Oblivion:Gold Farming
Throughout the process of getting to 100% Completion, we need Gold very frequently and in large quantities, so it is very important to optimize Gold farming as much as possible.
Overview
The mechanics of acquiring gold are very simple. There are only a few ways to obtain gold in the game:
- Selling items
- Quest rewards
- Pickpocketing NPCs
- Looting containers/enemies
- Duping Gold (via the Gold Dropping Glitch)
There are three main aspects of optimizing Gold farming:
- Since Gold is required constantly throughout the run, the goal is to find a farming method that can be performed as early as possible.
- We also need to minimize the Gold cost of acquiring the items/spells needed for the setup.
- Additionally, the amount of Gold being farmed needs to be minimized.
Previous Methods
Version 1 and 2
In Version 1 and 2, we optimized the process of selling items. This setup required the Spelldrinker Amulet quest reward from Ulterior Motives, a spell to fortify Mercantile to 75 (which was custom made in the Arcane University), and scrolls for duplicating the amulet. The setup was to use the spell to be able to invest in Palonirya, giving her a gold limit per transaction of 1700 Gold, the highest you can achieve early in the game. Next, scrolls were used to duplicate the Spelldrinker Amulet, which has a value of 3650 Gold. Finally, the amulets were sold one at a time for 1700 Gold each until we reached 847,000 Gold, a value that was estimated by adding up the cost of horses, houses, investing, and adding a buffer amount.
This method was extremely tedious since it required several manual mouse inputs per transaction, including manipulating the item stack slider. The process took about 20 minutes to complete.
Fiscal Responsibility
Our initial farming strategy had a very rough approximation of how much Gold was needed. A glaring issue with this approximation was that it didn't account for how much Gold we earned throughout the run, making the final total much higher than necessary. For Version 3, we created the Fiscal Responsibility Chart, which tracks every single transaction in the run. In cases where an amount of Gold given/taken was random, the worst case was always assumed. A small buffer amount of Gold was added to the final total to account for random events like getting arrested.
With this chart, we learned that the original Gold estimate of 847,000 was significantly higher than it needed to be. The chart shows that with only 425,000 Gold we can easily afford all purchases as they occur with some extra Gold to spare. It is worth noting that for each revision of the route, this chart will need to be recalculated.