NEW PLAYER GUIDE: GATHERING AND CRAFTING

In The Elder Scrolls Online, you can craft items using the following skill lines: Clothing, Woodworking, Blacksmithing, Jewelry Crafting, Alchemy, Enchanting, and Provisioning. Once obtained, these skills are accessible in the Skills menu and improve as you use them.
Many items you find can be used for crafting. Resources needed for Clothing, Blacksmithing, Woodworking, Jewelry Crafting, Alchemy, and Enchanting are typically found in the wild. During your explorations, keep an eye out to avoid missing plants, ores, mushrooms, pure water sources, and other useful elements. When you approach such a resource, you have the option to harvest it. This action does not require specific skills or equipment, but certain passive and Champion skills allow you to recover high-level resources or be more efficient.
You can also obtain resources by deconstructing equipment at crafting stations.

In cities, camps, and other unexpected places, you will find crafting materials in barrels, crates, and all kinds of containers. These are typically items that can be used for provisioning, but there are also recipes, as well as water used to prepare alchemy potions in flasks and waterskins.
When you open a container, be careful: it might belong to an NPC who won’t like you taking their belongings! Containers with an owner are identifiable by their red interaction text.
If you can’t find the materials you need, you might obtain them from other players! Check the guild traders and banks of the guilds you are a member of. You might also come across a player who is willing to trade.

You will need a crafting station to use your skills.
You can create all sorts of items from the materials you find. To do this, you must interact with the appropriate crafting station (an anvil for blacksmithing, a fire for provisioning, etc.). Then, you can access the necessary skill line and use your resources to craft.
Crafting stations are found in most major cities. They are indicated by icons on the map. Here is what you can do there, although some may not offer all these options:
– Refine resources
– Clean fish
– Create items
– Deconstruct items to obtain refined resources

– Improve item quality
– Study items with specific traits to learn how to craft items with the same qualities
– Craft furniture

The best products are made from good materials.
There are four disciplines that allow you to craft equipment: Woodworking, Blacksmithing, Clothing, and Jewelry Crafting. Learning and progressing in one skill line does not prevent you from accessing others, so feel free to try them all! Equipment crafters can create weapons and armor from raw materials. The materials used determine the level of the crafted item. If you have acquired the necessary knowledge, you can add style materials to modify the appearance of your creations, or trait materials to grant them certain attributes.
To master a trait, you must study an item that has it. This action destroys the item, and its duration increases with the number of traits you have already learned for that type of item. It is possible to speed up the process by spending points in certain passive skills. Research progresses even when your character is offline. In stations that offer it, research is accessible from the top right corner of the crafting menu. As your knowledge of traits deepens, you gain the ability to use special stations, located throughout the world, as well as in player houses. These stations allow you to craft special equipment that grants bonuses when you wear multiple pieces of the same set.
Equipment crafters can also deconstruct items to obtain refined materials, trait and style materials, and improvement materials. The latter allow you to improve item quality and can be tempering alloys, tannins, platings, or resins. Improving items that already have high quality requires higher quality materials in greater quantity. There are passive and Champion abilities that can facilitate this process. Some reduce the amount of improvement materials needed, while others improve the result of refining raw materials and deconstructing items.

Alchemists use plants, mushrooms, and other ingredients to create potions and poisons. To prepare potions, harvest these ingredients and then approach an alchemy station. You can then combine your reagents and solvents to attempt to concoct new mixtures.