Each of my characters has their own house. Some of them are huge noble homes, some are small 2 or 3 room homes, whatever fits who they are and what their needs are. When I am not actively playing them, I take them to their own home until I want to use them again.

I keep 4 small housing chests in each of their homes for transferring items between my characters, and Baron Jangleplume for their banking needs.

I usually have a kitchen or dining area, a bathroom, and a bedroom that I pretend they use.

If there is an addon that makes them eat/sleep I am not aware of it but would be interested in checking it out if there is one.

The houses are for decorating/making your own unique build from scratch. If you have not done so yet I recommend visiting homes listed in Home Tours (or just watch some videos if you do not want visiting other people's houses). You will be amazed by how creative many players are.

Glorious_Platypus wrote: »

I don't really struggle with the creativity side of things, I struggle being able to be creative. Like there's a whole system of crafting and getting decor items, etc, in place that I am still very unfamiliar with. Like I have some furniture pieces but only like.... 7. Out of thousands, maybe? And most of those are random pieces of plants, lol.

Furnishings are split into categories base on regions/race. You can find a lot of information on UESP. For example these are Alinor furnishings: https://en.uesp.net/wiki/Online:Alinor_Furnishings

Some furnishings are craftable, some come from antiquity leads, some can be bought from merchants in various zones (Home Goods merchants), and some are tied to achievements. And there is a whole housing community in ESO.

It's not possible to make a 'survival mode' addon like you're requesting for ESO. Addons can only change the UI (and then only in ways ZOS allows), they can't add, remove or change game mechanics. Maybe someone could fake it: put bars on screen for hunger and tiredness which gradually increase as you spend time away from home or go without eating and reset when you do those things, but it would be entirely fake, with no consequences for ignoring them and no benefits to looking after them.

The other option is to role-play it, which I know a lot of people do. For example have your character go back home at the end of each day (when you're about to log off), or in-between adventures if, like me, you often need to log off in the middle of a delve or something where it would be unrealistic for the character (and annoying for you) to go back home.

Houses are mostly for role-playing and because some people find it fun to decorate them (you might not be one of them and that's ok, but trust me when I say some people will spend huge amounts of time and money doing very creative things with furnishings). There's also some functional furnishings you can add, but only a few, most furniture is just for decoration. You can find a list of the functional ones here: https://en.uesp.net/wiki/Online:Services_Furnishings

Glorious_Platypus wrote: »

I like the idea of each character having their own place. But seems really expensive.

Confused about chest usage, though, since you mentioned it, and that'd be what I am most worried about. Chests in each character's house are not, or they are, shared between houses? Do I have to use only a special chest that has cross house functionality?

First things to know is officially you can't assign houses to characters. All characters on your account have full access and permissions to all the houses you own. Giving each one their own home is purely a role-play choice. (One nice thing about that is you can decide how you want to manage it - my two main characters started out sharing a house, then got their own ones later when I could afford it. One of my characters doesn't have her own house because she travels around too much for it to be worth it, but she has permission to use my other character's houses any time she needs to.)

There's only a few chests you can actually put items into - the ones bought with writ vouchers, tel var stones or crowns (and one unlocked by levelling up): https://en.uesp.net/wiki/Online:Services_Furnishings/Storage They're all shared between houses. If you put the same chest in 2 different houses all the items inside will be accessible from both houses.

I have not used this, I cannot speak to its quality, but this is what I found when I looked up "survival" on minion: https://www.esoui.com/downloads/info4147-RolePlayNeeds-TamrielSurvival.html#info

Soarora wrote: »

I have not used this, I cannot speak to its quality, but this is what I found when I looked up "survival" on minion: https://www.esoui.com/downloads/info4147-RolePlayNeeds-TamrielSurvival.html#info

Ha! I was thinking there's probably an addon for this. And you found it.