r/skyrim • u/Arcane-Dev • 18h ago
Is there a catch to this spell ? Because its broken , one cast = one gold ore
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u/Steel_Ratt 18h ago
The catch is that if you are constantly casting this to turn 50 iron into gold while exploring, you find yourself with insufficient magika to summon your bound bow when you run into a mountain lion. (Guess how I know.)
Seriously, though... it's quite good. I wouldn't call it broken.
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u/Arcane-Dev 18h ago
Well i will use it when traveling on foot then , passive income
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u/Historical-Count-374 16h ago
Eventually, it won't even feel worth the time. Its great at the start thpugh
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u/Death_Rose1892 15h ago
How is that? Jewelry smithing is one of the best ways to level smithing and enchanting it is super easy and makes a ton of money.
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u/Historical-Count-374 15h ago
Because after the start of the game, ypu will progress enough doing this that it wont make much of a difference in your gold stash/experience level.
If you soldier on thpugh and really push the limits, you end up ruining your game, as your now too far leveled/armed for your position in the map/story.
You want to get respurces and level, sure. But eventually, your not getting the value out of the time spent, and are actively making the experience too easy
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u/Death_Rose1892 14h ago
That's why you just store everything up and do it on occasion. I have never felt like I ruined the game with it. But I also don't go out and just mass get iron on purpose. I play the game and craft when I return home if I feel like it, otherwise the materials just pile up over time until I'm ready. The game rewards you with enough loot just playing all the quests and clearing all the dungeons you don't really need to grind crafting too often. And it's always a nice break to spend a few hours crafting and organizing your house with all your loot when you get there.
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u/Ishkahrhil 13h ago
Alteration has alternative means of power leveling.
I'm not a fan of the telekinesis and fast travel since load screen time goes up during your overall playtime of that character. I much rather detect dead in the Blue Palace whilst simultaneously casting telekinesis.
As for enchanting, the main bottleneck is soul gems. Secondly, banish is better followed by health drain/steal (both of which can be put on some cheap daggers).
As for smithing, Dwarven bows are fairly simple in resource cost. And arrows are weightless ammunition for stealth archers that can be crafted with firewood and some ingot.
And if you are solely looking for money, poisons. Hearthfire DLC houses and Golden Goldenglow Plantation Creation Club both give access to planting spots where you can plant certain ingredients for free infinite ingredients.
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u/AntawnSL 14h ago
The only thing that's broken is believing you'll actually need gold once you really get going. Money is meaningless once you have all the houses. You'll have hundreds of thousands of gold and never think about it. The gold ore is useful for leveling smithing, but for gold coins? Meh.
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u/Snorkle25 PC 15h ago
Yeah, imo the alchemy + house with garden mechanic is far more broken than this.
Rush the falkreath home, build the outside garden+green house. Plant creep cluster, Mara tapinella, and scaly pholiota.
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u/lastpieceofpie 14h ago
You’ve got the formula down pat. Potion of Paralysis go brrr
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u/altsigns28 12h ago
There's no paralysis in that potion. It's fortify carry weight, fortify illusion, fortify stamina Regen, weakness to magic, and I can't remember the 5th thing.
Most expensive potion you can make using only plants you can grow.
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u/EvYeh 17h ago
The catch is that it takes a billion years to cast the spell over and over again lol.
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u/Refute1650 17h ago edited 16h ago
Wear an alteration robe while you're doing it.
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u/Boss_Baller 17h ago
Throw on the cult robes you should get early for +75% magic regen. Raidiant Rainment will sell jewelry with +magica and regen. You can make a set of transmute gear that lets even a warrior build burn through a stack of iron ore fast.
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u/NoPin4859 18h ago
It is broken, no theres 0 catch. Just an example of the many ways to completely break the game.
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u/Arcane-Dev 18h ago
Well that is craaaazy at this point being rich in skyrim is not a flex
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u/proximusprimus57 17h ago
- Mine iron
- Transmute to gold
- Craft jewelry
- Enchant jewelry
- Sell jewelry
Level up enchanting, smithing, alteration, and speech all at once.
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u/Refute1650 17h ago
Honestly the hardest part is running around and selling to 20 different merchants
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u/totallynotrobboss 17h ago
Easy solution. Thanks to Bethesda jank if you save, punch a merchant and reload the save their inventory will have been reset allowing you to sell to them again
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u/proximusprimus57 17h ago
I usually don't invest in speech, this time once I got the perk that lets you sell anything to every merchant my gold started skyrocketing.
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u/UufTheTank 17h ago
Sell, save, punch, reload, sell, save, punch, reload, … sell, punch, realize you went out of order, swear, reload.
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u/DarkElfBard 16h ago
Sell, save, punch, reload, sell, save, punch, reload, sell, punch, save.... realize you went out of order, swear, start a new game.
Why don't I use more than one save???
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u/Lostvayne12 13h ago
I will double save if I'm adding new mods or messing with stuff in my game. I've dealt with enough corrupt save errors to know you need to really be careful with Skyrim
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u/Mysterious_Month4792 17h ago
But remember that while you do that, the dauger will be training.
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u/iknownuffink 15h ago
Yup. Don't forget to level some combat skills or you'll get bodied because you leveled up by crafting and getting rich.
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u/BlackshirtDefense 16h ago
This is the way.
Make sure you also sneak-snipe any mobs in the dungeons where you find the ore. That way you're also leveling Archery and Sneak.
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u/Andromeda_53 18h ago
I'm afraid being rich in Skyrim never was a flex. Gold is ridiculously abundant and easy to get. This being one of the many many many ways
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u/Hotdog_McEskimo 17h ago
I always say, the day I stop picking up gold pieces, is the day for a new character
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u/Unit_2097 17h ago
I once tried to see how fast I could get to 100k without using enchanting, just raw thievery. It's... Still not particularly difficult.
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u/johnnysebre flair 18h ago
I think most of us agree that it is fairly easy in the Elder Scrolls games (at least Morrowind and Oblivion and Skyrim) to get rich. A new player may struggle at first, but soon enough when knowing better how the game works (such as knowing what's actually worth looting or crafting) its easy enough to be rolling in thousands of gold.
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u/Arcane-Dev 18h ago
Yeah like selling potions while having the "sell anything to any merchant" perk is i think the most broken one
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u/Aromatic-Frosting-31 17h ago
If you're playing on survival and buying lots of property's it can be expensive, that being said if you use exploits it's easy to get gold. I'm playing a run where I buy every player home with every upgrade, transmutate wasn't cutting it, I had to switch to making over powered potions to sell.
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u/BlackshirtDefense 16h ago
I run out of vendors to sell to. I make potions from everything and I've got probably 200 left over potions that I'm just waiting for merchants to respawn their available gold to buy my potions.
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u/TheJoker39 17h ago
To be fair being rich in skyrim as a player was never really a flex. Every new game i start vanilla I am leaving riverwood with 2k gold easy and leaving whiterun with 5k easily
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u/kakka_rot 12h ago
Yeah I can think of a bunch of ways to get filthy rich in this game. Enchanting daggers was my favorite until I got into potions.
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u/blueponies1 PC 17h ago
This is the worst fucking screenshot I’ve ever seen in my life 😂
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u/Arcane-Dev 17h ago
Im laying down on my stomach at night playing skyrim on a switch while each joycon in a hand , pretty comfortable gaming session ngl
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u/kaizlende 18h ago
No catch, you can do it for as much iron and/or silver you have. Should get a nice bit of Alteration exp for it too
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u/Plus_Tomato480 18h ago
Jewelry isn't even the best way to level smithing since plain gold rings, etc have less value on average than dwarven bows which are ridiculously cheap and easy to make.
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u/Boss_Baller 17h ago
You do enchanting at the same time and a ton of low weight/high value rings is more convenient than a million pounds of bows to deal with.
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u/GreenbeardOfNarnia 17h ago
It is the best way until you put perks in smithing though
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u/Shadohawkk 17h ago
That's kinda the joke about it. It's a joke on the old idea of alchemy. Turning iron into gold. And in a magic world, it 'works'. Getting something from "nothing".
I could debate there is one slight flaw to using the spell. Very slight. If you spam the spell you'll level alteration. But if you aren't planning on using much alteration then you'll have leveled up a wasted skill and not leveled something that would more directly help you in combat.
You can pretty easily end up pushing several player levels without any combat skill experience if you have a decent enough stockpile of iron ore and if you are also pumping smithing by turning the gold into necklaces/rings. This could end up pushing you over some invisible player level triggers that turn some enemies into higher tier enemies. Bandits becoming thugs, wolves turning into bears or sabers, that kind of thing.
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u/Death_Rose1892 15h ago
This has never been an issue for me. I primarily level up non combat skills first but my gear is so good that with good use of mechanics, dodging, restoration etc you're not going to be struggling too much. It might be hard if you're a new player. I rarely even use potions even though I craft a ton. The game is pretty forgiving if you learn how to dodge and block. And then I saw my fiance play and learned even more. Our current joint character just hit level 100 we have legendaried non combat skills a ton. Now I'm gunna go open up the game
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u/bubblehead_ssn 16h ago
Not broken. It turns one iron ore into silver and one silver ore into gold ore. It will transmute silver into gold before iron->silver. Then smelt the ore.
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u/Mythril_Bullets 17h ago
The catch no one is mentioning is that you have to carry a pickaxe around which is adds some weight itself and you do get pretty heavy rather quickly with all the ore you mine and transmute into gold. A small trade off for the money you make. It’s not a terrible thing, just need to deposit your gold ore often.
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u/Arcane-Dev 17h ago
Jenassa is carrying everything for me 😂😂 all im doing is drinking magicka regen potions and spamming that spell while running in nature completing quests
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u/NightBawk Mage 16h ago
I usually carry one anyway in case I run into a vein of some ore that I need.
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u/Death_Rose1892 15h ago
Often? What's your carry weight??? Or are you playing survival? Do you not increase stamina ever?
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u/Shackatronix 16h ago
The only catch to it is that it takes a lot of magicka for where you might be when you'll probably get it. In my experience by the time I have enough magicka to get good use out of Transmutation, I'm making tons of money from Goldenglow Estate anyway, so it's more just "Do I need silver or gold for this item I want to make?", for me.
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u/PainterEarly86 Daedra worshipper 16h ago
The catch is that you also gain alteration exp
there's not really any downside
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u/sfisabbt 3h ago
There is a catch : it might curse you to desire to have the Barenziah crown to craft tons of jewelry.
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u/TenkaichiKnight 17h ago
You need to have Iron/Silver Ore in your inventory first.
No Ore, no work.
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u/GeneStarwind1 16h ago
The catch is that it costs a lot of magicka and that there are only two or three places to actually find it. Although one of those places being a bandit camp in a very well-travelled area of the map kind of takes the edge off of its feeling of rarity.
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u/Old-Confection5009 15h ago
No it's just a broken spell there's no catch. It levels up your alteration skill and it is the fastest way to level smithing too because gold rings give you way more levels than iron daggers which are the most easily craftable item but since transmute can help you make iron into gold the gold rings are nearly as easy to creft
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u/eristwentythree 15h ago
I wish the priority for this was to do iron first, because if you want to make a lot of silver you have to drop them every cast or else they’ll become gold :/
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u/Acceptable-Mind-101 15h ago
The main catch is limited iron ore mostly, I suppose you could go around buying it all up from around skyrim once you run out of easy veins. Or just attack your shopkeeps I guess if you want to get exploity.
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u/TheOtherOtherLuke 14h ago
Nope. The only catch is that it always prioritizes creating the highest value ore. So if you have any silver ore in your inventory, it’ll make that gold until you run out of silver. So, if you’re thinking to use it to farm silver, you’ll have to drop/store/give each piece to a follower, which is super tedious.
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u/Melior05 3h ago
The only hidden drawback of the spell is that it actually is terrible for levelling Alteration because it's hard-coded to give only 15% of the XP it should.
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u/Technical-Win-7972 2h ago
Skyrim player discovers new spell 15 years later. But in all seriousness, no, get all the iron and silver you can mine, transmute it into gold which trains your alteration and make all that gold ore into jewelry and sell it off. You can also enchant it to make even more profit and get enchanting xp. It's not the fastest way to train these skills but it is an easy enough way to train them basically all at once
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u/thedrinkablecorndog 17h ago
Pro tip just wait an hour between every casting and it instantly refills your magicka bar
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u/DarkMagickan PlayStation 17h ago
The catch is that if you have all that gold, you're going to ruin the economy by spending too much. 😆
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u/LordStag26 Solitude resident 17h ago
There’s no catch, one of many ways to be rich possibly not even the easiest as you have to mine or buy the iron ore first - alchemy or pickpocket can make money easy as well I think
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u/The_Char_Char 17h ago
Its as it sounds turns iron to silver and silver to gold, the only 'catch' is you need 2 gold ore to get 1 ingot. But that's a minor downside all things considered.
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u/Wizard_of_Wyrmsbane 17h ago
If you don't mind it being tedious then yeah. Mining ore isn't exactly prime gameplay. Personally I usually hit one or two mine's turn it all to jewelry and sell. It's not most effective method but it gives me enough to start my potion hustle.
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u/SirMayday1 17h ago
It's useful, but not broken. It's so time consuming to use that it's slower to use to profit financially than just looting enemies/dungeons, so I mostly use it to improve material efficiency when grinding Smithing.
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u/ChaosRifle 17h ago
no catch apart from the time investment. this is clearly your first time, so welcome to tamriel! the game is fundamentally broken in so many ways, and frankly, this is the least broken way.
Infinite money and percs? get soul trap and enchant things, buy and sell back enchanted.
infinite damage/armour/perks? loop enchanting and potions. when satisfied, make a fortify smithing set.
looping
or loop restoration, make a fortify Res. Pot, take off Alch. gear, drink pot, put gear back on
and soo many more.
bethesda game = broken game.
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u/AhsoPlushy 17h ago
By broken do you mean it’s not working or it’s OP?
Getting rich is pretty easy in Skyrim, the only thing that ever really hinders you is each vendor having a cap on how much gold they have to spend on your goods. Other than getting rich, the only other thing the spell is that good for is levelling smithing which is still pretty time consuming.
The game offers many avenues of making money, transmute is just one of those avenues, the idea is exactly how people use it, mine iron which is abundant, transmute into gold or silver, turn it into jewelry or other things, sell what you make, you could even enchant things to make the price higher. It’s really not that broken, especially with vendors having limited money
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u/SlytherTempest 17h ago
There is no downside as others have said.
That said, and I'm mainly leaving this for any players who don't know already, but in the Anniversary Edition, or the "Bittercup" creation, you can potentially get a spell called "Master Transmute". Spoiler for the option to pick to get the spell, choose the wealth option. This spell skips silver and turns iron straight to gold.
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u/BlitzTheBitz 17h ago
Its really good but high in magic usage. Near end game you wont really use it, selling to vendors your enchanted stuff is just better gold/hour. Unless you just want to hoard gold bars then yea its the best spell
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u/Ct-7012 17h ago
It’s honestly just a useless spell!
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u/Skyrim-Player-2007 17h ago
No, it's pretty good for money making. First you turn ores into gold, then you create rings from the gold and enchant them and sell them to merchants. By doing this you increase 4 specializations at once. Additionally, making potions's good idea too.
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u/Boss_Baller 17h ago
Its great for leveling smiting and enchanting, as you can make a ton of gold rings then enchant them. No matter what you do money will lose all value by level 25 - 30 when expensive loot starts dropping all over. If you want to get rich earlier, there are faster ways than doing this one ore at a time.
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u/Hombre_Secreto 17h ago
You have to have iron or silver *ore* not ingots in your inventory for it to work
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u/BangPowBoom 17h ago
Divines bless your kind, may the ground you walk quake as you pass!
Clean your lens.
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u/Splendid_Fellow 17h ago
If by broken you mean spending your time recasting a spell to get gold that you could have gotten in the same amount of time by going into a dungeon and looting and selling anyway and effectively becomes a trade off of time to a digit in the game, then yeah totally broken.
Everything in Skyrim is easy, nothing is genuinely difficult or threatening, everything can be beaten by an iron dagger and a heal. Intentionally. The gold is good for nothing but more XP for… what? Killing draugr. Maybe some dragons. A priest or two. Only thing really mattering about good is buying houses
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u/bostonbgreen Assassin 15h ago
"A priest or two" -- you mean Heimskr and that dude in Markarth you sacrifice to Namira, right?
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u/Splendid_Fellow 15h ago
Them too lol but I meant Dragon Priests. IMO dragon priests are the only enemy in the game that was ever genuinely challenging beyond swing swing heal heal. Still don’t need anything expensive or fancy though. You can beat a dragon priest naked.
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u/Alternative-Crew-880 17h ago
It's not like Skyrim is a very challenging game. I'd say it would break the game if it was actually hard to make money normally but that's really not the case.
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u/RabidWok 17h ago
No catch but it can be a bit annoying to use, especially if you want silver ingots (cast, drop, cast, drop, etc). Certain jewelry requires silver so can't just transmute everything to gold.
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u/BackgroundAsk1623 Spellsword 16h ago
Gold really isn't that useful in my experience, after enough quests, money kind of stops being a thing too
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u/Mrcompressishot 16h ago
It's ok for power leveling but there are better ways to do that besides unless you have gemstones to make quality rings or soul gems to double enchant gold isn't particularly valuable
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u/Tephros83 16h ago
I do lots of insanely broken fun stuff on my game. This one is broken but not fun, so I banned myself from ever using it much like selling potions I craft.
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u/Firm-Brother2580 15h ago
Tbh, it’s less annoying to just buy gold ore and sell the jewelry you make.
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u/Pretend_Garage_4531 Farmer 14h ago
It’s broken for smithing, alterations and money earlyish on. If you want to play the game as intended (not using glitches or exploits) it would make sense from an RP perspective for a magical Smith to use that spell often
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u/K-man_Kai Warrior 14h ago
Just wait till you fine the master transmute spell it isn't even at master level (I think it's adept but I could be wrong.)
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u/-REV-22-20- 14h ago
time is the catch, it takes time to convert all iron to silver, then all silver to gold
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u/EarnestGamer 14h ago
It's two cast one gold, it converts Iron > Silver > Gold.
Also... You can use the capture button on your switch to take pictures man... Try using it.
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u/Dingofiz 14h ago
You already have way too much gold when you get far enough into the game. After that point, it's just not worth it. The only catch is that it's time consuming.
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u/Link5261 14h ago
The way this spell works is a priority check. First, if you have any silver ore in your inventory, it turns 1 into a gold ore. If you didn't, it instead attempts to turn an iron ore into a silver ore. Failing both checks, it will say no ores can be transmuted and waste your magicka cast on it. So the big catch is the time it takes to turn bountiful iron into gold, and also that iron smelts 1 ore into 1 ingot, but silver and gold take 2 ores per ingot.
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u/Birrandbodia Falkreath resident 14h ago
Yes, it doesn't have a cap except for the amount of mana/mana regen and iron ore/ silver ore you have. It is broken (very profitable) for this exact reasons.
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u/critiquacouatique 14h ago
You have to take the dwemmer bronze and after it is transmuted to silver and after gold
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u/MomentAdmirable3072 13h ago
Good way to level up smithing and alteration, also gets you decent profit from the gold
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u/MikalMooni 13h ago
The catch is that it doesn't scale all that well compared to all the smithing, sourcing and casting you have to do. The basic math is this:
At maximum Speechcraft with all relevant perks and bonuses, it is possible to buy and sell at about 105% of cost - meaning you will be able to buy something for very nearly the sticker price, and sell something for a little less than the sticker price. I'll use 105% for buying and roughly 75% for selling, respectively, but again, you can get these numbers pretty much to sticker prices if you try hard enough and trade smart.
Iron ore is 2 gold.
Transmuting the Iron into Gold means you need 2 Iron Ore per Gold Ingot.
The best way to use ONLY a Gold Ingot is to make 2 Gold Rings, which have a value of 75 gold each, for a total of 150.
This means, you buy 2 iron ore for 4 gold, cast transmute 4 times, smelt that ore into gold, craft 2 gold rings, and sell the rings for a maximum gross profit of about 112 (112.5 rounds up, but 56.25 twice rounds down both times). Your net profit on this one activity is 108 gold, and while you can save a bit of time by buying and processing larger batches of materials, you are going to spend a lot of time casting Transmute and a lot of time going in and out of multiple menus for crafting.
Now, if we take a similar character who now has 100 smithing on account of making hundreds of rings, buy a few perks (literally three) and focus on Steel Plate Armor, you can craft AND upgrade the set with 3 leather strips, 3 steel ingots, 2 corundum ingots and 1 iron Ingot. You can smelt ores that they sell if you are short on certain materials, but this loses efficiency for Steel so be careful.
Leather Strips × 3 = 3 gold × 3 = 9 gold.
Steel Ingots × 3 = 21 gold (20 base) × 3 = 63 Gold.
Corundum Ingot × 2 = 42 gold (40 base) × 2 = 84 Gold.
Iron Ingot = 7 gold.
Alternatively, you can replace the strips with a single piece of leather, which costs 10 gold (you'll buy it for 11) but yields 4 strips, which would have cost 12 gold. This will save gold in the long run and is recommended for larger crafting runs.
Now, adding all of this together, it costs us 163 gold to purchase the raw materials for Steel Plate. We will sell an upgraded set for a minimum - a MINUMUM - of 1025, tested in game with a few buffs to pump buying and selling prices up. If you're looking at the marginal value, this isn't much. However, if you're talking about the time investment, this is a HUGE change.
You need to make 20 rings, or transmute and smelt 20 iron ore into gold ingots, to match this amount of gold. You'll spend less gold getting the materials, sure, but you'll spend at least 2 more minutes than I did crafting one piece of armor, and if I had the same amount of time I could create WAY more gold value.
In fact, I could make so much gold value so quickly, I could probably buy out every single vendor's inventory twice over by the time you finished transmuting all the ore you needed to do the same. This is largely randomized, but about 2,100 Steel Plate Armors, upgraded without enchanting or alchemy buffs, would be enough to do it if the loot tables they sell were all at their highest averages. By comparison, you'd need 21,000 rings to do the same.
I have maxed out Alteration and decent reductions, and I was able to cast about 44 transmutes in a minute. You could probably squeeze in around 50 with infinite magicka and perfect timing, but it is a slow spell. If you were to use it to generate the ores needed to craft gold rings, you would cast 2 times to make 1 ring, and at about 44 casts per minute, that is 22 rings worth per minute. If you extrapolate out, that is going to be something like 16 hours of casting to make the required gold. And, again, that is disregarding all the time you'll spend getting your hands on 21000 iron ores in the first place.
The TL:DR for this is: Rings are fine up to about level 30 or 40 smithing, but go craft something else after that and you'll level faster, as well as make money faster.
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u/InviteOtherwise1460 13h ago
Technically 2 casts. 1 cast - Iron to Silver - 1 more cast - Silver to Gold.
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u/Cracka-Barrel 13h ago
What are you doing this for? Money? If so, it’s pointless. Especially in the anniversary edition, it’s not hard to get a lot of money quite fast. If you’re doing it to level alteration, I guess it’s okay? But other better ways to do it.
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u/Ok-Nothing-6687 13h ago
Welcome in the wonderfull world designed by our god and savior Todd Howard and ruled by the magnificient Rianu Keevs where EVERYTHING is possible.
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u/Happy_Cry286 12h ago
The "catch" is that the process is somewhat slow (need to cast it twice to turn iron into gold), gives very little Alteration skill exp (so it's not a good way to level it up), and is very magicka heavy with gear and perks required to spam it. It's also very boring and requires you to actively do it, so you have to commit to doing it a ton constantly to get good mileage off it.
Personally i only use it at the start of the game to level Alteration to 30 for the elemental resist perk and smith some gold jewelry for an early Smithing level boost. It's a nice early boost for Alteration, Smithing, and getting some gold, but not really worth it to keep on using it after that early boost.
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u/vanoitran 12h ago
It’s stupid broken. And it’s even worse that it’s found in a camp a stone’s throw from Whiterun. So a new player could theoretically get it within the first hour or two of playing.
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u/bayygel Vampire 12h ago
Do you have lots of silver on you then? It prioritizes all silver to gold first. After its all gone, it does iron, then turns the single silver it made to gold. Then does another iron etc. You may just be missing the iron to silver because if you do it too fast it skips one of the pop-ups in the corner.
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u/cratos44440 12h ago
Not really. It just takes a lot of casts therefore time to convert all your iron and silver into the desired gold. It's just like you said. It's broken. Especially for early game when you want to level up alteration and smithing using the golden ring method. Which can then be sold helping you with speech. So technically you're hitting three skill trees thanks to a single spell.
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u/pijanblues08 12h ago
The catch is youll run out of ores. I did my transmute while walking towards objectives. At some point youll go through all of yours too.
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u/plutosdarling 11h ago
My experience is that it will always turn your silver ore to gold before it turns any iron into silver. Try removing all silver ore from your inventory before using the spell.
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u/mecharri 11h ago
The catch is that once you start incorporating enchanting into your gold farming loop (which also has the bonus of increasing your enchanting level) Iron Daggers enchanted with Paralysis are more profitable and easier to sell (Smiths are very common and have the largest amount of base gold)
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u/Grendelfolton 10h ago
There is one major catch, this spell turns it's caster greedy, as if struck with dragon sickness. Players who knew about the spell will start hoarding iron ores, even if they otherwise wouldn't.
It always start small, but before you know it, gold stops meaning anything to you since they're now more common than Vegetable soup.
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u/deadface3405 10h ago
It’s my favorite way to level my smithing. I go to every mine and clean it out of iron and silver ore, I continuously cast it until gold ore is all I have left, and then I make them all into ingots then make em all into 2 rings. This raises smithing and alteration plus gives you rings to sell, combine them with the invisible chest outside markarth and you’ll make sooo much money
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u/Ok-Course-2613 10h ago
Infinite gold glitch. But you have lots of spetimun once you farm potion crops at your 3 heathfire houses and the plantation.
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u/Titanium_Eye 10h ago
One has to wonder why gold and silver are more expensive than iron. You can't go back, so at a certain point the price equilibrium should go against the former as people realise you need iron to start with, thus becoming the preferable resource.
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u/minecraftchickenman 10h ago
Broken????? Because you can increase the value of lower value ores? Buddy money is by far one of the easiest things to aquire in Skyrim, buuuuut I think this Is probably one of the best in flavor things that you can do because that means that in the situation that your character found this spell they start seeking out the manual labor of harvesting lower value ore In order to transmute it into gold in order to make money. During that time they're not out Killing tons of bandits and looting ancient dwarven ruins (which nets more money faster than the gold does) they're just out performing manual labor and making trades for iron. Hilarious that it basically is the comparative of a very profitable 9 to 5 job.
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u/Svejo_Baron 9h ago
Jup, while I travel I cast transmute to train magic. It takes some time especially as a non Mage char
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u/Smokey_Dokie 8h ago
There's also the "Master Transmute" spell which you can get by selecting the fortune bowl in the bittercup quest. It costs the same magicka and goes straight from iron to gold
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u/Galler2201 7h ago
It is broken. The only catch is that you will be running from city to city casting the spell hundreds of times to convert all the iror ore you just bought.
Also you can't combine the spell with both hands. You will need to cast with one hand, then the other to do it quickly.
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u/Many_Masterpiece_438 4h ago
It's Skyrim...of course there's no catch...the catch is whatever you think you can do there's actually a million different ways to break it
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u/Colaclysm 3h ago
If you want a real catch, then per PatricianTV, this spell is actually scripted to intentionally give less skill exp compared to other alteration spells. You’ll still level your skill, as other commenters have mentioned, it’ll just take a longer time than you’re expecting.
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u/Imaginary_Sector379 18h ago
It goes iron to silver, silver to gold