How does a non-crafter, casual player in this game make enough gold (in game currency) to…

Zombocalypse

… to purchase his basic supplies and equipment from players who are actually in to trading?

I’m gonna be a very solo player 95% of the time I’m in the game. But I can surely contribute to the player-based economy by purchasing from them my food buffs, potions, and gear. I’m not looking to get ultra high end gear. Just stuff that will carry me through as I travel in Tamriel.

So… Just questing? What?

My first character will not do any crafting.

gamma71

Kill stuff

Nerouyn

You might be best off just begging in zone chat.

I'm not playing currently. Might start up again soon'ish. But I and I'm sure many others frequently make gear for new players.

If you've been playing for any length of time, then you probably have an abundance of spare materials of every level, and also know how much of a difference having decent gear makes to the levelling experience.

When I level alts - though I seriously hope I never have to do that again now - I make level green level 4 gear to get me to level 10. Then blue level 10 gear to get me to 20. Then purple level 30 and 40 sets. All with accompanying same level white jewellery.

Commit to 2 weapons and either mag or stamina and there are obvious best crafted sets.

Even with 10 level gaps like that, matched set bonuses will typically outperform whatever random gear you end up with from quests and drops.

JavaRen

Farm some mats and sell in a low end trade guild.

Zombocalypse

JavaRen wrote: »

Farm some mats and sell in a low end trade guild.

Shouldn’t I just sell those to NPC vendors? Is that too painstaking?

Nerouyn

Zombocalypse wrote: »

JavaRen wrote: »

Farm some mats and sell in a low end trade guild.

Shouldn’t I just sell those to NPC vendors? Is that too painstaking?

Definitely not.

Google eso pc trade centre, and / or listen in zone chat and you'll get an idea from people offering to buy materials as to what's currently good to farm.

Sometimes common materials go for impressive sums.

Syldras

Depends on whether you like to play a criminal character or not. Stealing is very lucrative.

Zombocalypse

Nerouyn wrote: »

Zombocalypse wrote: »

JavaRen wrote: »

Farm some mats and sell in a low end trade guild.

Shouldn’t I just sell those to NPC vendors? Is that too painstaking?

Definitely not.

Google eso pc trade centre, and / or listen in zone chat and you'll get an idea from people offering to buy materials as to what's currently good to farm.

Sometimes common materials go for impressive sums.

But I have to actually become a crafter in order to obtain even common materials, no?

Zombocalypse

Syldras wrote: »

Depends on whether you like to play a criminal character or not. Stealing is very lucrative.

You know what? Why not? I already mapped out what I want for all eight of my characters in my account. I never restricted any of them into getting into Legerdemain.

How does it work? Sell to thieves guild from your stolen items bag?

JavaRen

Zombocalypse wrote: »

JavaRen wrote: »

Farm some mats and sell in a low end trade guild.

Shouldn’t I just sell those to NPC vendors? Is that too painstaking?

Crafting mats sell to npcs for 2 to 4 gold each. On PCNA guild traders raw ore was about 20 to 40 last I looked, and alchemic flowers go from 40 to 400 each.

Nerouyn

Zombocalypse wrote: »

But I have to actually become a crafter in order to obtain even common materials, no?

Alchemical materials which are some of the best selling because potions are consumable and always in demand, no.

They're level-less and no skill is required to harvest them.

Equipment materials are more complicated.

If I recall correctly then no specific skill is required to harvest them. They do have levels and will spawn half at your character level and half at your max crafting skill level (by skill points invested in the relevant skill) for the associated craft.

You can sell those mats raw. There is a market for them. Though largely useless to players, the refinement process, which is affected by crafting skill, has a chance to reward bonus rarity upgrade materials. That's the good stuff.

FYI levelling equipment crafting in this game doesn't require crafting. Deconstructing looted equipment is the most efficient way to level them. But that is also affected by level of equipment you decon. If you level yourself to max level first (level 50 and 160 champion points) then you'll need to decon less gear to max crafting, assuming you ever care to do that.

Alchemy and cooking are levelled by making potions and food respectively.

Zombocalypse

Nerouyn wrote: »

Zombocalypse wrote: »

But I have to actually become a crafter in order to obtain even common materials, no?

Alchemical materials which are some of the best selling because potions are consumable and always in demand, no.

They're level-less and no skill is required to harvest them.

Equipment materials are more complicated.

If I recall correctly then no specific skill is required to harvest them. They do have levels and will spawn half at your character level and half at your max crafting skill level (by skill points invested in the relevant skill) for the associated craft.

You can sell those mats raw. There is a market for them. Though largely useless to players, the refinement process, which is affected by crafting skill, has a chance to reward bonus rarity upgrade materials. That's the good stuff.

FYI levelling equipment crafting in this game doesn't require crafting. Deconstructing looted equipment is the most efficient way to level them. But that is also affected by level of equipment you decon. If you level yourself to max level first (level 50 and 160 champion points) then you'll need to decon less gear to max crafting, assuming you ever care to do that.

Alchemy and cooking are levelled by making potions and food respectively.

Awesome. So harvesting in demand alchemical ingredients will likely have me meet alchemist players who will buy them from me?

If I may ask, what are some harvestable ingredients that lots of alchemists would really want?

Nerouyn

Zombocalypse wrote: »

You know what? Why not? I already mapped out what I want for all eight of my characters in my account. I never restricted any of them into getting into Legerdemain.

How does it work? Sell to thieves guild from your stolen items bag?

It's a mixed bag.

What you want to do is max legedermain quickly. The higher your skill, the better the loot. However there is a daily limit to how much you can sell, which can be increased with skill point investment as you raise legedermain skill.

If you're subscribed or have access to the Necrom chapter, there is an indoor corridor with lots of handy stuff in containers to steal, with no guards ever entering that corridor. Also a nearby thieves guild to sell the loot.

However, there's two kinds of loot and you want to pay attention to them.

There's junk loot which sells for 40 / 100 / 250 / 1000 in successive rarities, and also things like furnishing plans.

Necrom being old now, most of the furnishing plans you'd find there wouldn't sell for a huge amount but it would be worth checking the pc trade centre if you loot any purple and sometimes even blue plans. You might get lucky and hit paydirt.

There are better locations for making money from stealing but getting legedermain quickly to 20 is a grind worth getting out of the way ASAP.

Zombocalypse

Legerdemain and gathering plants seem to be two options right now.

AlnilamE

In addition, sell all your trash loot. When you kill things, they drop gold or mats, but also equipment. If you are not leveling crafting (though you could do this passively), instead of deconstructing them for mats, you can vendor them to NPCs. Some set items are worth selling to other players if they are in the right traits, but the vast majority you are better off vendoring to save inventory space.

Scrying can also give you some money, particularly the one-off purple leads available in each zone. But that's something you need to enjoy doing (which I do).

coop500

Scrying, if you have ESO+ and join the guild for it in Solitude (Western Skyrim) can be a decent gold maker without needing other players. You can just dig up treasures that sell for a nice sum.

Soarora

Zombocalypse wrote: »

Nerouyn wrote: »

Zombocalypse wrote: »

But I have to actually become a crafter in order to obtain even common materials, no?

Alchemical materials which are some of the best selling because potions are consumable and always in demand, no.

They're level-less and no skill is required to harvest them.

Equipment materials are more complicated.

If I recall correctly then no specific skill is required to harvest them. They do have levels and will spawn half at your character level and half at your max crafting skill level (by skill points invested in the relevant skill) for the associated craft.

You can sell those mats raw. There is a market for them. Though largely useless to players, the refinement process, which is affected by crafting skill, has a chance to reward bonus rarity upgrade materials. That's the good stuff.

FYI levelling equipment crafting in this game doesn't require crafting. Deconstructing looted equipment is the most efficient way to level them. But that is also affected by level of equipment you decon. If you level yourself to max level first (level 50 and 160 champion points) then you'll need to decon less gear to max crafting, assuming you ever care to do that.

Alchemy and cooking are levelled by making potions and food respectively.

Awesome. So harvesting in demand alchemical ingredients will likely have me meet alchemist players who will buy them from me?

If I may ask, what are some harvestable ingredients that lots of alchemists would really want?

Columbine (~1,500 each pc/na). You can also do the South Elsweyr questline to make dragon rheum (~5,000 each) start dropping from dragons and do dragons. You could also do the Looming Shadows worldboss quest in gold coast and sell minotaur motifs (~15,000-120,000 each).

madman65

You could try: https://tamrieltradesecrets.com/popular-farming-routes/ I have chest route in Deshaan that drops Mothers Sorrow items alot.

SilverBride

Nerouyn wrote: »

You might be best off just begging in zone chat.

I wouldn't recommend that. Begging in zone is not usually well received.

DreamyLu

I'm a solo player, chilling only. I don't touch end game. I do quests and/or delves once in a blue moon only. Although those very limited activities, I'm "rich". They key is trading.

Many of the common resources, with a unit base price of 1 or 2 gold, and that we can find everywhere on our way in big quantities, keep selling on trading market for a unit price by far higher. Typical example: rubedite ore.

Also, some resources that are supposed to be rare, but that can be find in big quantities simply because the "source" for those are everywhere, sell for more than 100 times their base price. Typical example: Torchbug Thorax. Based price is 2 gold and they sell around 380 gold for now. Torchbugs are everywhere around us. Just by catching all those on your way, you will be surprised how fast it goes to have a nice little reserve.

All that to say: on my opinion and based on my experience, for a player not doing much like me, trading is a very good solution to build up gold pretty rapidly and maintain a nice income.

XSTRONG

Go into a public dungeon and farm, kill worldbosses, do daily quest for rewards.
Its an easy way to start selling stuff

Just_Attivi

When I was new and without a clue, I did quests, grinded some public dungeons, and occasionally sold hoarded mats to those people advertising to buy a bunch of different things in zones (generally at prices well below what they plan to resell at). But the 'best' way you can both make gold and acquire materials for crafting and such, is just doing your daily crafting writs on every character. Its not a ton of gold, but its consistent, and you often get a lot of basic mats and purple mats, and occasionally gold mats, that often would be the majority of your gold sink when shopping, so it saves you money there too.

Zodiarkslayer

I would recommend crafting, especially provisioning.
It is easy to level, the ingredients are dirty cheap and with the appropiate passives you can get a lot of them for free each day.

So much so, that I, who isn't subbed anymore, have to craft once a week and sell the "junk" food, so that my inventory doesn't clog up.
With 11 total characters I am getting 100k to 130k in sales every week, literally from nothing.

Aliniel

The road to being (kinda) rich:

• Make 22 characters.
• Play a podcast.
• Do daily crafting writs on all of them.

You get 5k raw gold per character from the quest rewards alone. Plus, you get a ton of useful mats, and master writs to sell on the guild traders.

Your characters will slowly level up as you do them too. I occasionally did a random dungeon to speed things up (you mostly want the endgame mats).

This has been my (almost) daily routine for like two years and I'm sitting on over 300 mil gold. I consider this a casual approach. Big whales out there do some serious trading - flipping sales by monitoring low sale posts, etc.

To be honest, 95% of time why I play ESO is to "do something" while I listen to the podcasts - which I do daily. So, this works very well for me. If you do this just for the sake of getting gold, it may get boring for you quite fast.

FriedEggSandwich

I know you said you don't want to do crafting, but daily crafting writs take minutes to complete, and net you 5k gold per day, per character, assuming you do all 7 daily writs. That's just as quest rewards, no selling stuff.

The gold reward from them is not affected by your crafting levels, so you don't need to max out any crafting lines. So if you got 6 toons certified to do all 7 writs (which doesn't take that long), that's 30k gold per day, for about 15-20 mins work. During an event like the current one it would be 60k gold per day.

The only hurdle then would be aquiring the mats to do the writs, but once the surveys start rolling in that becomes easier too, and you also get mats as a reward for the writs. A stack of 200 style materials (obsidian, bone, molybdenum etc) can be bought for about 5k and will last you a while.

You probably do want to level up alchemy and provisioning anyway, because the passives from those skill lines make food and potion effects last longer. 20 mins extra on your food buff will save you a lot of gold in the long run. And the passive even makes XP potions last 20 mins longer.

When it comes to gear, overland sets are pretty good, and cost nothing but time to farm, no crafting needed.
https://eso-sets.com/sets/type/overland

Syldras

Soarora wrote: »

Columbine (~1,500 each pc/na). You can also do the South Elsweyr questline to make dragon rheum (~5,000 each) start dropping from dragons and do dragons.

Interesting that NA prices are higher. On EU, it was around 1000 for a columbine and maybe 3000 for rheum before the event (right now I have no clue). What happened to cornflowers, btw? They were extremely expensive for many years, but the price dropped to 70 each nowadays.

Djennku

Three easy steps for guaranteed gold:
1) kill stuff
2) loot everything
3) sell it to a merchant.

This is guaranteed to give you gold without the hassle of waiting for things to sell off a trader. Gold can be found off enemies too. While it won't make as much from a desireable item off a guild trader, that's still not a guaranteed thing that items sells in the first place.

amig186

When a new zone is added, do the daily delve, wb and incursion quests and sell the motifs that drop from them (in the guild store, not to NPCs). Even some motifs from old content sell decently, like the Assassins League ones from Gold Coast delves. It's worth checking on Tamriel Trade Centre to see which ones are highly priced at the moment.

Thoriorz

Do your research around "daily writs" and focus on that. It's a lot of work at first but then you'll have a solid "passive" daily income.
Do group dungeons, completing quests in them will reward you with 1 skill point, you also exp your skills there and there drop a lot of gear which you can either sell directly to NPCs or deconstruct for xp in carfting... And even if you don't have good gear, often the group finder will team up with players who have no problem conquering the dungeon solo and it's also quite fast... Personally I'd focus on this, run GD, deconstruct gear to get craft xp (occasionally sell to NPCs if you need gold) and slowly did everything around Writs, exp crafting, research traits etc., it's not so much about crafting stuff and selling to players as it, is about the actual leveling and doing daily writs...
I'd recommend a bit of google and youtube about Writs and if you plan on staying with ESO for longer this is a really decent daily income but it takes a lot of work in the beginning...
However if you like ESO and want to play long term I'd definitely recommend exploring everything around Writs.

Tandor

If you're not into competitive content and are soloing then you don't really need to buy anything, just rely on loot drops, treasure chests and quest rewards. The Trainee gear you'll get in the starter zones will be fine for your purpose and you can upgrade them by revisiting those zones when you feel the need to do so.

manukartofanu

Zombocalypse wrote: »

… to purchase his basic supplies and equipment from players who are actually in to trading?

I’m gonna be a very solo player 95% of the time I’m in the game. But I can surely contribute to the player-based economy by purchasing from them my food buffs, potions, and gear. I’m not looking to get ultra high end gear. Just stuff that will carry me through as I travel in Tamriel.

So… Just questing? What?

My first character will not do any crafting.

If you're going to spend 95% of your time just completing quests, then you don't really need gold. The hardest part at the beginning is upgrading your horse (it costs very little, but takes a long time) and your backpack (you'll need around 300,000 gold, which you'll gather while questing). Until you reach 160 Champion Points, it's worth just equipping and using whatever drops from mobs. That way, you'll level up all your armor skill lines. Also, join a guild—there are plenty of guilds that won't require anything from you but will treat you really well, explain everything, and craft for free what would otherwise cost hundreds of thousands of gold on the market.

And yes, for solo play, you need to focus on DPS. Potions and food are very cheap. For example, on my Arcanist, 200 potions cost 11,000 gold, and the best food costs just 2,000 gold. During the time that the food lasts, you'll collect a lot of trash and gold from mobs while doing regular questing. I sell the trash to NPC vendors and end up with a profit.

One more thing for the future: go and complete quests for vanilla dungeons at the Undaunted Enclave. You get 5 transmutation stones for each, and those are a more valuable currency than gold. At some point, you'll want create certain items for the best build anyway.