Crafting your own equipment is one of the draws of the Elder Scrolls series, so it’s no surprise Elder Scrolls Online offers that capability…

Materials: If you want to craft anything, you’ll need materials. There’s a few options available for the budding craftsman:

• Gathering: Simply look out for plants, logs and ore as you ride around, or kill wild beasts for leather and meat! The materials you harvest scale with your level, so pick a zone you like!
• Crime: Breaking into unoccupied houses or barns can get you a surprising amount of provisioning materials, along with recipes to learn and valuables to fence for gold
• Deconstructing: Gear you pick up from slain enemies or as quest rewards can be broken down at a crafting station for some materials and a lot of crafting experience.
• Hirelings: All the crafting skills except alchemy have a Hireling perk you can invest into, that will mail you a small amount of material every day. Note that this can include legendary quality crafting material, worth a lot of gold on the market!

Once you have your materials just look for crafting stations in any major city. Interacting with an equipment station (clothing/smithing/woodworking) will give you options to:

• Refine: If you have 10 raw material, you can refine it to get useful material
• Construct: Build an item (you can take items straight from your bank)
• Deconstruct: Break down an item for crafting experience and material
• Improve: Upgrade the quality of an item using tempering material
• Research: Destroy an item to learn a trait (items you can research will have a magnifying glass beside their name in your inventory)

Whilst a consumable station (alchemy/enchanting/provisioning) will just show you components, or recipes in the case of Provisioning. Most crafting areas have NPC craftsmen who’ll sell a limited selection of crafting items, usually materials to set the style of an item.

Research: You may have noticed the research tab at the woodworking, smithing and clothing benches. By researching a piece of gear with a trait on it, you will learn how to craft similar items with that trait (so researching an Iron Helmet with the Impenetrable trait will allow you to craft any heavy helmet with Impenetrable) though this destroys the item in question. You can have one item researching at each type of bench at a time (two with the metallurgy/carpentry/stitching passives) and it takes longer to research a trait for every other one you’ve unlocked on an item type – so research things you actually want first!

Sets: There are specific crafting workshops found out in the wild that allow you to create items with a set bonus – whether it’s bonus damage, or the ability to breathe fire every few melee strikes! Each set requires you to have researched a set number of traits to craft a piece, but other than that, it functions exactly like normal crafting – so this is a great way of improving your equipment as you level!

Styles: Gear can be crafted in different styles, determining what it looks like by default. You’ll have access to the racial style of your character by default, but you’ll also gain the ability to craft different styles if you find “motifs” by looting/stealing from containers or completing certain repeatable quests.

Writs: You can make some gold as you level crafting if you fulfil crafting writs. These refresh daily and can be found in all major cities on noticeboards – just look for the blue triangle markers that delineate repeatable missions. Writs scale with your crafting level, and completing them will give you a chunk of crafting experience and some materials, recipes, or resource maps that can help you progress even further. These offer good rewards for little investment, so take advantage of these when you can!

One of the potential rewards of a writ is a master crafting writ. Opening one will grant you a quest to create a specific item piece from a specific set, in a specific style with a specific trait – and you’ll need to upgrade the item quality to either epic or legendary depending on the writ. These can be a massive pain to complete as you may not have the DLC required to craft some of the combinations. Furthermore, you’ll need to unlock the item’s style – this can put you at the mercy of random drops or cost you a chunk of gold from a Guild Trader NPC. Finally, the materials cost of upgrading an item to legendary can be prohibitive in itself. Note: you can buy or sell the unopened writs via Guild Traders as well – legendary writs seem to give the best value for money if you can handle the requirements!

If you manage to wade through the obstacles and complete a master writ, you’ll obtain a handful of vouchers (the amount varies wildly from writ to writ, I’ve seen 2-118 offered) that you can spend at Rolis Hlaalu – the fellow you hand the completed writs to. He has some nice things on sale, for example:

• Crafting stations (including ones that can be attuned to a specific set for convenience)
• Transmutation station (allowing you to change the trait on an item)
• Research scrolls (allowing you to knock a day off research timers)
• Storage boxes (additional account-wide storage to place in a house)

The voucher price varies from item to item with research scrolls costing 3 to a transmute station at 1250 or a 60 item storage chest at 200. As such, you can get a benefit for completing something as simple as an epic enchantment writ, but to get the big rewards you really need to be aiming at legendary writs and saving up your vouchers.