Making Gold - Divinity: Original Sin II Walkthrough & Guide (2024)

General Strategies

Making Gold

This section takes a look at the tricks and techniques you can use to gain gold without cheating. Often bad equipment and low-level skills will slow your progress down and so if you find the combat especially difficult you may consider learning the strategies here to earn gold and buy upgrades to keep up with the brutal combat.

The Point of Earning Gold

A lot of the difficulty both early on and throughout the game comes from falling behind on the quality of your equipment compared to the level of your enemies. Even at the start with enemies as low as level 2 your gear is either non-existent or level 1. You will want skill books to cast the skills you need in combat too, barely any are gotten as loot in the game. This is where gold comes in - it helps bridge this gap of not keeping up with gear and skills as you progress. If you feel like the combat is too challenging at any point consider the above point and look to make gold to replace pieces of equipment that are too weak or acquire more skills via skill books from vendors that could balance your offense (or defense) better. This is never a requirement to beat any fights but it does make the challenge seem more fair, and you do not want the odds stacked against you especially on tactician when they are already stacked pretty high up.

Aside from helping you earn equipment and skills to be better in combat, it might also appeal to many players simply because it's enjoyable to acquire better items and skills. There are a plethora of different traders in the game, a lot of which will be introduced to you in this section (more to be added at a later date), and due to the random nature of stats you may spend quite a lot of gold to find the perfect set of gear for your characters. On top of that, the stats on gear get quite a lot better as you level up and since traders always sell items that are at your level, meaning upgrades are found on them quite frequently as long as you haven't upgraded in a level or more. Do note that they will keep items you sell to them so some items may appear to be lower in level / quality, but that's only because those items you sold to them don't scale up to you.

With that covered, let's get to the gold-making techniques now.

Gold-Making Techniques

This is what you came for. Good, let's start the earning gold, shall we?

Replacing Gear

The first thing to learn is that since you will be finding better equipment and replacing your old gear with new ones, sell the old gear. This may seem obvious, but with so much inventory space and the potential to hold countless items, a lot of players will hoard items they think they may need or want to keep. However hoarding items doesn't do you any good, especially since items you get as you level get much better and isn't marginal. The only types of equipment you should keep are items that give you special abilities that you may find very useful on occasion (e.g Teleport), especially if you have no other ways of performing that skill, or rings and amulets that give you bonuses you may need in-case you swap or edit your character build.

Civil Abilities & Efficient Trading

You can earn a lot more gold by having proper investment in your character's civil abilities. The most effective ones for earning gold are: bartering, lucky charm, and thievery. Telekinesis helps out at times and sneaking makes thievery easier to pull off but both can be redundant if you do the right thing or have a replacement. Let's take a look at how to use these abilities to our advantage.

Bartering is the most important one in that it allows you to sell items for more value and buy items for less. Have one character focused on placing all his civil ability points on bartering, and remember to give him any equipment that gives a bonus to bartering. You can even swap it on before trading to gain the bonuses if you have better gear to wear for fights. To have the bartering in effect make sure the character invested in bartering to be the one selling or buying the gear, in other words make sure that on the trading page you swap to his / her page (the portrait indicates which character you are trading with) before trading the items. This does not to be your main character as there is barely any hassle making the page swap whenever you trade even if you initiate the original conversation with your main character. Also keep note that the best potential traders will always be humans as they get an extra point in bartering right at the start without any investment so they start with an advantage and also end with the highest bartering points.

Lucky charm and thievery also contributes to making a lot of gold because they help you acquire extra items that you can either sell directly or upgrade your gear with and free up the old ones to be sold. Without thievery a lot of items are locked behind containers such as chests or entire areas behind doors. Stealing is considered a crime so this must be done with caution - however a lot of the times the locked chest / door is not marked red and hence not a crime but still can only be unlocked with thievery and lockpicking it. Lucky charm acquires you items by giving you a chance to find extra loot when looking in any container. A tone and effect is shown when an extra item(s) is found via lucky charm.

To trade efficiently and to make it easier to organize, whenever you find items you may want to trade send it to the character with the highest bartering civil ability. You can do this by dragging the items found onto the portrait of that character or into his inventory, or by right-clicking the item and pressing "send to ..". In their bag you can then shift+left-click each of the items you wanted to sell to mark them as "wares". This makes it so that while trading you can swap to their page and click the second button on the top-centre of the trade page "add all wares" to automatically put everything you marked directly into the sell window. The button above "add all wares" will add gold from the trader's side to match the value of the stuff you're selling automatically, even if you chose items to buy on their side. Once you're sure of the trade press accept to make the deal.

Picking Up "Junk" - Items to Look Out For

There are a lot of items that players seem to not bother picking up when in fact they are worth picking up for the sole purpose of selling to a trader. I'll try list some of the common things to look out for if you want to make some gold as overlooking these items can cost you a huge amount of potential gold.

• Plates: More specifically the silver or gold ones are worth more. Seems useless but is worth picking up for selling.
• Tableware: There are quite a few decorative jugs, cups, forks in the game - most of which sell for a pretty penny.
• Portraits: This one is quite possibly the most overlooked. Paintings on the wall can often be picked up into your inventory, and have decent value. Some are extremely heavy and cannot be picked up unless you have telekinesis or enough strength, but those aren't worth it when considering weight / value ratio unless you are desperate for say a resurrection scroll to get your party back up to continue your journey.
• Ingredients: Never crafted or even considering? Well notice how all the ingredients you find on the ground or in places are often worth quite a bit of value. Selling them off when crafting potions or scrolls is not something you plan to do is always well worth the gold you make.
• Scrolls: These can be quite helpful when dealing with a tough early game but once you feel you've gotten a hold on your characters' builds and can somewhat deal with tough fights, keep the most useful scrolls but sell the rest. Useful scrolls include utility skills like teleport and heals/boosts that may turn the tide of battle.
• Skill Books: Pick these up and sell them! Obviously learn the ones you want, but you often get duplicates of what you know or skills that you haven't gotten enough ability points in to even learn or plan to learn, so don't hold on them. Don't spread yourself thin trying to put ability points in everything and try to learn everything, focus on a couple types of skills per character.
• Miscellaneous: There are a plethora of other things that have value that don't necessarily fall into any category, but the idea is to pick everything up and check their value if they don't fall into the above categories. There are gems, random objects like jars with grotesques in them that have value.

After you pick all these up, mark them as wares in your bags with shift+left click and use "add all wares" button in the trade menu to put them in the trade screen all at once. Make sure you do this with the character with the highest bartering ability too.