Holy Moly Gems!

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For the first time, I completed the No Stone Unturned quest. The reward for completing the crown of Barenziah is the "Prowlers Profit" ability that shows up on your active effects screen. The description is that it increases your chances of finding gems. I would like to nominate that description for greatest understatemenet in the game. It practically ensures that you get a minimum of two gems (frequently flawless) up to a maximum of four or five gems from every single burial urn, chest, or any other container that you can open. (But it does not change what creatures drop - draugr still only drop their weapon and a few coins.)

I was so stunned by this that I decided to do a count. I made sure I sold off all my gems, and then I did the Valthume dungeon for a count. There isn't anything special about Valthume - it's your standard average sized run of the mill dungeon. I selected it precisely because I considered it typical (and because I had not yet cleared it in this game). Here was the tally after going through:

Amethysts: 14 regular, 14 flawless
Diamonds: 5 regular, 16 flawless
Emeralds: 16 regular, 16 flawless
Garnets: 14 regular, 15 flawless
Rubies: 20 regular, 21 flawless
Sapphires: 18 regular, 17 flawless

That's nearly 200 gems from ONE dungeon. While garnets are cheap - the regular ones are worth about 60 septims, things like flawless diamonds sell for about 1000 septims. It makes you completely re-evaluate what you decide to pick up in dungeons. While money ceases to be a factor fairly early in the game, I typically continue to pick up high-value pieces of equipment (basically anything ebony or greater) to sell upon my return to a town. I still need a flow of cash for things like training, purchasing homes, bribing guards, etc, even if the money I'm taking in is in excess of what I'm spending.

Of course, picking up a bunch of ebony weapons from draugr overlords is limited by what you can carry. The two handed weapons they drop are worth over 1000 septims, but also weigh in excess of 20 units. So you can only pick up so many. However, if you're leaving every dungeon with dozens of gems, it's not worth picking up anything else that isn't enchanted.

The value of the gems listed above is immense. I happened to level while in Valthume, so I headed over to Winterhold for a training session when I was done. I leveled destruction, from level 85-89. So the training costs from Faralda were nearly 25,000 septims. I sold about HALF my gems to her to make back my money. I then went and talked to each member of the college, and purchased every single book from them that I didn't already have, then selling gems backs to them. I even did the silly stuff like purchasing the master level conjuration spells I have no intention of using. I STILL didn't sell off all of my gems. So I'm estimating the gem value from ONE DUNGEON to be around 50,000 septims. It's impossible to know exactly, because it depends on your speech skill, what perks you have - notably allure - and any price increasing equipment.

What that effectively means is that those gems have the equivalent value of about 50 high-end pieces of equipment - and you can't even carry that many pieces of equipment without being encumbered. And that made me consider if doing this quest should be prioritized. I thought about it for a while, before deciding that it can't be prioritized, simply given the locations of all the gems. You have to advance several quest lines to even do it:

You need to advance the main quest to get into the Thalmor Embassy to get one of the gems.

You need to do enough jobs from Vex and Delvin to open up the special missions, as two of the stones are located in Pinewatch and that pirate ship, neither of which can be accessed without doing those missions.

You also need to advance the College of Winerhold quest line at least as far as it takes to get access to the arch-mages quarters.

You also need to at least start the Dark Brotherhood questline.

And about half of the stones are located at the end of dungeons, all if which much be cleared. So while I think it would be great to prioritize this mission, it's effectively impossible to complete early.

 

Damn. thats a goldmine. Never done that quest myself, though. I keep finding those stones, but I have probably missed alot of them.

 

Oh, now I know what I will try to finish first on my next character. I am building the urge to Skyrim. The plan is to now build a strong desire to play WoW and hopefully enjoy the new expansion. If I am lucky it will supply me with decent gaming for the rest of the year where I will get all the skyrim addons cheaply and play the crap out of it once again.

 

The limiting factor in how much you can earn is in part based on how much loot you can carry out of a dungeon. The value of a gem is so disproportionately high relative to its weight, that you always pick them up. It's just that before this, you never found enough of them to make up more than a fraction of the profit in a given dungeon. And given that 200 gems weigh LESS than any two-handed weapon, it effectively translates into unlimited money without the need of ever having to over-encumber your character. There is no point in picking up anything heavier than 1 weight unit. You're earning tens of thousands of septims from a single dungeon from gems alone. Everything else is peanuts.