I like completing lists of furnishing plans, but I'm starting to give up hope of ever collecting even 90% of the furnishing plans in this game. I wish furnishing plans were more like the food & drink recipes: a long project for the rare ones, but where I can at least find an unknown recipe if I search 10 guild traders.

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ZOS, I like collecting things, even if I never use them. I like the search, I like the satisfaction of finding the perfect thing either by farming or for a good price in a guild store, I like providing a service to my guildmates by crafting furnishings for them. I'm enjoying the hunt for House motifs and it feels rewarding to run around pickpocketing people. Furnishings plans.. not so much, anymore.

Pre-Morrowind, it was pretty awesome. I was able to pick up some purples out in the world. The 10-voucher purple envelopes had a good chance of dropping unknown plans, and the cost in mats + the writ (or foregone income by not selling a dropped writ) meant a lot of crafters could break even by selling their unwanted purple plans for 10-25k on PC-NA. 10-25k is affordable - a person can save that up, go on a larceny spree, or sell off gold tempers in zone chat, and it's an impulse purchase for a good chunk of the player base. A nice 100-voucher writ could get 10 envelopes, and it was exciting to open them. For motifs I was working on Akaviri and only had one or two Mazzatun pages, but it was a long-term goal.

Since Morrowind, trying to collect plans has been *** awful, profanity fully appropriate. Not only are the drop rates on Morrowind purples atrocious, not only are BA motifs broken (still batting zero for these and Morrowind paintings), but the increased cost for the purple envelopes decimated the plan market. I'm sure devs much better data than I do, but the supply of purples has dried up in part because it's difficult to sell a plan (that isn't redguard or House) for over 25k gold, and the break-even point for unwanted purples is now closer to 30-40k per plan on PC-NA despite falling prices on writs worth less than 20 vouchers. Even at 25k the plans take weeks to sell, filling up a sales slot that I could have used to make 50k+ from mats over the same amount of time. It's not rewarding to open four envelopes to get only one unknown recipe when you know the other three plans won't sell for anywhere close to the price you paid to get them. (I'm sure it's worse on console.)

Put another way: between February and May, I learned about half of the available Homestead purples (as of today, 221 of 383), and currently have 856 of the 1045 Homestead patterns on my crafter (about 4/5). Between June and now, I've learned 8/150 of the Morrowind purples, all of which are daedric - and therefore cheap - but only 55 of the 290 available Morrowind patterns (1/5).

Something needs to change, whether that "something" is drop rates, envelope prices, or the writ->voucher formula. Back in January, one of the devs said that they want housing to be a long time investment, and I'm a-okay with that. I have 2.5k hours in this game since July 2016, I'm 9/9 on all crafts as of August, and I farm 9-10 hours a week for fun. I'm okay with this taking time! But if I'm having trouble, that means lots of people are having even more trouble and that's not okay.

tl;dr Morrowind and purple homestead plans are difficult to find, in an un-fun way, for players who aren't rolling in gold. Please improve this.


Anyone else with suggestions/anecdata/commiseration?

(All furniture plans counted by the Furniture Catalogue add-on, which I strongly recommend for PC users - the list is searchable and you can link the item or the recipe in chat. I use purples as the reference point because they're easier to obtain than dropped gold plans, and they range from cheap wood elf stuff to the rare redguard and House furnishings.)