The ElderScrolls Online Crafting Leveling Guide

Crafting in Elder Scrolls Online is very in-depth and very slow to level. While the intricacies of crafting are well beyond the scope of this article, I will be covering some great tips for leveling up your crafts in an efficient manner.

Start Gathering Materials Early
You do not need to learn any skills or buy any items to start gathering materials in the game world – you just have to find them and interact with them. Materials are often hard to spot (you need to spend skill points to make them more visible), so you will have to keep an eye out for them.

Lumber can come in the form of saplings (small trees) or logs on the ground, ore comes from mining nodes that look like discolored stone lumps on the ground, runes (for Enchanting) are stones with a glowing center, and Alchemy & Clothing reagents often come in the form of plants. Leatherworking materials typically drop off of beasts.

Once you learn what each material looks like and keep an eye out for it, it is easy to find. I have found that your first zone after the tutorial is the best spot to harvest materials – most players are too new to the game to recognize what materials look like in these zones so the nodes are largely ungathered.

Deconstruct All Items
Deconstructing breaks items down into a small amount of ingredients that you can subsequently use for crafting purposes. The most bizarre thing about leveling crafting in ESO is that deconstructing items provides by far the most experience out of any crafting activity. Furthermore, the higher the quality of item you are deconstructing, the more experience points you will earn.

Make The Cheapest Item
When crafting, you earn experience points based on the item of the level you are crafting, not the amount of materials it requires. As an example of this, crafting a level 6 dagger will provide the same amount of experience points as a level 6 greatsword, even though the dagger requires far fewer ingots than the greatsword. As a result, you always want to craft the item which requires the least amount of reagents to get more experience points out of your materials.

Consider Finding a Crafting Partner
f deconstructing items for experience points was not unusual enough, even more unusual is that you get far more experience points from deconstructing items made by other players than by deconstructing items you craft yourself (~3 times as much experience in fact)!

If you really want to powerlevel crafting, you can find a partner to craft with. You can trade each other your crafted goods so the other player can deconstruct for three times the normal rate of experience.