Money making guide

For the Dragon Age II guide, see Money making guide (Dragon Age II).

See also: Stealing: Profitable Targets

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 (i.e. 5 sovereigns is 5). Two other types of smaller denominations are used, silver () and copper ().

Exchange

• 100 = 1
• 100 = 1

Note: This conversion of currency happens automatically.

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. They can also earn 95+ gold by the time Lothering is completed (see The Spellward).
• 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 because the money earned from selling a single potion exceeds the cost of making it. Dwarf Nobles benefiting from Gorim's special discount, get double the revenue, allowing profit to be made from crafting and selling Greater Lyrium Potions and Lyrium Potions as well.

• The Potent Lyrium Potion Recipe can only be purchased from the tranquil at Wonders of Thedas in Denerim for 11 17 50.
• Someone in the party must have Master Herbalism for this exploit to work.

	Cost	Qty	Total	Vendor
Lyrium Dust	2 40	4	9 60	Circle Tower Quartermaster
Concentrator Agent	33 0	2	66 0	Gnawed Noble Bartender
Distillation Agent	13 20	2	26 40	Gnawed Noble Bartender
Flask	1 10	1	1 10	Gnawed Noble Bartender

The table above details what is needed for one potent lyrium potion and the ideal places to get each ingredient. The listed merchants are selected because they minimize travel time, though other merchants are available.

The resale value of a potion, 1 25 0, minus the cost of making a single potent lyrium potion, 1 3 10, yields a profit of 2190 per potion.

Bug! Selling too many of the same item to the one merchant may corrupt your savegame. The bug appears to happen when a vendor gets overloaded with 549 or more stacks of items. The bug has been fixed in patch 1.04.

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, though, tutorials are not covered in this wiki. There is a script that will calculate how many potions' ingredents can be bought based on how much gold one has. It appears to be inaccurate about how much a single potion's ingredients cost, however.

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.
• 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 230 by selling the book to Jertrin instead of returning it to the Orzammar Shaperate for no reward.
• Forgotten Verses: In Denerim, Sister Justine will pay 7 50 0 for bringing the Ancient Encrypted Scrolls, for a total of 12 50 0 if you requested the "collateral" mid-dialogue. The extra 5 0 0 is not shown on the pop-up but it is added.
• 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 85 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 (Origins) page for more information.

Redcliffe crystal glitch

This is a very fast and profitable glitch that can be done immediately after Lothering. After Hearing about how to help Redcliffe, convince the blacksmith to continue working. Then go to the bar. Make the bartender join the fight without killing him. He will put the girl in charge of the bar. She will sell everything for free, but will not restock. However, if you "buy" her whole inventory, leave the bar and return, she will restock the crystals. After doing this several times, sell them to the blacksmith. The higher level you are, the higher tier the crystals will be.

She no longer sells the crystals in the PC version.

This has been confirmed to work on the Xbox 360 and the PS3 as well.

Note: This isn't actually the sole case. If you talk to the militia who are drinking in the tavern, you'll see a mini-cut scene showing them complaining that Lloyd is making them pay for their ale. Once you've seen/heard this conversation between them, you can then threaten Lloyd into making you co-owner, therefore making it so you can get a small profit every so often (from 20 silver and upwards), but also free items which once again - restock every exit/ entrance. Thus, this makes it easier to get the Helm of the Red during the Redcliffe assault as well as allowing you to take the crystal glitch. - Xbox 360

Infinite money glitch

Main article: Exploits (Origins)#Unlimited Money

ps3 and xbox360 One of the easiest ways to get money is to put an item in the Junk section of your inventory and then go to a merchant. In the Junk section you have two sell options, "Sell" and "Sell all". When selling the item, hit the "Sell All Junk" button and immediately after hit the "Sell" button. If you hit the buttons quickly enough, you can sell the item twice.

Traps are a Girl's Best Friend

This is a continuous quest in Lothering and you can keep on selling Allison traps (The merchant in the inn sells an unlimited number of trap triggers, the only component you need for spring traps). This only works if you have the three spring traps when you first talk to her, otherwise when you say "I will return with them later" and then later return, the quest becomes complete. This quest becomes impossible to complete if you have fought the desperate refugees, as Allison will refer to you as a troublemaker.

One very important note to make is that you will receive experience each time you do this as well. You will rapidly gain levels, which can lead to difficulty when you next encounter enemies with levelled gear while you will likely still be using grey iron. Use with caution.

If you unequip everything from your party except for Items that don't scale in level, sell them all in Dane's Refuge after achieving your desired level and gold, exit the building then go back in and everything will have scaled up to the appropriate level so you can have dragonbone armour and weapons at the beginning of the game.