You know this reminds me of something that's been bothering me for a while. I can't recall elder scrolls lore ever mentioning fullmetal alchemist style alchemical-transmutation ever before. Making potions, sure, but transmuting mineral ores? Was anything like that ever mentioned in any previous games? It just feels out of place compared to the rest of the established magic systems in the elder scrolls world. It feels unfinished too. Why only iron ->silver->gold? Why can't you transmute any other minerals or materials?

It's not even FMA style alchemy -- that's just what the premise of alchemy is, as far as I know. Now, I say "as far as I know", because I do not claim to be an expert in alchemical history or anything. Almost any exposure I've had to alchemy was some silly things in Chemistry during high school and then FMA. But again, with my limited and debateable knowledge, I assert that alchemy's basis is that you take one thing and turn it into one different thing.

You see this also manifested in Chemistry with the Law of Conservation of Mass and Energy, which is a similar concept. You can't output less OR more than you put in.

As for restricting it to iron --> silver --> gold, I have no idea This is my first TES game, I'm ashamed to say.

I guess in this case if we look at it from Chemical view and imagine that such a thing was possible, that the atomic weights of iron, silver and gold are different and actually increase towards the later, and as such more and more of the former elements would be necessary to be able to get the same physical volume (ie standard ingot size) for each transformation.

Following on from this I would then support the 2iron for 1 silver, 2 silver for 1 gold approach

There's a transmute spell?

To begin, two iron ore have more mass than one silver, and two silver more mass than 1 gold. Still doesn't make it right. But also, the basis of alchemy was to turn things into what they aren't given whatever materials you have. So a single iron ore turns into a single silver ore turns into a single gold ore.

I guess the discussion is sort of moot because we're jumping back and forth between scientific and mostly-fantasy (I say that because alchemy was indeed once studied in reality, so it's not -all- fantastical). I don't know, I just really like the idea of transmutations failing instead just trying to balance by making the spell cost more material-wise.

Indeed -- http://elderscrolls.wikia.com/wiki/Transmute_Mineral_Ore

I agree with you on that part, it would be more realistic for it to fail instead of it to just cost more, as I find it hard to believe that any body with around 90 magicka can cast it, meaning a bandit could. Why all the bandit raids then?

Skyrim takes place about 200 years after the Oblivion crisis... maybe alchemy has made some great strides since then?

A failure chance would indeed be more fun and interesting, I'm just throwing out suggestions. I actually used the transmute spell quite a bit with my pure-warrior character to make some cash early in the game (you can use it even without putting any perks in alteration or points in magicka, strangly enough). I probably wouldn't have bothered though if it took 4 iron ores to make 1 gold, that would have gotten too tedious pretty quickly.

Logically it really should cost a lot more mana though.

Not quite. That would be like saying that the premise of religion is to control the masses. It's just that is what the powers that be have used it for. The origins of alchemy are actually the earliest roots of our understanding of the sub atomic world(known today as chemistry) and the powers that be believed the only viable part of it was the theory that one element could through chemical reaction be transformed into another element. So when any study of alchemy was sanctioned by those powers it was officially for the pursuit of transforming lead into gold and that is how the mythos was attached to alchemy.

Is the spell really the problem, and not the vast amount of iron ore available at fast respawning vendors?

Both are a part of the problem, in my opinion. PISE plans to improve upon the iron ore on vendors deal, I believe, and so fixing the spell would be nice too.

Why not just add a 1 day cooldown?

This would just be annoying, personally. I'd much rather chance fails than have to hop in bed and sleep for 24 hours between transmutes (which is what you'd do, you can't deny it, when you have a stack of iron you recently farmed to try and level up Smithing/Enchanting with). Also, I don't know if this idea stems from WoW, but it worked out well there because there was a player run economy with millions of people with 1-day cooldowns for 1 transmute as opposed to just the one player in Skyrim.

Seems way too tedious. I still support the failure system.

The spell itself is tedious and dull. Sure, you could sit around casting it, waiting for your whole magicka pool to regen each time (because if you're trying to abuse transmute, you're obviously pretty low level) but its quicker to just find a dungeon, murder everything in it, and steal its pants. Honestly iron is more valuable to me as a smithing resource, its more effective (and probably profitable) to craft a bunch of iron daggers than it is to transmute a bunch of gold and then use it to pay for smithing training. Anything that just nerfs the spell through stats will just make it duller and more tedious. Odd failure effects would at least make it entertaining.

But t
That's not fixing anything though, it's just making profits less. Plus that's the whole point is to make it annoying, isn't the whole point to get people to stop doing this? Even a 30 minute CD would work then, not waitable, real life.

Strictly speaking, from a chemistry angle, 1 iron ingot should become roughly about half a silver ingot, which would become about a quarter of a gold ingot, if my periodic table isn't lying to me and you really want a good reason to go 2 to 1 on conversions. Each does have about twice the atomic mass of the previous IRL (i.e. more protons and neutrons).

Edit: I think I just levelled up my Nerd skill. ^^

mmm... I don't know. For most of my characters, casting transmute takes 95% of their magicka already. I'm not fond of staring at the screen while the bar refills, so I tend to cast it from time to time, and do something else in between times. Usually I forget I was transmuting, and end up with a dozen lumps of iron ore in my pockets.

By the time I get a character with enough juice to abuse the spell, they're usually rich anyway from selling dungeon loot.

I think it's probably a play style thing rather than outright breakage. IHMO, obviously.

Honestly, I don't see a need to change this spell at all, I mean youre not gonna got 1000000000 gold quickly through 'abusing' this spell.

Transumute was in Oblivion. Actually, it was added as a single use scroll in the Mehrune's Razor DLC.

If you could transmute iron to anything higher then gold, then it would be really unbalancing and subject to abuse.

Quicker, and likely more profitable to boot. Finding one enchanted item will easily be worth more than a cartload of gold ingots and even just a few sets of low-end armor can compare quite favorably.


You're assuming that the ingots of various substances are constant-volume (i.e., an iron ingot and a gold ingot are the same size), but they're actually constant-mass. All ores and all ingots have a weight of 1 EU (Encumbrance Unit), regardless of material. The greater density of silver and gold means that those ingots are smaller, not that you need to transmute more iron.


On the discussion of "the point of alchemy" historically, nobody has mentioned the spiritual side yet. The whole "lead to gold" thing was about purifying your soul along with the metal. The reason, then, for only being able to transmute iron -> silver -> gold is that, at each stage, the metal becomes more "noble" and more (spiritually) pure. I'm not sure that any other raw materials have a similar relationship. And "equivalent exchange" is purely an FMA fabrication.


In any case, I don't see any problems with Transmute Ore as it stands in vanilla, since there are other, much more effective, ways to get rich quick. I don't think that any pure nerf to it (cooldowns, take a million HP damage every time you cast it, 2:1 conversion ratios, etc.) is called for. I could go for a chance of failure with random wacky results, but that's because it would be more interesting and more fun than the spell just working every time, not because I think the spell is overpowered.

Really its fine as is. I mean a much more profitable method of converting iron ore into gold is to craft a dagger, enchant it and sell it for like 600+gold. Where more work transmuting gold gets you 34 or something like that. In two clicks I convert 2 gold into 600 and your worried about making a 34 profit? There are much bigger exploits in the game, perhaps invest your time ito a mod which addresses some bigger issues than the transmute spell.

I don't really see a problem with Transmute... It's not like every mage in the world can buy it from the closest shop and get rolling. As far as I know, the book only exists as loot in three places in the whole game. This makes the spell pretty rare and a nice reward, same as Equilibrium.

I used the spell a few times after I found it, but after that I didn't bother. I also rather use my iron ore for armor and weapons than jewellery. You could add a failure option to the spell (in Morrowind all spells had a possibility of failure) or maybe turn the item into a random ingot (that would be cool). But buying iron ingots just to transmute sounds so boring, that I wouldn't even think about it.

I disagree though that the gold (and also the silver) items are not worth making if you want money, since some of the jewelled rings and neckleges are quite expensive (and they can be enchanted as well) and I always have plenty of gems in my inventory.

That's what is implied to be going on at
It's actually sold by a certain merchant. Enthir, I think.


As far as transmutation goes in reality, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_transmutation is real. It happens in our nuclear reactors every second of the day. Scientists have actually did transmute lead to gold. However, the process is so costly and the result is so small that it could never be a feasible way of making gold.