ESO Jewelry Crafting Guide: How to Level Jewelry

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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

Becoming a master jeweler takes time, but the amazing passives you’ll gain and the expensive materials you’ll save by leveling this skill is worth all the trouble. It’s the most expensive profession in Elder Scrolls Online, so it makes sense to plot your path wisely.

In this ESO Jewelry guide, we’ll discuss the best ways to level Jewelry in Elder Scrolls Online, including tips and tricks on how to make the most of the craft.

Let’s get started!

Other ESO Crafting Guides:

• Blacksmithing Guide
• Alchemy Guide
• Provisioning Guide

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Why Level Jewelry?

Jewelry is the one and only crafting skill in ESO that is locked behind DLC. You’ll need to have the Summerset DLC or ESO+ to be able to do Jewelry crafting, as it was released during Summerset. If you already have the base game and don’t have ESO+, it’ll cost you 3500 crowns in the crown store for Summerset.

Jewelry costs the most of any profession, and its ingredients are no different. Once you’ve maxed your Jewelry line and picked up all its passives, you’ll save loads of money and resources on jewelry, and you’ll have a leg up on endgame content. You’ll also be able to turn a pretty profit if crafting is your thing. Let’s dive right into the best ways to level up Jewelry so you can start getting those Chromium Platings and putting them to good use.

To start, you’ll need to speak to Felarian, who is located in Alinor, Summerset. He’ll task you with gathering materials, crafting a ring, and then deconstructing that ring. You can bypass this if you’ve already gathered materials and gained Jewelry levels by deconstructing items.

Where to Find Materials

Materials for jewelry crafting come either from deconstructing any jewelry you find or by mining the various seams found about Tamriel (ranging from pewter to platinum). You’ll find seams in the same places you’d find ore veins — near mountains and on hillsides. Jewelry seams tend to stick out more since they’re shiny, but you can always invest some points into “Keen Eye: Jewelry” to make them glow and stand out more.

Mining the seams gives you Jewelry level dust, which you can refine at Jewelry crafting stations to make ingots. In the process of refining, you can find precious upgrade materials, such as Zircon (purple) and even Chromium (gold) grains along with pulverized trait materials. Deconstructing items will give you ingots as well as trait materials. 

Jewelry Survey Maps are also a great way to collected a large amount of raw jewelry materials all at once. They can be difficult to find, as most specify the location without a map marker (unlike the new ones from Blackwood, Western Skryim, etc.). If you collected a survey map after turning in your daily writ, you can find any of the locations with a quick Google search or walkthrough on YouTube.

Leveling Jewelry

There are several great ways to boost your Jewelry skill level. To start off, you’ll want to put some of your Champion Points into the Crafting Tree passive called “Inspiration Boost.” Each stage costs 15 points and gives you a 10% increase in your crafting inspiration gained. Investing in all three stages makes any crafting gainst you receive 30% stronger, helping you max out your crafting skill lines quicker.

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 money.

Leveling Method #1: Deconstruction

Deconstructing rare jewelry will boost you along quickly in terms of experience. You can buy purple or blue jewelry outright from a guild store, but you can also get it easily without paying. Every day you complete a random dungeon, you have a chance to get a random Endurance, Agility, or Willpower set item, which will sometimes come out to be jewelry. That’s mostly left up to luck, so you can try looting treasure chests for jewelry as well.

You can also buy intricate jewelry, which “increases inspiration gained from deconstruction… by 300%.” This sounds great at first, but doesn’t always play out. The experience you can gain from at lower levels is capped so that you don’t deconstruct a level 160cp item at Level 1 and shoot up to Level 10. This makes more gameplay sense, but also downgrades the potential bonuses you can get from deconstructing items at lower levels. It’s probably worth it to grab any intricate jewelry you can find under 600 gold, but blue and green jewelry will get you through it nearly as quickly.

If you’re interested in the math, deconstructing regular jewelry will give you the following experience percentages compared to intricate jewelry:

• White: 42%
• Green: 47%
• Blue: 54%
• Purple: 59%

It’s not worth deconstructing gold jewelry unless you have Plating Expertise maxed (which you won’t when you’re leveling up). Essentially, if you’re buying jewelry to deconstruct and there are blue pieces for 300 gold and an intricate piece for 1000, it’s more cost-efficient just to get three blue pieces. 

Leveling Method #2: Crafting

Crafting jewelry will also increase your experience in Jewelry crafting (what a surprise!), and taking advantage of the daily Jewelry crafting writ is a great way to do this. Once you craft the required jewelry, you’ll gain additional crafting inspiration as well as items you’ll need to craft future jewelry upon turn-in. You can only do a crafting writ once a day, but the bright side is that you have a chance at getting a free intricate jewelry piece as well, which will further increase your experience when you deconstruct it.

Crafting jewelry will give you less experience than deconstructing, as you’ll only be able to craft lower-level jewelry at first. You can craft the highest-level jewelry possible and deconstruct it, but you’ll still net more experience deconstructing items you find rather than create yourself. 

Jewelry Skills 

Out of all the skills the Jewelry crafting tree has to offer, players will benefit the most from the “Plating Expertise” passive. Once maxed out, it’ll reduce the material cost of upgrading your jewelry (for example, upgrading three jewelry pieces to gold level will cost 4 instead of 10). With the current price of Chromium Platings going for upwards of 200K, that’s a total cost of 1.2M instead of 3M! That’s a pretty good deal for only three skill points.

Jewelry Research 

Research takes a long time to complete for jewelry, but knowing every trait is very useful. If you want to prioritize traits from the start, I strongly suggest researching Infused and Bloodthirsty first. Most endgame DPS builds call for either Bloodthirsty or Infused, depending upon their role in the fight. Bloodthirsty focuses on giving a DPS more DPS at the end of a fight for execute style gameplay, whereas Infused is targeted for increasing damage for a flat amount throughout an encounter.

You’ll need to prioritize traits because you can only ever research one piece of jewelry at a time. The other crafting trees allow you to research up to three, but in Jewelry, it’s only ever one. You can decrease the time it takes with the Lapidary Research passive, which will save you months of time in terms of research. Necklaces and Rings both have nine traits each, and the research time starts at a measly six hours. However, each trait you research next will double in time. This ends up in the last trait researched taking sixty-four days. Unfortunately, that’s not a joke.

Thankfully, at max level, Lapidary Research reduces the time each research will take by 25% and limits research time to thirty days. Instead of necklaces taking 3066 hours (127.75 days), they’ll only take 1867.5 hours (77.83 days), saving you just shy of fifty days of research time. With rings, you’ll save 100 days of waiting around while you research a jewelry trait. The waiting will be painful regardless, but shaving 100 days off of the usual 255.5 days of waiting makes it a decent amount better. 

Crafting Station Locations and How to Get Your Own

Crafting stations for Jewelry were added into each zone with the Summerset expansion, so every major city will have a jewelry crafting station. The best cities for interacting with crafting stations that players usually flock to are Rimmen in Northern Elsweyr, Vivec City in Vvardenfell, and Leyawiin in Blackwood. The jewelry station in Summerset is where you’ll have to start out your Jewelry crafting journey, but it’s further away from the wayshrine than the choices listed above, which is why fewer people use it. 

If you want to have a jewelry crafting station in your home, you can do that as well. You can get one by buying it out of the crown store for 3000 crowns, or by completing master writs until you can buy the jewelry crafting station from Faustina Curio (stands next to Rolis Hlaalu) for 125 writ vouchers. Faustina Curio can be found in Elden Root (Grahtwood), Wayrest (Stormhaven), and Mournhold (Deshaan).

While you could earn the writ vouchers through completing Master Writs, we highly suggest that you do not! Let us explain.

Writs – Crafting Missions

Jewelry crafting writs are a great way to increase your level, as they only require you to create the most basic level of jewelry for each category. You should definitely set aside some time to do a jewelry crafting writ daily if you’re intent on leveling the skill line quickly, as the daily crafting writs really do boost your crafting experience. Getting free intricate jewelry upon turn in certainly helps the process go more quickly as well.

Most players choose not to do Jewelry Master Writs. Jewelry as an ingredient costs much more than any other base game crafting ingredients, partly because it’s new and partly because it’s DLC-locked. Since not as many people can refine the materials, the ingredients you can get become rarer.

Overall, doing any Master Writ that requires you to upgrade white jewelry to green and blue will involve burning ingredients that are hard to come by and really expensive. You’re better off selling ingredients if you don’t plan on using them, or saving them up so you can craft or improve your own jewelry in the future.

Join the High Ground

We hope this ESO Jewelry guide helps you to level up your jewelry skill line more quickly so you can get out of the crafting station and back to traversing through Tamriel. For the latest on Elder Scrolls Online and your other favorite games, follow us on social media and subscribe to our newsletter.

Happy gaming!