Posted on April 9, 2014, GameFront Staff Elder Scrolls Online: Gold Farming Tips & Tricks
There’s gold to make and quests to take in Elder Scrolls Online if you know the tricks to work the market. The stingy NPCs of Tamriel won’t offer much gold for completing missions or for selling rare gear, so you’ll need to rely on other methods for making stacks of digital dollars. Get some of our combat-tested tips in the farming guide below.
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Gold Farming Tips & Tricks
Cash doesn’t come easy in ESO. Quest rewards give a pittance, and merchants pay the absolute minimum value for your items. If you’re looking to make bank, check out the methods in each section.
Provisioning: Loot, Ingredients, and Doubling Your Profits
Items are everywhere. Ingredients for provisions are commonly found in crates, barrels, and baskets. Any brown wooden or wicker container usually holds ingredients.
What are all these random ingredients for? Provisioning is the cooking skill in ESO, allowing you to create buffs for health, stamina, and magicka. But, if you’re like us, you’ll have so many extra ingredients you won’t know what to do with the rest.
Provisioning is one of the easiest skills to grind, and one of the easiest to reach skill level 50. Find recipes by searching through cupboards, house chests, and night stands. These are commonly found in Inns and town homes.
By finding and using recipes, you’ll unlock new combinations of ingredients to create at cooking fire. Cooking fires are found in base camps or inns if you’re in town.
The ingredients aren’t worth anything, so be prepared to fill your inventory with worthless items until they can be cooked. Once you’ve completed a recipe, sell off the left-overs for easy rewards.
Want to double your profits? Unlock the special provisioning skills “Chef” or “Brewer” after Provisioning Skill Level 7 and 9 respectively.
Each rank of Chef instantly creates 1, 2, and 3 extra servings of a completed food recipe at no extra ingredient cost. Brewer works the same way for drinks.
Crafting: Collecting Resources,
Resources like rawhide, jute, maple and iron are very valuable in every form. Wood is used for Woodworking. Leather and fabric is for Clothing, and metals are for Blacksmithing.
You’ll always find metal ore near large rocks or cliffs. Keep an eye out for mounds of brown or black rocks. Wood is found near trees or bushes. Look for discarded logs with a few leaves on the side.
Leather is trickery to find. Typically, any non-aggressive animals or natural dwellers of the landscape will randomly drop hides. Fabric is harder to spot — look for collections of yellow or blue stalks jutting from fields.
To craft with these items, you’ll need to refine them first. Take wood to Woodworking tables, metal to Blacksmithing anvils, and leather or fabric to Clothing stations. These are typically found together, check your map in towns to find where they’re located.
Resources can be sold for a profit alone, but you can always earn more by refining resources first. The only caveat is that you’ll only be able to refine resources in batches of ten. But once refined, they’re instantly worth more to merchants.
Want to make even more cash? Take those refined resources and construct items. It doesn’t matter what you build — just make stacks of swords with metal, piles of light armor, or useless wands you don’t need.
Do it often to increase your crafting skill level and make tons of cash off the crafted junk. Save upgrade items and trait gems for the items you want to keep. Unless you’ve got plenty of extras.
WTS Valuables: Using Zone Chat to Sell
If you’re looking for big money, try selling those valuable resources or other unique items in Zone chat. By right-clicking an item you’ll be able to link any item in chat. Do so to share what you’re selling in Zone chat and let people know you’re looking to sell.
Items like Racial Lore Traits typically sell for 2,000 gold each. Stacks of refined crafting resources also sell for much higher in Zone chat than if you were to sell them to merchants. NPC vendors will buy stacks of 100 resources for 100-200 gold, while buyers on Zone chat will typically pay 1,000+ gold.
Be on the lookout early for blue or green gear. These will also sell for higher prices in Zone chat, if you’re willing to put in a little extra effort.
Rare gear is rewarded more often in dungeons or by completing Dark Anchor events. Look for team dungeons and farm them for improved gear, or watch the skies for giant anchors and clear them for a random reward.
ESO features a C.O.D system, allowing you to mail items to buyers. When sending an item for sail, type your price with the C.O.D feature selected and attach the item before sending. This way, you can send items without worrying about trades. The buyer will have to pay your price before they can collect.
Join a Trade Guild
Want to sell everything to other players without having to use Zone chat? Join a trade guild. Every guild features a store where members can buy and sell their wares (with the right permissions unlocked) and if you join a particularly large group, you’ll have plenty of prospective customers.
Currently, many 50+ trading guilds commonly advertise membership in Zone chat. Look for one that gives you buying/selling permissions right away.
Typically these groups are full of crafters looking to purchase extra resources to save time. They’re a good place to buy more at a reduced price, or easily sell for slightly higher prices than NPC vendors.
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