If someone wants to be a crafter in the game...assuming this means all six of the craft skills...there are three approaches that I tend to recommend, each with pros and cons.

Main does it all:

the convenience here is that your main can just learn all the recipes and motifs and do all crafting themselves...no account shuffling when you need stuff. The con is the massive number of skill points this consumes. I just counted on one of my crafters, and a fully fledged crafter in all six lines with research running will use about 100 skill points.

This means being utterly dedicated to skill point farming. Is it possible to be a maxed out fighter and crafter? Yes...there are over 375 skill points in the game right now, with maybe 300 being “easy” to obtain. So you can attribute 100 to crafting and have 200 left for fighting...that’s plenty. But it means farming the points. There are about 400 sky shards in the game...so you need to grab most of these (including dlc zones and Cyrodiil) to put toward crafting.


Use an alt crafter:

you don’t necessarily reduce the amount of work by putting the 100 skill points into an alt...but it means you can select which skill points to go after. If you take this approach, I recommend creating a character you might use in the future. If your main is a magplar and you’ve been thinking about trying magsorc someday, create a decent mag sorc character. You’ll do a lot of leveling to get all those points, and who knows...maybe they become a fighter some day. If you ever decide to use them that way, it’s helpful of they aren’t a fat bald Nord sorc named crafty mcdikpunch, lol.


Use a blend:

For those who might want to minimize skill point hunting, you can divide crafting onto multiple characters. This is also VERY helpful for those trying to manage crafting without the eso plus craft bag, where characters are being used to hold a lot of stuff.

You can pretty easily divide the craft lines between characters. The equipment lines should all be on one, since they share motif knowledge and other stuff. Then you can put the consumables on another character. You could use your main for equipment and an alt for consumables, or two alts. You can also divide up the consumables amongst many alts...this really cuts down skill point farming.

I recommend this for players without a craft bag. Back when I started playing, my main was my equipment crafter. Then Alt 1 held all equipment materials. Alt 2 did enchanting and held all runes. Alt 3 did alchemy and provision and held those.


Regardless

For those who like the crafting game and are getting started I always offer a few tips. We don’t know what features Zos will tie to crafting in the future. Consider the master writs, which when introduced offered massively valuable rewards to master crafting characters. If you’re taking the time to develop an alt, I always recommend working up all six of their craft lines...just rotate through who you have deconstructing items, and move through your alts leveling them one at a time. And consider running trait research on all of them. It only take a minute to have a main crafter construct junk items for research, and if we get some feature tied to it they’ll be ready for it.

My reasoning for having my main as my crafter is that the acheivments for crafting and knowing all the styles are ones that I want for my main as I actively hunt for in-game acheivments.