ESO Clothing Guide: How to Level Clothing

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Human Made

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

In Elder Scrolls Online, maxing out your crafting skill lines can be a real chore, but the clothing skill line is definitely one you’ll want maxed out on at least one character. Depending on how you play, you can bypass the clothing skill line altogether, but you’ll lose out on a lot of money you could have saved and also made.

Clothing crafting is a great skill to level so you can max out your medium and light armor wearing character gear, helping you to play the most difficult content available. Having a maxed out clothing skill is also particularly lucrative as it saves you from using a lot of expensive clothing crafting items while also allowing you to sell gear to both new and experienced players alike from crafted gear.

In this ESO clothing crafting guide, we’ll go over how to get your clothing skill line up quickly, where to find materials, what passives to take advantage of, and more. Let’s get into why you’ll want to get your clothing passive and how best to go about doing it.

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Where to Find Clothing Materials

Clothing materials are both easy and difficult to obtain, depending on the type. Medium armor comes from animal furs, so you’ll naturally build this up through fighting beasts throughout Tamriel. Light armor comes from plant silks, and is more difficult to obtain as the plants simply blend into the landscape.

If you want to find materials for light armor more easily, you’ll definitely want to invest some points into the passive Keen Eye: Cloth. The illumination of the otherwise regular looking plants will make harvesting them much easier, and save you some decent coin from having to buy them in guild stores. Keen Eye: Cloth won’t do anything at all for helping you to collect the medium armor furs, as you can only get them from killing animals.

A solid way to collect a lot of these is by farming areas with many animals in them. Mudcrabs are the classic way to harvest a lot of clothing resources oddly enough, so hugging the beach of any zone and killing everything in your wake will get you a decent amount. Once you collect the raw materials, refining them out will give you the necessary materials to craft clothing, and will net you a lot of great upgrading material as well.

Clothing Leveling – Crafting

The clothing skill line is honestly one of the easier skill lines to naturally level up, as you’ll get a lot of light and medium armor from completing content in the game. If you don’t immediately sell it all, you can deconstruct it which will boost your level substantially from the higher rarity items.

There are some things to invest in first though that will make this process much quicker if you are starting out and wanting to level up your Clothing skill quickly. First and foremost you’ll want to put some champion points into the crafting tree passive called “Inspiration Boost.” There are three stages costing 15 each, which will give you an “increase in your crafting inspiration gained by 10%.” This will make any crafting gains you receive 30% stronger, helping you to max out the crafting skill lines much more quickly.

ESO+ is the other bonus to consider, which gives you another 10% increase on crafting inspiration. If you don’t have ESO+ consider doing a lot of crafting in a burst when there is an ESO+ free week to make the most of it. With both of these bonuses you’ll get a solid 40% increase in crafting inspiration, making the crafting journey take much less time and save you some money along the way.

Creating clothing items is not a great way to level up your crafting skill line, as deconstructing higher level items will get you a lot more reward. Also clothing items are so easy to come by, you might as well just focus on deconstructing. Doing your daily clothing crafting writ surely won’t hurt in boosting up your level though. Another great bonus from deconstructing items is all the crafting resources you’ll get.

If you are wanting to still make money off of items you find, we suggest that you sell ornate items as well as white rarity common items. All of the green, blue, and purple light and heavy armor should go straight to deconstructing unless it’s from a set that can sell for a lot on guild traders (such as Divines Mother’s Sorrow armor).

The higher the rarity, the more experience you’ll get, so a perfect way to obtain these items is through dungeons. Normal dungeons will always give you blue items from each boss and often from chests, while veteran dungeons will give you purple items. Aside from getting some great experience from doing daily random dungeons, you’ll get a lot of items you won’t want to use that can be used for deconstruction. 

Clothing Skills 

The most important clothing passive is definitely Tannin Expertise. It will be more important for later in the game when you are past CP160 and are aiming for doing high end veteran content, but it will save you loads of money.

By more than doubling your chance of improving items, it will take less than half the usual upgrading material to boost the rarity and thus strength of your armor. The most important of course being from purple to gold which costs Dreugh Wax, which is consistently growing to be a more expensive item on the guild traders. Costing more than 17,000 per Dreugh Wax, you’ll definitely save yourself a lot of money with that passive.

Clothing Research 

Research is one of the more annoying things for clothing, as it requires you to get through both light and medium armor. It’s smart to prioritize traits from the start, and as divines is still the go-to trait for both DPS and healing, you’ll want to research those first.

Training is another great one to research sooner than later as you can craft your lower level characters gear and heavily decrease the time it takes to level them. Prioritizing traits is useful because eventually the research times will grow exponentially and at the last will take 30 days nearing the end of each trait on an almost fully researched piece of armor. With the Stitching passive, you’ll be able to research up to three items at once at its final level. This will make the time it takes to research every piece go by much more quickly, especially with the reduction in each research time by 25% (with a max of 30 days on any research time).

With 9 traits each, you’ll have 7 light and 7 medium armor pieces to research. Starting out at a very manageable 6 hour wait time, it will double each time you research a trait on the same type of armor piece. This ends up in the last trait being researched on each armor piece taking 64 days. Stitching will cap that last time to 30, and make getting there much easier too by allowing you to research 3 at once instead of 1.

If you don’t invest in Stitching at all, it will take you 3066 hours (127.75 days) to fully research 1 piece of armor (such as medium helmets). Multiply that by your 14 items… it’s not a pretty number. With the Stitching passive, it will only take 1867.5 hours (77.83 days) for one piece, and you’ll be able to research two other pieces at the same time. All in all with the stitching passive maxed it will take you roughly about a fifth of the time, making it a true time saver.

Crafting Station Locations and How to Get Your Own

Crafting stations for clothing are generally very easy to find. Usually near the blacksmithing and woodworking crafting table in each major city, you’ll be able to access the clothing crafting station with ease. The best cities with crafting stations close to one another and near a wayshrine are Rimmen in Northern Elsweyr, Vivec City in Vvardenfell, and Leyawiin in Blackwood. Deshaan, Mournhold is a great base zone city to use for crafting stations close to its wayshrine along with other useful locations like the undaunted quest givers and the fighters and mages guild.

If you want your very own clothing crafting station, it’s easy enough to get one with either crowns or writs. The quick way is by buying it from the crown store for 3000 crowns. I prefer to earn the crafting station through the in-game currency of crafting writs, but it will take you time to earn them. Costing 35 writ vouchers from Rolis Hlaalu, you can buy a clothing crafting station there instead.

Rolis Hlaalu can be found in Elden Root (Grahtwood), Wayrest (Stormhaven), and Mournhold (Deshaan). You can earn your writ vouchers by completing any master crafting writ, and you can start earning these master crafting writs when you turn in daily crafting missions that are done at the highest level possible (for clothing it would be Tailoring Rank X). 

Clothing Writs – Crafting Missions

Clothing crafting writs is a great simple way to increase your level, but they won’t net you that much experience in comparison to other techniques discussed above. Doing so will get you some great clothing crafting material though which is worth its weight in gold.

Once you start turning in the highest level clothing crafting dailies, you’ll get some great items back such as Dreugh Wax and also clothing master writs. If you plan on doing one of these master writs, make sure you have all of the necessary items available as well as the motif the crafting writ asks for. If you start one without being able to craft it, and you want to start a different one, you will have to abandon the first and you will not get the master crafting writ envelope back. This effectively deletes the item that you could have sold for a decent amount on the guild traders, so be weary before starting one!

Join the High Ground

Becoming a master clothier is a lengthy process, but it is definitely worth getting through for the valuable benefits you’ll get once you max out all of your clothing passives. We hope this ESO clothing crafting guide helps you to level up your clothing skill line more quickly, keeping you out of the crafting stations and on the battlefield. For the latest on Elder Scrolls Online and your other favorite games, follow us on social media and subscribe to our newsletter.