Guide for earning money/gold (1.22)

I've seen some posts worrying about the high costs of either the runewright, the crafting of grandmaster armors or even Corvo Bianco, so I thought I'd share some of my experiences on the chance that this might help people. I'm currently sitting on about 170k gold at level 25, and that is after having fully maxed out the runesmith.

Right off the bat: I have not found a viable way to earn noticeable money with trading or crafting alone. If anyone has got tips there, I'd love to hear them. In my experience, becoming rich is rather all about being as much of a loot-whore as you can be. Sorry, if that's not what you wanted to hear, but witcher contracts, fist-fighting and gwent can only take you so far :-] With that said, here's some guidelines:

• Loot everything you can get away with, as in absolutely everything. Crafting components and food don't usually weigh anything, so you don't have to worry about that. If you're outside and there's a guard around, you can test if you're being watched by opening the looting window and waiting for a warning to appear. If not, go right ahead, even in broad daylight ;-)

• Picking herbs to sell them is generally not worth to the time, as they sell for fairly little compared to the effort. Other than for personal use, don't bother.

• Crafting materials on the other hand are much more interesting. For example, anything with dimeritium in it is worth absurd amounts of gold, as are all the dusts (like emerald dust, sapphire dust). You should get plenty of either by just general looting. Here's a tip that I've found quite practical: Keep 10 of each crafting item, and sell the rest. That way, you automatically keep rare items while making money off what's ubiquitous. I've done this for the whole playthrough (100 hours by now) and haven't run into any problems. If you end up needing item x or y to craft something, its usually just leather or some metal that can be bought right at the blacksmith.

• Runes/Glyphs. Probably the most underestimated money-maker of the whole game. You constantly get them from everywhere, yet only need like 9 of them to fully enchant the witcher gear of your choosing at the runesmith. Besides that, you can gleefully sell all the rest without any problems (or just sell them all and buy what you need straight from the runesmith when the time comes). And it's very much worth it. I can't think of any other item where I tend to be so surprised that Hattori has already run out of money again as when selling runes and glyphs. Sometimes I swear it only takes like four of them. So yeah, holy shit.

• Don't forget to visit the banker dwarf of Hierarch Square from time to time to exchange all the unusable currency you collect. It's often a nice surprise to spontaneously think of him and walk away with an additional couple thousand gold out of the blue.

• As many have said, farming all the sea treasures in Skellige and selling them right probably amounts to 50k+ in gold (don't quote me on that, but its definitely several dozen thousand). On the roundtrip, you will quickly become overburdened, no matter your carry weight, so I would just ignore it altogether. You usually just have to jump off the boat and dive a couple of meters anyway. This is an exercise in stamina, but you can help make the time pass by listening to a podcast in the background, or watching a movie on a second monitor/laptop. It's actually somewhat relaxing and reminds me of some trucking simulator games, traveling around the world, earning money with each stop :-]

• When it finally comes to selling, note that different merchants pay different prices for the same item. In general, stick to big cities. Village merchants buy for as little as half as much as their richer metropolitan counterparts. Selling smithing goods, armor/weapons on horse items can best be done to the "Top-notch swords!"-ARMORsmith at Hierarch Square and Hattori in Novigrad, as they both offer great prices as well as have a lot of cash to go around (1800-4000g). Meanwhile, innkeeps pay best for general items such as pelts and food, of course. Interestingly, the innkeeps at Kaer Trolde and the one on Hindarsfjall paid better than any I could find in Novigrad. People say you should sell books to the bookseller at Hierarch Square, but they're really just not worth much, no matter where you sell them. And generally, when you exhausted the budget of a merchant, you have to wait five days for him to reset.

That's probably everything I can think of right now. I've probably not exhausted every method of earning money in this guide, so do let me know if there's something I missed or got wrong!