infinitedraught wrote: »

I’m new to eso and mmo games, but a long time player of Elder Scrolls games. I love the lore and the ability to explore a vast majority of Tamriel. I’m looking for a guild that is welcoming to new players and casual. What I’m most interested in is crafting at this point and getting that one character leveled in all the crafting professions. Just looking for general advice when to start and how to tackle this whole process. I’ve read a lot of guides and they are helpful but also confusing. This could be because I haven’t advanced ver far in the game yet however.

Start crafting by researching the trash gear that drops from your quests/adventures. Deconstruct those which you aren't going to research. You will very quickly outlevel gear that you get to begin with, so there is no sense in saving it. You'll slowly level the skills. The research is the biggest time sink, especially at later levels, so get it started ASAP.

Crafting also ties into housing; furnishing your home with items you construct at the same crafting stations.

These will require skills from multiple crafts, so having all crafts on one character will be needed there.

Food is important for any player, so provisioning is a good one to level early. Steal as much food as you can and just craft as much as possible in to recipes to level up provisioning.

Alchemy you also level by doing. Crafting potions, learning the attributes of the ingredients.

For the rest, it's all about deconstructing. Deconstructing provides a lot more experience than crafting. Deconstructing the items you get, or if you have some gold buy from guild traders because deconstructing stuff other people made is good experience. The items with the blue ribbon icon are the best because those give extra inspiration, the crafting experience, when deconstructed.

As far as researching traits, there's a passive in each crafting skill line that shortens the length of time it takes to do research as well as increases how many items you can research at once-- except Jewelry, which is only 1 item at a time-- so if you put some skill points into those passives you'll be able to research 3 items per skill line. As long as you're finding dropped items that have traits you need to research, you can research the first several traits on each item pretty quickly. If you aren't finding items with the traits you still need to research, speak up in zone chat or guild chat and ask if anyone is willing to craft an item with a trait you need, because some players will be happy to do that for free, or maybe for a small tip. Sometimes this is even true for items with the Nirnhoned trait, especially if you can supply them with the correct type of Nirncrux so they don't need to use any of their own.

As far as the trait materials, it's easy to find them by looting containers in town. You can craft with looted materials, but you'll still want to launder them so a guard won't confiscate them if you get caught. You can also get trait mats from refining raw materials and deconstructing items. Again, there are passives that increase your chances of getting trait mats when you're refining or deconstructing, so you'll want to invest skill points in those passives.

And as far as improving items, there are passives that increase your chances of successfully improving items, so invest skill points in those as well, otherwise it will take a larger number of temp mats to improve an item.

As for the passives that make it easier to spot the nodes, you might not need to spend skill points on all of those, because for some things it isn't really that necessary. For example, I find it pretty easy to spot ores and metals, as well as wood and runes, even without the passives-- especially once you know what to look for as far as the different types of wood, ore, and metal-- whereas the plants needed for Alchemy and Clothing tend to be more difficult for me to spot unless I've got the passives that make those plants glow.

One more thing to be careful of is that if you get another skill point to spend and you decide to spend it on increasing the level of items you can craft, make sure you've either already completed your daily writs for that crafting skill line, or else that you definitely have enough of the mat needed for your old skill level. In other words, what can happen if you're not careful is that you increase your skill level for a particular craft, which means you will no longer be able to farm the raw material needed for crafting items at your prior level. So then you go to complete your daily writ in that craft only to realize that you don't have enough of the mat to do your writ! When that happens, you normally go farm some more of it-- except now you can't farm that particular mat anymore, so you'll end up having to either buy some from a guild trader or abandon your daily crafting writ.

Crafting can suck up a LOT of skill points, so be prepared for that.