Elder Scrolls Online - Crafting Guide - Main Crafter

This is part of our Elder Scrolls Online Crafting Guide for New Players.

Planning Your Characters and Account: Main Crafter

Your Main Crafter -- the character who will ultimately do the most demanding crafting -- should also be the character with which you do most of your adventuring. Such a character will generally accumulate an excessive amount of Skill Points over time, enough to fully fund your combat skills, master all crafts, and still have points left over.

However, this is over the long-term. And you may decide along the way that you actually don't want this character to be your main adventuring character.

• You can change a character's Race and Alliance, but you are stuck with their Class.
• The biggest commitments for the Main Crafter are Trait Research, Motifs, and Master Provisioning Writ Recipes.
• The sooner you identify who your Main Crafter will be, the sooner you can start accumulating Research and Motifs on them. Research, in particular, takes literally months.
• You can put these off, but motifs and recipes will cost you inventory space to do so if you are unwilling to risk just getting the motif or recipe again later.

In the early game you'll likely have a shortage of Skill Points. There are various ways to mitigate this:

• You can spread out the crafting skills over all your crafters and slowly improve your Main Crafter as Skill Points become available. In the meantime, you can focus on Trait Research, preferably maximizing your ability to research in all four areas of Blacksmithing, Clothing, Jewelry, and Woodworking.
• You can save some points by just concentrating on your core skills, ignoring Passive skills for the moment, and if necessary Rededicate (respec) your character to recover skill points in obsolete skills.
• You can chase Skyshards, getting easy ones that don't require much or any combat at all. This, however, will likely take you to various zones and for some players it can ruin their sense of story progression and discovery.
• You can grind out some early levels, such as at the dolmens in Alik'r where players do dolmens pretty much 24/7.
• If you are in a busy guild, typically a few people will be in Alik'r at all times of the day, and you can use the Guild Roster to teleport to them. Once there you can join a dolmen group and teleport to the other players in the party to reach the Wayshrines that are closest to the three dolmens.

Another option is to have a dedicated character as your Main Crafter, but that would require that you level both your adventurer and the Main Crafter, in order to have enough Skill Points on the Main Crafter.

A final option is to simply not worry too much about Research and Motifs IF you are not worried about getting Vouchers from Master Writs.

• Instead of crafting your gear sets, you can just use overland or dungeon gear sets.
• Motifs and Research help you complete Master Writs for Blacksmithing, Clothing, Jewelry, and Woodworking.
• If you are willing to acquire vouchers much more slowly, you can delay or forgo doing Master Writs for these skills. The other crafting skills also have Master Writs, but they reward very, very, small amounts of Vouchers in comparison.
• In any case, until your trait Research is high and your Motif knowledge is wide, the probability of you being able to complete a Master Writ is slim. The time and cost involved really can be excessive.