Elder Scrolls Online: Crafting Guide Series Part Three - Enchanting, Alchemy & Provisioning

If you have seen the first two parts of my crafting guide series, you have managed to create something with your blacksmithing, woodworking, clothing and jewelry crafting materials. I would say it’s time to put those alchemy, enchanting, and provisioning materials to good use. 

Today’s guide is going to be on exactly that. Starting with enchanting, we will go through how to turn those useless materials into something worth using.

Enchanting

Enchanting has two options within its station that you can take full advantage of: creation and extraction. 

Extraction is the exact same in every way as deconstruction from other crafting stations you may remember. If you have found an enchantment and have no use of it, simply extract it or deconstruct it, and you may or may not receive some of the Runestones that went into crafting it. Creation, on the other hand, is where the magic happens.

You have three types of Runestones: Potency, Essence, and Aspect. Potency dictates the level of your enchantment you’re about to make. These runestones will change over time as you level up and grow as a crafter. They also dictate whether or not the enchantment you’re about to make will add something to you or your weapon, or if it will take away something from the enemy. However, we will get into that in just a moment.

Essence Runestones are the really important part. These Runestones will be what your enchantment is based on. Whether your enchantment will be about Health, Magicka, or Stamina, whether it will be about weapon or spell damage or perhaps even fire, ice, shock, or poison damage, it’s here that the core of your enchantment is chosen.

Lastly, we have Aspects. The Aspect Runestone is the easiest to understand. This is the quality of your enchantment in the order of white, green, blue, purple, then gold. Each step up will increase the strength of your enchantment.

Let’s put it all together. I select my Potency Runestone to match my level, but I also choose the add rather than take away. Next, we choose our Essence Runestone, which I chose to be Health related. Then, for Aspect, I chose basic white quality for this example. So, altogether we have Add, Health, white quality and the picture below is exactly what we have created, an armor enchantment that will increase our health.

But, what if we change the Potency Runestone to take away rather than add? Let’s see what changes. 

Actually, it’s still health related, and it’s still white quality. But this time, it becomes a weapon enchantment that deals with magical damage and absorbs the enemy’s health and restores it to me.

Just something to remember: when it comes to knowing what Runestone does what exactly, you’ll have to figure that out on your own. When you first find yourself a Runestone, it won’t tell you what it does, rather just give you a question mark rather than a word. Once you have used that Runestone, you will then learn its purpose.

Alchemy

Now, let’s talk about Alchemy. 

The Alchemy Station only has the option to create, so don’t worry about deconstruction or improvement or any of that other stuff. When creating with Alchemy, you have two options: to create a potion or a poison. If you want to create a potion, you need to select water as your solvent. Likewise, if you choose to create a poison, then choose the acid, disgusting, bile like solvent.

Both the water and the acid will change according to your level. For myself, you can see that my water is called Lorkhan’s Tears. But for brand new beginners, you’ll find that your water is called natural water. The reagent section is all those herbs, wildlife, and plants you gathered up in part one of the guide. 

When creating your poison or potion, it is as simple as pairing like with like. Each reagent has different properties: some increase Health while others Stamina and Magicka. Some increase spell resistance while others physical resistance. Some increase weapon damage and others spell critical. So, when creating your potion or poison, it’s simply pairing two or three reagents together that do the same thing.

Now, similar to enchanting, as a new player, you won’t see all the fancy symbols next to your reagents. I see them only because I’ve learned what each reagent does. You can find out each one of the reagent’s properties by using them over and over. This will help you to discover each property on a reagent.

So, let’s see this in practice. I select my water as I want to make a potion, not a poison. Then, I select my reagents. Now, here’s a free tip from me. Making a health potion requires the two reagents: Columbine and Mountain Flower. These two combined will make a potion that restores health and stamina as well as their recoveries. 

Provisioning

Lastly, we have provisioning, the art of cooking and brewing.

From part one of the crafting guide series, you have collected ingredients from barrels and boxes all around Tamriel. Hopefully, you came across some recipes too, as they are needed for this process. If not, don’t panic. Find the local inn and speak to the chef or the Brewer NPC. They will sell you a small handful of recipes.

Once you have read a recipe, it will be available to view inside the provisioning crafting station. Now something to be wary of is that recipes have levels, so make sure you’re creating food or drink that is to your level. If you want to level up quickly, then using ESO Gold will be a good way.

Now, you have read your recipe and you want to create that item. The crafting station will tell you exactly what ingredients you need to create that item and also how many of it, too. So, make sure you have those ingredients on you and get creating.

Honestly, provisioning is the most simple to understand. Here’s a little tip for you: food is primarily used to increase your base attributes, whereas drinks are used to increase your recoveries. Now, you may find some that do both, but primarily food does the base stat, drinks do the recovery. 

Now be warned: you can’t consume both food and drink. You can only have one of these two consumables active at one time. 

So, after all that, you should be able to create yourselves some useful enchantments now, which you can place on weapons, armor, and jewelry. Perhaps you can also create some handy potions or deadly poisons or even create yourself a scrumptious meal or a quenching beverage.