Looking to the future, I'm looking up recipes on istariareference and if I added it up right, I will need a bare minimum of 60 silver to get Blacksmith to 100.
That's bare minimum, and that's assuming I can find enough unguarded cobalt near a biped anvil (which I don't remember ever existing before). So it will likely take a bit more than that, probably in the range of 100-120 silver (due to having to switch to Stone for T4).
Right now I only have about 23 silver and for the life of me I can't really see much of any good ways to make money that don't involve adventuring.
The money I have on me right now, I obtained through the slew of one-time Blacksmith quests that you are only able to do once and then that's it.
I've seen that dragging a diskful of cut gems to the pawnbroker gives about 4 silver, but that takes nearly two hours to do due to how far away the gems are from the gemcutter and the walk from the gemcutter to the pawnbroker in NT.
Something similar can be done with bronze bars, however, you can only make about 4-5 silver until the prices fall to where it isn't worth doing anymore.
Selling any type of tools or weapons doesn't work very well either, because even if you stick them all on the PB simultaneously, the price still falls on each one (going from 24c down to as low as 8-10).
Is there something I'm missing, or is it "adventure or go without"? The problem with adventuring is that I will need spells, weapons, and armor (which I will need to make myself, but in order to do that, I need to level these crafts, but yet I need the forms to do so, and I need money for the forms), and of course higher stats from leveled crafts would be a godsend too.