Money making guide

This page provides a guide on the best ways to make money in Dragon Age: Origins. Money can be earned by completing quests, selling items, stealing, or looting fallen enemies and containers. You are occasionally given the chance to ask for monetary rewards above the 'normal' quest reward, and at times the success of such attempts depends on your coercion skill. Money is used for purchasing items, making donations and bribes, and improving the strength of an allied army for the final battle.

You will be able to accumulate at least 350 prior to the Landsmeet, if you've collected all the loot items and sold everything to merchants without donating anything. This amount is enough to buy 3 or more of your dream items from any merchant. It is also possible to accumulate over 1,000 prior to the Landsmeet without making any Potent Lyrium Potions. This requires you to do all the available quests (including downloadable content), pass all the money-related coercion dialogues, steal from all out-of-combat NPCs and in-combat enemies, and sell all items to merchants, except for the items of your four party characters. If you don't want to worry about money and the tasks required for money, you can spend time producing Potent Lyrium Potions.

Basic Mechanics
A sovereign is a gold piece, or 1 (ie. 5 sovereigns is 5). Two coins of smaller denominations are used, silver and copper.

Exchange


 * 100 = 1
 * 100 = 1

General Notes

 * One of the best sources of money is selling loot. Bear in mind that every time you choose to avoid a battle, you give up the ability to loot the defeated enemies. If that makes you feel better about your character though, you may consider it a good trade-off.
 * The Dwarf Noble Origin yields a special markup rate for selling items to Gorim in the Denerim market district. Income doubles for all looted, stolen, given, or crafted items. Assuming that the sale of items makes up for at least 2/3 of the total income (a very conservative estimate), the Dwarf Noble will have approximately 67% more money than any other origin at the same point in the game.
 * Every time there's a dialogue option to ask for money, go for it. There's not one option in-game where you get more money by not asking. Worst case scenario is you will get turned down and/or receive negative approval from an NPC, but these decisions will not have any long-term effects toward your ending.
 * You will not miss any important plot points for being cheap, so feel free to refuse offering money to people.

Potent Lyrium Potion Crafting
Making Potent Lyrium Potions is one of the most profitable activities in the game. For every 99 potions crafted, a profit of US$216810 is made. If you're a Dwarf Noble, profit leaps to US$1454310.

The potent lyrium potion recipe can only be purchased from the tranquil at Wonders of Thedas in Denerim for US$111750. It's useless until someone has a master herbalist in the party.

Ideally, you'll require exactly US$1132404 to start up operations, which is the cost needed for the recipe and all ingredients for a full stack of 99 potent lyrium potions. You're also going to need ten free slots in inventory, nine for the ingredients and one for the potions.

The table above details what is needed for one potent lyrium potion and the ideal places to get each ingredient. Note that Figor, whose shop is off of the Orzammar Commons, will sell you flasks for 1, but requires more additional travel.

The total cost for the ingredients to make a single potion comes to US$10310. Its value is 5, which means that any vendor will buy it for 125, giving a profit of 2190. This is a rate of return of 21%.

A stack of 99 potions costs US$1020690 for required materials, and the revenue is 12375, leaving a profit of US$216810. If that money is then poured into ingredients, another 120 more potions can be made, and so on.

On the twelfth trip, you'll break 1000 by following this example, and will be crafting 813 potions. That requires 33 slots just for the lyrium dust, plus four more empty slots for one stack each of the bartender's ingredients, plus a slot for your new potions. So do what you can to free up inventory before getting into this.

As Lyrium dust is the only thing you need outside the Gnawed Noble tavern (Denerim market district), it is faster to buy lots of dust from the Circle Tower for 23760, and make the potions in the Gnawed Noble, selling potions to buy the agents as you go, to reduce travel time back and forth.

Note that it is tedious at best when making 500+ potions as the game requires one click per potion, for PC users there is a simple workaround in macro scripting programs such as Autohotkey, tutorials are not covered in this wiki but here is a sample script:

$F12:: Loop 598 {  Click 1163, 815 }

Some Mathematics to help you starting your trade: be M your current money in, N the number of potions you can craft (integer), P the profit for selling N. For every N, one needs to pay 1.1N+13.2*2N+33*2N+2.4*4N, that is 103.1N or 1.031N. If M=1.031N, then you can craft N=M/1.031 (rounded to the inferior) potions for P=0.219N in with N flasks, 2N Distillation & Concentrator Agent, and 4N Lyrium Dust.

Profitable Quests

 * Rescue the Queen: During the prison break, earn 80-90 depending on your Coercion skill and 2 votes at the Landsmeet by asking for their money. A highly skilled lock picker is required to maximize gold accumulation.
 * Precious Metals: For an upfront investment of 40you can earn up to 98in revenue (58 profit) with high persuasion (or a minimum 20if you kill Rogek or steal from him).
 * Asunder: A side quest that takes place in The Deep Roads, beneath the dwarven city of Orzammar. For a reward of 25 50, the Warden must allow the Pride Demon to escape, although if you have more than one party member and pause, 3 of them can tell him to give you money and one to have him fight you.
 * Unrest in the Alienage: A highly skilled lock picker can acquire 22 in a chest in the last room of the Run-down Apartment in The Alienage.
 * A Lord's Trust: The First Task: Earn 10 (or 15 with high persuasion) during the optional subquest to return the love letters to fighter Baizyl (requires a Lockpicker). The quest requires you to at least temporarily side with Lord Harrowmont and is a subquest of A Paragon of Her Kind.
 * Lost to the Memories: An Orzammar side quest which rewards 5 (plus 10 if you later return to Orzammar and speak to Orta)
 * Pearls before Swine: The Warden can earn up to 4 if chosen the correct dialogue options. This is the only quest known that yields you More money by refusing to Persuade. To maximize the profit: first suggest that you are going to kill them, then choose the dialogue option "Hand over all the money", this will yield you 2 before you could complete the quest which will reward you with another 2.
 * Thief in the House of Learning: Earn ~250 by selling the the book to Jertrin instead of returning it to the Shaperate for no reward.
 * Complete as many Job Board quests as possible. Each of these side quests will yield 1-6.

Coercion
Maximizing the Warden's Coercion skill gains access to otherwise unavailable persuasion dialogues which often allow stronger negotiating positions with NPCs. Nearly all the notable side quests listed above can benefit directly with high Coercion.

The Strength and Cunning attributes also augment coercion. The strength score minus 10 is your base Intimidation, and your cunning score minus 10 is your base Persuasion. Each rank of Coercion adds 25 to both Intimidation and Persuasion. The highest Persuasion and Intimidation checks are 100, so if you have e.g. a Cunning of 75 for a cunning-based rogue, you will only need one point in Coercion to pass any Persuasion checks, though you will need more for any Intimidation checks. Four points in Coercion negates any need to put points into Strength or Cunning for extra Coercion (though the skill does require 16 Cunning).

Stealing
Stealing will not net you as much money as Lockpicking but you could earn well over 5 by the end of the game simply from Stealing
 * Most of the time, you will get either a Shard or Health Potions
 * Other times, you will get around 2 - 30
 * From yellow & orange name NPC, you could get over 2
 * Profits from stealing will scale with your character level, it's best to steal later from people you know will be sticking around (Lothering for instance will vanish as soon as you finish any of the main Quests).
 * Prior to patch v1.03, it was also possible to set Zevran or Leliana to auto-steal during combat in the tactics screen

Lock Picking
Maximizing a rogue character's lockpicking skill will gain access to locked rooms and containers which may contain money or sellable items. The notable quests above should indicate when a lockpicking character is required for maximum earnings.

Warden's Keep Party Chest
With the Warden's Keep DLC, you can store early to mid-game weapons and armor loot in the party chest rather than selling them immediately.

Items stored in the chest will autolevel along with the character, and can be sold for significantly more as a tier 7 item later in the game. This behavior will work on consoles only, not on PCs. There's also a limit for the number of items allowed to be stored in the chest.

The Weapons page lists the price multipliers for the different tiers - a tier 7 (dragonbone) weapon is worth 18 times more than a tier 1 (iron) version of the same weapon. The "average" weapon tier throughout the game is presumably 4 (Veridium) at price multiplier 9 vs. iron, which still yields twice the cash if you postpone selling it until it has turned to dragonbone.

Not all weapons and armor autolevel: Staves and unique items (like the Aodh or Thorn of the Dead Gods) generally don't; the same goes for most items with "darkspawn" in their name. But it works for generic weapons and armor, and can give a quite significant profit.

Console
If you are on the PC, you can just use the console to give yourself as much money as you want. See the Console page for more information.