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How to Make Money in Elder Scrolls Online (11 Ways)

How to Make Money in Elder Scrolls Online (11 Ways)

Elder Scrolls Online is filled to the brim with content and stuff to buy. Things in this game do not come cheap, especially those flashy gear and luxurious furnishings. Your wallet needs to be bursting with gold to make your dreams come true in the lands of Tamriel. So how can you make money in Elder Scrolls Online?

We have listed 11 ways of making money in Elder Scrolls Online ranging from beginner-level to veteran level:

  1. Antiquities
  2. Gold Style Page
  3. Farming Motifs
  4. Thieving
  5. Farming Public Dungeons
  6. Poison
  7. Gems
  8. Treasures
  9. Daily Rewards
  10. Writs
  11. Praxis Khajiit Brazier

Antiquities

Antiquities

The Antiquities method is one that you can do at any level and will earn you around a million gold over a couple of days. It is a bit of a grind but it’s a lot of fun and it will net you a ton of cosmetics and furnishings along the way. Leveling your Scrying and Excavating to level 10 will earn you close to a million gold if you do it properly.

The key to the success of this method is at the very end you will dig up a treasure that’s worth 100,000 gold and you can sell it to an NPC merchant. Combine that with all of the 5,10,20,50 thousand gold and treasures that you’ll be digging up and selling to NPCs along the way and you’ll find yourself nearly a million gold richer on the second day.

Artaeum

The first thing you’re going to do is travel to the zone of Artaeum, you can either get here by doing the first zone story quest in Summerset or you can teleport to a friend or guild member that’s already here. Once here, you are going to dig up the green, blue, and purple leads that the game automatically gives you until you get to Scrying and Excavating level 5. This is the perfect zone to reach level 5 as it’s the smallest zone in the game and you never have to run more than a few feet to get to the next dig site making this zone incredibly efficient for leveling up your skills.

all zones

Once you have hit level 5, you’re going to all of the zones as seen on the right. Look at your map list and you’re going to do them all one at a time. You’re going to dig up the free green lead that you have which is found by opening up your Journal and choosing the Antiquities tab and clicking Current Zone. The Current Zone will list a green lead, every zone has a free green lead that you can dig up as many times as you want.

The first time you dig up that green lead, it’s going to give you a guaranteed blue lead and the first time you dig up that guaranteed blue lead it’s going to give you a guaranteed purple lead. Once you’ve dug up that purple lead you are done in that zone then you should leave and go to the next zone.

So if you did Alik’r Desert first and as suggested above, Artaeum, you now go to Auridon and dig up the green, blue, and purple lead there and then move down on the zone list and complete each one. Once you’ve completed every zone on the list, you’ll be Scrying and Excavating level 8.

Don’t forget the zone of Eyevea, it is a hidden zone not shown on the zone list. It is accessible by clicking the ship on the left side of the map. The only way to get here is actually by completing the Mages guild quest line, so once you’ve completed that you’ll be able to go through a portal in the Mages guild in the town of your choice such as Daggerfall and you’ll be able to dig up the three antiquities lead in Eyevea.

Now that you have dug up all the three guaranteed leads from every single zone in the game which would be Alik’r Desert to Wrothgar and the somewhat hidden zone of Eyevea, you will hit level 8. Now go ahead and start digging up all of the Mythic items that look interesting to you and this should take you from level 8 to level 10.

Once you have reached level 10 and you’ve dug up all of the guaranteed leads, you’re now ready to head on over to western Skyrim into the town of Solitude and go into the Antiquarian Circle and walk straight inside then go up the stairs, once upstairs you’re going to run to the back of the room and on the dresser in the back corner is going to be the final lead. Once you scry and excavate that lead, it’ll give you an Al-Esh Ascension Coin treasure and as you may be aware treasures are good for one thing and that is selling them to an NPC.

This coin will sell to an NPC for 100,000 gold and along with all the leads you previously acquired, you will be swimming in gold. It doesn’t take very long if you grind it out, you can get it done in a day or if you play more moderately then it’ll take a couple of days and you’ll end up nearly a million gold richer. Not only that but you will also have a ton of furnishings, cosmetics, skins, motifs, and all kinds of treasures for your house that you didn’t have before you started. As mentioned at the beginning, this method is accessible to all players veterans and beginners alike.

Related: How To Become A Vampire in Elder Scrolls Online: 3 Steps

Gold Style Page

A lot of people have no idea that this method even exists. This is a Gold Style Page that drops at the end of a specific dungeon every month. It goes through rotation and it drops from the final boss. If you beat the boss on Veteran and you have the hard mode achievement, there’s a chance it will drop. As mentioned, it’s on rotation so it’s not always the same style page drop but this style page usually sells upwards of 400,000 gold and sometimes above a million. So here’s how to find out which style page is dropping right now.

Gold Style Page

Simply open up your Crown Store menu and search for arms pack and then it will show you a monster helm arms pack. As seen in the picture above, it is the Sentinel of Rkugamz arms pack, there will be more packs in here but those will be only purchasable, so focus on the monster arms pack only. At the time of reading, this arms pack will have changed so continue accordingly.

The Sentinel of Rkugamz is the final boss in Darkshade Caverns 1. So when you kill this boss on Veteran or if you have already killed him on hard mode or if you haven’t then you can kill him on hard mode and that will give you a chance at the style page. You do not need to kill the boss on hard mode, you just need to have killed him previously on hard mode, so after you’ve done it once, you can do it on lower difficulty thereafter and you always have a chance at the style page.

The style page has a drop rate of somewhere between 5-10%, it is rather low but it’s also a really easy farm. It’s something you can run once a day with friends or with PUGs for a shot at hundreds of thousands of gold.

Darkshade Caverns 1
Darkshade Caverns 1 location

Sometimes the dungeon that it drops in is an easy one like the one mentioned above Darkshade Caverns and sometimes it’ll be a much tougher dungeon or perhaps a DLC dungeon. So depending on the drop dungeon, just take a look at it and figure out for yourself if it’s going to be worth it trying to farm or not based on your ability to take down that boss/content.

Farming Motifs

motifs

The next method for farming gold is Motifs and farming Motifs. Motifs are what you use at the outfit station to change the way you look. You can either farm the motif and learn it yourself so that you can up your fashion game or you could farm the motif and sell it to someone else for a hefty price. Depending on how new the motif is and how hard it is to obtain, it may sell for a ton of gold or maybe not so much.

dungeon list

The most valuable motifs tend to drop in the newest Veteran DLC dungeons. nearly all of these dungeons have a chance to drop motifs when you kill the final boss. The chances of getting a motif depending on difficulty of the dungeon is listed below:

  • Normal, you have roughly a 10% chance at a motif,
  • Veteran, you have roughly a 40% chance at a motif,
  • Hard Mode, you have a 100% chance at a motif.

All of these dungeons will eventually drop motifs if they’re not currently dropping them right now. The only ones that wouldn’t be dropping motifs are the latest ones as sometimes it will take the developers a few months to add that motif into the loot table. Depending on the motif you get, it will sell for anywhere between 5,000 to 500,000 gold, it just depends on how new and how difficult it is to get.

coffer

If you want other ways of getting motifs instead of the dungeons then don’t worry there are plenty of motifs that don’t require you to do dungeons. To get them, every DLC zone in the game has Daily Quests that you can do. Usually, there are two to three different quest givers in a zone and sometimes there are as many as four and each of those dailies will give you a Coffer at the end when you turn them in.

That coffer has a chance at a motif, the newer the DLC zone the more valuable the motif. In a brand new DLC zone, these will sell for hundreds of thousands of gold, if that zone has been out for a while then it will sell for much less around 3,000 to 50,000 gold.

gold coast kvatch

One of the most valuable motifs to try to farm is in the Gold Coast by doing the dailies in Kvatch. They’re very easy to do and if you happen to get the Minotaur Chest motif then it will sell for nearly 1 million gold, you just have to get a little bit lucky for this. If you get any of the other motifs then they’ll sell for anywhere between 5,000 to 300,000 gold.

This is a really fun way to make money as it allows you to improve your fashion game while also selling any duplicates to make tons of gold. Motifs will also drop in Trials but that is a bit more difficult to farm as it requires 11 other people to want to do the same. This is the most frequently used method of making gold in the game.

Related: Elder Scrolls Online Which Alliance, Faction, And Race To Pick

Thieving

Thieving can be a quite lucrative and fun way to make money. One of the best places to thieve is to go to the town of Vos in northeastern Vvardenfell. A general tip for thieving in this town is to steal stuff from people until you get a motif. Not only will you make decent money selling all of the items you stole but the motif that you inevitably get from one of the townsfolk can sell for anywhere between five and fifty thousand gold or if you’re looking to up your fashion game then you can learn it yourself.

vos

If you’re going to use thieving to make money then it’s worth leveling up your Legerdemain skill and getting the passives from it. This is going to increase your ability to sneak, it’s going to increase your chances to successfully pickpocket by 50%, and it’s also going to increase the number of items that you can sell to the fence. There are a lot of things in this skill that will increase the financial viability of thieving.

Legerdemain

What you’re going to do is pickpocket/steal from a regular town NPC twice and then when nobody is looking, you’re going to kill them this is going to give you the third and final piece of loot that they’re carrying and it’s going to cause the NPC to reset which means when you come back to them after they’ve respawned later they will have three more pieces of loot and hopefully one of those will be a motif. You can keep doing this to the whole town hopefully without getting caught and in mere seconds you will have accumulated a ton of items to sell and get gold.

There are a lot of chests and coffers and things like that that you can steal from and all of these things have a chance at giving you one of the motifs for this zone and that motif will sell for between five and fifty thousand gold when you get it. Depending on which motif it is, some motif sets are a lot more popular than others and Chest pieces always tend to sell very well compared to the rest of that set.

Thieving can be a lot of fun and a great way to mix up the way that you make money. Vos is not the only town you can thieve in as there are plenty of towns in the game. This town just happens to be one that can also give you motifs in the process making it much more worthwhile looting-wise.

Farming Public Dungeons

Another money-making method is farming Public Dungeons for gear that sells really well. Some Overland Sets sell for a ton of money and drop inside these dungeons. Public dungeon bosses also drop the weapons for these sets which are oftentimes the hardest piece and the most valuable ones to sell.

Deshaan dungeon

You can go to a public dungeon like the one in Deshaan (seen above), this dungeon drops Mother’s Sorrow, it’s high in demand and therefore very valuable. So if you come to a dungeon like this then we recommend running around the dungeon, doing a loop around the dungeon killing all of the bosses that are available and if they’re not there when you run by them then go to the next one and open up all of the chests while you’re running the loop. Every chest you open has a chance at a weapon and every boss you kill has a chance at a weapon.

forgotten crypt dungeon

This is one of the farms that are easy to do for new players and veterans alike. After one lap through the dungeon, you can acquire a bunch of stuff and the chance to get something quite valuable such as a Mother’s Sorrow Inferno Staff. The lower-quality stuff can net you around 10,000+ gold from just a quick loop of the dungeon. If you are lucky enough to get the Mother’s Sorrow Inferno Staff then you can sell it for upwards of hundreds of thousands of gold.

Not only will you make money from this method, but you are also going to get a decent amount of XP too. This method is something that you can start doing anytime. We especially recommend that you use this method ASAP if you have a Magicka character that you’re leveling up, as you’re going to be able to unlock (in your item set collection system) all of your Mother’s Sorrow pieces so that you’ll be able to craft it for a cheaper transmute crystal cost down the road when the time comes to craft your own Mother’s Sorrow set.

Rivenspire

Other great zones to farm public dungeons for sets and gold that are going to be incredibly useful to particular builds are:

  • The zone of Rivenspire. The public dungeons here will drop the items for the Necropotence set, very popular among Magic characters.
  • The zone of Wrothgar and the two public dungeons here have a chance of dropping the Briarheart set which is an incredibly popular set among stamina characters.

Running these dungeons will benefit your build by getting the best sets for you or by simply getting a bunch of items to sell to somebody else for big gold. As usual, the weapons are the big ticket items so if you find a weapon such as a Briar battle axe then that’s going to sell pretty well.

Poison

poison

This is a quick tip/method for new players and making gold. In Elder Scrolls Online you’re going to pick up a ton of poisons of all different types along the way. There are different types of poisons with different levels and they’re going to use up a chunk of your inventory space and leave you wondering what to do with them.

The answer is sell them for gold. Each one’s only going to sell for around 5 gold but you’re going to pick up hundreds and thousands of these and if you sell them to the merchants that’s going to add up quick. So go ahead and sell these for some quick cash.

Related: Ultimate Beginner’s Guide To Elder Scrolls Online (10 Tips)

Gems

soul gems

Just like poisons, another way of making a quick buck is to sell your overflowing Soul Gems. Without even noticing you will be carrying 1000s of these gems, as you can see in the picture above. You will have way more than you need and what you should do is whenever you get a stack of 200 Souls Gems, you sell it for 6,000 gold.

So if you find that you have useless Souls gems lying around and that your stacks are building faster than they’re falling then go ahead and start selling the excess ones to vendors for six thousand gold.

Treasures

treasure

Now let’s talk about treasure. What is a treasure and what is it good for? If you ever find yourself with some treasure either stolen or otherwise and you can hover over an item and in the top left corner of that item’s description it will say treasure, this means that this item is good for one thing and one thing only and that is to be sold to an NPC merchant so go ahead and sell them off.

fence

If the treasure has a red hand icon next to it that means you’ve stolen it. The only way to get rid of it would be to go to any Outlaw Refuge (icon seen in the picture above) and go talk to the Fence there and they will buy the stolen goods from you.

There’s only one exception to selling all treasure to NPCs which is the Clockwork City dailies require you to turn in five stolen games or toys to the NPC to complete that activity. If you’re not doing the Clockwork City dailies then don’t worry about that right now and as mentioned it only applies to toys and games.

Daily Rewards

daily rewards

Another quick tip that’s worth noting which you’re probably going to be doing passively anyway is at the beginning of each month you will get a new calendar of daily rewards for logging into the game. It’s worth taking a look at this calendar because every few months or so the developers will hide a 100,000 gold reward for logging in somewhere around the third week usually.

So just be sure to check the login rewards and then if there’s a hundred thousand gold rewards make sure you sign in enough times that month to collect it. This will be the easiest 100k you’ve ever earned in this game.

Writs

We can’t talk about making gold without talking about Writs. Writs are incredibly useful for new players because they give you materials to craft and upgrade your gear from lower to higher levels, there are lots of other reasons to do Writs. Sadly, Writs aren’t that much fun and you may not want to partake in this. Many players run away from this rather mundane chore but you can not deny its money-making potential.

Writs

Not only do writs pay you pretty decent money but they also give you crafting materials that you’re going to need. Turning in writs will give you crafting materials and occasionally it will give you gold materials so that you can gold out your gear. You can exploit this writs method using multiple characters to make even bigger bucks.

You will get 4,600 gold in a day, that’s just the gold reward and does not include the gold tempering alloy or any other gold materials you get when you turn in the writs. This is just gold that you will get every single time you do all of your writs on a level 50 and beyond character. Multiply this number by 30 days and you will get 138,000 gold in a month per character. Just by adding one more character to this and you will double the gold yield to 276,000 in a month.

You make this kind of bank just for doing your writs only by setting apart a few minutes at the beginning of your day to go and knock out those daily writs. If you use four characters then you will be getting 552,000 gold a month. If you use all your character slots i.e. 6 then you will be making 1,104,000 gold per month. That is 1 million plus gold in your account for a measly amount of work.

So if you want an incredibly simple, laid-back, and easy way to make a million gold a month you could do your Writs on all of your characters every day. If you are willing to partake in this rather boring task then more power to you.

Related: Which Class Should I Choose In Elder Scrolls Online?

Praxis Khajiit Brazier

Elsweyr Prologue

If you are the type of person to pick up lottery tickets from time to time then this method might be of interest to you. If making 1,000 gold or 10,000 gold or 50,000 gold just doesn’t sound exciting then how about 17 million gold? Yes, you read that number right, there is a way you can earn 17 million gold. Doing a particular daily in this game could earn you a blueprint that sells for 17 million gold. How do you get this you may be wondering?

Go into the Crown Store then go to the Prologue section of the crown store and pick up the Elsweyr prologue quest. By completing the Elsweyr Prologue quest you’re going to unlock a daily quest in Grahtwood.

grahtwood daily location

After you’ve done the prologue quest you should go to northern Grahtwood, north of the town of Cormount. You can get here by using the Cormount Wayshrine, heading north from the shrine, and then right as you get to the exit in the north (pointed out in the picture above) you’ll see Zahari who will have a daily quest.

praxis khajiit brazier

You can come here and do this daily quest every single day. By turning in this quest you have a chance at the coveted Praxis Khajiit Brazier which sells for upwards of 17 million gold. The odds of getting one are low but it’s 17 million gold that might be yours and very few people know about it.

This is another way to make money that you can do at any level. It’s not one that you would spend all day doing but rather something you would do once or twice a day and it can be like a little lottery ticket that you buy once in a while just in case you win the jackpot.


You can use these methods to make hundreds, thousands, and even millions of gold. Not only that but a lot of these are much more fun to do. So pick the one that sounds the best to you and try it out. See how much money you make. Feel free to start with the easier ones if you’re lower level and put those high-level motif farms off toward the end.