10 Gold Making Methods in ESO

There are many ways to make gold in the Elder Scrolls Online. Whether you have one, three, nine, or even eighteen characters you will actively gain gold just playing the game, questing, delving, exploring, and PvP all reward gold.

If you want to make MILLIONS of gold keep reading, in this guide you will find 10 methods that I’ve used to become a multi-millionaire in the Elder Scrolls Online.

Selling via Trading Guilds

You’re going to come across a lot of sell able items in your adventures around Tamriel, and while you can vendor most things for gold the most profitable way to make gold is selling to other players and one way to do that is through a guild, or two, or .. did you know you can be in five at the same time!?

Guilds in Elder Scrolls Online offer a unique trading system unlike any other games I have experienced, you see there is no “auction house” in ESO instead there are Guild Traders. There are currently ~197 guild traders located across Tamriel.

When a guild has at least 50 members they gain access to a Guild Store located at any Bank and members can trade between each other. Additionally, the guild can bid with gold on a guild kiosk location where an NPC will sell your listed items to anyone.

You can be in 5 different guilds at the same time and you will have 30 slots to sell items per guild. The postings are up for 30 days or until they sell or you cancel the listing. Guilds can also have a maximum of 500 members.

Some trading guilds are in lucrative, fast-selling locations. The more lucrative, however, the more costly the bids for the Guild Trader which results in high competition and a need for the guild to raise funds to afford the trader. Trading guilds will sometimes require weekly dues or have a weekly sales requirement, they will also host guild auctions, raffles, farming events, and take donations.

But what about the tax the guild receives when you sell an item, where does it go? The tax collected is deposited into the guild bank however it is rarely enough to maintain the cost of a trading location, high end locations cost in the double-digit millions per week to operate. Even the lowest trafficked traders cost at least a million per week.

Picking a Trading Guild Location

The most profitable selling locations are typically in the capital cities, Mournhold, Wayrest, and Elden Root. Crafting locations such as Rawl’kha, Vivec City, Rimmen, and Alinor is advantageous as well because the guild traders are close-by the bank and crafting writ dailies in case someone needs something in a pinch.

The least trafficked guild traders are located in Outlaw’s Refuges or places in the middle of nowhere, such as alongside a road. Lower traffic traders are typically start-up guilds or traders that just want a place to sell their wares without the stress of managing a high traffic location.

How to Join a Trading Guild

To find a trading guild, press (G) or browse to the menu and find the Guild option, from here you can filter your search to “Trading” and your play-style needs, casual, balanced, or hardcore. When applying for a guild, read the whole recruitment post, most trading guilds require some kind of participation in events, weekly sales requirements, and/or dues. Find one that you know you can handle and once you get the hang of trading, you can always apply for another guild if you need more sales space.

Selling in Zone Chat

If you aren’t a part of a trade guild, then you can sell in the zone chat (/z) and someone may come along and buy your stuff, but first you should check prices.

For example, I wanted to sell an [Elsweyr Tower, Ancient Huge] furniture recipe and somebody immediately offered 375,000 gold for it. However, the market value was 3,500,000 gold and I sold it within hours as it is a very rare drop from the final boss in Moongrave Fane/Lair of Maarselok.

You can check the market value and item prices a number of ways:

• Link item to chat and ask for a PC (price check).
• Visit the guild traders in major cities, Wayrest, Mournhold, Elden Root and search your items there to get an idea of value.
• Addons can provide pricing data, however the data comes from your trading activities via guild stores and guilds you belong to overtime. (Addons can only be used on the PC version)
• Check the price on the Tamriel Trade Center website.

Crafting Dailies for Gold

Crafting writs can be picked up in any zone at the largest city or quest hub. These daily crafting quests are an excellent way to make gold in ESO and provide a bonus of character leveling experience. You can begin completing the writs at around level 5 when you visit your first town and complete the introduction to crafting quests.

As you level your character and have reached the max level of 50 you will receive 4.6k gold per character per day. If you complete the 7 daily crafting writs every day for a week then you will earn 32.2k. Now say you had 3 characters, that’s nearly 100,000 gold a week and if you have 9 characters then you would earn almost 300,000 gold every week.

Here’s a handy table to break-down the amount of gold potentially earned with crafting writs per character per day and over the course of one week:

Doing crafting writs does take time, at 9 characters it takes about 40 minutes to log into each character and complete their daily writs.

Check out our guide on how and where to complete your crafting writs as quickly as possible.

Crafting for Gold

You can craft all kinds of things in The Elder Scrolls Online and make a profit off of it such as potions, furnishings, enchanting glyphs, and most notably legendary armor. You can acquire legendary crafting materials through daily crafting writs and from refining raw crafting materials.

To make the most of your crafting make sure you have:

• Level 50 in each of the professions and as many skill points spent in each crafting skill line.
• The extraction passive skill in each crafting profession that allows you to extract more valuable materials through refining and deconstruction.
• The Meticulous Disassembly perk slotted from Champion Points.
• Hirelings skill to receive free materials once a day in the mail.

Crafting writs award you with a variety of rare crafting items, craft surveys, and sometimes a Sealed Master Writ, so it is very valuable to consistently research traits for items and collect styles.

Sealed Master Writs can award you with Writ Vouchers a currency that you can trade for legendary furnishing recipes to spruce up your house or craft and sell furnishings for gold. Legendary furnishings are not cheap to make so it is suggested that you farm for the resources yourself for maximum profit.

Material Farming for Gold

Material farming can be done in any zone and is very profitable in ESO. To make the best of your time, you are going to want to move fast to get as much materials as possible. There are sets and slot-able champion points that make farming both faster and more rewarding.

My preferred armor set for farming resources is Adept Rider combined with the mythic item, Ring of the Wild Hunt. These two sets are going to make you run nearly as fast as a mount at 60% speed when you sprint out of combat. Adept Rider can be crafted with 2 Traits known in Summerset or traded/purchased from other players. Another useful movement speed set is Jailbreaker’s from the dungeons Banished Cells I and II.

The best-slotted Champion Points to have when it comes to material farming are going to be:

• Meticulous Disassembly
• Plentiful Harvest
• Master Gatherer
• Steed’s Blessing

Farming Furniture Recipes

Furniture recipes can fetch a nice amount of gold, particularly blue, purple, and yellow designs. There are quite a few hotspots for looting furniture recipes in ESO. This requires a lot of repetitive searching of urns, desks, dressers, backpacks, trunks, nightstands & wardrobes. If you’re farming furniture plans for gold I found it’s best to complete a run through once or twice and then move on to other activities.

Popular places to search for furniture recipes are listed below, each of these locations require DLC or Chapter upgrades from the base game:

• High Isle has a few good locations with loot-able chests, the tower at Tor Draioch, Castle Navire, and Mandrake Manor in Gonfalon.
• The Bearer’s Rest in the upstairs portion in Fargrave which requires stealing items and resets the second you walk in and walk out.
• Councillor Jiric’s Manor in Leyawiin which requires you to do the Blackwood introductory quest to gain access.
• Summerset Isle in the town of Shimmerene in the chapel and inside the Direnni Acropolis.
• Looting urns in the Dreloth Ancestral Tomb located in the eastern part of Vvardenfell.
• The castle in Rimmen, Northern Elsweyr.
• Arkthzand Cavern a public dungeon in Blackreach.

Ayleid ruins are very popular because the enemies walking around can drop an Ayleid furnishing plan worth upwards of 15,000,000 gold. It is the rarest furnishing motif in the game (or so thought) and at one point it was thought they didn’t even exist. It can take hours until you see one and they are farmed by other players heavily. Popular locations to farm for them are:

• Bonesnap Ruins in Stormhaven
• Rulanyil’s Fall in Greenshade
• Rootsunder in Grahtwood

It is speculated that when you find an Epic or Superior quality (purple) furnishing plan, there is a cool down of 15 minutes until you can find another. For this reason, if you are choosing to run through an Ayleid ruin it is suggested you do not loot urns, just kill the enemies.

Style Motif Farming

Any daily or weekly quests can be worth your time because the coffers rewarded from the quests you are doing them in can drop valuable armor or style pages.

Doing daily quests can award you with valuable style motifs such as the Crafting Motif 39: Minotaur Style in the Gold Coast from the quest “Looming Shadows” or completing a weekly trial quest in the Maw of Lorkhaj and being rewarded the Dro-m’Athra Shoulders which can be worth 2,000,000 gold.

Style motifs such as the entire Imperial Style folio can very rarely drop in desks, dressers, backpacks, trunks, nightstands & wardrobes in all zones.

Scrying and Excavating

Once you have unlocked Antiquities* in Solitude, Western Skyrim take a teleport to Artaeum (or any small zone like Bal Foyen, Khenarthi Roost, Betnikh, Bleakrock, Stros M’Kai, Eyevea) and begin Scrying here for the quickest way to level the skill. While leveling scrying you can turn a tidy profit over and each successive quality item you retrieve, the more it is worth. Some excavations you can sell on the trader. Scrying antiquities is also the heart of how you acquire mythic items such as the Ring of the Wild Hunt.

*Antiquities and Scrying are unlocked with the Greymoor Chapter. Artaeum is a part of the Summerset Chapter.

Treasure Chest Farming

In every zone, delve, and dungeon across the land Treasure Chests can spawn and inside they can offer up any of the following items:

• Gold
• Style motif chapters associated with the zone the chest is located in.
• Overland armor or weapon set pieces.
• Furniture paintings.
• Treasure maps.
• Antiquity Leads for Scrying.

If hunting down Treasure Chests sounds like fun grab some lock picks, and if you have Champion Points to spare you will want to put points into the green Craft section for Fortune’s Favor and the Treasure Hunter slot-able skill to increase gold gained and the quality of items you can receive in chests.

In the Excavation skill line from Antiquities, you can achieve the passive “Keen Eye: Treasure Chests” which will allow you to see all treasure chests much more easily because they glow a very bright blue.

Flipping for Gold

“Flipping” or just buying something someone has priced low and re-listing it for more is not always the easiest and fastest way to make gold, but can net you a lot of money if you learn the market and come across the right deals before someone else.

Item flipping is most commonly done with style motifs, furnishing recipes, materials, armor, and anything that is the “flavor of the month”. There are add-ons available to help tremendously with flipping items and can show you if an item can make you a profit or if the price is too high.

Recommended Add-ons for Gold Making

If you are playing on the PC add-ons can be a very valuable resource to your gameplay. Let’s get an overview of what add-ons are helpful and best suit your needs.

TamrielTradeCentre

TTC is one of the most powerful tools when it comes to trading as it helps give you an idea on the last 24 hours of trading what the prices were set at, lowest price, highest price and what the average was.

MasterMerchant/Arkadius’ Trade Tools

Master Merchant (MM) and Arkadius’ Trade Tools (ATT) shows the correlation on a graph of prices as items are sold on guilds. It will only “scan” your guild if items are sold unless you go to another guild and manually scan theirs. Along with TTC, it can provide you with accurate detail of pricing and what to post your items for.

AwesomeGuildStore

AwesomeGuildStore helps you choose filters for what you are looking for, how much you want to pay, and whether or not a deal is good depending on what your pricing tool or you think is. It also helps filter out everything and just generally look for specific items.

HarvestMap

HarvestMap will be able to show you all of the harvesting nodes (including chests!) that you have gathered from and is account-wide so that in the future you can gather from them again and know exactly where they are. This is useful for gathering to sell raw materials or gathering to craft and sell upgraded armor such as jewelry for over 1,000,000 gold.

MiniMap by Fyrakin/Votan’s MiniMap

There are two mini map addons to choose from Fyrakin and Votan. These works as a dependency for HarvestMap or for finding your way around to gather quickly, they are powerful in that you do not have to look at your main map every time you need to get somewhere and they are highly customizable.

MapPins

MapPins will work alongside MiniMap and HarvestMap or neither if you don’t want it too, essentially, MapPins helps with showing you where everything is, chests, thieves troves, antiquities, and you can filter out individual harvesting nodes in case you want to look for just wood or just silk!

WritWorthy

WritWorthy is a great tool as it will inform you on the price of materials and whether or not you have the materials to make a sealed writ that you can obtain from doing daily crafting writs or from a guild trader. To complete some jewelry writs they can cost well over 1,000,000 gold and not give very many writ vouchers which are not worth turning in at all.

Path of a Gold Making Millionaire

When I was new to ESO I struggled to find the best ways to make gold, but as you progress through the game and with some time you will learn the value of items. With every new Chapter and DLC the market will shift, new items will be introduced and some older items will phase down in price. However, using any number of these activities will net you quite a lot of gold, no matter what update is added to the game.

I recommend mixing the methods to your play style and coming up with a plan that works for you. With some trial and error, and steady practice you will have a system and clear path to becoming an ESO millionaire too!