Tips to level alchemy and make easy gold.

  • Welcome to Skyrim Forums! Register now to participate using the 'Sign Up' button on the right. You may now register with your Facebook or Steam account!

wrighty

Thalmor 3rd Emissary
hey there, I've recently got hearthfire and I've been working on my alchemy with the new greenhouse and garden additions and I've come up with a way to easily level alchemy and to make a lot of gold.

I've been working on a dark elf alchemist build and in this build I wanted to use alchemy as my hobby and my career and live in the wilderness avoiding most major towns, so I built lakeview manor and I mostly stay around falkreath hold and visit falkreath and riverwood.

With the garden you get 11 places to plant and with the greenhouse wing you get 18 I think, each plant only needs to be planted once then every 3 days it will yield between 3-5 crops, it depends on the plant.
As you may know the best potions to increase alchemy are the highest value potons, the higher the value the more the skill increase and the more money you make, the highest value potions need a giants toe, which are hard to come by in any number.
Luckily I found the most cost and time effective plant ingredients to use.
You need to plant Creep Cluster, scaly pholiota and mora tapinella in your garden and greenhouse, plant more mora tapinella because creep and scaly plants both yield 5 crops per plant and mora crops only yield 3 crops per plant.
pick all of your crops, I end up with 40 clusters, 40 pholiota and 60 something moras, with 0 fortify alchemy gear my potion value is 1432 and I make 40 in each crop, i then travel to riverwood sell them and wait 3 days then return to my manor and repeat I make easily 20000 gold per harvest.
This is great for roleplaying characters that want a career and a way to make money but have limitations, my character doesn't directly fight and avoids most dungeon delving.

A way to make this easier is to get 70 speech or use the speech persuasion loop in the black briar meadery to quickly level your speech then get the investor perk and invest in the riverwood trader, the shop is bugged and when invested in this shop has over 11000 gold to buy your potions. this allows you to offload your potions easily.
I also recommend investing in all 3 levels of the experimenter perk which reveals all ingredient effects IF you have the dragonborn dlc, you can then eat 1 of every ingredient to get all of the effects revealed in the game and then respec your perks so they're not wasted, this can be used to respec your speech perks after you've invested in the riverwood trader too.

This is a fast way to level alchemy and earn gold without dungeon delving for roleplay characters or for just quick easy gold.
 

itsLilBeastHD

Jason, Modder.
Great guide and it's much appreciated as i been looking for some fairly easy to come by ingredients to level. I'm a nordic warrior fighting for the Empire and alchemy/enchanting happen to be my hobbies. Think of it like this, Nord who uses a greatsword, battleaxe, bow and sneaks while doing it.

Anyways, i appreciate the guild and i'll put it to good use. Now i need to go build lakeview again lol.
 

wrighty

Thalmor 3rd Emissary
Great guide and it's much appreciated as i been looking for some fairly easy to come by ingredients to level. I'm a nordic warrior fighting for the Empire and alchemy/enchanting happen to be my hobbies. Think of it like this, Nord who uses a greatsword, battleaxe, bow and sneaks while doing it.

Anyways, i appreciate the guild and i'll put it to good use. Now i need to go build lakeview again lol.

Thanks, im happy that i could help.
you could build any house for this really, in fact windstad manor is best because the fish hatchery gets you loads of river bettys to use with deathbell for some very powerful poisons. I just said lakeview because thats what im using for my roleplay.
You could do what I do and have a greenhouse at every house, I travel between houses, lakeview is my cash crops, winstad is my poison crops and the other house is for restore/regen/resist potions.
 

jonathan90

well known member
Best thing I would do, is sell and buy poisons at a cheap price, since I am an alchemist... I am more like a poison alchemist. and my alchemy for my wood elf is level 51. and I am trying to go up as high as 100.

But I am only working mainly on "poison craft" if you know what I mean.
I use nordic weapons and etc. and I have a dawngaurd DLC installed, as well as the dragon born DLC alongside my hearthfire DLC. So I have all 3 DLC's for skyrim on xbox360.

I am working on a theif/assassin, slayer type of character to vampires.

I am not going for illusion at all. but I have an easy erray of poisons I have just mixed up. and they can be extremely useful against powerful enemies indeed.
 

wrighty

Thalmor 3rd Emissary
Salmon Roe + Histcarp + Silverside Perch = Your Welcome

If you see in my original post I did say that there were better high value potions, if you want the highest value then salmon roe + histcarp + jazbay grapes is better than with silverside perch.
however even with the fish hatchery you cannot get salmon roe,therefore it's difficult to get in any number, whilst with my suggested ingredients you can get between 40-60 of each plant every 3 days which yields 40 potions with a value over 1000 gold(at mid level alchemy, no fortify gear) per harvest.
 

wrighty

Thalmor 3rd Emissary
Best thing I would do, is sell and buy poisons at a cheap price, since I am an alchemist... I am more like a poison alchemist. and my alchemy for my wood elf is level 51. and I am trying to go up as high as 100.

But I am only working mainly on "poison craft" if you know what I mean.
I use nordic weapons and etc. and I have a dawngaurd DLC installed, as well as the dragon born DLC alongside my hearthfire DLC. So I have all 3 DLC's for skyrim on xbox360.

I am working on a theif/assassin, slayer type of character to vampires.

I am not going for illusion at all. but I have an easy erray of poisons I have just mixed up. and they can be extremely useful against powerful enemies indeed.

If you want to level your alchemy then following my tips is by far the fastest way, you can be 100 alchemy and 200,000+ gold in no time, then after you have maxed alchemy you could use the fish hatchery at winstad manor, plant some imp stool, canis root and deathbell and have river betty in your hatchery, these 4 ingredients will give you powerful damage health poisons and paralysing poisons.
 

Undilar

Thalmor Officer
Best thing I would do, is sell and buy poisons at a cheap price, since I am an alchemist... I am more like a poison alchemist. and my alchemy for my wood elf is level 51. and I am trying to go up as high as 100.

But I am only working mainly on "poison craft" if you know what I mean.
I use nordic weapons and etc. and I have a dawngaurd DLC installed, as well as the dragon born DLC alongside my hearthfire DLC. So I have all 3 DLC's for skyrim on xbox360.

I am working on a theif/assassin, slayer type of character to vampires.

I am not going for illusion at all. but I have an easy erray of poisons I have just mixed up. and they can be extremely useful against powerful enemies indeed.
This may be weird but I have never played a dark elf until right this second but I never use illusion or alchemy or alteration the fact is I dont know what to do?
 

wrighty

Thalmor 3rd Emissary
This may be weird but I have never played a dark elf until right this second but I never use illusion or alchemy or alteration the fact is I dont know what to do?

Dark elves are amazing, they look awesome and make the best vampires because of their fire resist, their lore is very good too, my current character is a telvanni mage soon to be vampire lord.
For illusion use muffle and invisibility for stealth, calm, backstab, calm, backstab and repeat for easy kills, frenzy mobs to lessen the numbers. For alchemy follow my tips and alteration is mainly just flesh spells like oakflesh which add protection, theres also detect life and detect dead spells and its quite useful for a defensive character.
 

jonathan90

well known member
If you see in my original post I did say that there were better high value potions, if you want the highest value then salmon roe + histcarp + jazbay grapes is better than with silverside perch.
however even with the fish hatchery you cannot get salmon roe,therefore it's difficult to get in any number, whilst with my suggested ingredients you can get between 40-60 of each plant every 3 days which yields 40 potions with a value over 1000 gold(at mid level alchemy, no fortify gear) per harvest.
yes,pretty cool advice man.
If I do not have a certain ingredient, all I do is make a potion to fortify barter.
then I get it heaps cheaper.does not mean you have to buy all the ingredients. you just buy the ingredients you need to fullfil the potion. but finding ingredients is better because it cost's nothing.
 

jonathan90

well known member
If you want to level your alchemy then following my tips is by far the fastest way, you can be 100 alchemy and 200,000+ gold in no time, then after you have maxed alchemy you could use the fish hatchery at winstad manor, plant some imp stool, canis root and deathbell and have river betty in your hatchery, these 4 ingredients will give you powerful damage health poisons and paralysing poisons.
also harvesting your own ingredients is even better....:D
 

Undilar

Thalmor Officer
Dark elves are amazing, they look awesome and make the best vampires because of their fire resist, their lore is very good too, my current character is a telvanni mage soon to be vampire lord.
For illusion use muffle and invisibility for stealth, calm, backstab, calm, backstab and repeat for easy kills, frenzy mobs to lessen the numbers. For alchemy follow my tips and alteration is mainly just flesh spells like oakflesh which add protection, theres also detect life and detect dead spells and its quite useful for a defensive character.
thanks
 

Lethennon

Member
You can spend a little time on this one but will end up "winning" the money game without cheats.

1. You will need the "banish Daedra" enchant. You can find this on some items, and as a random purchase. Disenchant the item to get the enchant.

2. Iron is cheap. Use what little gold you have to make as many iron daggers as you can.

3. Enchant the iron daggers using petty souls with the daedra enchant.

4. your iron dagger of annihilation (ingot/petty soul) is now worth ~500 gold. Where you only spent probably 10 gold per dagger to make.

This will lvl your smithing AND your enchanting. I found this worked very well. I started, in my case, with ~300 gold. Made 10 daggers. Then had 5000 gold. Then made 50 daggers. Then had 30k gold and like 20 more daggers in case i need to trade.

This becomes ESPECIALLY valuable if you train your speech skill enough to get the "sell anything to anyone" perk. You can do this very easily by going to Riften and speaking to the front desk person at the Black Briar Meadrey. Intimidate him to tell you the truth, and keep cycling the dialogue over and over and over.

The biggest problem with this method is that vendors only have 1000 gold unless you get perks to improve it. Though using the daggers as your own form of "currency" with the trade anything perk is an option.
 

Ritterkreuz

Active Member
So much effort. Just go to Eastmarch. Go up the road that leads from Windhelm to the Morrowind border and collect the snowberries, make sure you stop at the farms. Grab the wheat too if you want to make some health potions. Then go south of the city to Kynesgrove, from there start picking the Dragon's tounge, just keep working your way south into the geyser, there's tons of the stuff. You can easily snag enough materials to make over 50 fire resistance potions without cheating. it'll make you money and raise the alchemy skill.
 

wrighty

Thalmor 3rd Emissary
So much effort. Just go to Eastmarch. Go up the road that leads from Windhelm to the Morrowind border and collect the snowberries, make sure you stop at the farms. Grab the wheat too if you want to make some health potions. Then go south of the city to Kynesgrove, from there start picking the Dragon's tounge, just keep working your way south into the geyser, there's tons of the stuff. You can easily snag enough materials to make over 50 fire resistance potions without cheating. it'll make you money and raise the alchemy skill.

Well it's not really much effort, all you need is to buy some land that costs the same as an unfurnished breezehome, then build up until you get the greenhouse wing, technically you do not even need the greenhouse you can use just the garden which has 11 crops.
In game plants take too long to replenish, yes you can make 50 potions but my method allows 40 potions of incredibly high value every 2 days, it gets to a point where potions become a form of currency, you simply sell them when you buy things.
This is not cheating either, the greenhouse and garden are made for alchemy.
 
This may be weird but I have never played a dark elf until right this second but I never use illusion or alchemy or alteration the fact is I dont know what to do?
Illusion, and Alteration are easy. Cast spells, Alteration has _Flesh to re-enforce your armor, Detect Life is real handy for hunting, and not getting ambushed by Sabercats, and Paralysis can be used offensively to knock down those ultra tough foes that you don't want to fight. Illusion is a bit trickier to use Effectively, but can be one of the most effective when you learn to use it.

Calm can stop a charging Sabercat dead to rights, it's pretty awesome for this (Especially with Detect Life to see them coming.) Fear can make a "Everybody beat on the player!" Bandit rush into a 1-on-1, or avoid some fights all together, works really good with a Bow. By ythe time they run way out into the outfield, it wears off, and they run all the way back to attack you again, you've got time to pull out your bow, make out with your girlfriend, smoke a cigarrette, shoot them all, and recover your magicka, but it's a better tactic for out in the open where they wont kite you down the corridors, into traps, and ambushes by unfeared allies. Fury just rocks, you can make them fight each other, and when they're done, fight the last one (Usually the boss) before he recovers from killing all the minions. It's especially funny on the bandits who are out front, grumbling about the way the Boss is treating them, then you lead a Mutiny against him. You have to top them off, though, when it's a long melee. Also nice for killing that guy (Nazeem seems to be a popular choice) for a bargain. Shoot him with Fury, let him attack you first, slap him down like a clown, teabag him, strip him, and pose him in compromising positions with the Battleborn Ox (In the cloud district) take screencaps to blackmail his family, and it's a 40 Septim fine for "Assault."

The higher level versions work on higher level mobs, and eventually get a Blast Radius. Clairvoyance is pretty useless, Courage (and so on) are kind of nice for training, but there's maybe 5 times you get to use Call to Arms in the Civil War quests (And on the way to the Western Watch Tower) so not worth it. If you can cast it, Harmony is an effective "Everyone Chill!" and Mayhem, well, that's pretty much only if you Want to be in the middle of the mosh pit (Or Mêlée, in French.)
 

Recent chat visitors

Latest posts

Top