Gamer created a handy guide for finding all the Barenziah Stones in Skyrim and claims you'll "definitely thank him later"
Some quests are memorable for their story, and some are memorable for making players grab a notebook. "Thank Me Later" falls into the second category: two dozen identical purple stones scattered across Skyrim without a single map marker.
One player put together a compact printable checklist covering all 24 locations of the Stones of Barenziah, and it turned out to be exactly what many Skyrim fans needed. Vex hands out the quest at the Thieves Guild in Riften, but she doesn't give any hints about where to look. Stones sit in Jorrvaskr, the Thalmor Embassy, the Dark Brotherhood Sanctuary, the Palace of the Kings, Reachcliff Cave, and over a dozen other spots that a player could easily go an entire playthrough without ever visiting.
The real problem isn't finding the stones, it's keeping track of them. The game doesn't show a counter until the quest gets activated through a conversation with Vex, and in older versions, collecting all the stones before that conversation could break the quest completion entirely. The typical story goes something like this: eighteen stones found by accident over forty hours, then the last six require revisiting every single location all over again.
The reward explains all this masochism. After turning in the stones to Vex, the Dragonborn gets sent after the Crown of Barenziah, which grants the hidden Prowler's Profit perk – a massive boost to the quantity and quality of gems found in loot. In practice, that means pulling several flawless diamonds out of burial urns and completely breaking the economy: one Nordic ruin can wipe out every merchant inventory in a city.
There are tricks too. Stones can be picked up several at a time by spamming the interact button (easiest with Slow Time shout active), and PC players have mods that add quest markers for every stone or even warp players straight to the next one after grabbing the current one. The console route is the fastest of all: a string of player.moveto commands with the stone IDs carries a character through all 24 locations in a couple of minutes.
There's a certain irony in how the later a player completes the set, the less useful the reward becomes. By the time someone finds the last stone, they usually already have enchanted rings, maxed speech, and a chest full of gold, and flawless diamonds from urns just turn into pretty clutter. The ideal scenario is finishing the quest around level ten, when a hundred septims still mean something.
The Stones of Barenziah remain the only quest in Skyrim that gets completed with a spreadsheet instead of a sword.
