ESO Blacksmithing Guide: How to Level Blacksmithing

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Penned by Angus Green

Angus is our resident Elder Scrolls Online specialist. He lives in Eugene and is a teacher by day.

Reviewed by Benjamin Barr

One of the essential crafting skills in Elder Scrolls Online, the blacksmithing skill will benefit your character in many ways. Whether you are looking to gather and sell expensive materials or if you want to improve your weapons to their highest level, blacksmithing will allow you to maximize your experience. Blacksmithing is a useful crafting skill you’ll want to get to max level as soon as possible so you can reap all the rewards it has to offer. 

In this ESO blacksmithing guide, we’ll go over the uses of blacksmithing, where to find materials, top crafting benefits, along with much more useful information you can apply right away in-game. But first, let’s hop right into why blacksmithing is so important in the first place.

Other ESO Crafting Guides:

• Jewelry
• Alchemy
• Provisioning

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Why Level Blacksmithing?

Blacksmithing is one of the crafting skill lines that most players will focus on leveling due to it providing so many benefits to your character in game. Being able to craft yourself both heavy armor as well as one-handed / two-handed weapons means that you will have much more access to all of the possible set bonuses in the game. Sure, you can always find a master crafter to build you sets, but when you can make it yourself you can play whatever you want, when you want. And forget about paying those crafting fees. 

Other than crafting sets of blacksmithing materials, with a higher blacksmithing skill and more passives activated, you’ll gain more materials from collecting from blacksmithing nodes as well as from refining the raw materials you gathered. The holy grail of uses from the blacksmithing skill line is probably the ability to improve items with tempers more easily. So not only will you be able to improve your white quality item up to the highest possible gold quality, you’ll spend half as many of the expensive tempering materials to do so. We’ll highlight which of these passives to snag first further down in the guide. 

Where to Find Blacksmithing Materials

Blacksmithing materials can be found anywhere out in Tamriel, most notably ore veins that can be found in rocky terrain by mountain or hill sides. The ore veins that you find will correspond to the player’s Metalworking passive rather than player level, so if you are Rank 1 with iron ingots, you won’t be finding the rubedite ore veins you need when you are CP 160.

You can also find ore veins more directly through blacksmithing surveys, which are maps you can get through completing a daily blacksmithing crafting writ. The treasure map style item will show you an X that marks the spot in one of the zones across Tamriel that you can go seek out and find for six rich ore veins, giving you double the amount of ore you would normally get from each node. From all this raw ore, you can go back to a crafting station and “refine” the ore into around 6–10 ingots per ten ore refined.

This also has the chance of creating tempers for upgrades, including Honing Stone (white -> green), Dwarven Oil (green -> blue), Grain Solvent (blue -> purple), and finally Tempering Alloy (purple -> gold).

Another way to obtain blacksmithing materials for this ESO blacksmithing guide is through deconstructing items, both armor and weapons. When you are at a crafting station, press the deconstruction icon and it will show you all of the possible items you can deconstruct that are made from metal. If you don’t want to deconstruct your favorite weapon, make sure to “lock” that item in your inventory so that it will not show up in the deconstruction menu.

Once you deconstruct an item, you have a chance to collect the style material that was used to make it as well as the metal and upgrade materials. So if you deconstruct a Level 1 epic (purple) quality orc style sword, you may get iron ingots, manganese style material, and grain solvent.

Crafting Station Locations and How to Get Your Own

Crafting stations can be found all throughout the game, most easily found in the major city of each zone. Depending upon the city’s layout, the location of the crafting stations and their distance from each other change. So in Windhelm, Eastmarch it may take you a while to get all your crafting done, compared to Rimmen, Northern Elsweyr. Smaller cities in zones will have crafting stations as well for blacksmithing, but sometimes they are harder to find and not as close to a wayshrine.

One of the best ways to get around city hopping to get your crafting needs done is to simply purchase (or find) your own crafting stations to place in your house for easy access. Getting your own blacksmithing station can be done in several ways — the fastest but most expensive way is by simply buying a blacksmithing station outright from the crown store for 3000 crowns.

However, you can also earn one through crafting writ vouchers earned through doing Master Writs which are more difficult crafting missions. But to obtain a Master Writ, you’ll need to first complete a normal crafting writ of that type at its highest level (meaning you’ll need to do a daily crafting writ for a skill you have at max rank). Writ vouchers can also be done during certain events such as the Witches Festival during October.

Last but not least, and with the best looking crafting station, you can earn one for free through scrying. The Anvil of Old Orsinium is a legendary level antiquity that can be found in Wrothgar. The lead for this item can be found through killing enemies from the public dungeon called Old Orsinium. Be sure to take down all of the bosses in the area, as I got the lead from the Pyre Keeper Rugdrulz fight. 

How To Level Up Blacksmithing in ESO (Crafting & Deconstruction)

To level your blacksmithing skill with this ESO blacksmithing guide, you’ll want to deconstruct as many heavy armor and metal weapons as you can find. Intricate items will give you bonus inspiration towards its correlating crafting tree, so this will speed up your leveling process.

Doing your daily blacksmithing writ will also give you bonus inspiration for it, further increasing your leveling.

You can also create and deconstruct blacksmithing items, but higher level items give you more experience. Rather than creating ten iron daggers, you may just want to make one voidstone dagger instead. Search guild stores for intricate items as you can find them fairly cheap, and it really does speed up your leveling.

For each rank of your Metalworking passive, you can work with new types of metal, and the higher ranking ones will give you more experience per piece deconstructed or created.

Blacksmithing Skills

Temper Expertise (the last passive) will give you the most benefits for helping your character get to the best build possible, but these other passives are important too.

Miner Hireling is the most useful for me as it provides me with many items for free that I can either apply to making my weapons and armor better or simply sell for high profit.

If you want to be a master crafter, be sure to take Metallurgy early, as it gives you the most bang for your buck if you take it early on.

Keen Eye might be the least useful of the skills mentioned in this ESO blacksmithing guide (as you can spot ore veins fairly easily without it), but it still has its place in a well-rounded kit.

Passives & Upgrades

Here’s a look at all the passives in order:

Blacksmithing Research 

Next in this ESO blacksmithing guide, let’s touch on why researching all of the traits on all items is important. Even if you do not plan on crafting any items, you will want to research traits on items regardless. This is because once you have a trait researched, you can transmute any of your items of the same type into that trait. If you have the Nirnhoned trait researched already on mauls, once you get your Perfected Merciless Charge from the Maelstrom Arena that has the trait of Training, you won’t have to run it all over again. You can simply change that item into having the Nirnhoned trait, or even craft a new version of that weapon so you have both options available. Keep in mind this will take around 25–50 transmute crystals, depending upon how much of the set you already have collected. 

Researching all of the possible traits for items can be long and arduous. The Metallurgy passive already strikes on why this is important, allowing you to research more than one item, up to a max of three. Reducing the research time is also essential as it can take a long time to complete each research spot for an item. For the first trait it’s a breeze, being only six hours. But the issue is that it doubles the duration for each trait you already have researched, so the second trait will take twelve, the third twenty-four hours, etc. By the time you are researching the 9th trait, it will take sixty-four days!

Metallurgy should always be taken as early on as you can and maxed so you can reduce the time it takes for each research by 25% and further limits that last research spot to a more manageable thirty days. Keeping in mind that it takes so long to research all of the potential traits of daggers, swords, greatswords, cuirasses, etc., you will want to gameplan what traits are most important to you.

If you are invested in PVP, you’ll want to research all of the Sharpened traits first, so you can get extra penetration on items. If you want pure damage, research the Nirnhoned trait sooner, so it doesn’t take over two months of waiting when you want to put it on your item.

Writs: Crafting Missions

We mentioned writs earlier in this ESO blacksmithing guide, but where do you get them? Every major city has crafting mission boards that give you crafting missions suited to your crafting level.

Once you take the crafting writ, you create whatever item it asks for and deliver it to the crafting delivery crate which completes the quest for you and gives you a shipment of related items to that crafting tree. Once you have your blacksmithing crafting passives leveled all the way up, you have a chance of receiving a blacksmithing master writ as a reward for turning in a daily, that can give you anywhere between 5 and 800 writ vouchers, although generally you’ll find them in between 10–100 depending on whether they’re of epic or legendary quality.

Once completed, you will deliver the item to Rolis Hlaalu, who can be found in all three of the capital cities (Elden Root, Grahtwood + Mournhold, Deshaan + Wayrest, Stormhaven). Rolis Hlaalu sells rare furnishings, motifs, and even crafting stations among other things in exchange for writ vouchers.

Become a High Grounder

Being a master blacksmith will help you optimize your character and make money while doing it, so make sure to follow this ESO blacksmithing guide early in your adventure.

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