Primateus, on 16 November 2011 - 03:48 PM, said:
How the hell do you guys get the money to do all that crafting?
I've improved my smithing schedule into a (slow) moneymaker. In one of the mines near Whiterun/Windrun/first city you get to (to the north west, underground lair, has a spike pit, I found a tome of Transmutation which turns iron ore into silver ore and silver ore into gold ore.
Buy iron ore (price 5-10, available at all smiths + the general goods store), transmute, transmute, smelt gold (turns 2 iron ore into 1 gold bar) manufacture gold rings, sell them for around 25-30 each (your speech will also level as a result). Your initial investment is multiplied by at least a factor 3. It's just slow, but you can easily transmute while scouting the land.
Once you have a bit of money, find a Damage Stamina weapon, disenchant, stop transmuting iron into gold but make iron daggers instead (1 leather strip, 1 iron ingot) and level enchanting. Damage Stamina is for some reason worth a lot to vendors: around 1.5x more than Soul Trap or damage enchantments - at enchanting 40 and speech 30 (I started over from scratch on tuesday), I get around 250g per dagger using the simplest materials available (petty soul gem, 30g, 60g if bought with soul on board, leather strips - 9g, iron ingot anywhere between 14-18g), making it economically possible to just buy filled soul gems as well for a bit of a speed boost.
When farming, it is important to know that the sale price is reduced by 10% for each gem size lower than common. This makes the above scheme workable with petty soul gems, so the soul of any wolf/mudcrab will do. To boost the effectiveness, you'd ideally also have a bow or weapon with soul trap.
If you're not interested in levelling smithing but want to level enchanting and/or just make extra money from your sales, just enchant every vanilla weapon this way for a tidy profit.
EDIT: like dibs says, if you focus on smithing completely only 3-5 hours are required to get it to near perfection, but the cost can be staggering - I spent in total 16000g on my first character on smithing to speed-level it.
With the above approach, I've paid most of the Whiterun house + furniture from this, have around 5k gold in reserve and have spent around 3k on magical gear to experiment on what enchant makes the most dosh. It also gave me 10 levels out of the 19 I currently have on this character just through Enchanting + Smithing upgrades. It is just boring as heck and a high smithing is not going to help you if you run into anything out to kill you.
This post has been edited by Tapper: 17 November 2011 - 08:23 AM
Everyone is entitled to his own wrong opinion. - Lizrad