So now the NDA is lifted l can finally talk about the main focus of the game for me - food.

Been a wandering cook since MW. Planning on doing the same here.

My one irk about provisioning is that you need to find the recipes before you can cook something. I only found two or three recipes and found all but one of those in Coldharbour. I would prefer if there was a way to discover recipes by randomly combining stuff - like food alchemy which is what good cooking really is anyway.

I like the regional variety in recipes. I plan on having alts in all alliances (not necessarily the right ones) so they can pass recipes and ingredients on to my main cook.

I have also tried alchemy but there were so few plants. I would like if you could find the odd ingredient as a monster drop or in crate loot with foodstuffs. I found alchemy much trickier to advance.

So what are you thoughts about crafting? What did you like and dislike? Ideas for improvements?

Definitely liked crafting and used it A LOT on every character I rolled. It was very useful but I didn't dable in Cooking or Alch very much mostly because those crafts took up a ton of inventory space. If I could improve cooking, I'd say less materials at low levels and for Alch I'd say a better tool for discovering the best way to discover how herbs work. For instance, on Alch, I made a handful of potions and the UI still didn't tell me what traits a type of herb would offer or even what happened to my chemical concoction. This is fine or whatever but I felt like it was pointless. Maybe it gets better at later levels.

I tried all the crafting, and liked them all.

You can find all the starter recipes for your region the last two zones you experience with the prophet (as well as a ton of lockpicks). I never encountered any recipes beyond the starter recipes though.

As for plants to use for alchemy, I found that commonly traveled areas they were scarce, but when you wander off and explore less inhabited areas, you find a lot more. My biggest mistake though, was that I had forgotten (been a while since I'd played a TES game) that you could eat them to learn their traits, so I wasted a bunch on experimenting through crafting.

Fishing... I found no purpose behind it, and it just seemed to be a waste of time waiting for a fish to bite. So I quit collecting worms and bugs for bait.

My biggest gripe about crafting though, is the Improvements on weapons/armor. The items you need can only be found via extraction of items, but they very rarely yield the ingredients for Improvements.

Oh yeah... I was also disappointed that there is no jewelry crafting.

The best way to learn traits of the reagents, is to eat them. If you experiment and don't learn any traits, it means you didn't create anything useful and as a result you didn't learn anything and didn't get a potion out of it.

I would like to see the fish you get from fishing used for cooking. Perhaps you could fish up other things for other crafts too? Like water plants for alchemy, shells for armour or clothing?

I too would love to be able to craft jewellery - as l do in real life. I hope they might consider adding it later.

I am a tad disappointed that there are only 4 rare racial styles, since the other 10 will be available for people off the bat and quite common. but I assume they will ad more since they missed out armours like glass, dwarven, and ebony.

How do you eat them exactly? rclick-->eat?

What do you mean? When you start the game, the only racial style you can craft is your own. You have to find books to unlock the other styles. Did something change since last beta?

These two!
Also, having some initial "craft this, craft that" quests would be quite good, maybe even better if that quest made you gather all the needed materials and crafting yourself basic equipment with no other reward (that would be a paradox...).

Yup. Or highlite it in your inventory and press E to use.

I tried provisioning, smithing and enchanting:

Provisioning was underwhelming. There's ingredients literally everywhere, but the effects of the food were no big deal and there were very few recipes. I probably won't bother with it live.

Smithing was a lot of fun. It took a little getting used to, like needing to add more ingots to make a higher level item but it was rewarding. The one thing that svcks is researching. It's purely a time sink, and you can only research an effect for one particular item, meaning if you use iron gauntlets with +stamina to research the +stamina effect you can only craft that effect into gauntlets, and it takes 6 hours to research it.

Enchanting was a bit confusing and there were like no runes to collect. I understand that it's designed to be confusing but given the scarcity of runes it's too much trial and error. I took my enchanter out to collect runes and wound up finding 3 runes and 103 iron ore. 3 runes! Then I trek back to Daggerfall, create a single glyph from that failed expedition and that was only to discover the effects of those runes - the glyph itself was worthless and I used it to extract a rune.

if they don't drastically increase the number of runes found in the world I can't see anyone wanting to take enchanting as a profession.

Fishing feels like a complete waste, unless there are recipes for it that provide above average buffs, the time spend on it is totally wasted, takes too long, and you don't even have a 100% chance of what you get being a fish.

Other than that, all professions were spectacular.

EXCEPT ONE ANNOYING DETAIL WITH ALCHEMY.

I'm used to Skyrim showing what ingredient doens't work with what, here it's not like that, if you find 2 ingredients dont play nice, you MUST remember them yourself, since there is no ingame way to know if they work or not (unless you know all 4 traits already, but it's impossible if you repeat, unwillingly, the same mistake).

I would take it with pleasure, as I found a LOT of runes and even more seemingly useless glyphs to extract.

My only critique of the crafting system is not really related to the mechanics but inventory space.

I don't know what game balancing mechanic having limited inventory space helps with, but I find it frustrating to have to destroy items out in the field to pick up something else when I am out playing. It just ends up breaking up the fun with unneeded traveling back to a merchant hub. To me quest driven leveling already eats up too much time running back and forth when you add on having to travel back to a merchant every 30 min to sell. I like to work up all the crafting lines, but I end up passing by all crafting nodes besides ore, wood and Jute.

no, but whether you have them are not they are still common. you can easily ask someone in chart to make you a set from them. daedric on the other hand? Ancient elf? no ones going to have those.

I was overflowing on runes, I had even legendary ones, BUT what I hated is that I never had a balanced number, I could end up with 15 of a type, 2 of another and 0 of the other, guess that's just luck.

But there were more than enough, and I dare say that the ability to find legendary ones might be too high.

Any fish I caught were always labeled as Trophy. Dunno what good that does, since there's no housing to mount trophies anyway.

And yeah... That's a stickler with alchemy. Heck, I'd just be happy if it kept a list of recipes you learned so that you didn't have to try to remember what made what.

Put crafting materials in the bank, as it is shared between ALL your character, AND you can use that to craft, it doesn't need to be in your inventory (goes to all crafting), so there is no reason to hoard it in your personal inventory.

I do like that you can leave all you crating stuff in the bank and then you can still use it wherever you are crafting. That is handy for alts too.

But unless I am mistaken, if I pick up an item in the world I still have to go back and put it in the bank. It doesn't automatically divert to the stack I have in the bank right?

Quick note on this, the effects of food I thought were quite strong. I was playing the mages guild instance where you had to kill the dog-like thing at the end and I failed 2 or 3 times. Granted I may have been low in level, but it was a real challenge AND everything would respawn if I didn't complete it each time. Then I used some +35hp food buff and it was instantly easier, did it on that run thru too. The +35hp put a big chunk into my hp bar on screen too.

The items you need for improvements can be found. I got an epic crafting item from a heavy bag in the cheesemonger's hollow. I saw a couple heavy bags last beta and didn't see any in the previous 2 betas, so they may be new. Also, people will no doubt sell or trade the ones they won't use, so you can get the stuff you need that way, which I think will be good for the economy.

Regarding jewelry, I didn't see any way to craft it. Maybe they have something else in mind for it.

You still have to go back and put the item in the bank. You don't then have to take the item out of the bank again to craft with it. I think you can buy more bag and bank space too though l am not sure how much.

Wow what the hell? I explored Glenumbra nonstop for like two hours or so and found 3 runes and a ton of iron ore.

Maybe there's specific kinds of places that runes spawn, much like how ore seems to spawn near rocky outcroppings and giant boulders. I haven't figured that out with runes yet.

But it does stack to 100, so you can hoard quite a bit of it, also the first inventory upgrade costs 400g, which is easy to get, it jumps to 2k for the next one though.

I advice you to take the first upgrade as soon as you have around 600g, it's worth it early on to even hoard worms and sell them, the next upgrade I'd do after I get a horse probably.

The bank upgrade is 1k, up to you if it's worth it or not, but if you keep only craftables in there you should be fine with the basic pack.