https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZGYSWLQDpqo

Complete Beginner's Guide to ESO Antiquities: Scrying & Excavation
(Greymoor Chapter Required, which will become free/base game sometime around October)

Getting Started Where to Unlock the Professions

To get started with Antiquities, travel to Solitude in Western Skyrim and begin the introductory quest in The Antiquarian Circle. This short quest introduces the Antiquities system and grants you two essential skill lines: Scrying and Excavation. Completing it also gives you the Antiquarian's Eye, a special tool used in the Scrying minigame as well as a locating tool for finding your dig sites.

Once you've completed the introductory quest, your Scrying and Excavation skill lines appear under the World category of your skill menu, and you're ready to begin hunting relics across all of Tamriel.

What Are Leads?

Antiquity Leads are items used to Scry for Antiquities. Leads have fixed locations, such as drops from certain enemies, containers, or merchants. Each antiquity page indicates in what zone it drops and what monster or boss you have to kill.

Leads come in five quality tiers, each requiring a higher skill level to use: Green at level 1, Blue at level 3, Purple at level 5, Gold at level 7, and Red/Ultimate 10.
You can receive green, blue, purple and gold leads at any level however you will need a specific level to actually use them. You can pick up a gold lead at level 1 but you cannot scry or excavate it until you reach level 7.

How to Obtain Leads

Every zone you have access to starts you off with a free Green lead. Completing that rewards you with a Blue lead. These starter chains exist in nearly every zone in the game and are a small way to generate raw gold with vendor-able treasure items, since each tier of treasure sells to any NPC merchant for more than the last.

Beyond those freebies, leads drop from a wide range of sources. World bosses, delve bosses, and public dungeon bosses are some of the most reliable, with many specific gold and mythic leads tied to particular bosses in particular zones. Treasure chests out in the open world drop leads regularly. Thieves Troves drop leads as well. Safeboxes and random containers throughout the world can also yield them. Sometimes digging up one antiquity rewards you with the next lead in the chain automatically.

Mythic items are their own category entirely. Each one requires five separate lead pieces gathered from five different sources, often spread across completely different zones and types of content. Some require veteran dungeon or trial clears, others come from specific public dungeon bosses or delve bosses. You need to be at least level 7 in Scrying to scry for these leads, and you need the Antiquarian Insight IV passive unlocked. They are the primary endgame of the Antiquities system and absolutely worth pursuing for build optimization. Level 10 is more of a trophy hunter and collectors goal.


XP Per Lead Tier and Level Requirements

Both skill lines cap at level 10 and require 700 XP total to max. They level at roughly the same rate.

XP earned per lead: Green gives 1 XP, Blue gives 3, Purple gives 5, and Gold gives 10.


Level 2 XP Needed-8
Level 3 XP Needed 12
Level 4 XP Needed 30
Level 5 XP Needed 40
Level 6 XP Needed 60
Level 7 XP Needed 85
Level 8 XP Needed 115
Level 9 XP Needed 150
Level 10 XP Needed 200

The curve gets steep fast. The last two levels alone eat up 350 of your 700 total XP which is why switching to gold leads as soon as you hit level 7 makes a big difference.

Best Places to Level Up

From level 1 to 5, Artaeum is the fastest zone to grind in. It is tiny, has no enemies to knock you off your mount, and you can sprint between every excavation site in seconds. Open the scrying menu, select the green lead, dig it up, get the blue lead as a reward, dig that up, and repeat. The green lead is infinitely repeatable so you never need to go looking for new ones. If your mount speed is not fully trained yet this matters even less in Artaeum since the zone is so small. During my test run on an alt, I managed to unlock blue leads (level 3) within 30-35 minutes doing this method in this zone.

From level 5 to 7, sweep through zones and complete as many purple tier leads as you can. If you run out, then scry green/blue or complete various tasks in zones, use treasure maps, open chests etc. You will unlock many pretty easily.

From level 7 to 10, work gold leads and mythic chains. Ten XP per completion and you are doing productive character work at the same time rather than just grinding for the sake of it.

The Scrying Minigame

When you open a lead from your Journal under the Antiquities tab, you enter the scrying puzzle. The board is a hex grid of tiles called facets, each marked with a symbol. Around the outer edge are six glowing blank tiles. Starting from the bottom center tile you expand outward, claiming adjacent tiles, and the goal is to connect your controlled area to as many of those glowing tiles as possible before your turns run out.

Every glowing tile you reach removes one false dig site from your map. Reach all six and you get a single pinpointed location. Miss some and you may end up checking two or three spots before finding the right mound. You can re-scry as many times as you want before heading out, so if the board looks bad just reset it. Costs nothing.

Your two resources are Turns, spent one per regular move, and Magicka or Power Charges at the top which look like glowing gems, which power your special abilities and are earned by expanding your controlled area during the puzzle. Every 2 glowing tiles you grab during a minigame recharges one of those power charge gems.

There are three active abilities in the Scrying line. Coalescence converts a surrounding cluster of facets to match the center one, letting you form long connections in a single action. Farsight branches a chain of facets outward from your area. Dilation claims all adjacent matching facets touching your controlled area at once. You really only need to invest heavily in one of these three, and personally I have found that Coalescence is bar far the easiest and fastest to successfully clear every glowing tile with minimal planning. As I show in the video later on, I clear master tier scry's in seconds using only Coalescence.

Future Focus should be maxed as a priority. It increases your starting Magicka Charges which gives you more options on your very first turn before you have had time to earn charges through expansion. Scryer's Patience adds extra turns and is worth picking up early as well.


After the puzzle, head to the marked area on your zone map, slot the Antiquarian's Eye in your quickslot wheel, and use it while standing still inside the marked boundary. A glowing orb appears pointing you toward the exact dig site (the direction the light is flowing off of the orb is the direction you need to run in). You are looking for a dirt mound with yellow sparkles on the ground.

The Excavation Minigame

Once you interact with the mound you enter the excavation puzzle. The grid is made up of soil tiles at varying depths. Somewhere in there is the antiquity, and nearby there may be bonus loot tiles rewarding extra items. A Time gauge counts down and you need the antiquity fully uncovered before it hits zero, it isnt actually "time" though. The time is just a roleplay way to display a click/power counter. So be careful with your clicks.

You have three tools. The Hand Brush clears one layer from one tile per use and is the only tool that generates Intuition, which powers your other two tools. It cannot damage the antiquity no matter how deep you go with it(Unless you dig on a fissure which are the smoking blocks). The Trowel removes three full layers from a single tile in one use and costs two Intuition charges, but it damages the antiquity if used on a tile shallower than three layers. The Heavy Shovel removes one layer from a wide area at once but only affects the highest layer present, so if surrounding tiles are at mismatched depths it will underperform. The trick with the Shovel is using the Hand Brush to level nearby tiles down first so it clears as many as possible in one swing. You should essentially always aim for a clean 3x3 square with this method, or as close to it as possible. Excluding fissure blocks for example.

On harder leads you will run into smoke/gas fissures on the grid. These can be connected into a chain and detonated with a fully charged Trowel, clearing a huge section of the board instantly and making bonus loot much easier to find if done right and if the RNG setup allows. The catch is that if a fissure sits directly above the antiquity and you detonate it, the item is destroyed and you have to find another dig site. Always confirm where the antiquity is before attempting any chain reaction near it, and ideally trigger it after the antiquity itself is already revealed. You also need to ensure the fissures are all on the correct level for the max powered trowel to work, so look for the smaller pebble brown dirt level. If you Trowel a fissue while its on the light brown/sandy crust tiers, it will ruin your fissure setup entirely.

For Excavation passives, Keen Eye: Dig Sites helps you spot mounds from further away while traveling, but is more optional due to the antiquarians eye if you are short on skill points. Prioritize the Trowel and Heavy Shovel upgrades once they become available.

Making Gold with Antiquities

Green treasure sells to any NPC for 250 gold, blue for 1000, and purple for 5000. These are vendor items with no other purpose so sell them immediately. Running through every zone's starter chain adds up to well over 300,000 gold in total, not counting bonus loot from excavations.

Some excavations also yield motif pages which should not be sold to NPC vendors but can be listed through a Guild Trader. Prices vary depending on how new or rare the motif is and the demand on your server. These are commonly obtained from Treasure maps in pertinent zones, which is one of the leading reasons why some treasure maps have higher costs on the market.

Worth being realistic about this system as a gold source though. I would never consider this a primary gold generator that I would suggest to players over other methods I have expressed in the past, you are definitely better off even just farming materials in craglorn instead. Or farming sought after sets, upgrading them and selling those on trade posts. This is more so a "thats a nice perk while I do this" type of deal, OR potentially beneficial to very new players with less access to other farm methods and trade knowledge.

Tips and Things the Game Does Not Tell You

Re-scrying costs nothing. If you are looking at three dig sites just scry again until you get a cleaner board.

Once you unlock a mythic on one character, you can make it as many times as you like for alts, by simply crafting it at a transmute station. This is also how you get it with the correct trait you want, instead of the default spawn trait.

If you are power leveling and do not care about bonus loot, skip it. You only need to uncover the main antiquity to receive XP. Chasing bonus loot takes time and cuts into how many leads you can run per session. (Later on, I would advise trying to get the bonus loot for higher tier leads. Since EXP is not as important after 7, and the rewards are much better)

Artaeum has no aggressive NPCs. Nothing will knock you off your horse, which makes it faster than almost any other zone for early grinding regardless of your mount stats, and the zone is tiny with limited locations excavations will even populate.

The full Scrying line costs 16 skill points to max and Excavation costs 14, totaling 30 skill points across both. If you are short on points, prioritize Future Focus, Antiquarian Insight, Scryer's Patience, and the shovel OR Trowel upgrade first. (It's kinda like picking a primary tactic, you don't really need the trowel and shovel. Pick one and do that method, I recommend the shovel method personally. More consistent success with more bonus loot and a higher average of dirt tiles fully uncovered per minigame.)

Hope this was helpful to some players!! If you have your own advice or things to add to the conversation, let me know! Or ofc any questions, I am happy to answer as always.
GL HF!
-ESO Feanor