Beginner’s guide to gathering materials in Elder Scrolls Online

While out and about adventuring in Tamriel, you are bound to come across resource nodes for things like wood, ore, and plants. While at first glance it may seem pretty straightforward, Elder Scrolls Online handles material gathering in a slightly different way than other MMOs — so here’s our beginner’s guide to gathering materials.

Materials are naturally used in crafting, which allows you to fashion gear for your character. A character can technically learn all crafting-related skills, but it requires an immense amount of Skyshards and Skill Points. One specific category of crafting passive affects your gathering, however — the first one for each skill:

• Alchemy: Solvent Proficiency
• Blacksmithing: Metalworking
• Clothing: Tailoring
• Jewelry: Engraver
• Woodworking: Woodworking

Materials spawn in a unique way in ESO. Instead of specific types of materials spawning in specific areas — for example, Copper Ore spawning in beginner zones in World of Warcraft — ESO uses a character-specific system. The nodes you see in-game are based on your Character level and your Passives level.

As an example, if you are a level 50, CP 160 player and you have level 1 Metalworking, if you come across a mining node the node will have a 50% chance to be Iron Ore (the lowest level mining node,) and a 50% chance to be Rubedite Ore (the highest level mining node.) This ensures that you always have a chance to obtain level-appropriate resources for Writ completion. This also means that you can technically gather high-level crafting materials from low-level, less populated zones — so if a zone is overpopulated or you’re finding competition for your nodes, simply head to any different zone.