Early game gold farming without breaking immersion or exploiting vendors

[TamrielTactician]

I've been thinking about this a lot on my current playthrough. Everyone talks about the alchemy loop or enchanting loop like it's mandatory, but those feel kind of soulless to me. I want to actually make money in the first 20-30 levels without just spamming potions or enchanted iron daggers.

What I've been doing instead is actually looting everything and being selective about it. Like, I'll grab weapons and armor from bandits, sell the heavy stuff, keep the enchanted pieces. Jewelry always sells for decent weight-to-gold ratio. But the real thing I noticed is that if you actually do the radiant jobs for the Thieves Guild early (even just a few burglary jobs), you get paid AND you're looting houses that respawn. It's slower than the loops but it feels like actual thieving instead of just... crafting.

On my Switch run I'm trying to stick to stuff that doesn't feel like I'm cheating the economy. Hunting, selling pelts and meat. Foraging ingredients and selling them raw instead of making potions. Doing actual bounties and quests. It takes longer but the game doesn't feel broken by level 40.

Curious if anyone else deliberately avoids the crafting loops or if I'm just being stubborn about it. Does the gold actually matter that much if you're not trying to buy a house in the first 10 hours anyway?

 

[DragonbornVet]

I'm kind of with you on this, honestly. The crafting loops feel like they're solving a problem that doesn't really exist if you're not trying to fund a house run or min-max gear in the first 20 levels. By the time you actually need serious gold - like, when you want to buy property or stock up on soul gems and rare ingredients - you've already looted enough dungeons that money stops being tight anyway.

The radiant jobs thing is solid. Those burglary runs actually pay decent if you're selective about what you grab, and there's something satisfying about doing the job "right" instead of just... existing and getting richer. Plus the Thieves Guild questline itself pays you as you go, so it's not like you're broke while you're working through it.

Where I'd push back a tiny bit though: selling raw ingredients instead of potions is actually leaving gold on the table harder than you might think. Like, yeah, it feels more "immersive," but a potion of healing sells for way more than the ingredients that went into it, and you're not crafting 500 of them - just selling the ones you naturally find or make while leveling alchemy normally. Hunting and pelts is legit though, that's slow enough that it doesn't feel broken.

The real answer to your question is no, gold doesn't matter that much early on. By level 30-40 you've got enough from quests and looting that the economy isn't a bottleneck anymore. You're not being stubborn, you're just not playing on a self-imposed hard mode. There's nothing wrong with that.