Elder Scrolls Online - Crafting Guide for New Players

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Target Audience
This Crafting Guide for The Elder Scrolls Online (v5.0.9) is aimed at totally New Players:
  • You don't want to just grind, but also quest and play the game.
  • You are willing to spend some time up front setting up your crafting.
  • You want some direction for what to do next in managing your crafters.
If you are in a hurry to maximize your crafting skills for whatever reason, then you can of course grind and shop for the resources you need. We will omit such strategies because they can be applied at any time to accelerate your progress. Instead, we will assume:
  • You are a new player, presumably with a new account, so you will start with very few resources.
  • If we actually suggest grinding, it won't be endless but will have a definite short-term goal.
  • We will not simply suggest you beg for resources or favours from established players. If we suggest you ask for something, it will be a common and basically free resource.
Do This First
The very first thing you should do is actually decide what you want out of Crafting in the first place.
  • Upgrading Gear
    • If for no other reason, you should have one crafter who can cheaply (i.e., with the fewest possible materials) upgrade your gear from green to blue to purple to gold. Once gear is Bound to you, it cannot be transferred to someone else to upgrade, so you have to do it yourself. Without the appropriate Passive Skills, the cost in materials is pretty high.
  • Gold
    • Daily Writs can award a lot of gold over time. You will want to steadily level up all your Crafters because the gold award is based on the character's level, and not their actual Crafting skill.
    • You can just leave your Supporting Crafters at the most basic level, possibly not even put any Skill Points into them at all. The materials and Writ rewards can be converted into gold, but if you want a really low-maintenance no-fuss source of straight gold income, just leave them all at the basic level.
  • Writ Vouchers
    • You will need to decide how much and how quickly you want these.
    • Remember that once you have "enough" and reached the target of how many vouchers you need, you basically don't need to grind them out. So if your time frame is very long, you can relax and not grind so much.
    • If you have a lot of crafters at high or maximum tier, you may run a severe materials shortage that can be very annoying to overcome, such as finding Violet Coprinus for Alchemy daily writ turn-ins. And depending on guild store market conditions, running around to look for and buy materials at a reasonable price can consume valuable time; and buying them at an unreasonable price can severely undermine your overall profitability.
  • Crafting Gear
    • Trait Research can take a very long time, long enough that in the meantime you could have already acquired a set of gear from dungeons or adventuring or Guild Stores.
    • If crafting your own gear is the main thing you want from Crafting, make sure you're actually going to use that gear because the time and effort to get there can be significant.
    • Research anything you can get your hands on immediately as the initial Trait research times are short.
    • Meanwhile, look at what Traits you would like on your gear and try to get that Trait research out of the way because the time to research a Trait can rapidly increase to literally weeks. For anything other than Nirnhoned, Crafters will often craft you an item to use for research, either for free or a modest tip, as the Trait material is plentiful and cheap and they just need to make a Level 1 item. I still recommend you at least offer to front the materials if you can or tip them by giving them back Raw materials in the same quantity.
    • Except for Nirnhoned gear, do not buy any trait material. Over time you will get vast amounts and many crafters have literally thousands in the Crafting Bag. This is one of those things where asking for some might get you flooded with too many stacks.
  • Crafting Furnishings - In addition to what we suggest here, you'll need to keep an eye out for sources of special furnishing materials (such as Culanda Lacquer) that cannot be gathered, acquired from Hirelings, or awarded from Daily Writ rewards.
Planning Your Characters and Account
General Help

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