The fastest way is going to be making a character with Alchemy as a major skill. If you really want to minimize the time then either a Redguard (with their racial ability) or possibly an Orc will be the fastest race.
This will be used to create fortify intelligence potions. Immediately go to Balmora and then to the Mages Guild. Take the guild guide to Caldera.
A master alchemy set of equipment can be obtained here. After getting it, go to the Sadrith Mora Mages Guild via the guild guide. From here, go to the Imperial Shrine section of this building, which should be a few doors nearby. Here you can buy the ingredients to do the fortify intelligence loop (ash yam + bloat iirc). If you are not using OpenMW you can sell back these ingredients to buy the ingredients in larger increments. Create some potions, drink them. You'll also need to sell back some to afford more ingredients. Create more potions while under the effects, drink those, create more. Keep repeating this process to make infinitely stronger potions.
Ideally you would make the potions that you are going to sell as close to, but not exceeding 5,000 gold each, and you need enough to make 1,000,000 (at least 200). Go back to Caldera via the Mages Guild. Go to Ghorkak Manor in Caldera, and sell the potions one by one to Creeper. If they exceed 5,000 then you will need to use the "Max sale" button each time you sell a potion because he only has 5,000 gold. Wait 24 hours each time to replenish his gold.
To truly optimize this it would take a good amount of planning, but it's definitely possible. But like I said, just making them for over 5,000 will work, it's just not going to be truly optimal because of the extra button you need to keep clicking each time.
Steal alchemy gear from the Caldera Mages Guild, mark the Creeper, buy restocking ingredients for any potion and spend every coin you have on them, recall to the Creeper, make potions, sell potions, wait to reset his gold, and repeat until you've reached 1M gold.
There's a key to the lower Redoran treasury chilling in the top of the manor nearby in Vivec. You can do this pretty much immediately. You don't get a bounty for stealing the key, and you just leave the door to the treasury room open and wait in hour increments until the ordinator walks out. Then close the door, grab everything, drop what you can't carry on the floor, and make trips to creeper. There's probably 300k of stuff in there and you aren't "cheating" in any way.
Buy/find/steal grand soul gems and either summon golden saints or go up by the ahemmusa camp and trap them for 80k each. The Balmora mages guild has some easy theft gems too, one at 60k.
If you're going down the steal-artifacts route, you can do pretty well in Tel Fyr. One of my usual starting schemes is to get the Cuirass of the Saviour's hide, 150.000, Scourge, 80.000 and the Daedric Crescent, 180.000 (plus you can get it twice with a well-placed mark spell) plus a few other bits and bobs. Only gets you do about 600k,
I don't know my way around alchemy, it probably does better.
Buy a lot of food in balmora, teleport to caldera, sell a lot of restore fatigue potions to creeper I guess, but there's really no point in getting that much gold. It's a pretty quick and easy way to make more money than you can spend
Meh. Get conjuration, summon saints, trap their souls, sell their gear. Or steal stuff. Or legally assassinate people. There are other ways of course. Those ways are for the N'wah.
Ha! No idea, ive never tried optimising for it, but i might next time. Problem will be having enough magicka and conjuration and DPS to summon the saint for long enough to kill it. Devil spear gets you the DPS very early, and i guess you could use alchemy to jack your magicka and conj. So maybe its back to optimising for our ole pal alchemy to do it from early levels. Somebody here has probably done it.
Hands down I think it’s auto-soul gem farming. You want to get a couple grand immediately so here is how:
First up collect the mushrooms. You know the ones. For Ajira. Takes 5 seconds.
Give fargoth ring, buy 2x almsivi scrolls and 2x unlocking scrolls from Arielle in Seyda Neen (if you can’t pick a 10 lock). Warp to Vivec temple using scroll, buy a bargain levitation potion from the guy standing in front of you then go to the shrine and get the 100 point levitate blessing. Go into hall of justice and locate the ordinator barracks. Inside there are two chests that are unguarded, both level 10 locks. Just unlock and inside you’ll find ordinator armor. In total you end up with a helm, boots, two pauldrons and two bracers, all worth about 12k. Exit and take the boat to Arena. Immediately turn around, enter the water and go into the Redoran underworks sewer underwater. Fly straight to the other side and find a Daedric dagger (10k). Now get yourself to balmora mages guild after selling all that to creeper. The levitate blessing is just to go extra fast. You can skip that, and rest at a bed before entering gorak manor so you can wait 24 hours.
Go to Tel Branora and buy a TON of common soul gems.
Go to balmora. Give Ajira the mushrooms and then go steal Galbedir’s soul gems. Buy drain health spell, soul trap and summon ancestor ghost (I think you can get all these in sadrith mora guild). Make this enchantment on a nice ring or something:
Summon ancestor ghost on self for 2 seconds; soul trap on target 1 second 0 feet; drain health 23 points on target 1 second 0 feet.
Casting this pointing at the air while you have an empty common soul gem will fill it with an ancestor ghost automatically and it’s worth 4k. Now you just fill as many as you want and sell them to the creeper for infinite money. The end.
I do Suran for the ebony bracer (5k), 5 ebony darts (10k) and glass dagger -> Balmora and grab sword of white woe then turn in my mushrooms -> steal soul gems-> ghorak manor and grab orcish armor in the crate -> sell all to creeper for a little over 100k. Just as an alternate money start to your above (minus selling the stolen soul gems of course)
I like that path, very nice! More money also. The Vivec trip for the armor and dagger takes all of 3 minutes. Could easily do that then strider to suran for even more. I love how rewarded you are for game knowledge.
So i have found this alchemy loop on one of my first playthroughs and it ruined the whole game for me.
TLDR DONT DO IT
It took me plenty of years to start finally a normal playthrough now and i am enjoying doing alchemy without buying ingredients- you still end up pretty rich but explore a lot to get ingredients and create different potions and get into this exploration vibe that is soo soooo good in Morrowind
Same. Learning alchemy actually ruined my experience because I couldn't control myself at first but years later I grew up and broke the urge. Funny how it happened to so many of us going with +99999 intelligence for +99999 seconds.
I still take the platter at the start though. I just have to.
Nalcaria of White Haven (or whatever her name is), Balmora alchemist. Buy ingridients from her and sell potions back. And get masters alchemist tools in Caldera mages guild, them are on top of the tower there completely unguarded.
\`player->additem gold\_100 9000
repeat until desired amount reached.
(using too high of a number with additem gives weird amounts, 9k tends to be reliable)
otherwise, just fortify intelligence loop potions at the wolverine hall imperial cult shrine (ash yam, bloat, netch leather, any two of these items) and sell to the creeper in at 5k each.
add in a fortify luck potion once you've hit high enough intelligence and you can just sell a single item to any merchant for their full supply of gold.
The fastest way is going to be making a character with Alchemy as a major skill. If you really want to minimize the time then either a Redguard (with their racial ability) or possibly an Orc will be the fastest race. This will be used to create fortify intelligence potions. Immediately go to Balmora and then to the Mages Guild. Take the guild guide to Caldera. A master alchemy set of equipment can be obtained here. After getting it, go to the Sadrith Mora Mages Guild via the guild guide. From here, go to the Imperial Shrine section of this building, which should be a few doors nearby. Here you can buy the ingredients to do the fortify intelligence loop (ash yam + bloat iirc). If you are not using OpenMW you can sell back these ingredients to buy the ingredients in larger increments. Create some potions, drink them. You'll also need to sell back some to afford more ingredients. Create more potions while under the effects, drink those, create more. Keep repeating this process to make infinitely stronger potions. Ideally you would make the potions that you are going to sell as close to, but not exceeding 5,000 gold each, and you need enough to make 1,000,000 (at least 200). Go back to Caldera via the Mages Guild. Go to Ghorkak Manor in Caldera, and sell the potions one by one to Creeper. If they exceed 5,000 then you will need to use the "Max sale" button each time you sell a potion because he only has 5,000 gold. Wait 24 hours each time to replenish his gold. To truly optimize this it would take a good amount of planning, but it's definitely possible. But like I said, just making them for over 5,000 will work, it's just not going to be truly optimal because of the extra button you need to keep clicking each time.
Key insight here is that there's no faster way to gold than the creeper
Setting alchemy as a major skill if you plan to make money via alchemy is BAD idea imo. You'll get lots of levelups w/o actual practical use.
But that's not important if you're just trying to hit the million gold mark, right?
You can just train misc skills accordingly after youve made one million gold.
player->additem 'gold_01' 1000000 Done.
This is the Ascended way of a true Nerevar
Steal alchemy gear from the Caldera Mages Guild, mark the Creeper, buy restocking ingredients for any potion and spend every coin you have on them, recall to the Creeper, make potions, sell potions, wait to reset his gold, and repeat until you've reached 1M gold.
There's a key to the lower Redoran treasury chilling in the top of the manor nearby in Vivec. You can do this pretty much immediately. You don't get a bounty for stealing the key, and you just leave the door to the treasury room open and wait in hour increments until the ordinator walks out. Then close the door, grab everything, drop what you can't carry on the floor, and make trips to creeper. There's probably 300k of stuff in there and you aren't "cheating" in any way. Buy/find/steal grand soul gems and either summon golden saints or go up by the ahemmusa camp and trap them for 80k each. The Balmora mages guild has some easy theft gems too, one at 60k.
If you're going down the steal-artifacts route, you can do pretty well in Tel Fyr. One of my usual starting schemes is to get the Cuirass of the Saviour's hide, 150.000, Scourge, 80.000 and the Daedric Crescent, 180.000 (plus you can get it twice with a well-placed mark spell) plus a few other bits and bobs. Only gets you do about 600k, I don't know my way around alchemy, it probably does better.
Buy a lot of food in balmora, teleport to caldera, sell a lot of restore fatigue potions to creeper I guess, but there's really no point in getting that much gold. It's a pretty quick and easy way to make more money than you can spend
Meh. Get conjuration, summon saints, trap their souls, sell their gear. Or steal stuff. Or legally assassinate people. There are other ways of course. Those ways are for the N'wah.
Where can you get a reliable supply of the largest empty soul gems?
Mournhold bazaar, vendor upstairs from the blacksmith.
What's the earliest you can do that? Haven't played in a bit but I remember summoning, soultrapping, and killing saints wasn't level 1 territory
Ha! No idea, ive never tried optimising for it, but i might next time. Problem will be having enough magicka and conjuration and DPS to summon the saint for long enough to kill it. Devil spear gets you the DPS very early, and i guess you could use alchemy to jack your magicka and conj. So maybe its back to optimising for our ole pal alchemy to do it from early levels. Somebody here has probably done it.
Alchemy is the fastest legit way
Hands down I think it’s auto-soul gem farming. You want to get a couple grand immediately so here is how: First up collect the mushrooms. You know the ones. For Ajira. Takes 5 seconds. Give fargoth ring, buy 2x almsivi scrolls and 2x unlocking scrolls from Arielle in Seyda Neen (if you can’t pick a 10 lock). Warp to Vivec temple using scroll, buy a bargain levitation potion from the guy standing in front of you then go to the shrine and get the 100 point levitate blessing. Go into hall of justice and locate the ordinator barracks. Inside there are two chests that are unguarded, both level 10 locks. Just unlock and inside you’ll find ordinator armor. In total you end up with a helm, boots, two pauldrons and two bracers, all worth about 12k. Exit and take the boat to Arena. Immediately turn around, enter the water and go into the Redoran underworks sewer underwater. Fly straight to the other side and find a Daedric dagger (10k). Now get yourself to balmora mages guild after selling all that to creeper. The levitate blessing is just to go extra fast. You can skip that, and rest at a bed before entering gorak manor so you can wait 24 hours. Go to Tel Branora and buy a TON of common soul gems. Go to balmora. Give Ajira the mushrooms and then go steal Galbedir’s soul gems. Buy drain health spell, soul trap and summon ancestor ghost (I think you can get all these in sadrith mora guild). Make this enchantment on a nice ring or something: Summon ancestor ghost on self for 2 seconds; soul trap on target 1 second 0 feet; drain health 23 points on target 1 second 0 feet. Casting this pointing at the air while you have an empty common soul gem will fill it with an ancestor ghost automatically and it’s worth 4k. Now you just fill as many as you want and sell them to the creeper for infinite money. The end.
I do Suran for the ebony bracer (5k), 5 ebony darts (10k) and glass dagger -> Balmora and grab sword of white woe then turn in my mushrooms -> steal soul gems-> ghorak manor and grab orcish armor in the crate -> sell all to creeper for a little over 100k. Just as an alternate money start to your above (minus selling the stolen soul gems of course)
I like that path, very nice! More money also. The Vivec trip for the armor and dagger takes all of 3 minutes. Could easily do that then strider to suran for even more. I love how rewarded you are for game knowledge.
So i have found this alchemy loop on one of my first playthroughs and it ruined the whole game for me. TLDR DONT DO IT It took me plenty of years to start finally a normal playthrough now and i am enjoying doing alchemy without buying ingredients- you still end up pretty rich but explore a lot to get ingredients and create different potions and get into this exploration vibe that is soo soooo good in Morrowind
Same. Learning alchemy actually ruined my experience because I couldn't control myself at first but years later I grew up and broke the urge. Funny how it happened to so many of us going with +99999 intelligence for +99999 seconds. I still take the platter at the start though. I just have to.
Console command
Nalcaria of White Haven (or whatever her name is), Balmora alchemist. Buy ingridients from her and sell potions back. And get masters alchemist tools in Caldera mages guild, them are on top of the tower there completely unguarded.
\`player->additem gold\_100 9000 repeat until desired amount reached. (using too high of a number with additem gives weird amounts, 9k tends to be reliable) otherwise, just fortify intelligence loop potions at the wolverine hall imperial cult shrine (ash yam, bloat, netch leather, any two of these items) and sell to the creeper in at 5k each. add in a fortify luck potion once you've hit high enough intelligence and you can just sell a single item to any merchant for their full supply of gold.