^This.
Provisioning has a few weak point, but the recipes are actually the fun part of it. It always gives me a little bit of a thrill to find a new recipe or a rare ingredient.

However, there are maybe one or two things that would be nice:

- Have a skill that gives you some sort of "cooking chest" or "ingredient pack" so you can lug around a few more of the ingredients. With different ingredients for the alliances, provisioning is THE most space intensive craft in the game. As little as 5 additional spaces just for ingredients would be immensely helpful. I have already specialized in only making food and not taking brewing ingredients, I have the more rare stuff in my bank and the ingredients for lower level food sorted out completely, but it still takes up considerable space, because you just have to take that one single pile of pepper or that one single piece of garlic with you if you find it.

- Make it clearer what the hireling is good for. As far as I've heard, it only provides you with stuff you can just as easily obtain yourself and not even with recipes. Rumor has it that the hireling can get you one or two ingredients that you cannot find otherwise, but as of now nothing can convince me that a skill point in provision hireling is a point well spent.

You won't find tomatoes in normal containers. The Provisioning hireling is the only source of tomatoes and oats and they only come from that hireling upon putting 2 skill points into it.

You can use the ingredients that come from other factions if you have the recipe.

If you're finding it difficult to find Provisioning ingredients then you are simply not looking in the right places. Unlike the smithing professions wherein you can just farm whatever node happens to be in your area and move up to the next area to get its node, Provisioning requires you to be more attentive when looting. It does follow a similar principle in that lower lvl ingredients drop in lower lvl zones. However it also follows the principle that other faction ingredients drop in areas where those factions are present. Rare (if you can call them that) additives drop everywhere and it is your job as the Provisioner to distinguish what is actually rare and worth keeping and what is not really rare and can be left behind. If you have autoloot on and you're trying to save everything, then you're doing it wrong.

I like that there are so many ingredients. When I'm looting a dungeon, every sack and barrel and crate can have something different in them, which is a lot more fun than having them all be empty or full of lockpicks. This is not a 'loot all the things to win' game. This is loot sensibly to win game. If you can't manage that, then you're in for a world of frustration. But that is not the game's fault.

its quite a challenge to find some the the mats and recipes if its to easy then we all be doing it , can be a pain at times but its ok

We may have a different concept of "challenge".
If the challenge was something like "Kill that Mammoth" or "Climb that mountain", sure.
But the challenge of Provisioning is "Open 100+ crates".
Which i don't really find challenging.

I don't think that the recipes are what is wrong with provisioning.
I think its the ingredients and gathering thereof, and the completely random nature of doing so. I mean, why is there a jar of pig's milk in an old burnt barrel? (And would you really want to drink it?)

You can't really set out to get anything specific due to the variety of stuff you can get out of any particular box in any particular zone. Also most of the stuff you do get, you can't use for one reason or another as pointed out above, and because the inventory system is so broken/clunky/limited picking up everything you find is just not sustainable.

I'm not suggesting reducing recipes or removing ingredients, but perhaps changing a few things around and adding intermediate steps.

The problem is you can get pretty much any of these in any box in any zone with minimal consideration seemingly to level, tier, or use as far as where you find stuff. (There are some current limits, I have found items used for lvl 1 recipes in veteran zones, however, in level 1 zones you'd mostly find lvl 1/5 items only).

Considering you begin the game with 60 inventory spaces and assuming you're not levelling any other craft, you're still left with the need to have room for:

Meal Milled Flour Sifted Flour Cake Flour Baker's Flour Imperial Flour Drippings Cooking Fat Suet Lard Fatback Pinguis Stock Jus Glace Viande Imperial Stock Brown Malt Amber Malt Caramalt Wheat MaltGolden Malt White Malt Corn Mash Wheat Mash Oat Mash Barnley Mash Golden Mash Rice Mash Wine Grapes Grasa Grapes lado Grapes Camaralet Grapes Emperor Grapes
Ribier Grapes Red Wheat Barley Oats Hallertau Hops Hops Saaz Hops Salt Garlic Pepper Snowberry Juniper Berry Canis Root Concord Grapes White Grapes Jazbay Grapes Onion Tomato Potato


And so on and so forth I'm sure this is by no means a complete list but enough to get the idea.

The easiest way forward that I can see would simply be to add in the capability to have farming. This would help with alchemy as well. Then you could add combination steps. Player housing would of course simplify this but I see no reason why you couldn't use public farmland - there are already plenty of 'farms' around simply allow a player to do it there. (LOTRO had a farming craft that was reasonably well implemented, but growth time and decay time was fairly quick, it was considered an 'active' tradeskill rather than something you'd leave and come back as in Skyrim. Something like this would be more suited to public farming spots). Alternatively, simply have all of the npc farms of the appropriate tier growing the appropriate item, at least then you could go to a specific place to get a specific item. Have the respawn be fairly quick.

You could grow wheat, and then turn wheat into the various flour types, and turn flour into the various mash types, meaning in the raw material stage you'd only have to actually haul around wheat and only of the tier you're imminently planning to use.

You could plant specific grapes and berries depending on what you wanted to ultimately cook. You could plant onions, tomatos, potatos, depending on what you wanted to ultimately cook. (Or find NPC fields of these items). You could craft stock and broths out of grown ingredients.

This leaves you with:
Drippings
Cooking Fat
Suet
Lard
Fatback
Pinguis
Jus
Salt
Pepper

As items that can't really be found in a field of some sort or made from items that can be found in a field of some sort. I suppose you could add a place to mine salt.
So simply leave these as crate finds but remove everything else from the potential crate itemisation since you can find it somewhere specific, ie growing in the ground (and later, hopefully, grow it yourself). This makes more sense that you'd be finding cooking fat and such in boxes in peoples houses rather than finding perfectly preserved grapes in good condition in a footlocker under the pier or in a dark crypt filled with undead.

Crate/box itemisation would include the above (give or take) and with only a dozen or so provisioning items coming out of boxes, people might actually start picking them up and would have space to do so to save them for provisioners due to the strict inventory limits.

The only other solution that I could see for the system as is would be to add a materials bag that all tradeskill related stuff automatically goes into that has an extremely high limit, like 500 slots, so that you could effectively gather provisioning materials without them cluttering up your inventory in stacks of 2 and 3 items that you don't want to get rid of just in case you need them but you really can't keep and so on and so forth.

It seems to me, that people forget that there's veteran levels after 50, where you will get around to the other continents.
It would not surprise me if you by this got access to new recipie's.
I do agree with LadyLothi though, it could be nice with focused ingredients bag, so it will be easier to store the ingredients meant for provisioning.
The reason for the ingredients bag is, that you might still want to keep ingredients from earlier zones you have visited, so that you can go back and make food for other people and gain an income by selling this food.
Apart from that - the way provisioning is set up now, makes me think that changes is not necessary.

in other areas you will find the other recipes and mats you haven't in your area
I am in ebon but I did start a toon in dagger and found the looting of crates. the items in them was differnet to ebon so there is the answer

@Shimizu‌ You are approaching this in the wrong way. If you had done any amount of Provisioning for long enough you would realize you do not need to keep all of those ingredients on hand. As others like Dragonheart013 and LadyLothi already said it's not hard to determine what ingredients you want/need at any given point. This is the active decision making that ESO asks you to make.

The point of having lots of ingredients is that it is more fun to open a container and find different things even if you don't need them, than it is to open lots of empty containers or containers with only lockpicks. The latter is what other games do and it's pretty damned boring. It's also immersive that different regions would have regional variants of food, which would also tie into the availability of local goods.

If you are trying to make room in your bank/ backpack for a stack of every single item in the game, you are doing it wrong. Period.

and for the love of Molag Bal....add the dang fish into provisioning

Yeah, that's pretty much the plan Nudel, is to work out a handful of recipes that I want, write what to pick up on a postit and stick it to my monitor. I'm able to adapt to the situation, just feel that the entire provisioning skill could be more efficiently implemented.

I love Provisioning. If anything, make fish useful as an ingredient, but I wouldn't make wholesale changes to this profession.