Question: How to best farm purple furniture plans?

AnduinTryggva · November 2

I am a passionate crafter and decorator who likes to craft the furniture with which to decorate my homes. I also have little money (a sickness common for all decorators) so I have mostly revert to farming the furniture plans myself.

I usually go into the zone of which I wish to have the plans from and go to a good farming location. My routine is: I loot until white plans drop and I switch character. Usually this occurs after first a green plan drop, then a blue plan drop, then whites drop. But no purple. It is really really rare ultra rare that a purple plan drops this way. Is there a way to improve the drop rate of purples?

DinoZavr · November 2

Nope. The drop rate is coded at the server.

What you can do:
First. and the mandatory setting: slot the green "Homemaker" star for +10% chance of the extra plan from lootable containers
Second. not any container can drop furnishing plans (i guess you know that) you want desks, wardrobes, trunks, nightstands, cabinets, urns, backpacks. "Stealable" containers are OKay too (when there are too few unowned ones (like in CWC or Murkmire)), but they have different drop tables, where treasures occupy a lion share, so on average owned containers are inferior to the unowned ones (i have some good statistics confirming that).
Third: to save your time you can purchase some purples: Rolis and Faustina offer purple (or mixed) envelopes for the Writ Vouchers (though they offer only a subset of plans, which actually drop in the appropriate zones). Though you can sell duplicates via Guild Traders and buy what you need (on PC there is a great addon Awesome Guild Store - to filter unknown plans and motifs).
edit: UESP has compehensive lists of available plans, so you can figure out when you have got everything they do offer.

As for cooldowns. I don't want even to start this. Five years ago i was pinpointing cooldowns placing ten low level toons at the entrance of Dreloth Tomb in Vvardenfell. Without quest it had 81 urn inside (and one dwemer jug outside).
Cycling their logins i had noticed they never get 2 recipes of the same quality (there was no CP2.0 system at that time). They were getting ONE provisioning green, ONE provisioning blue, ONE furnishing green, ONE furnishing blue (and if lucky - something purple). And they were unable to get more befor cooldown expired. The cooldown then was 15 minutes.
It contradicts your observations, but whites are not on cooldown and have no relation to purples (i guess i know the source of this superstition - one famous housing ESO player has stated in her YouTube video - "if you get whites - this means it could be puprle, but purples are on cooldown. swap the toon as cooldowns are per character").
In my books recipes of different quality/color are on the different cooldowns. so i disregard whites drops at all.
Now green & blue cooldowns are 10 minutes.
edit: (i rely on my own statistics (and i have quite a lot of it), so i shall NOT argue with players who eager to prove me wrong, thank you for understanding).

Puprle cooldown is not well known. i may speculate it is one hour. But the sheer rarity of purples prevents us from getting one plan per hour, even if we swap characters (cooldowns are per character). But, yes, changing toon after purple drop is very reasonable. Just note: provisioning recipes are on theirs own cooldowns which do not affect furnishing plans cooldowns.
Neither do blue and purple (and one golden (Impreial)) motif books. By the way Imperial books drops (on average) in 1 of 400 clearing Dreloth Thomb (i have this statistics too).

My approach is to buy purple recipes from Guild Traders, as there are many good reliable ways to earn gold in game.
Chasing purple ghosts is exciting, but less profitable then the boring grind.

If you have access to Necrom, start "a thief to catch a thief" quest and do not turn it in. Clear Sailenmora Crypts, as, even after nerf, they are still good and may drop valuable BASE GAME plans like Redguard ones - some of which are damn expensive.

edit: added UESP credit and a "not flammable" note

freespirit · November 2

I have given up trying to farm purple furnishing plans.

Insread I now have many maxed Jewelry crafters, the master writs that drop from those crafting dailies give me more than enough vouchers to buy the various document pouches from the two writ vendors and the surveys give me enough mats to do the dailies.

With current deflation even the rarer jewelry trait mats have become a lot cheaper too but tbh most add up iin my crafting bag on their own!

By selling duplicates plans and there will be duplicates, I earn enough gold to buy plans not available or refusing to drop from pouches. During double xp events I also sell the master writs, I end up with that many.

I did farm the Lost Inn in West Weald quite a lot, with its very easy reset it was worth doing but I got more base game purples than new ones, so I gave up.

Over the years you learn to spot which plans will provide a crafted item that people will want to buy, so the other thing I do, is buy purples from guild traders, craft the items, sell them, earn money to buy more plans!

You would be surprised how often those plans actually pay for themselves pretty quickly! 😁

AnduinTryggva · November 2

@DinoZavr

Thanks for all these explanations and advice! Really appreciated!

Concerning white furniture plans: I consistently have the pattern:

1 or double green plan, then 1 or double blue plan, then white plans. This spree of white plans can continue quite some while before it goes back to 1 (or double) green, 1 or double blue etc. EXCESSIVELY rarely a purple one.

Somewhere in another thread someone explained that you get a random seed when looting from a loot table and depending on this seed your luck is higher with a quicker drop of green or blue plans or lower. I understood that this current seed can expire and upon expiration you draw a new seed.

I am not sure if the white plan spree indicates that I get a new seed or not. My experience is though that I continue sometimes to loot whites after whites and sometimes this white phase is shorter.

merevie · November 2

There is a passive method. Southern Elsweyr has a daily reward box that infrequently awards purple furnishing plans. It also awards dragon ingredients and herbs most days.

It does require the zone quest and rather a lot of dailies to unlock, but is a high return long term investment of your time.

If you are a master crafter and have a guild with all the set stations, it is best to do the daily reward writs and use the tokens to buy random zone purples at the reward vendor. This will also give a nice profit which you can use towards buying more.

There are times of the week, like early week nights, when stock moves slowly on guild traders so the bargains will still be sitting there.

DinoZavr · November 2

AnduinTryggva wrote: »

1 or double green plan, then 1 or double blue plan, then white plans. This spree of white plans can continue quite some while before it goes back to 1 (or double) green, 1 or double blue etc. EXCESSIVELY rarely a purple one.

this is what i experienced with plundering Dreloth Thomb five years ago. with such massive amount of containers you normally end up with one green and one blue per session. then all you get are whites (or one purple is you are really lucky), new colored plans drop only after theirs appropriate cooldown expires.
by the way: i did a lot of stealing in Fargrave (due to uber-fast containers reset upon reentering the building) - the tend stays - i was writing down timestamps of green and blue plans (and provisioning recipes for the complete picture). we getting a lot of furnishing whites, as they seem not to have a cooldown. Fargrave owned containers cooldown was 10 minutes for me.
Greens have slightly greater drop chance than blues, this is why you are typically observing - green -> blue -> white --> white.. -> green -> blue sequence. (of course it may be blue - green - white - white, but more seldom, as blue drop rate is a little lower than green, but not on a huge margin).

in my stats i get furnishing purples once per 4 .. 6 hours of constant looting, but you have your own loot logs, yes?

AnduinTryggva wrote: »

Somewhere in another thread someone explained that you get a random seed when looting from a loot table and depending on this seed your luck is higher with a quicker drop of green or blue plans or lower. I understood that this current seed can expire and upon expiration you draw a new seed.
I am not sure if the white plan spree indicates that I get a new seed or not. My experience is though that I continue sometimes to loot whites after whites and sometimes this white phase is shorter.

i would say - this is just a hypothesis for me.
we never had Developers detailed explanations concerning algorithms used on server, it would be logical to assume the pure random value determines the next drop (at least this fits my scheme of things rather well). but careful examining loot logs (maybe with AI) might confirm or deny hypothesis like that.

Good luck with plans hunting.

edit: typos

DenverRalphy · November 2

You'll hear multiple claims about cooldowns and how long the timers last. Trying to discover who is the most correct will result in unwarrated frustration. There's a very simple and time proven method for farming furnishing plans.

Start with your first character then farm until you hit a Blue or Purple plan.

Blue: Immediately switch to the next character in the rotation.
Purple: Take that character out of the rotation for the day and move on to the next toon.
5 - 10 runs through without a single blue or purple drop, switch toons cuz you're just chasing bad rng on that character.

If you do that with 8+ characters (I use 12 personally), by the time your rotation cycles back to a character that's already looted a blue, whatever cooldown they may or may not have will have expired. Characters that have looted a purple I move to the bottom of the list, and don't use them again until after server reset the next day.