Mastering Crafting: Tips for Success in The Elder Scrolls Online (ESO)
In The Elder Scrolls Online (ESO), crafting plays a pivotal role in shaping your character’s power, usefulness, and overall experience. Whether you are looking for ESO Gold to craft powerful weapons and armor, brew potions, or enchant items, mastering the crafting system can greatly enhance your gameplay. Crafting is not only a way to become more self-sufficient but also a lucrative way to make gold by selling rare and valuable items.
Understanding Crafting in ESO
ESO offers seven different crafting disciplines, each specializing in a particular set of items or utilities. They are split between “Equipment Crafting” and “Consumable Crafting.” Knowing which discipline aligns with your goals is the first step toward crafting mastery.
Equipment Crafting
- Blacksmithing – Used for creating heavy armor and metal-based weapons such as swords, axes, and daggers.
- Clothing – Tailors light armor (magicka-based) and medium armor (stamina-based) using materials like cloth and leather.
- Woodworking – For crafting staves, shields, and bows. This is essential for many damage-dealing classes.
Consumable Crafting
- Alchemy – Allows you to craft potions and poisons that provide temporary boosts or deal damage over time.
- Enchanting – Enchants gear with special effects such as increasing damage, defense, or stat boosts.
- Provisioning – The culinary craft that creates food and drink to temporarily boost health, stamina, or magicka.
- Jewelry Crafting – Lets you craft rings and necklaces with unique bonuses and traits.
Essential Crafting Tips for Beginners
Crafting in ESO can feel overwhelming at first, but with the right approach, you can quickly master the basics and make crafting work for you. Here are some essential tips to get you started:
1. Invest Skill Points Wisely
Each crafting profession has its own skill line, which unlocks various abilities and passives as you invest skill points. Initially, you may want to focus on just one or two crafting disciplines to avoid spreading your skill points too thin. For example, if you’re a damage dealer, investing in blacksmithing or woodworking might make more sense, while healers and magicka users may want to prioritize clothing and enchanting.
The key abilities to focus on early include:
- Keen Eye – This makes gathering materials easier by highlighting nodes.
- Metal Extraction, Unraveling, and Lumberjack Hireling – These abilities increase your yield from gathering materials.
- Improved Crafting – Unlock higher tiers of crafting materials as you level up.
2. Gather Materials Everywhere
One of the best things about ESO’s crafting system is that materials are found everywhere in the game world. Whether you’re completing quests, exploring dungeons, or simply traveling between towns, you will come across crafting materials. Be sure to gather them whenever possible.
Each zone in ESO has different tiers of materials, with higher-level zones yielding better-quality resources. To speed up the gathering process, it’s worth unlocking the Keen Eye passive in each crafting line to help you spot nodes more easily.
3. Research Traits Early
Traits in ESO are essential if you want to craft specialized gear, but learning them takes time. To research a trait, you need to find an item with that trait and then research it on a crafting station. This process can take anywhere from six hours to over a month for advanced traits, so it’s best to start early.
Here’s a strategy for trait research:
- Always have something researching in every crafting discipline. The process continues even when you are offline.
- Prioritize researching traits for the gear or weapons you use the most. For instance, stamina-based characters should focus on researching traits for medium armor, while tanks should focus on heavy armor traits.
- As you progress, research times increase, so managing these early on will save you significant time in the long run.
4. Use Crafting Writs for Experience
Crafting writs are daily quests that require you to craft specific items in exchange for experience, gold, and materials. These writs are an excellent way to level up your crafting skills without wasting too many resources.
To unlock crafting writs:
- Find the crafting certification NPCs in major cities, who will guide you through a brief tutorial on each crafting discipline.
- Once certified, you can pick up daily writ quests at boards located in any major town.
Crafting writs provide materials and experience that can significantly boost your crafting levels, making them a must for any serious crafter.
5. Invest in a Crafting Bag (ESO Plus)
One of the most valuable tools for any crafter is the Crafting Bag, a perk granted to ESO Plus subscribers. This bag provides unlimited storage for all crafting materials, removing the need to manage limited inventory space constantly.
If you plan to craft seriously, the Crafting Bag is invaluable, as materials from all crafting disciplines can quickly fill up your normal inventory. Having easy access to a massive storage space allows you to gather and stockpile as many materials as you want.
Advanced Crafting Strategies
Once you have the basics down, you can move on to more advanced crafting strategies that will help you master the system and become a top-tier crafter in ESO.
1. Maximize Your Crafting Passives
Every crafting profession has essential passives that will make you more efficient. Here are some of the must-have passives for advanced crafting:
- Hirelings: Hirelings send you materials daily, and upgrading this passive increases the frequency and quality of what they deliver.
- Extraction passives: These passives boost the amount of material you retrieve from deconstructing items, which is especially important for leveling up your crafting faster.
- Efficiency passives: These reduce the amount of materials required for crafting, saving you valuable resources over time.
By unlocking these passives, you will minimize material waste and maximize your crafting efficiency.
2. Specialize in Set Crafting
In ESO, specific crafting stations throughout the world allow you to create set gear. Set gear provides powerful bonuses when multiple pieces are worn together, and these bonuses can be a game-changer for your character’s build. However, crafting set gear requires knowledge of multiple traits.
To master set crafting:
- Focus on researching the required number of traits for the sets you want to create. Some sets require knowledge of as many as 9 traits, so it can be a time-consuming process.
- Once you can craft set gear, you can offer your services to other players, creating custom sets for a fee. This can be a lucrative way to make gold.
3. Craft and Sell Potions, Food, and Glyphs
If you’re looking to make gold through crafting, consumables like potions, food, and glyphs are in high demand. These items are constantly used by players, meaning there’s always a market for them. To be successful in selling consumables:
- Provisioning: Focus on crafting popular food items that offer long-lasting buffs. Certain foods like Orzorga’s Smoked Bear Haunch are highly sought after.
- Alchemy: Create potions that align with popular builds. For example, stamina potions and health potions sell quickly because all players need them.
- Enchanting: Craft glyphs to boost weapon damage or enhance resistances, and sell them in guild traders.
By crafting and selling consumables, you can generate a steady income from other players who need these items for their daily gameplay.
Conclusion
Mastering the crafting system in The Elder Scrolls Online takes time and dedication, but the rewards are well worth the effort. Buy Elder Scrolls Online Gold, gathering materials, researching traits, and using advanced strategies, you can become a master crafter in ESO. Not only will you be able to provide your character with top-tier gear and consumables, but you can also establish yourself as a valuable asset to your guild and the ESO community.