For your first character, decon everything. If you're leveling ledgerdemain as well, go to the Daggerfall docks and loot the armors, then launder those and decon them as they give solid progress once they're not tagged as stolen. For JC, dolmens are a great source of jewelry to decon. And start with daily writs asap.

linuxlady wrote: »

reply with something that hasnt been said in the thread (if possible) that would be something you learned that you wish you knew about crafting before you took up crafting.


I'll start:


Don't start off with one main crafter. Develop two characters or toons for crafting

train them both to learn all the traits for wood and jewls. Then on one toon focus on metal weapons and on the other focus on metal armor. Again on the one toon focus on cloth armor and on the other focus on leather armor. That way between the two toons you'll get all 9 traits learned in the least amount of time.

And of course if you have the in game gold, buy and use research scrolls as often as possible...

[snip]


Tips
If you want to power through research on every character then have your main crafter make multiple low-level items ALL in the same style. Breton is my fav because it is the first style in the crafting menu and the stones are easy to buy. This makes it easy to see if you already have an item in your bank, so you don't make unnecessary duplicates.

For PC users the add-on 'trait buddy' compliments this as it is so easy to see who needs what.

Scrolls can advance research by a day, only use them when there is at least 1 day left on every bit of research. Arguably they are most efficient to use early in the research process - the total research time to learn 9 traits will be the same if you use x scrolls at the beginning, or x scrolls at the end, but using them earlier will mean your character has more traits fully researched earlier.

Finally, mastering research is a long process, so accept that it won't go perfectly, try and keep your research slots full, but you risk getting burned out if you try and take it too seriously.

[edited for baiting]

My advice :

• Main crafter (9 traits, incl. Nirnhoned) = Imperial because that style (gold) is expensive, the other racial styles (blue) are almost as cheap as the air we breath. Saves you a lot of gold. But why not make all your alts a (8-trait) crafter, in the end, it saves you a lot of gear swapping between alts - bank - main crafter - bank - alts when you loot something you want to upgrade and retrait.
• If you also train alts, it is recomendable to split clothing in light armor and medium armor and to split blacksmithing in weapons and heavy armor (==> main crafter (Imperial) = Weapons + Medium + Woodworking (Shield, Bow + Frost staff), Alt 1 = Heavy + Light + Woodworking (Fire, Lightning + Restoration Staff) and when 8 or 9 traits swap. Other alts, whatever you like, but why learn medium armor on magicka based alt or light armor on a stamina based alt first ?)
• Jewelry is expensive. Healthy, Robust and Arcane are fairly easy an cheap to learn on alts, all the other ones are a bit harder get (depending on the content you play) and cost more
• Ask guildmates to craft lvl 1 stuff with trait X for you if you need it to research trait X.
• Check the description of the (passive) skills to see why you should (not) take it.
• Alchemy and Provisioning are essential for all your characters and if you have enough skillpoints and materials they are easy and fast to level (within 1 hour, maybe faster).
• If you have ESO+, deconstruct all intricates and all green, blue, purple and gold loot instead of selling it to the merchant. Deconstruction gives you crafting materials (incl. tempers). However, keep in mind that, some loot is better to be sold in guildstores or zonechat.
• Spend as much skillpoints in your crafting skills as you can. 1/3 in Keen Eye is enough. If you don't have ESO+, skip the hirelings or sell the things you get but don't need (and in the end you'll need everything). Or use an alt as "crafting bag"
• Do crafting writs daily. I like Vivec for that, but I know others prefer other locations to craft them. When logging in for daily writs, don't forget to pay to the stable a visit to feed your mount. After 6 months you have fully trained mounts.
• Spend your tempers wisely, especialy the purple and gold ones, and only if you have the skill that reduces the cost of tempering.For <cp160, green or blue gear is good enough.

Leveling my crafting skills has been a while ago for me (I have 1 9-trait main crafter, 15 8-trait alt crafters and 2 that are almost 8-trait alt crafters, the alts will not go for 9 traits, too expensive). On my 2nd account (also 18 characters) I tried to achieve the same, but on most alts I (temporarily) stopped around 5-7 traits.Some advice may look a bit weird, but for me it worked.

1) Don't worry about getting to 50. It's trivially easy to get there with the help of another crafter. It would take 1-2 hours top. Just do it when you feel like it .. just level quickly to the level when you get the last concurrent research passive.

2) The most important advice : NEVER, EVER go without learning a trait. And get to it yesterday. This is what takes ages.

3) use research scrolls .. those with cooldown are cheap and cut your research time in half.

4) learn 6 traits on everything. It's not that long, and you can craft very good sets already. Then, learn the rest.

5) Motifs are ..sadly not that important. Most players don't care, the rest use outfitting. Don't ruin yourself, unless you want to collect them all for the personnal achievement.

don't forget you'll need a lot of extra skill points to both fight and craft, so, you may want to pick a large DLC zone like orsinium, morrowind and summerset to farm sky shards...

ESO plus if you're serious about it.
Loot everything,
Breakdown all your looted gear and glyphs.
Pick up all available plants and water.
Guild traders often have cheaper provisioning recipes for daily writs than in game merchants.

This is all just off the top of my head:

Don't neglect learning all the rune stone words and alchemy traits, maxing those maxes the chance that you will get master writs from enchanting and alchemy, they will drop as often as gold mats from max level equipment daily crafting writs.

You can then hoard them and do them all on one of your other characters to get a large amount of xp or you can sell them for good gold.

When doing your trait research focus on the ones you are most likely to transmute something to, even if its expensive get a load of potent Nirn early on and learn it early on, on your first character at the very least.

After you have the ones you want the most researched you can go at your own pace for the rest, I can't stress this enough you do not need to rush as fast as possible to become a nine trait crafter, you can have access to those sets you so badly want right now, just ask in your guild or in zone for a crafter to make the sets you want, you do not need to wait, just make sure you have all the mats you need for the sets.

You can also get crafters to make you most research items for free, expensive trait mats you need to provide though, such as Nirn and most of the jewelery traits, the rest costs next to nothing for the crafter to provide so most do it for free within guilds.

If you decide to do trait research on alts in the future is best to wait until you have them all researched on your main, that way you can make all the research items you need and its expensive to do and will send you broke if you try to do it all at once when starting out.

Decon everything your character picks up that they don't need or need anymore when leveling new characters before you even think about buying intricate gear, don't get me wrong the gear is cheap to buy but when your starting out you will have bugger all gold to work with so don't spend more than you need to, your going to need to level the character/s anyway your gonna pick a load of free stuff up make use of it first.(only thing you should be passing to your main instead of your alts is purple gear, better off deconing on a character with all the passives to get the materials if RNG favors you)


Do not be afraid to ask for help or even donations of gear, best time to ask is just before the daily writs reset, a lot of players will be there a few minutes early waiting for the quests to reset, if you catch their attention especially if your in a big guild(especially a trade guild) you will be surprised by the number of people who take note and about an hour or so later you could well end up with a lot of stuff in your mail.

Since a lot of these players myself included have reached the point where we don't need any of the intricate gear or glyphs or green recipes any more and just either vendor or decon it, since its small worth small change selling in guild stores and we would rather use are trader slots for something more valuable to sell instead and we don't have much space to hoard stuff we are not going to use or sell, so we will happily give it away.(jewelry intricates are the exception those are still worth something to sell compared to the rest)

Other than that crafting will take a long time to set up especially if you plan to make all your characters crafters so you can maximize the benefits of doing daily writs on multiple characters, if your on PC make sure to get lazy writ crafter it will save you a lot of time, if your on console you must have the patience of a saint or you will likely give up on any dreams of having 18 characters doing daily writs.

If you invest in crafting eventually you will reach a point where you are able to make more gold than you know what to do with, it is not a get rich quick scheme but it is a way to never have to farm mats/steal/farm gear/motifs ever again unless you feel like it but it will take a lot of time and gold to set it up at first.



Most important of all avoid housing completely until you feel you have more gold than you know what to do with and your 80% sure you have bought everything you need maxed out every crafter etc... because the moment you go down the rabbit hole that is crafting your destined to be short on gold all the time.

I think that is enough drivel from me some of is should help.

preevious wrote: »

2) The most important advice : NEVER, EVER go without learning a trait. And get to it yesterday. This is what takes ages.

Although it's true that trait research is what takes a long time, I would argue that you don't need to stress out about missing a day at it, because in the early stages it takes a day or less to research a trait (6 hours, 12 hours, or 24 hours-- less with ESO+ and/or the passives that decrease research times), and in the later stages it takes so long to research a trait that skipping a day isn't going to make that much of a difference. But you should get started as soon as possible.

Also, once you've finished researching all of the traits in a given crafting skill line, you can respec your skills to recover any skill points that you'd invested in the passives that let you research more traits at once.

linuxlady wrote: »

reply with something that hasnt been said in the thread (if possible) that would be something you learned that you wish you knew about crafting before you took up crafting.


I'll start:


Don't start off with one main crafter. Develop two characters or toons for crafting

train them both to learn all the traits for wood and jewls. Then on one toon focus on metal weapons and on the other focus on metal armor. Again on the one toon focus on cloth armor and on the other focus on leather armor. That way between the two toons you'll get all 9 traits learned in the least amount of time.

And of course if you have the in game gold, buy and use research scrolls as often as possible...

I did split my crafting in the dark "before the crafting bag" times, and really regretted it.

If you split the crafting, you've just doubled the number of motifs you need. And recipes, depending on how you're doing provisioning. After master writs showed up, it became a real hassle to keep straight which crafter knew which motifs. [or which recipes] Hunting for a motif you already have on the other crafter can be an exercise in frustration, and a way to lose a lot of gold.

I did end up duplicating all the provisioning recipes on my smith/wood/clothing crafter. It was easier to duplicate the provisioning recipes than duplicating all of the motifs. Of course, if you are crafting only for yourself and not worrying about master writs, then your mileage may vary.