Skyrim: How To Make Gold With The Transmute Spell

If there’s one thing that fans of Skyrim know all too well, it’s the struggle of never having quite enough gold to purchase that next big house or powerful piece of gear.

So every player knows that if you intend to make a big purchase, you have to constantly be looting enemy corpses for items and selling them to the many different merchants of Skyrim. Pick up every axe and amulet you find, otherwise kiss goodbye to Proudspire Manor.

But it doesn’t always have to be this way. There are ways of making gold in Skyrim that not only net you a lot of money but also help you improve some of your skills.

So with this article, we’ll show you how to make gold with the Skyrim Transmute spell.

Skyrim Transmute Gold Guide

The Transmute Mineral Ore spell is an extremely unique ability in Skyrim that allows players to turn ores from one form to another.

So for example, if you have a piece of Iron Ore, you can cast this spell to turn it into Silver Ore. Casting the spell a second time will then turn that Silver Ore into Gold Ore. All it takes is two different uses of this ability to increase the value of an Iron Ore by 250%.

Players can use this final valuable product to craft gold accessories like rings and necklaces, and sell them for even more money than what the raw material itself costs. Those who are willing to devote a few hours to this process, will eventually find themselves swimming in gold coins.

How To Find The Spell

Now there are three main sources through which you can get your hands on the Skyrim Transmute spell.

The first of these is a bandit hideout to the north of Whiterun known as the Halted Stream Camp. Players can kill a few different enemies in the external area of this location, to then gain access to the mineshaft built into the hillside on the back.

There are a few more foes inside the mine, including a particularly tough Bandit Chief, but clearing them out should be your first priority. Once the dust has settled, you can locate the Spell Tome on a table right next to where the enemy leader was standing.

One Spell Tome can also be found inside the Ansilvund tomb to the north of Riften. You visit this location as part of a few different quests, but one in particular, ‘A Love Beyond Death,’ automatically starts when players are halfway through the area.

See this quest through to the end, after which you can locate the spell on a table next to another important quest item.

A final Skyrim Transmute Tome can be purchased from the NPC Tolfdir at the College of Winterhold after you have gained access to the institution and reached at least skill level 50 in Alteration.

We personally recommend that you go for the Spell Tome located at the Halted Stream Camp because it is the one you have access to the earliest. The hideout is also fairly close to the first major city you visit in the game, and it has a bunch of ore veins from which you can mine Iron.

In the off chance that you are unable to get this one in particular, then you should resort to the other two sources.

How To Make Money

The Skyrim Transmute spell is an adept level spell, which has a base cost of 88 Magicka. This is not a particularly high requirement, but players who are not focused on mage builds may find that they can only cast this spell once every minute or so. This is an extremely slow rate of conversion.

To speed this process up quite a bit, purchase a set of Novice Robes of Alteration for your character. Equipping this will increase your Magicka regeneration by 50%, and Alteration spells will cost 12% less to cast. If you find that you’re still running out of Magicka quickly, an instant way to reset the meter is to use the ‘Wait’ function to skip time forward an hour.

Next, make sure that you are carrying a bunch of Iron Ore in your inventory because this is not a spell that you cast onto an object. Using it automatically changes the state of an ore without any direct interaction from the player.

Once you have accumulated a ton of Gold Ore, use a Smelter to turn two pieces of it into one Gold Ingot. Then use this ingot to craft either one Gold Necklace or two Gold Rings. If you have some precious stones with you such as Diamonds or Rubies, you can incorporate them to craft even more valuable variations of these accessories.

Now, you can finally sell these items to merchants to earn a bunch of gold. In fact, this entire process of using magic, crafting items and then selling them, creates a chain of sequences that also level up your Alteration, Smithing and Speech skills.