Skyrim: The Ultimate Gold Farming Guide – Fastest Methods

We’ve categorized the methods into three types: Early-Game Exploits, Mid-Game Legitimacy, and Late-Game Godhood. Choose based on your progress.

I. Early-Game Exploits: The First Bucket of Gold (No Skill Investment)

Perfect for new characters fresh out of Helgen.

1. Riverwood Triangle Trade

• Location: Riverwood.

• Key NPCs: Lucan Valerius (Riverwood Trader), Orgnar (Sleeping Giant Inn), Alvor (Blacksmith).

• Operation:

  1. In Lucan’s shop, steal the 2 Dwemer Metal Ingots on the counter (high value, not marked as stolen).

  2. Sell these ingots to Orgnar or Alvor.

  3. Wait 48 hours (using the wait function) for the merchants’ gold to respawn.

  4. Repeat. This is the fastest, zero-cost method for your first significant income.

2. Infinite Merchant Gold Bug

• Operation:

  1. Sell items to a merchant until their gold reaches 0.

  2. Alternative: Sell them all your items for 0 gold (effectively storing them with the merchant).

  3. Exit the trade menu, immediately Quicksave (F5), then Quickload (F9).

  4. Open the trade menu again. The merchant’s gold will have respawned (usually to their base amount, e.g., 1500 gold), but the items you just “sold” will still be in their inventory.

  5. Now, you can buy your items back or sell other items to take their newly refreshed gold.

• Principle: Quickloading resets the merchant’s gold but does not clear the most recent transaction history.

II. Mid-Game Legitimacy: Skill-Based Wealth (Stable & Efficient)

Once you have a foundation in certain skills, these methods will make you rich while simultaneously power-leveling them.

1. Alchemy – The Green Gold Mine
This is the single most powerful and fastest money-making method in the mid-game.

• Core Principle: Use high-value potion recipes for massive profit margins.

• Top-Tier Recipes:

  • Blue Mountain Flower + Blue Butterfly Wing: Very common, great early-game value.

  • Creep Cluster + Giant’s Toe + Wheat: The ultimate money-maker. A single potion can be worth thousands of gold.

  • Garlic + Nordic Barnacle + Salmon Roe: Extremely high value. (Salmon Roe is obtained by catching jumping salmon or using Unrelenting Force on them).

  • Deathbell + Salt Pile: Cheap, common ingredients, good profit.

  • Mora Tapinella + Scaly Pholiota + Creep Cluster: Excellent for farming from your own Hearthfire garden/greenhouse.

• Operation Flow:

  1. Gather the above ingredients in the wild.

  2. Craft the high-value potions.

  3. Sell them to any alchemist or general merchant. Their high value will easily drain any merchant’s gold.

  4. Use the profit to buy more ingredients and continue the cycle, leveling Alchemy rapidly.

2. Enchanting – Transmuting Lead into Gold
Turn cheap gear into valuable enchanted items.

• Core Principle: Apply expensive enchantments to cheaply crafted weapons and armor.

• Best Enchantments:

  • Banish: Drastically increases an item’s value. Find a weapon with this effect (e.g., an enchanted Iron Dagger) and disenchant it to learn.

  • Paralysis: Extremely high value. Learn from a weapon like the unique “Mace of Molag Bal” or random loot.

  • Absorb Health: Common and valuable.

  • Fortify Sneak: High value and useful for many builds.

• Operation Flow:

  1. Mass-produce Iron Daggers or Leather Bracers (lowest cost).

  2. Hunt creatures or buy petty/lesser soul gems.

  3. Enchant the daggers/bracers.

  4. Sell the enchanted items for many times their base cost.

III. Late-Game Godhood: The Fortify Restoration Loop (Wealth Beyond Measure)

When your Smithing, Enchanting, and Alchemy skills are high, you unlock the game’s ultimate economic system—the end of all money problems.

1. The Fortify Restoration Loop (The “God-Mode” Crafting Loop)

• Goal: Create gear that fortifies Alchemy, then brew potions that fortify Enchanting, then create even better Alchemy gear… creating a feedback loop of exponentially increasing power.

• Simplified Process:

  1. Craft a set of apparel (Necklace, Ring, Circlet, Gauntlets) with “Fortify Alchemy”.

  2. Wear this gear and brew a “Fortify Enchanting” potion.

  3. Drink the potion and craft a new, more powerful “Fortify Alchemy” gear set.

  4. Repeat steps 2 and 3. Your bonus percentages will climb to insane levels (e.g., thousands of percent).

  5. At this peak, you can:

     • Brew a “Fortify Smithing” potion of immense strength.

     • Drink it and improve a weapon at a grindstone, giving it astronomical damage.

     • Enchant it with Banish/Absorb Health, creating a weapon worth hundreds of thousands of gold.

2. Dealing with Merchant Gold Limits:
When your items are worth more than any merchant has:

• Invest: Use the Investor perk (Speech tree) to permanently increase a merchant’s gold by 500.

• Master Trader: Use the Master Trader perk (Speech tree) to sell any type of item to any merchant.

• Merchant Carousel: Travel between multiple cities to sell your wares.

• Bartering: Sell your expensive item, then buy back all of the merchant’s valuable materials (ingots, soul gems, ingredients) to effectively “drain” their total assets.

Gold Farming Roadmap Summary

Final Recommendation

• If you want an authentic experience, focus on Alchemy. It balances profit, fun, and incentive to explore Skyrim’s flora and fauna.

• If you just want to solve money problems quickly, use the early-game exploits for seed money, then transition to Alchemy.

• The Fortify Restoration Loop is the ultimate solution, but be warned: it can make you overpowered too early and potentially ruin the game’s challenge and fun.

Choose the path that suits you, and may your purse be as full as your soul gems, traveler!