Provisioning is the activity of making Food and Drinks from a camp fire, it is one of the easier crafts to skill up in. Food increases total attributes, while Drinks increase the regeneration rate of Attributes. Below I will talk about the Basics of Provisioning, Skilling up quickly, and making a profit. 

Basics of Provisioning
Provisioning is usually picked up as a “side craft” by some players, and is typically only used for their own benefit. Food will increase the consumers total Health, Magicka or Stamina, and Drinks will increase the regeneration rate of the same Attributes.

Each type of food will require you to learn that Recipe, Recipes can commonly be found in containers such as Barrels or Chests (common thievery loot) and can be trained, this will also deplete the recipe so it cannot be shared to others.

You will need to spend skill points in order to craft higher quality recipes, higher level recipes, and more food or drink produced from each batch, as well as a Hireling to search for some of the Ingredients for you.

Food and Drink qualities are as followed:
Green – Boosts one Attribute.
Blue – Boosts two Attributes.
Purple- Boosts all three Attributes.

Skilling Up in Provisioning
As I said, Provisioning is one of the easiest crafts to max out. Just make sure to train as many recipes as you can, green recipes are common and cheap to buy from other players, so never pass them up if they aren’t already known. As with any craft, the higher level food you produce — the more skill gained, but you will need ways of acquiring a lot of ingredients…

Exploring anywhere is a good way of acquiring free Ingredients, since all ingredients are used by all levels of provisioning. Delves are especially good for coming across a lot of barrels and crates, which are not considered stealing since they are not part of any town, and are typically owned by hostile enemies. There are also a lot of food sources from boxes and miscellaneous clutter in cities, but are now considered stealing with the new Thieving system.

Hirelings now deliver a lot more Ingredients than before, so be sure to spend skill points into this early on to help increase your skill and provide you with more materials.

And if you really want to skill your Provisioning up as soon as possible, you could dump a lot of Gold into a few Guild Stores and have large stock piles of Ingredients for use. Good if you are a high level and have the gold, but if you’re just starting off — you might as well level it as you go.

Cooking Up a Profit
Not many people actually try to make Gold by making food and drinks, that may give you a chance against any competition! I have sold food in bulk before, and honestly at one point I made more gold from that than I did my Blacksmithing. So I will tell a few tricks of mine to making profit from Provisions :)

Part of making profit is not spending much (or anything) for your Ingredients, some of the Major Trading Guilds sell a lot of Ingredients in bulk, but will typically overprice them. Try “WTB (Ingredient)” ads in Zone/Guild Chat, or check some of your Guild Stores for the cheaper deals. Often you will find someone selling 7 Potatoes, but for a good price, so buy all of the good deals — regardless of how small the amounts are, they will add up.

A MUST for all Provisioners is to get the skill points to produce up to 4 items at a time while crafting, this will net you a lot more profit and let you use a lot less ingredients, which will make you a more successful Provisioner :)

Be sure to put as many points as possible into your Provisions Hireling, they will yield a decent amount of Ingredients, and from time to time they will give you one of the Epic Ingredients (Frost Mirriam and Bervez Juice) used for epic food & drink.

Faction Capitals, Cyrodiil, Craglorn & Rawl’kha are good places for selling high-end food & drink, Veteran Rank 5 & 10 items are the most popular and best selling, especially in bulk.

Food does tend to sell a little better than drinks, but drinks are really good as well — especially for long fights, like in Veteran Dungeons or PvP Seiges. Blue Food is probably the best for lots of sales and profit, Epic recipes are harder to make in bulk — and don’t sell for a whole lot more. I don’t sell many Green items either… although they’re relatively easy to produce.

There are many new recipes from the Patch 1.6 revamp of Provisioning, so you will have to experiment with the different recipes and find out which are best sellers, and what to make.