Gold seems to be a very crucial factor in skyrim for means of buying and upgrading homes or just quickening the rate you are leveling.

There are lots of methods to the madness of how much time one will consume in order to gain gold in skyrim. I have watched a number of interesting videos and read several threads. Currently I have come to find that having a large amount of gold at the level of 1 will allow you more flexibility with how you wish to gain skill levels and if you wish to limit which skill levels to work on. Only that it is high unlikey that someone will beable to gain a large amount of gold staying at level 1 during that same time since the skills that progress your level apply to a very wide area of the game including transactions. Although you don't have to accept your level up simply my never opening the skills menu once you have reached that point, if you never open this menu you also will not beable to spend a skill point and if you have 2 level ups waiting for yo they will ultimately take effect right away when you open the skill menu.

My method will indirectly level skills with a small factor based on you and what you do or choose to equip and use; It will also involve transactions, a lot of transactions, exploration, combat of some means, and you should really consider taking a companion!

Dungeon diving!

Simply grab a companion, decide what means of killing your oppenents you wish to use and dungeon dive away and just loot EVERYTHING!!! trade items to your follower until they and you cannot carry anything else then run back to a trader and sell it all!! Keep anything you make find of interest; gems, ores, ignots, gold, enchanted items (for disenchanting purposes) and anything you don't wish to sell.
If you fill up your mule and yourself before finishing a dungeon just go back to town unload and come right back to clean up the place. You don't have to be overly obsessive about what you do and do not pick up looting all on each body is usually enough to keep things moving quickly with little stopping to look around but you may wish to.

Obviously some dungeons are going to be extremely challenging for a level 1 character!

Owning a house is not 100% needed but will help keep your carrying capacity, keeping items you wish to preserve inside containers within your home of choice. (note: making money in this fashion with allow you to buy breeze home and fully upgrade quickly so you have some containers to save your items in)

Taking on quests is optional, a lot of the time you may get a quest item before taking the quest. Questing that way is certainly different but it happens.

You can implement alchemy and enchanting into this method since you will be getting lots of ingredients and soul gems! You will get items for black smithing but its not likely blacksmithing with return you the better profit margin like the others.

I feel that this is an obvious way to gain gold in skyrim without using any exploits, glitches or cheats. Just that some users may overlook the obvious and forget that skyrim is filled with items waiting to be looted!

I have easily been averaging over 1k gold an hour, I base this stat off of the time played on the file and the amount of gold my character has since he has never bought anything.

Quick note! If you are timely about your business you can easily achieve higher numbers!

I have more specifics to my method as far as race, equipment, followers and locations that optimize the process but I would like some feed back on Dungeon diving!

I encourage replies, suggestions and thoughts relevent to the topics of dungeon diving and gold!

First, I think gold is not all that important. Eventually, you get so much you can buy all the houses in the game and still have more than you need.

Second, there are some very easy quests that give 1200 to 1500 gold without doing anything more than ratting someone out or delivering a package. Thieves guild quests are non-violent and provide 500 a pop without even advancing the storyline.

Third, smithing, enchanting and alchemy are less dangerous early in the game and provide plenty of gold if that is the main goal. Alchemy especially so since the starting materials are free and if you pick the right ingredients, you can make upwards of 500 gold per potion, more if you start adding perks to the alchemy tree.

Dungeon diving and looting can be a profitable endeavor but merchants only have so much gold per day and you can only carry so much, especially early in the game. I think it makes more sense to watch what you pick up and stick to high cost per weight items like gems, potions and jewelry rather than armor and weapons. Most of the time when I open a chest I take the gold and lockpicks and leave everything else unless it is an enchanted item I can use to disenchant or sell for a huge payday. (I also tend to collect staffs just as a hobby). Taking every piece of clutter is a waste IMHO. Every Draugr has a greatsword or bow and the weight adds up fast. I would rather not go back two and three times to the same place to clean it out, but that's just me.

I have about 250 hours in on three characters and I can honestly say that I have never, not one time, said "man, I'd like to buy that but I just can't afford it."

Having said that, the initial post is still a good idea.

I will definately look into these quests.

My main goal is to have more money that I can spend at level 1 without using a cheat/glitch/exploit

I am not opposed to quests that particularly give over 1000 gold and will likely seek them out now.

as far as weight there are means of increasing carrying amount and a follower is key!

Who doesn't already do this? Dungeon delving and loot selling seems fairly obvious to me.

Well, I've discovered a unique way to use swords in Skyrim. First you get a sword. Then, when you're going to be in a fight, equip it, and swing it at the enemy.

You're welcome.

I wipe with my gold, painfull but I have so much I don't know what to do with it. I have 100,000 right now and that's after I bought all the houses recently. My rule for picking up items to sell is it has to way under 1 pound and be worth over 1,000 gold, if not then I leave it. So mainly I only pick up jewelery or robes. Gold had never been a problem or me because I hardly ever but anything from a merchant because they never had anything good. This is one of my biggest problems with Skyrim. I wish the merchants had special weapaons/gear that you can only buy from them, just like Oblivion. Skyrim stores always have the same old crap and 99% of it can be found. Oh and I bought spells at the college but that is it. I really wish a merchant had that awesome sword you can't find anywhere or can't make and it costs 15,000 gold so it's a little bit of a challenge to get when first starting off. The only unique items I like come from daedric quests.

There's just not enough to buy to soak up the gold that you can get just by progressing normally in the game. One toon (now retired, soon to be deleted) hit level 30, owned every house in the game (except Hjerim - I REALLY dislike Windhelm, so I never buy that house), had everything she could possibly need, and I quit playing her sitting on 250k gold. *shrug*

Gold flows like the water in this game.

How many hours have you all spent playing on these characters?

I just get an adolescent Korean slave laborer to grind for me. $12.99, flat charge... although, I think all of it goes to his "handlers". Not him.

Post Time Played and gold found please.

I don't connect to Steam to play, so don't think I can give you hours per toon. I started playing at release, and have played for 12 - 16 hours a day, at least 5 days a week, since. But that's spread over a lot of toons.... some of which are long gone now as I knew I'd never play them again. So I guess I can't give you chapter and verse on time played on the toon with 250k, but then again, I don't see why you need that or what it would prove anyway (other than that I'm retired, and I can AND DO play as much as I like since I don't have to worry about real world stuffs....)

...how much of this game have you played? I have so much gold on characters I could start eating it for nourishment and never run out. I could probably build Solitude to-scale out of gold coins. I don't even loot items to sell anymore. I'm level 40.

...what? "Your method" of progressing in an RPG...is clearing dungeons? Perhaps you can make use of MY method to do this even faster. I equip weapons and kill things with said weapons. It really speeds things up. And it's fun to boot! Everyone should do this. Another poster above me apparently uses a similar method of swinging swords at enemies, but my method involves actually killing things with swords.

per hour?

get a banish weapon, break it for the enchant, and make some iron daggers.
get petty gems and enchant them all.

Money doesn't mean anything anymore. you just walk around with 10 daggers in your pouch and buy/sell as you want.

Run through one dungeon, loot everything for a payment. Repeat.

Each game has been that way, not really any honest living ways to make money saddly.

Well.... you can. But if you think dungeon after dungeon is boring.... try chopping wood.

In Daggerfall, I found a place to buy really good armor REALLY cheap. Then I hauled it to another area and made about 300% profit on it. So far in Skyrim I haven't found anything like that. Every merchant seems to pay the same for stuff, and some of them charge a lot more to buy....

Honest gold for honest work..

Here's a 10 MINUTE video (!) on chopping wood.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UZYBoB339iI

I'll take your word for it.

Either this or pick pockets/swipe every worth more than $10 and join the theives guild

^^
All of this. Plus the fact you'll have access to even more if you join the TG and trade with its fences at a major discount. The NPC fence gold increases as you increase the TG influence and max out at 4,000 gold per fence by the time you become the TG guildmaster. At 9 TG fences, that's 36,000 gold for all the goods you hoodwink the hard working denizens of Skyrim of.

The DB quest alone nets you 20,000 gold for becoming guildmaster. And that's on top of the other priceless gems/magic equipment you get as guildmaster perks. And then there is the Golden Touch and Treasure Hunter perks in the lockpicking skill...

And if you do the Treasure Hunt side quest, you'll end up with a crapload of gold and precious gems with just those 2 perks alone. Add the smithing/enchanting/alchemy skills to these, and it's damned near impossible to walk around Skyrim without a ton of gold weighing down your inventory. Making gold is a cake walk, especially when you run out of the big item stuff to collect and buy like houses. TBH I can't imagine what my toon would be doing with so much loot per hour. It's not like he'd need it to buy a high tech STAG Tank or F-69 VTOL

It's become a mini game for me to see how long it will take me to make all the beggars in Skyrim at least 5,000 gold richer in tips

I like to make bank looting dwemmer ruins and using all of the scrap. Melt it down and sell ingots or even better forge and improve dwarven bows. With the steed stone, a follower and some strength potions/enchants you make it out rich after just a couple.

Well I did ask for feed back.. I did state in the original post that I felt this was an obvious means so for all the captain obvious wanna be replies, thank you for stating the obvious. This thread is about methods for gold generation per hour.

I have recently discovered another method that was getting me 3500 per hour, it has a lot to do with the hidden chest in dawnstar next to iron breaker mine!

I have yet to run into any quests that reward me with anything over 500 gold that I can recall

Saying that gold is not crucial is interesting but I guess it depends on what it is you are looking to do and how early in the game you are trying to do it this is a very freelance game so its not like you have to even do a single quest or you could do all the quests its open to the user.

I am looking to discover the greatest gold per hour method, I am not interested in how to use swords or how obvious the method may seem lol

So there we have it. Do lots of dungeons and you can get a lot of gold.

What a staggering revelation!

Yes.. Genius is clearly in the air.. I just posted how this is not about how obvious you may think my first method/idea was to you.
Considering people have already posted similar replies I'm going to assume you haven't read the entire thread and if my assumption is wrong well.. Point in case.

Thank you for your input but I would appreciate a more co-operative reply and not a downplay attempt towards my idea.

Actually, I've found that looting everything nets very little more over time that just looting things with a suitable weight to value ratio. I've gotten to the point where I there are very few unenchanted armor or weapons I will loot, even in early game. I've noticed that regardless of whether I take everything, even going back more than once, or only take what I can carry without a follower, I have relatively the same amount of money.

As said, best bet for making money early is the TG quests- get a sweep and bedlam job in the same city for a quick 1000 gold each time. If you are planning to become guild master, you have to do them anyway, so might as well do them early when money actually is a concern.