Kingdom Come: Deliverance II Money Making Guide: Fastest Ways to Get Groschen

Henry starts Kingdom Come: Deliverance II with nothing. No coin, no gear, barely a shirt on his back. Almost everything in Bohemia runs on Groschen: food, a bed for the night, gear repairs, bribes for the guards, better armor, a halfway decent horse. The good news is the money shows up pretty quick once you know where to look. The trick is to run a few methods at once instead of betting everything on a single one. Sell what you loot, brew potions from herbs you can pick for free, grab the early quests that pay well, and haggle on every single trade. Stack even two or three of these together and your purse fills up fast.

Selling Loot Without Tanking Merchant Prices

Your main income, especially early on, is what you strip off dead bandits and soldiers. Once the enemies start showing up in real armor (metal helmets, gauntlets, leg armor, breastplates), every body on the ground is a small payday. Armor and weapons are where the real money sits, not random tunics and pitchforks. Gauntlets are a favorite because they are light, they are worth a fair bit, and they barely eat into your carry weight. Good pairs can run into the hundreds, and late game you can see pieces valued well over a thousand (one writer clocked a pair around 2,080 Groschen, though that is more of a mid-to-late find).

The catch is that traders never pay full value. Without any haggling you usually get maybe 75 to 80 percent of what an item is listed at, and that is on a good day with a merchant who actually likes you. So the price you see in your inventory is more of a ceiling than a real number.

Sell to the right shop

Different merchants pay better for different goods, and matching them up matters more than you would guess. Weapons and armor go to a blacksmith or weaponsmith. Potions go to an apothecary. Food goes to a grocer, butcher, or tavern keeper. Selling a sword to a general merchant is a quick way to leave money on the table.

Watch the stolen tag

Anything you swipe off a body that did not attack you first, or pull out of someone's chest, picks up a red hand mark. Normal merchants will not touch stolen goods. You have two real options: sell to a fence (Fence Whitebeard in the Nomad Camp east of Troskowitz is the easy early one), or stash the loot in your personal chest and wait it out for a week or two until the tag fades. The Trafficker perk under Thievery speeds that wait up.

Keep your reputation clean

Prices swing hard based on how much the local merchants like you. Stay in their good graces and you sit up in the 90s, and that gets you better prices both ways. Murder and steal in the same town you sell in and the numbers tank fast. A clean approach: pick one town as your selling hub and do your dirty work somewhere else.

Carry weight is the real bottleneck

Loot is heavy. Once you are loaded up you walk slow and you cannot fast travel. Dump the cheap stuff (anything worth under maybe 50 Groschen is usually not worth the weight once you are carrying real armor) and save room for the expensive pieces. A horse turns this from a chore into a non-issue, because you can offload straight into its saddlebags.

Haggle every sale

Hold the close-deal button instead of tapping it and the haggling bar pops up. Nudge the price in your favor and the merchant will either accept, counter, or lose patience. Small asks land more often than big ones. Closing out of the menu without a deal burns their patience fast, so only haggle when you mean it. Every now and then, let a deal go in the merchant's favor on purpose. It sounds dumb, but overpaying a hair raises your reputation with them, and that pays off on every sale after.

Best Early Side Quests for Fast Cash

Side quests are the cleanest money early on, because most of them are legal, low-risk, and they pay better per minute than grinding. Once the Wedding Crashers main quest opens the world up, run around and grab every side quest you can find before you start knocking them out. Early tasks pay maybe 20 to 50 Groschen, but the ones from nobles and wealthier folk can push past 200.

Report the cabbage thief for an easy 800

South of Semine Castle, around where a little road dips below the river into the forest, there is a man named Pepa hiding in a cave. He has been stealing cabbages to make special sauerkraut. You can leave him alone and come back any time to trade cabbages for his sauerkraut, which is a decent early healing food. The sauerkraut falls off later once you switch to potions, though, so the cleaner play is to report his theft to Bailiff Thrush in Troskowitz. Pepa vanishes, and the Bailiff hands you around 800 Groschen. For something you can knock out in the first hour or two of open-world play, that is a serious boost.

The Miller's fistfight tournaments

Head down to Lower Semine Mill and talk to Miller Kreyzl and his crew. They run good-natured fistfighting tournaments among themselves. Beat the three scrappers there (10 Groschen each) and Kreyzl fronts you 150 Groschen to enter the bigger tournament at the Zhelejov Wagoners' Inn. You can just pocket Kreyzl's money and walk away clean. Or you put 100 of it toward the Zhelejov fights, beat three more opponents (10 each), and the innkeeper kicks in another 200 as a reward. All in, that route lands you somewhere around 300-plus Groschen for a few minutes of punching. Not bad for unarmed brawling.

The Jaunt and the Gules bandit chain

After you meet Blacksmith Radovan, head up to Trosky Castle and pick up The Jaunt. The quest itself is not a huge payday, but it opens a string of follow-ups where Gules (back at Semine Castle) asks you to hunt down his old bandit comrades. Each one pays a reward, and each camp is stuffed with lootable armor. The real payoff is the last bandit, Casper. Loot the keys off his body, pop open the chest in his camp, and you are looking at roughly 1,739 Groschen sitting there in one box.

Barley the Riddler

Out on the roads you will bump into a wandering fellow named Barley who throws riddles at you. Answer his first riddle right and he pays 150 Groschen. Get every riddle and take the coin option, and you can walk away with up to about 550. It is free money for paying attention, and it usually catches you while you are traveling anyway.

General quest tip

Quest givers reward you in other ways too: gear, perks, reputation, sometimes a horse. The Groschen is the headline number, but the side benefits often matter more long-term than the cash. Still, when you are broke in Troskowitz and staring down the price of a recipe or a repair, a few quick quests are the fastest honest way to get liquid.

Alchemy Potions Worth Brewing and Selling

Alchemy is the closest thing the game has to free money. Herbs grow everywhere and cost nothing to pick, you get access to a bench almost right away (Bozhena's place first, then Troskowitz), and every potion you brew can be sold to an apothecary. The output scales with your skill, so the better you get, the more each batch is worth.

Quality is everything

Each potion has four quality levels: Weak, Normal, Strong, and Henry at the top. Higher quality means stronger effects and a higher sale price, so it pays to follow the recipe closely. A few things drag quality down: a mistake at the bench, using dried herbs, or using old herbs with red condition. Using at least one fresh herb helps, and there are perks later that smooth this out (Secret of Equilibrium handles the dried-herb penalty, for example). Early on, just aim for Strong by nailing the timing on your boils and grinds.

The best early potions to brew for profit

You want recipes whose ingredients are common and free. The standouts are Lion, Marigold Decoction, Saviour Schnapps, and Chamomile Decoction. Sage, mint, nettle, marigold, chamomile, and belladonna are all over the map, so you can gather a stack while running between objectives without going out of your way.

Here is a quick table of the potions worth your time early on. The base values are for Strong quality; what a merchant actually pays is lower than that and swings with haggling, your reputation, and your Speech.

| Potion | Ingredients | Base value (Strong) | Why brew it | |---|---|---|---| | Lion (perfume) | 2 Sage, 2 Mint | ~70 | Easy herbs, sells high, also boosts charisma | | Marigold Decoction | 1 Nettle, 2 Marigold | ~50 | Cheap healing potion you will use yourself | | Chamomile Decoction | 2 Chamomile, 1 Sage | ~35 | Dirt-cheap herbs, quick sell | | Saviour Schnapps | 1 Nettle, 2 Belladonna | ~35 | You need these to save anyway, so brew extras | | Buck's Blood | 1 St. John's Wort, 1 Comfrey, 1 Dandelion | ~55 | Stamina buff with a decent price |

Lion is the headline. Two sage and two mint, both growing in big patches near the Troskowitz apothecary's own garden, and you turn out a batch that fetches a nice price. With decent haggling, a run of four Strong Lions can bring in a healthy chunk of change from herbs that cost you nothing but time.

Brew in bulk

The right perks let you squeeze more bottles out of a single craft. The Alchemist line (Alchemist II and up) bumps your yield per brew, so one trip to the bench can spit out several potions instead of one. That is the difference between alchemy being a side hobby and a real money printer.

Sell smart

Take the potions to an apothecary, not a general merchant, and haggle the price up. Potions stack, so you can offload a big batch in a single trade. Do not bother selling the rare stuff you brewed for a specific use (Saviour Schnapps you should mostly keep for saving). Offload the common ones you can replace in five minutes of herb-picking, and your apothecary keeps paying you for the same free plants over and over.

Bandit Camps and Treasure Maps Worth Raiding

Bandit camps pull double duty. You clear them for quest credit and reputation, and then you strip them for gear and gold. Most camps have a chest or two, and quite a few are tied to treasure maps that point you at a bigger stash somewhere out in the woods.

Loot the bodies first

The bandits themselves are usually the best haul. Strip the armor and weapons off every body, with the same rules as before: keep the pieces worth more than about 100 Groschen, leave the junk. Gauntlets, helmets, and breastplates are the high-value, lower-weight picks. Once you are swimming in carry weight problems, a horse lets you load up everything and ride it straight to a blacksmith.

The Vidlak bandit treasure

This is the earliest big score most players stumble into. During the Lackey side quest (which you also do while hunting for the dog, Mutt), you hit a bandit camp northwest of Tachov on a cliff. The leader drops the Vidlak Bandit's Map. Read it, then head to the hollow tree north of Vidlak Pond and follow the stream down a short way. There is a chest sitting in the reeds with about 300 Groschen and a Golden Crucifix worth around 1,430. That single chest is one of the best early-game boosts you can grab, and you can reach it from basically the start of the open world.

The Gules chain chests

The Jaunt follow-ups with Gules (covered above) send you through a string of bandit camps. Each one has loot, and the last one, Casper's camp, holds that roughly 1,739-Groschen chest once you lift his keys. Do the whole chain in one push and you walk out with the quest rewards, plus a pile of sellable armor, plus the chest cash. That is a very good afternoon.

Treasure maps in general

As you poke around side content, you will find more treasure maps. They are drawn on purpose to be unhelpful, so half the work is just figuring out what hill or bend in the river the scribble is showing you. The reward is usually worth the head-scratching. Keep the maps in your inventory and solve them when you happen to be in the right part of the map instead of going out of your way.

Pick your fights

Some camps have more or better-armed bandits than others. Early on, do not be too proud to come back later, or to draw a couple of them out one at a time instead of charging the whole group. A camp you clear with a sliver of health and a pile of free armor is a win. A camp that kills you is just a reload.

Investing Groschen Into Trade Perks and Haggling

The single best long-term money move in the game is pouring points into the Speech tree's trade perks and getting good at haggling. Gear and quests give you one-time payouts. Better prices give you a percentage on every transaction for the rest of the game, and that adds up fast.

How haggling actually works

When you have items in your cart at a merchant, hold the close-deal button instead of tapping it. A bar pops up and you can drag the price up when selling or down when buying. The merchant then accepts, counters, or loses patience. There is a patience indicator above and below the price bar, and the bigger your ask, the faster it fills. Let it fill all the way and the merchant walks, you lose reputation, and the haggle is done.

The move is to push in small steps. Tiny asks almost always land, and they add up over hundreds of sales. Closing the haggle menu without a deal burns patience hard, so commit once you start. And every so often, give the merchant a deal in their favor. Tipping them a little raises your reputation, and high reputation is what unlocks the best prices in the first place.

The Speech perks worth taking

Buying and selling in this game is governed by Speech, and the trade perks all live in that tree. The ones that pay for themselves:

• Artisan: 10 percent better prices on weapons, armor, and clothing. This is the workhorse perk, since loot is your biggest income stream.
• Polished Wares: another 10 percent on items in perfect condition (98 percent or higher). Stack it with Artisan and a clean piece of gear sells for 20 percent more. This is why repairing your loot before you sell it matters.
• Silver Tongue: +4 Speech when haggling. A bigger gap between you and the merchant means more deals land.
• Final Offer: one extra chance to bargain after the merchant loses patience. Basically a free redo when you push too hard.
• Hustler and Partner in Crime: make selling stolen goods easier. Hustler is the early one; Partner in Crime (level 20) lets you sell stolen items to anyone with no detection at all.
• Ladies' Man: 15 percent discount buying from female merchants, plus a Speech bonus. A solid pickup if you buy a lot.
• Jack of All Trades: +2 to all skill checks, including haggling, and double Speech XP from those checks. Good everywhere, not just at the shop.

Reputation and appearance

Your Speech number is only part of the equation. Reputation with the local merchants swings the price range, and so does how you look. Walk in clean, in decent clothes, and the merchants start from a better baseline. Stumble in bloody and in torn gear and the numbers get worse before you even open your mouth.

When to invest

Grab these perks as soon as you can, especially Artisan and Polished Wares. The Trosky region is where money is tightest, so the percentage gains matter most there. By the time you reach Kuttenberg the economy loosens up a lot, but a fat Speech stat and clean haggling habits still mean you pay less for the good gear and pull more out of every sale. The cheapest lesson in the whole game: never tap to close a deal when you could hold and haggle instead.