I figured with about a month to release we can make a consolidated thread with the most up-to-date information. I have a lot of questions about crafting, so hopefully we can help each other out.

1) Bag space - How does bag space work in this game? How many slots do you initially start out with? Or do they use a weight system like in other ES games?

2) Are there specializations within the crafting trees? Clothing allows you to make light and medium armor. Blacksmithing allows you to make heavy armor and blades. Can you choose to specialize in only medium armor and blades, or will you be sort of "forced" to make pieces of heavy armor to increase the blacksmithing skill.

3) How expensive will it be to initially start crafting? Will I be poor because instead of selling all the random loot I pick-up, I will have to break it down for trait research?

4) How many professions could you feasibly take on at once? I intend to do Clothing for sure, but I'd also like to take Blacksmithing. If I take these two could I also take on some of the "lesser" professions like enchanting, alchemy, or provisioning?

1. Works alot like other MMORPGs. You have multiple bags that hold a select amount of items. Weight has nothing to do with carrying capacity.

2. You are free to "specialize in any crafting skills you want. You can do all six, pick and choose or choose not to any at all.

3. Depending on how they structure it, it might cost a bunch to start with. Not many people may have noticed, it looks like it costs money to refine resources (although to didn't charge you anything in the beta). And that can get expensive real fast.

4. You can do all the professions at once, it will just take lots of resources, time and money.

1. You start with just your backpack and shared bank, both of which can be upgraded to about 100 slots each. Slots are used, no weight. Items stack but poorly for crafting mats. For serious crafting you need well more than 1000 slots just to handle the myriad of different crafting materials. Even by using your alts as mules, you won't have even remotely enough inventory slots to be a dedicated crafter. Hopefully ZOS will steal creatively copy the brilliant and widely lauded system of crafting material storage that was used in Guild Wars 2. Your bank is shared among all characters on your account and is incredibly small even after being increased to its max size. You cannot make a guild to access its guild bank unless you have 10 members (players, not characters), it's only 1000 slots in size and is shared among everybody so it's pretty limited.
2. You "specialize" by learning traits for each piece of armor and weapon that you wish to make. You can only research 1 trait at a time, more after spending skill points in a skill line appropriate to the crafting profession in question, and it takes a very long time to learn all of the traits for each of the various armor and weapon types. In theory you could focus entirely on medium armor and that would make you very good at adding traits to medium armor. Up to you how you spend your research hours.
3. You make less gold by breaking down items and using them to level up your crafting professions (by reusing the parts you gained to make and break more items until you finally run out) than you would by simply selling the items or breaking them down and then selling the results. However, you will be leveling up your professions in the process.
4. You can pick up all of the crafting professions if you want; it depends entirely on how many skill points you want to devote to them. You will eventually gain enough skill points to max out every crafting profession even on one character, but it takes a lot, and your combat skills will have fewer devoted to them in the mean time. Up to you how you spend 'em. You'll also run out of inventory slots real fast (if they don't introduce a much more reasonable system for us to store our crafting mats).

Hmm that's interesting... So you can focus on finding all the medium armor traits or you can just get specific traits for specific items....

Bag space will be the biggest issue it seems.

1) I don't remember off hand, but I wouldn't mind more than I saw in the beta weekend I was in. it did appear to be a certain number of stacks, not a weight system at all.
2) I did not find any sort of specialization like that within the skills. medium armor is under Clothing not blacksmithing. I don't see any "force" required in making armor instead of just weapons, if you are so inclined. ... but personally I would rather have as much variety available as possible. ... increases the odds of being able to make something that gives skillups AND is salable.
3) well, if breaking it down for research is too costly, you can choose not to. in the beta weekend I seemed to be behind in finances compared to what some said they could do. .... but I was also dabbling in ALL crafting, on one character. ... which was not a way that seems ideal other than a higher efficiency of trying things out sort of way.
4) I've read that 2 is the "intended" impact without causing undue strain on combat skill development. its about 24 skill points to obtain all the skills for a given craft.
but, if all the character is going to do is sit in town and craft there's no need for the detection skills or use skills, which can knock 3-5 points off of what you need.

for a regular character, it depends on how narrowly you want to focus your combat related skills, how much diversity you want to have available. if you only want to skill out a dozen or so select combat skills, and twice that in applicable passives, or something, then it would free up (long term) a lot more skillpoints to use towards crafting.
but, on the other hand, it takes a relatively small number of skill points to do everything in one variety.... so unless I am totally mis-estimating the viability of having an escort (or there's some mechanic that would prevent it) or sneaking your way to skyshards at relatively low level, or sneaking to special crafting stations... it should be relatively viable to have a somewhat dedicated character doing almost exclusively crafting.

I would be interested in opinions of those with more experience in ESO, about how viable having a character of say, level 10-15 doing almost exclusively crafting would be. IS there a mechanic that would prevent you from hiring higher level people from taking you to skyshards (so you could get say, 30 or so skillpoints available with minimal combat skills) or special crafting stations?

You need to get a trait for every piece of armor or weapon that you want to make. They aren't general.

If you research a medium armor chest piece that has the Reinforced trait, it takes time and destroys the item. You then gain the ability to add Reinforced to any medium armor chest piece that you make later on. You could not make other medium armor types as Reinforced until you research that particular trait on those item types (legs, shoulders etc) one time.

Bag space is a massive issue.

You could absolutely do that (have others escort you to sky shards), but leveling isn't that hard and you will want a lot of skill points, so you might as well just level up and accumulate as many skill points as you can.

Pack horses will also be used to carry and/or store items. I don't know the size of the bags on the pack horses. Bank and character bags start with 50 slots and can be upgraded by increments of 10. The cost increases exponentially higher. The nice thing about the crafting in ESO is you won't have to make 40 gloves to level up. Breaking down items will give you experience and components.

oh I totally get that.

but thats the thing in a way. if you want to have a crafting alt that can make anything in a given tree, there might be a balance point of spending your time leveling your main, but having the alt do JUST crafting.

I read somewhere that its set up so that breaking down items that you yourself made(presumably account based?) gives greatly reduced skillup credit. any idea if thats so?

Gigantic throatable balls deep winerses, for you!

New crafting article at TF: http://tamrielfoundry.com/2014/02/rudrias-crafting-basics/

As for the horses, at least on the basic starter one, you have to feed it to level it up in either speed, stamina, or carrying capacity. The basic Imperial horse starts with zero capacity; you can feed it once per day to get 1 slot per feeding. The slots are added directly to your personal inventory. So I guess you can get up to 50 more slots that way... think they're maxed at 50, then you can buy the next tier of horse, which starts higher and also goes 50 levels.

I think you start off with 20 bank and 30 inventory slots. There is a person you can talk with that sells you more inventory space and you can to the banker to increase how much you hold in the bank. You can also craft while having items stored in the bank.

Sorry no useful crafting info here but just a comment.

I hope they do something major with inventory and bank/bag slots.

I hate all the time I have had to spend on other games managing bag space.

Let me purchase a couple crates, barrels sacks etc and just toss stuff into those and deal with them when I don't feel like questing lol

Bag space for serious, dedicated crafters in ESO is a living nightmare.

• We very badly need ZOS to just take the fantastic crafting material storage system used in Guild Wars 2 and use it in ESO.
• A bank that holds only crafting materials, has one slot for each different type of crafting mat, stacks to 999, shared.
• Zero effect on non-crafters.
• Win.

not account based character based

if your alt crafts the item you get full points for breaking down, but that would mean leveling up the craft on 2 characters

Is this confirmed in game with cold hard numbers, or just rumored?

This question may or may not pertain to crafting, but how does chat work with megaservers? Is there going to be a trade channel that is just jam-packed with thousands of people trying to sell things?

Agreed.

Here's http://www.gamesas.com/topic/1490774-the-bag-space-issue-thread-3/, if anyone would like to weigh in on the subject. Just dug up thread two and found it locked (post limit reached), so made the third thread just now.

Lots' of info http://elderscrollsonline.wiki.fextralife.com/Crafting as well.

Cas

K so just a bit more information I personally noticed.

1) Researching takes a LONG time - and it seems to scale depending on how many times you've researched on A SPECIFIC ITEM
For example, I researched a trait on some light chest armor, took 6hs (if i remember correctly) the first time. Next time on light chest armor it took 12 hours (again, if i remember correctly)
For light armor boots - the first research took 6 hrs, and i imagine the second would take 12
Now, does this continually double, or does it cap at some point (maybe 24 hours? I DON'T KNOW
But IMO it's not worth it to put skillpoints into the 'research 2 things at once and faster" because eventually you will have researched EVERYTHING and why waste money on that respec?

2) There are special 'set' crafting tables out in the world - and these ALL require that you have researched THAT SPECIFIC ITEM twice (the least I saw was twice, it might be more later-in-game)
So for example, there was a set that could make me do a knock-back area thing when I fell below a certain amount of health (once every like 3 minutes)
I needed 3 parts of this set for it to 'work'
Each PART (be it a weapon, shield, or armor) required me to have researched 2 traits in each part
So if I wanted to make light chest armor, light armor boots and a restoration staff, I would need to have researched 2 traits in light chest armor, 2 traits in light armor boots, and 2 traits in the restoration staff.

3) I found provisioning to be SUPER awesome - I had found a blue recipe that only took liver and onions, and it gave me 115 to magicka AND stamina for AN HOUR
After getting the skill that makes you make 2(more for later on, but i only got to 2) per 1 set of ingredients I effectively ALWAYS had 115 extra to both of those stats... and I could give them to my group members to make dungeoning easier... really seems like a USEFUL craft to me


As for your questions; the bag space...while super limited - I managed to basically 'do' every craft while actually playing, I just kept my inventory to the bare essentials (some food, some potions and soulgems
And basically hoarded everything 'of importance'
That being said, those [censored] little "carapaces" you can find that say "sell to a merchant" i got rid of and replaced with an actual crafting item
I basically 'deconstructed' all the items I found EXCEPT for the crafting line I KNEW I wouldn't need/use (in the case of my healer, it was the blacksmithing line)

I basically would find tons of heavy armor/weapons and iron ore...I just sold them, and "used" everything else
Got both decent money AND crafting EXP
Naturally you should do this AFTER you sell everything to make a comfortable "starting gold" collection.


And finally;
"How many professions could you feasibly take on at once? I intend to do Clothing for sure, but I'd also like to take Blacksmithing. If I take these two could I also take on some of the "lesser" professions like enchanting, alchemy, or provisioning?"

If I were you I'd just be smart about it - to me it sounds like you are planning on using light/medium armor (hence clothing) and a metal weapon (hence blacksmithing)
You shouldn't waste skill points nor profit from the blacksmithing line - when you could just as easily find someone/pay someone to make you your weapon (if this is indeed your plan)
Likewise, if you were planning on being a heavy armored bow-er, you should go blacksmithing and just pay someone to make you a bow.

It just makes sense to be able to sell one 'main' crafting line for money, and 'do' the one you will use more (naturally armor will always trump weapon, because you can make 6 pieces vs 1 piece)

But to answer your question - yes if you REALLY wanted you could easily do clothing, blacksmithing AND another...it realistically ONLY takes like 5-10 skill points to 'max out the ability to make the highest level stuff' (you don't NEED all of the extra skills like "see ores from 20 feet away")

That site seems to have a lot of misinformation. For example it has the same description for Enchanting and Clothing, and it says Clothing makes light and heavy armor, when in fact it makes light and medium.

I disagree with this - 'unlimited crafting space' (which is what you are essentially arguing FOR) could lead to the flooding of the market
If I could just have space for every possible crafting material - up to 999 in a dedicated slot, I could easily make almost 3 or 4 THOUSAND of a given food item (for example)
Or, 999 of a 'super-awesome potion'
You could realistically just collect everything on your 'main' character, go on a crafting alt and make 999 of everything, and basically insta-level in crafting...or sell the crafting mats so someone ELSE could do that.

Just seems bad - I like that there's a restriction and semi-limited bag space so that one is..in essence FORCED to 'give up' at least one crafting line for the sake of money/space...makes it so that it cannot be the case that 'everyone is awesome at every craft...and therefore crafting is arbitrary'