Leveling up crafting takes time. You can expect reaching max level after you reach veteran levels.

Your first choice is whether you try to keep your crafts at such level you can craft equipments for yourself, or you just let crafting level up lower pace. The first choice require you deconstruct all your loot except items having unseen trait, which you naturally put under research. Keep deconstructing and researching. My only advise is NOT to research sturdy nor well-fitted items. Research them later as seventh and eighth researches, when they take many weeks to finish. If you decide to level up crafting slower, you should sell most of them because they give good source of gold. At higher and veteran levels you can catch up as higher level gear gives more points to level up crafts. Crafting requires skill points. You will be badly constrained with skill points to level 40. After that it gets easier.

Crafting uses material tiers. E.g. for blacksmithing the lowest tier is iron, which allows crafting between levels 1..16. Select iron as material and increase the amount of iron until the level is what you desired. When you wnat to craft to level 16, you need to switch to steel. Again, fine tune the level by increasing amount of materials. This gets repeated at levels 26, 36, 46, vr1, vr4, vr7, vr9, vr15. You need to invest skill points to crafting to make gear at higher tiers.

Traits modify your gear. If you e.g. select precise trait, the weapon has extra chance for critical hits. making a sharpened weapon has more armor penetration. Keep researching traits. The earlier you start, the better because trait research uses real time. Learning first trait takes six hours regardless you are logged in or not. Trait learning time always doubles. Second trait for an item takes 12 hours, third 24 etc. To add a trait to gear, you need to have a trait stone and select the trait on crafting board.

Traits also limit crafting of gear ses. You can't make e.g. a sword of Night's Silence set until you have completed researching two traits for swords. To craft Night's Silence items, you need to find it's crafting table. In AD it's north from Harborage at coast, in EP it's south from Harborage, for DC at small island near Hag Fen wayshrine. Invest to skill points to learn traits faster and in parallel.

Gear has style. You can craft first only you native style. When you find a style motif book, read it to learn anew style. Style only changes visual look of gear. It does not affect stats of gear.

Just a few other tips:

• Pick the type of character you want to play for now and end-game and determine what traits that build will need. Research each of those traits on every piece of gear you plan to use first, and don't research a 2nd trait that you will not be using before you do the first that you need. You will get a full set of the traits you need faster even if you have to wait for one of the traits.
• Join all 5 guilds that you can. Many guilds will give you free or cheap items to research with the exact traits/items that you need first.
• To get enough skill points to start early crafting as well as enough killing skills, go get ALL the skyshards for your alliance in a hour or two. There are completely safe/mostly safe skyshards available just by traveling the map. DC has 69 shards for 23 skill points, AD has 54/18, EP has 50/16. You can travel to any 1-50 zone just by travel to player/friend/guild member. You will get all those free skill points plus all the XP just for exploration plus opening all those wayshrines for later questing. With the extra skill points you can apply them to lower research times early.
• If on PC there are several Addons that will keep you straight on what research you need next.
  AI Research Grid - Shows all your research for every character by item-type and trait, plus Motifs
  ResearchAssistant - marks inventory items whether you know the trait or not
  Skyshards - marks them all on your map and whether you collected them or not

If you can't find a reliable crafting buddy, it also works to deconstruct things made by another one of your own characters, so one strategy is to do the same craft on two characters but on one of them only spend points in extraction and the main passives for which tier materials you can use (they won't need research and improvement points like your main crafter unless you have extra points to spend in which case having them research and then remake items for your crafter to research when they're ready can save you bank slots).

The higher the item you craft/deconstruct the greater the 'inspiration points' gained, however if you're doing crafting writs you may not want to invest in higher tiers of materials right away (even if crafting and deconing them would level your craft faster), because you may have trouble obtaining the materials needed if you don't have a character that's ready to venture into those zones. Hides can definitely become a problem with writs (just drop the writ for that day if you can't get it), but that said... if you're sneaky and quick, and careful you can farm in zones over your level of course.

I definitely recommend traveling the roads to get the skyshards you can reach, as well as discovering the 'hidden' crafting stations and the wayshrines closest to them. In the interest of making crafted sets it's best to strategize your research by keeping an even number of traits researched on at least 5 items, so for example rather than ending up with 6 traits on 2 out of 7 armor slots and only 2 or three traits researched on the rest, try to get 2 on everything, then 3 on everything, then maybe switch to focusing on getting 4-6 traits researched on 5 out of 7 armor pieces so you can make full sets of some of the better ones. The 8 trait crafting stations won't be in places you can get to until later in the game though. Do some checking in guild stores if you need to, or even ask in zone chat if someone can make you a researchable item you need, rather than just researching whatever you happen to have picked up if it's not what you really need to spend time researching right now.

And a tip for making gold on crafting writs - the reward gold is based on Character level, while the other items in the reward are based on the craft level and may not be as useful, so if you have a high leveled main character that doesn't craft go ahead and get them certified for writs anyways as they can still turn in a 'sip of magicka' made by your actual crafter and get more gold for it than your lower leveled crafter will get for turning in a 'solution of magicka'. Alchemy and Provisioning writ items don't have to be crafted by the character turning them in at this point, so you can easily make up a batch of baked potatoes or whatever and pass them out to your other characters to turn in for some quick cash each day (this is how I finance my daily horse-training upgrades). At level 6 I'm getting less than 200 for a writ, at level 15 I'm getting 300 per writ, at level 26 I'm getting about 400, and at veteran 3 the reward is over 600, regardless of what level items you're turning in.

AssassinTheMage wrote: »

So, when it comes to researchable traits, what you can research is all based on what crafting station you are at (city in the game)? I have a ton of the research gems, but when I look to research, I have no options to do so.

When you loot pieces of armor or weapons sometimes the description will include a "trait" these are:
Armor: Sturdy - Impenetrable - Reinforced - Well-fitted - Training - Infused - Exploration - Divines - Nirnhoned
Weapon: Powered - Charged - Precise - Infused - Defending - Training - Sharpened - Weighted - Nirnhoned
When you deconstruct one of these they will sometimes yield a gem that can be used to craft items with that trait.

Depending on your crafting passives you will have 1-3 research slots available to you. When you go to a crafting station, the far right tab will be Research. If you have any traited items in your possession (or in your bank) you will be able to see in that tab which traits are "researchable" - you can select it then and begin researching that trait for that type of weapon/armor piece. Once you have researched a trait on that item you can then use the stones to craft weapons/armor with that trait. The catch is that it's item specific - so if you research 'weighted' on Inferno staff you will be able to create a weighted inferno staff, but not a weighted lightening staff, (until you find a weighted lighting staff to research).

You can craft traited items from Any crafting station, once you have done the necessary research (and have the trait stone).

The Hidden Crafting Stations add extra stats and effects to the items crafted there. Wearing 2 items of the set will give you an extra effect, 3 items will give you a second effect, 4 items will give you a 3rd effect, and 5 items will give you the final extra effect (in addition to the other 3) for having a 'full set'. The catch is that different stations require you to have a certain number of traits researched on an item before you can craft it there (as part of the set anyways). So for instance, if you have researched 2 traits on helmets you will be able to create a Helmet of Death's Wind which requires 2 traits, but not a Helmet of the Seducer because that set requires 3 traits to be researched. So to get the full benefits of the crafting stations that require 2 traits researched, you will need to have 2 traits researched on at least 5 different pieces of armor (weapons & shields count too). To get the full benefits of the crafting stations that require 5 traits researched you will have to have researched 5 traits on at least 5 pieces of equipment. You don't actually have to apply a trait to the items you create at these special crafting stations, you just have to have done the research that would allow you to do so.

Does that make sense?