This is part of our Elder Scrolls Online Crafting Guide for New Players.
A lot of people will say you "need" to get ESO+ for the Crafting Bag. And it is highly recommended because just juggling inventory can cost you hours a day. But you can do without if you manage your materials carefully and aggressively sell or use the excess.
When the Crafting Bag is active (i.e., you have ESO+ active either through a subscription or ESO+ trial period), materials are drawn first from personal inventory, then the Bank, then the Crafting Bag.
But when the Crafting Bag is locked, materials are drawn first from the Crafting Bag, then personal inventory, then the Bank.
Bank
Although it costs a lot, this has quite a high priority for expansion because it is the bottleneck for transferring things back and forth. And some space will have to be allocated for shared resources, such as potions used in Daily Writs for Alchemy.
Housing Storage
Mule Characters
Your crafting characters will double as your mules and main sources of inventory space in the early game are the Bag Space level-up reward, the early ranks of Backpack space, and Mount Training for Capacity. Later, when you have more gold to spare, you can top up the Backpack space to 200.
Levelling up sometimes give rewards that end up taking space because you don't want to delete them. Avoid the level up rewards unless you need the skill points.
Guild Stores
If you don't want to use the Crafting Bag, you will need to sell aggressively. On PC you can use the Tamriel Trade Center (TTC) addon to help you price things to hopefully quickly sell. If you can't move things fast enough, try bartering with friends and guildmates.
A lot of people will say you "need" to get ESO+ for the Crafting Bag. And it is highly recommended because just juggling inventory can cost you hours a day. But you can do without if you manage your materials carefully and aggressively sell or use the excess.
When the Crafting Bag is active (i.e., you have ESO+ active either through a subscription or ESO+ trial period), materials are drawn first from personal inventory, then the Bank, then the Crafting Bag.
But when the Crafting Bag is locked, materials are drawn first from the Crafting Bag, then personal inventory, then the Bank.
Bank
Although it costs a lot, this has quite a high priority for expansion because it is the bottleneck for transferring things back and forth. And some space will have to be allocated for shared resources, such as potions used in Daily Writs for Alchemy.
Housing Storage
Getting all of these is very important for long-term management. You will use them to store Surveys and reserve materials such as one stack of each type of Provisioning Materials so you don't accidentally sell or craft away everything that you might suddenly need.
Mule Characters
Your crafting characters will double as your mules and main sources of inventory space in the early game are the Bag Space level-up reward, the early ranks of Backpack space, and Mount Training for Capacity. Later, when you have more gold to spare, you can top up the Backpack space to 200.
Levelling up sometimes give rewards that end up taking space because you don't want to delete them. Avoid the level up rewards unless you need the skill points.
Guild Stores
If you don't want to use the Crafting Bag, you will need to sell aggressively. On PC you can use the Tamriel Trade Center (TTC) addon to help you price things to hopefully quickly sell. If you can't move things fast enough, try bartering with friends and guildmates.
Experienced Sellers
If you have a stock of good-demand materials, but not the patience or access to a good guild kiosk to move them at a good price, something you can try is to find a veteran trader who does have the experience and guild kiosk access to move them.
What these traders do is make gold from margin. They buy from you for a price that might be near or slightly under the low end of TTC suggested price. This may not seem very good, but consider:
- They are probably looking to buy bulk. As in literally thousands of units. Because they can actually clear it that quickly and still make a profit.
- By trading directly to them, you are not losing gold to listing fees and sales fees.
How they make their gold -- and they can actually make quite a bit of it -- is buy from you but sell at a higher price. Even after listing fees and sales fees, they can make maybe 6%-10%. Which is not a lot, so they try to sell bulk. However they will only buy what they know they can move, so don't expect to find someone who will want everything you have.
Be wary of just partnering with anyone. It's not uncommon to see someone advertising in zone chat wanting to buy unlimited quantities of certain materials -- but at maybe half of what the low end of TTC suggested price is. That's basically a scam. If you wanted to fire-sale your wares you could do it like that yourself too just offering to sell at such discounts in zone.
Provisioning Materials
Track what materials you need to make the food required for your Daily Writs. For the rest, if you need to free up inventory space, consider using one of the crafters with the Brewer or Chef passive to create food and drink, then sell them straight to the NPC vendor. This is especially useful for stolen Provisioning Materials if you don't want to pay to fence them, although the 1 gold piece fee can easily be recovered in profits.
Refining Materials
Track what materials you need to make the food required for your Daily Writs. For the rest, if you need to free up inventory space, consider using one of the crafters with the Brewer or Chef passive to create food and drink, then sell them straight to the NPC vendor. This is especially useful for stolen Provisioning Materials if you don't want to pay to fence them, although the 1 gold piece fee can easily be recovered in profits.
Insane amounts can accumulate over time due to Daily Writ rewards and Hirelings, and then get moved into the Crafting Bag during free ESO+ weeks. This in turn causes new materials to accumulate outside the Crafting Bag once the free ESO+ trials are over.
An aggressive strategy is to save just one full stack of each type of Provisioning Material in Housing Storage, then sell the expensive ones, such as the purple materials or selected materials that might be selling well in guild stores. For the rest, craft food and drink, and sell them to an NPC vendor; depending on guild store market conditions, this can be the most efficient way to handle large volumes of materials that you may have accumulated.
Regularly craft and sell to keep your inventory light; and remember to have a reserve (in Housing Storage, which is not accessible from crafting stations, unlike the Bank) in case you do need to craft something, such as for a Sealed Provisioning Writ.
If you are short of certain materials to complete crafting to vendor, Guild Stores are of course a way to acquire Provisioning Materials and often quite cheaply. Just watch that the cost per unit does not end up causing you to take a loss instead of making a profit.
Refining Materials
Do NOT refine materials (e.g., Raw woods that refine into Sanded woods) until you need them. In this way, you are constantly depleting your supply of refined materials instead of piling up both raw and refined materials in your inventory.
Eventually all your raw materials and refined materials will be out of the Crafting Bag. At that point, you are banking reserves with Surveys.
Surveys
In general, you in fact do NOT want to use your Surveys if you do not have to. Doing a lot of Surveys during ESO+ just puts them into the Crafting Bag, which in turn will put pressure on your inventory when ESO+ is over. Many types of Surveys will obviously take up a lot of inventory space, but in the long run those stacks take up less room than piles of raw and refined materials accumulating in inventory because your tens of thousands of units in the Crafting Bag have to be used first.
Surveys
In general, you in fact do NOT want to use your Surveys if you do not have to. Doing a lot of Surveys during ESO+ just puts them into the Crafting Bag, which in turn will put pressure on your inventory when ESO+ is over. Many types of Surveys will obviously take up a lot of inventory space, but in the long run those stacks take up less room than piles of raw and refined materials accumulating in inventory because your tens of thousands of units in the Crafting Bag have to be used first.
You can implement this strategy once you get some of the Housing Storage.
For Enchanting, you actually want to do your Surveys -- what you are really doing Surveys for are the rarer runes that you need to turn in during your Daily Writs. For example, for Potency X Enchanter Writs you often need Oko not just to craft the Glyph to turn in but also because the Daily Writ asks for a unit of Oko. If you have a lot of Potency X characters, you will likely run a shortfall and if you don't do your Surveys, you will have to buy to make up the difference -- and typically they are very expensive.
During your ESO+ subscription or during ESO+ free trial periods, we recommend you prioritize your Enchanting Surveys so that all the runes you gather get stashed in the Crafting Bag. What you get from Writs and Hirelings and deconstruction typically won't accumulate as aggressively as materials for the other crafts.
Note that you never get a survey in a map you do not have access to. For example, if you do not have the Elsweyr expansion, you cannot get Northern Elsweyr surveys (but you can still get treasure maps for inaccessible locations).
Decide How Much Is Enough
The best inventory management tip is to basically decide when you have enough. Are your Crafting Bags already stacked with literally thousands of materials? Do you have thousands of Writ Vouchers and nothing you really want to buy? Do you have a huge gold reserve?
Then just stop doing too many daily writs, stop collecting every hireling, and stop gathering every node you see. That will considerably slow down the pace at which you get so many materials that you have to juggle it frequently.
Crafting Bag Account
Here's a radical idea -- Have another account.
This account doesn't have to have anything other than the bare minimum to log on and play Elder Scrolls Online. You are not even really going to play the account.
The purpose of this "Crafting Bag Account" is simply to hold all your materials inside the Crafting Bag whenever free ESO+ rolls around. Move absolutely every material over there during free ESO+ -- empty the Crafting Bag on your main account.
Then, whenever your main account needs materials, withdraw them from this account.
The advantage here is any new materials you get from your main account get used first because the Crafting Bag there is empty.
With this setup you can clean up all your surveys, even refine all your materials, as long as everything sits in the Crafting Bag Account.
To transfer materials conveniently you may want your own private guild. To have access to that guild bank you need 10 accounts as members, so during Free Play week, make a bunch of free accounts you will never play and add them to this storage guild.
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