limit

You can sell Vampire dust for 250 gold per dust when you finish a certain quest in the imperial city.

Robbers Glen Cave because with the expection of the boss monster the rest of the monsters are imps. That means easy access to the chests

Loot the mage guild halls and the fighters guild halls they won't miss the items and you'll get easy gold that you won't have to fight for

Fighting in the arena is also an easy way to make money

Once you reach LV 20 Glass Armor set is your new best friend for making money

Oblivion gates give you tons of valuable stuff at higher levels. Just get some feather or fortify strength going so you can hold everything and you can make tens of thousands per gate (figuring you can sell each piece of armor and weapon for 1200 each in a lot of cases, plus all the other loot). I barely made anything anywhere else compared to the gold I got out of the gates.

Oh my god, yea I did this for a while but got sick of it after 10-20 levels. If I ever start a new game, I'm only ever using trainers for Mercantile. Any time you need some bonuses to personality, squeeze in 5 levels of Mercantile with the trainer.

The other thing to consider is that if you are hauling in the Daedric items, don't worry about the losses. Just find the vendor with the most gold and sell Daedric items one at a time so you get the most you can. Unlike Morrowind, you don't have to wait 24 hours each time fortunately. On the other hand, very MUCH like Morrowind, the bigger problem with selling Daedric items is that you get so rich so quick that gold becomes meaningless.

Really no need for me to repeat, but I′ll do it anyway.
Alchemy, fighting bandits (and of course looting them) and dungeon diving are my best suggestions.

Rockmilk Cave for sure if you are playing Vanilla. You can also sell alchemy equipment in the MG guild halls.

Aha! You said you were on PC right? Then I would suggest getting the Living Economy mod! (or at least, it seemed to help when I had the same problem)
Take a look at it http://www.tesnexus.com/downloads/file.php?id=4432

Or you could just get Oscuro's Oblivion Overhaul. I think Living Economy is packaged with it.

:ninja: Sell Skooma. :whistling:

You might want to create a spell that does +[nice chunk of Mercantile] for 5 seconds and use them on trader NPC's. Maybe charm too but I dont know if that will help.

Master Alchemist, and Master Mercantile.
Get a bunch of ingredients(doesn't matter what)
Make a potion for each ingredient. It is worth 56 gold, if you are a master merchant(maybe not master, but enough so you get about 50 or so gold per potion)
Then just sell them in bulk to any vendor who accepts them. The money rolls in.
I went from 300 septims or so, to 17 thousand. I would of had more, but I thought if my earlier potions had more ingredients, they would sell for more, but they don't.

Of course this will take forever to reach, but once you get there, it is mad money.

Or sell skooma.
In fact, my newest character is an Alchemist/Skooma Dealer. With a combo of selling my skooma to people(mods, although it does fetch a nice price in Vanilla) and mastery of Alchemy, I started with nothing, and am at 20 thousand or so.

Of course, if you aren't a master of either skill, there are great ways listed above

Alchemy nets a fair bit of cash at higher levels, especially if you're selling to Sinderon, colllect all of the tomatoes and graqes outside Skingrad and make potions, thats how I made my fortune (with a little help from the arena and misc quests), I was selling potions for 100 drakes.