This is a preliminary look at crafting in Elder Scrolls Online. This is as much info as Zenimax is allowing to get out, but I would say it’s a good enough overview.
There are 6 crafting professions in the game. These are blacksmithing, clothing, woodworking, alchemy, enchanting, and provisioning. None of these professions have prerequisites or requirements. There is also no need for specialization, so you can shuffle between them as it fits your needs.
When we say there are no prerequisites, we mean you do not need to obtain tools to start in any of the crafting professions. You will need to collect supplies, like wood or metal, but that’s about it.
As you may imagine, blacksmithing, clothing and woodworking are closer to each other than the other professions. These four have the same aspects: Creation, Improvement, Extraction, and Research.
Obviously, Creating is the act of building things. How you use building materials improves the quality, and therefore the stats, of the item you are creating. For example, you start out with iron ingots if you try to build a sword. The more ingots you use, the better the sword. You can also choose a style (purely visual) and trait (which determines bonuses).
You can upgrade weapons through a process called improvement. You can improve the tempering of a sword, for example, from normal, fine, superior, epic, all the way to legendary. There is a catch to this: you can fail to improve your item, and doing so could mean you lose it.
Extraction refers to the ability to break down an item to its raw materials. In the case of a sword, this means reducing it back to ingots. Similarly, Research allows you to get a trait from an existing item. In this case, you wait a certain period of time after getting that trait to prepare to imbue it in a new item.
Alchemy is a far simpler process. You simply combine one solvent, and two reagents, to make potions, for health, mana, and other stat buffs.
Enchanting involves making glyphs, again so that you can attach them to items, like armor and weapons. This has two aspects. Creation has you combining three runes with a potency essence and aspect rune to make a glyph. You can also use Extraction to pull existing runes out of items.
Finally, Provisioning is the process of preparing food and drinks. You can obtain existing foods from NPCs or as pickups. Subsequently, you can cook pies, stews, soups, beverages for temporary buffs.
The Elder Scrolls Online is coming April 4 to Windows, and then June to Playstation 4 and Xbox One.
