Transmute Ore isn’t that great, admittedly.

Not long after launch the EXP for Transmute Mineral Ore was reduced to almost nothing.

There are faster ways to make gold including those without exploits. Regular alchemy is profitable, the legitimate better method of training smithing is more profitable, at higher levels you can get the stones of Barenziah and never worry about money again or just do a quest for like 1400 gold a pop.

Because of the lack of unsmelted iron in the game (while the most common ore it’s not plentiful enough for this) it’s not even that effective for training smithing. You’re better off getting smithing to 30 through Iron and Leather (since Ingots for iron are much easier to get) and then taking a follower and grabbing every piece of dwemer misc items that can be smelted to ingots you can find, and making bows with 2/3s of it, and upgrading those bows with the other third.

As for best spell; it really depends on your needs, Invisibility and muffle are overpowered, Healing spells are great. Flesh spells are Okay.

I actually used this in my first or second playthrough.

Yep, I’ve done that before. If you mean the guy who everything he touched turned to gold it is spelled “Midas.”

Used this for as long as I can remember lol

Oh yeah I do it all the time man. It’s so good and made my enchant, smiting and speech levels go up really fast. Really op for early game riches

Potion making is the most profitable and easy money maker maybe does help with skills

And your so leveled up bit not to attack or defend you get torn to shreds for abit.

Everyone and their mom knows about this

Moneys just not hard enough to come by for this to be worthwhile

The only downside with this is that only general stores and I think one merchant in Riften will buy jewelry, and general stores tend to have less gold to barter with than, say, a blacksmith. So if you have a ton of ore to transmute, and you don’t have the salesman perk, you’ll have to do some traveling or a lot of waiting to sell all your jewelry.

this plus the resto loop from the spiffing brit

I’m definitely a fan of the Midas Method although, I didn’t have a name for it before. 👍🏼

Literally never have I had a character that doesn’t have this spell.

Did this already, and got the needed gold I needed to buy a house

Sounds like a technique an MC in a manhwa would use to get ahead early

Goated

This is my go to method for building a battle mage. If you complete barenziahs crown for the thieves guild you’ll find gems way more often and it makes creating jewelry much easier

An my science teacher said it was impossible to make gold… Ha proved him wrong

Yes, you get the spell at the bandit camp north of whiterun, I think it’s on a table with ore if I remember correctly.

I always use that method to grind

I used this method a few years back when I was still new and couldn’t figure out any glitches, but I might revisit this

figured it out back 2013

This is one of my favorites spells and I use it all the time and is very useful for me no one talks about it because no one really give it a second thought

Let’s not forget that selling valuable items gets you even more experience with shopkeepers

You should avoid doing this on legendary until you are quite decently leveled and ahead of the difficulty curve, as, especially for lower level characters, this can net you way too many levels too fast without offering tangible combat benefits in the short term. You can very easily lock your character in a position where its not possible to beat the game, or, even clear out a leveled dungeon, without the use of game-breaking exploits.

Yeah I figured that out when I was little lol

Yes

I’ve used this since I’ve started playing

I use this method, didn’t realise it was well known, it’s great

This game requiring you to do the task to level up each skill turns this game into a menu sorting game for a huge chunk of it

I thought everyone did this

Ots one of my favorites in fact whenever I get to whiterun I head to halted creek very early and get my copy there

Say what you want magic is the best. Sure you can take my weapons in jail but good luck I love to summon dremora lords

If by Midus you are referring to King Midas from Greek mythology, then your spelling is wrong. Even in Greek, it is spelled mu iota delta alpha zeta. So the romanization should spell Midas.

What happened to this channel? No videos for a year but lots of shorts in recent weeks. Just weird.

ESO, Nate, and many many more TS5 Skyrim YT constant creators have explained this method before you kind sir.

I used at my last playthrough & I used garlic salmon roe & barnicel potion to make money to besides conjeration spell on dead animal

Nope, takes too long and obtaining ore is boring (buy ore, kill blacksmith, load save, repeat)…

everyone knows this trick

this have been a method for years

1. Yes we knew
2. Nobody called it that
3. Midas*

Honestly, this spell, coupled with the “Prowler’s Profit
” passive effect (reward for finishing Stones of Barenziah), is basically just a money and exp printer

Yes, true, you can do this, but the jewellery you make often is worth more than most vendors have. Even with certain perks, most vendors don’t have the money, so you have to either quick save quick load to reset inventory or travel, that’s even if you have the high-level speech perks in place at all.

Midas is spelled with an “a” my friend.

What are you talking about?! This is one of the oldest tricks in the book..”never heard people talk about it before”, obviously you have, it’s not like your sorry ass thought this up -_-

I spent a playthrough doing this while living in Whiterun and RP’ing as a journeyman enchanter – going out to collect materials in order to pay for mead and food at the tavern. It was a very chill playthrough.

You get easy gold when you learn the banish enchantment. Just get a bunch of iron daggers and enchant banish daedra on it with petty soul gem. Sells like hot cakes

It turns iron into silver, do it again it’ll turn silver into gold

Yeah I still do this. Every play through I’m a merchant

I start out in Helgan and pick ingredient I can find between the start and river wood and then later whiterun by then I’ve also cleared that one mine for iron and returned the golden claw for some gold.

Then I go to arcadias and get myself as much of her ingredients I can afford and try them all to unlock one property.

Then I get to work making potions until I run out of ingredients, sell my work back to her and then pay her for training.

Then I make my way to Halted stream for the tome and return to whiterun with even more iron ore, get to work once again making many gold rings and then selling them to anyone who will accept them. Once I’ve amassed several thousand coins I buy a horse and travel a route through Skyrim I’ve developed (I never fast travel and sleep at inns each night) to buy ingredients from alchemists and sell my potions anywhere I can (this becomes extremely lucrative once you level alchemy and speech)

Eventually I pick that one speech perk to buy and sell anything to anyone and I sell my potions to anyone I imagine someone in their trade would reasonably purchase from an alchemist while also stocking up on iron ore and soul gems.

Usually after several in game weeks this becomes extremely profitable, allowing me to use my iron to make gold rings and enchant them fortify sneak using my grand soul gems.

All in all my play through allows me to level Alchemy, Speech, smithing, alteration, enchanting.
every day I sleep at an inn since it applies well rested bonus and early game I use thief stone since it allows you to level alchemy and speech
I always pray at dibella shrines located between whiterun and markarth, her temple, temple of devines and helgas bunkhouse which increases speech by 10 points, I also donate my gold to every beggar I see for another 10 points and finally I snag a dibella amulet whenever I see one at a general store.

It’s a super grindy playthrough but I like that it allows you to generate coin very fast to invest further in anything I want (training, housing, armour, spells, horses, that one guy in solstheim who digs out the barrow for you)

I’m a master trader in Skyrim and on my best playthrough probably have 500k to 1m gold in my safe in solitude

Potion of fortify enchanting, enchant something to give you better alchemy, repeat this process back and forth until you can make potions worth millions and game breaking enchantments

I’ve used this method for several play through’s (not sure if that’s how to type that) though I like to have some silver for the different gemstones, my least favorite part about it though is the issue of finding and filling soul gems early on.

Wait, you’ve never heard anyone talk about this before? I’ve known about this for years.

I’ve used it and it’s even better if you’re playing the switch port of the game, because if you have amiibos(can’t remember if it’s limited to the Zelda series amiibos or if works with all amiibos, it’s been awhile since I loaded up my save file on my switch) they can net you a lot of ore and ingots. It’s perfectly balanced with no exploits what so ever.

“Midus” lmfao

Been doing this for a while, completely agree

I use it, but I always save some of the gold to have a stock to make crafts to keep, particularly after I’ve leveled enchant pretty high or to max.

ESO (the youtuber not the game) featured this method on his channel quite a while ago, and it seems like the only better method is the restoration pot glitch

Figured everyone did this already

Literally just been doing this on my recent play through! Granted it’s more of an experienced player trick

And there are only 2 places in the game you can get the spell.

You know. I was trying to do the enchanting alchemy loop to become op. I feel like i was missing something and i think this is it.

I’ve used it for a long while

At a certain point I start dropping those trinkets cause I have too much to sell and not enough gold in the world

Where can I find this book?

Was literally just telling someone about this

Or do the loop that spiffing brit uses.

I have been using it for years and as a result my non modded characters have become op

Enchanting them rings is my money maker, while waiting on kajit chests to respawn

but shouldnt it be midas not midus??

With the experience mods it’s become useless. You can max out all your skills and perks in Riverwood. Gold becomes useless in the game very quickly anyway

I remember doing this on the ps3, legit i would speedrun to get 200+ iron ore for that

Not hating but this is a known grinding method that many videos have covered.

Underrated spell, I agree

Some play stealtharcher, some get transmute and become a jewelery merchant

Pretty sure this is how I got rich on my first character back on the original release

Lol I have been doing this since I stumbled upon the time way back. I even called it the same thing. Good short 👍

I do this at the start of each playthrough now.

I remember the midas method, that transmute spell i found in a bandit filled mine comes in handy every playthrough

Found this one in my first game. I’d never stepped foot in a mine before this, but after I figured out the potential profits I stripped every single mine east of whiterun bare. I managed to level up my smithing skill by 30 levels thanks to how much jewelry I made. It’s unreal how lucrative this is.

sorry but the restoration is just an upgraded version of that as you take a few rings and inchant one with smiting or inchant upgrades and use that with potions to inchant a stronger one and repeat it cost a little more then this but when you can have a dager with over 1 million burn damage you’ll like it a lot more

Still, the transmute spell should have been expanded on a LOT. Here are a couple of thoughts I had:

1.) You should have been able to transmute several different items, like iron daggers/swords/maces/armor/etc should have all been transmutable, you could have had them just break down into raw iron that then converted.

2. It should have had more powerful versions that let you gather enough ingredients together to set up some kind of physical structure in the world, maybe a transmutation table or something? That new workbench should have let you upgrade your transmuting abilities.

3. Kind of links to number 2, but you should have had the possibility of eventually (it should have been something akin to crafting an Ultima weapon in a final fantasy game, as in it should either take a while or be very very difficult to pull off) creating a Philosophers Stone. The stone should have been incredibly powerful though, Skyrim had a bad habit of giving you items with epic backstories and then making them supremely underwhelming in the game. The philosophers Stone should have legit been a god tier overpowered item (as should many other items in the game). Maybe have a little menu pop up when you use it and you can select which power it uses. One could be to create the “elixir of life” so maybe you use that power and then until you switch off that ability, you can go around draining life from people to slowly build up liquid in a bottle and then once you’ve gathered enough life energy to fill the bottle; you get this new potion that boosts your health and/or stamina and/or magicka by a flat 250-500 points. You could also just have the philosophers Stone boost your spell effects (idk if it should be ALL spells or maybe just like destruction, alteration, conjuration, or something else?) by maybe 50% whether that’s duration or damage or what would be based on the individual spell.

I have like 4 more things I could list but this comment is way too long already. Just wanna point out that this is 1 of probably 280 ideas I’ve had for expanding spells, mechanics, or items in Skyrim. If only I was skilled at modding dammit.

Yes I do

Whatcha gonnna do with all that walking around time?
Make gold, baby!

Huge blunder, its Midas

I use this every time. Alchemy+Enchanting+This and I buy my full 5 training levels every real level, every game

Enchanting potions kinda suck but alchemy is a powerful money maker in its own right, use Blue Flower and hanging Moss

And you enchant it with water breathing so you aleays have the same value using all the inferior soulstones

No one talks about it because it’s a given

best spell is fortify alchemy cause it can be used to creat a potion that fortify enchantment, and then enchant god tier stuff

every playthrough yet and probably every after that

This is one of my favorite things to do, especially when I’m doing a jack of all trades playthrough.

I’ve been doing this for years 🤣🤣

If you didn’t know this, you haven’t *Truly* played Skyrim

Yes but no vendor has so much money to spend😂

Where is the ring of “Kadahk mezalf”

What’s the song playing in the background?

Yes, I do use it

Been doing it for years lol

me walking around with muffle and transmute Laughing at myself for being addicted to Skyrim.

I’m glad other folks know about this, I felt like everyone I mentioned it to acted like I had a rennaisance level idea.

I use it wheb I gather up to much ore

job simulator

I want to know why they never Incorporated smithing gold ingots into like a hundred gold

The midas method huh? Yeah I use it, I got so much gold I can buy all houses 2 times over

Yes

I do everything but the enchanting, as I usually don’t have enough soul gems. they tend to go towards staff recharging.

I think spiffing Brit might have mentioned it before

I’ve been using this since I found that spell. I imagine the jewelry market in Skyrim would have realistically crashed with the number of water breathing enchanted necklaces their are. By the way I believe water breathing was the best enchantment because it doesn’t matter the soul gem size but the price is always the same.

The best spell for me is close wounds, every playthrough i end up as a one hand skill paladin

Once you know what you’re doing, the economy of Skyrim breaks like glass. I usually buy a house just to have somewhere to put my potions and enchanted jewelry because the local merchants run out of money too fast

Discovering transmutation on my mage was probably the best thing thay ever happened to me in this game

Just for people who dont know it, the more expensive an item is to smith, the more xp you get, good jewelry is worth quite a bit as well

Yes I did use it before and yes I will continue to use it😁🙂

Don’t forget all the speech xp for selling all that stuff

Hate to be “that guy”, but it’s spelled “Midas”, with an ‘a’.

Unless you aren’t referencing the king who was cursed to turn everything he touched to gold.

When I want a lot of money in Skyrim I open the console and type “player.add item 0000000f 9999999” and I’m done. If I want to level a skill I type in “player.advskill [Whatever skill] 9999999999”

I used to do this to level quickly. Transmute and smith, sell, until high enough level to enchant gear with alchemy boosting effects. Make op alteration gear that negs cost and then run around casting your highest alteration spell. If you’ve already mastered tree once you’ll still have master spells. You can literally do this for any school of magic, destruction, restoration, illusion, so on.

not midas? either way its can earn you a useful amount of money

I did this with daggers

Thanks bud, I’ll keep that in mind when I get that spell

I’ll just stick to slapping my horse in the arse for several hours

The only bottle beck is that it takes a lot of soul gems and vendors usually don’t have much gold to buy your stuff.

I’ve always used the “go into dwarven ruins and bring out 800 dwarven ingots to turn them all into bows” strat for smithing, but this is cooler

My favorite is pickpocketing until you max it out and then training just to steal the money back. If you know a fence the stuff you’ll get from maxing out pickpocketing will earn you well over 10k in gold and will raise your speech by a lot too

Pair this with prowlers profit and you are filthy rich

Member the ps3 days, farming mines, smithing hundreds of daggers and jewelry to get smithing to 100 to get daedric gear and uber improve weapons.

I just download cheatroom set all my skills to 100 get dragon armor and weapons and go rain hell

Wait you get exp from smelting the ingots into bars now?

lmao people were doing this when the game launched you didn’t name shit

This will be my main spell on my Hlaalu Traveler build: sell everything you can, become rich, makes some precious artifact, use bare minimum armor (only Improved Bonemold helm and gauntlets, the rest Yellow Dunmer Clothes and Cultist boots), keep with yourself a bow and a sword, no need for stealth, and level up both Speech and Lockpick skills

Nah grinding crafting skills is just bad gameplay mechanics that is boring, repeatitive and you have to do it every game. Transmute makes it just a little better. Ignite ftw, its stacking damage over time and dual cast staggers enemies so it makes life of a mage much safer.

I saw the alteration book and knew you were going to talk about transmute mineral ore I use the ” Midas Method” all the time but never thought of that name love it

I think we all did this

I think you mean “Midas”

Me in every single playthrough once I get this spell: *stonks*

invisibility in my opinion is easily one of the best spells in the game

I normaly save iron for dwemer bows to raise smithing but this is good too.

This has been my go to method for leveling up my smithing for a few years. It was a big game changer from spending a ton of money and making iron daggers

Lmao, I saw the thumbnail and thought “it’s gotta be transmute”

I wonder how much this would destroy the economy if it was widespread in Skyrim?

I do steps 1,2, and 3. Levelling enchanting didn’t even cross my mind with this idea, but now it certainly has

I love this technique. Been using it for ages. Pairs great with windstad mine mod

You cannot possibly convince me that you havent heard other people talk about this

I remember my child self being such a business man with this spell.

Also telekinesis was also a great spell it useful to also speed up alteration
Also was hilarious doing cabbage shots in the basket
Was like playing a real life sport 😂

I do this all the time

Oh yeah, I’ve done this. I think most people have, but maybe that’s just me. Not a bad method for jewelry, which is the fastest way to level smithing just about I think (since experience is based on the value of the item)

Is does raise the question of how messed up the economy is in ES.

I forget which channel talked about this, but yes, one of the major Skyrim youtubers used this exact method.

Tbh I thought you were gonna talk about power-levelling by enchanted armour to make alteration free, using telekinesis to pick something up, then fast travelling across the map while holding it. 2 trips is 0 to 100 in Alteration, make it legendary, repeat. Super fast levelling.

Thank you for this

yeah, every time i start a new character, this is one of the first things i do

Hands down one of the best spells

Midas

Good name, and yes I use it

I found the spell tome in a mine with a crap ton of iron ore… but I don’t have enough maximum Magicka to cast it yet. I need to get a mage hood.

I don’t know how you’ve never heard about this before this has been the “meta” way to play Skyrim since it came out

I think this has been a very common cheese method since release

This is my go to for a fresh save. I always max out a characters Smithing, then do Enchanting then Alchemy

Never heard anyone talk about it? This is what makes me quit every Skyrim play through. My stealth archer quickly masters enchanting, smithing, alteration, and I have enough money to trivialize the game. Been doing it since release lol.

ESO talked about this ages ago on his channel

I always used it for smithing, but I rarely enchant this jewelry. Usually it ends up in one of my houses 😂

Yup, you can also uae items like vokun and clavicus masque to net even more gold. It’s also a great way to power level mage skills with trainers. Since most trainers at the College of winterholdare also vendors, you can train with them for money, and then sell all that enchanted jewelry to them (preferably equipped with a fortify barter item/potion) to get your money back, rinse and repeat. You can get to level 30 in a few hours.

Me: gets the book and just uses it to get enough gold for a gold bar and then startsduping it and a grand soul gem👁👄👁

I used the midus method so often that I get ptsd flashbacks whenever starting a new character at thing point. oh, and don’t forget leveling your speech skill as well since enchanted items don’t stack, amking it so that you sell every item seperatly, thereby generating more speechcraft levels as you sell them.

From a gameplay perspective, this is a valuable spell for non-thief playstyles.

From a world building perspective, this spell sucks because this is a spell that makes gold nearly worthless. Unless it’s stated that this is an extremely rare spell, I have to assume that any Alteration adept with access to an iron mine could easily crash the economy and flood the markets with transmuted gold and silver.

If the game had a system that made the economy fluctuate depending on supply and demand, The Dragonborn could singlehandedly make Gold go from Expensive to Worthless In no time (also yes, I use this whenever I level up Smithing and want a decent amount of Septims quickly)

Also It’s funny that YouTube thinks Smithing Is wrong and wants me to change It to Smiting

i honestly end up doing this almost every playthrough lmao
people always talk about stealth archery and it makes me think of this – this is my stealth archery

Don’t forget silver ore, the step between iron and gold. It’s a bit tedious because you have to keep dropping your silver ore to not convert it (unless you have a mod; I don’t know if they patched it in the recent rereleases) but more common gems like garnet and amethyst slot into silver, so this lets you level up your smithing, clear your inventory, and make a huge profit.

I was literally doing this as I watched this video

Crash the market, Dragonborn style

Tjats how I always wirk on my smithing. Got any gems that go with silver, make those first, then everything else is with gems that go with gold or just the gold rings.

Enchanting was always annoying just because I nevwr had enough money to buy soul gems or I couldn’t find any.

I always hated doing the save, hit, reload, strategy for some reason.

The problem, though, in skyrim is that since it’s not a true RPG and more of an action, RPG. What do you do with the gold? There’s nothing to buy in the game that’s worthwhile having.

Telekinesis is the best Alt spell; you can just carry carrots or other useless junk around with you as you travel Tamriel. Run out of magicka? Wait an hour, or enchant your set to make alt spells cost less. Plus you can get telekinesis at Alt lvl 45 from Tolfdir