In Which Gyllerah Gets a Room

No actual plots pursued in this session, but I did secure the free room at the inn! And put stuff into the bank! And also did a bunch of hunting around Alinor’s environs for various and sundry ingredients, which I then used to do a boatload of crafting.

Highlights

• Play date: 10/10/2022
• Session number in this run: 8
• Went to the Golden Gryphon Inn to check out the housing situation
• Found the owner NPC up on the third floor who gave me her spiel about giving me a free room to promote her establishment; cool, free room! And yes I promise not to put any Daedric shrines in it
• Aside from that, did a large circuit all around the outside of Alinor, looking for ingredients to farm
• Killed assorted critters and got assorted ingredients
• Found a couple more iron veins and several maple logs I could chop up
• Found a generic chest I’d found on the last exploration but it was locked with an intermediate lock, and so far I do not get how ESO’s lockpicking system works, it’s different from Skyrim’s
• Killed a few more Night Runners
• Got enough ingredients that I went back into Alinor and found the bank, so I could stuff a bunch of things out of my inventory into that backlog
• Then went out again for more ingredient farming and critter killing
• Found assorted runestones
• Came back with enough ingredients that I was able to come back and make a couple of level 6 items, including a new helmet and jerkin
• Deconstructed a few things as well
• Made some assorted glyphs and used them to enchant weapons I made out of the iron
• Sold a few things to the merchant just outside the crafting plaza
• Boinged back to inn room
• Cync reminded me that there was a crate of free stuff to be had for the High Isle event, so I logged back on a short while later to grab that
• Dumped a bunch more stuff in the bank, and also did a little more crafting, to free up more inventory slots
• Successfully opened all of the nested boxes in the freebie box, and got all the stuff, including nifty armor sets

Commentary

I would not normally spend an entire post on nothing but crafting and housing, but how ESO does things is still new enough to me that entire sessions just learning game mechanics are pretty helpful. So y’all get an entire post about that.

First and foremost: I had read up on how housing works in ESO, and in particular noted that you could get a free room as a player home at certain inns in the game, including the one in Alinor. I’d initially misinterpreted this as “you have to get the free room in order to unlock the ability to get other housing”, but both Cync and Erin in the Swamp Haven Guild tell me I’m mistaken about that? Still though I wanted to learn a bit about how housing works.

So I went to the inn to check it out. And I gotta say, the entire little conversation with the owner NPC, Felande Demarie, was just as delightful as the commentary I’ve been seeing out of the Khajiit merchants. I quite like the idea of the innkeeper trying to bolster the reputation of her properties by handing out free rooms to apparently reputable-seeming persons, by which the game means, the player. You could argue what this says about her judgment if she’s willing to hand out a free room to a scruffy-looking low level adventurer, but hey. 😉 Given how her conversation proceeds with the player, apparently she’s had quite a bit of trouble with previous tenants! So even a scruffy-looking adventurer would be a step up.

I was not surprised, but was slightly disappointed, to find that the room she gave me was not furnished. Clearly I’m going to have to do something about that. And indeed, a good bit of my activity in the rest of the session was oriented around trying to figure out if I could make or buy furniture.

There are furnishing merchants in Alinor, I discovered. But none of them were selling super basic things like simple beds, or chairs, or storage chests. Fancy ones, yes. Simple ones, no. Apparently the idea here is that I’m supposed to make furniture, which would be fine and all except for the part where I had trouble finding basic designs for furniture, too. I think I managed to find one for a military style cot, and that’s about it?

And of course I’ll have to find the materials to actually make those items as well. Which will require another round of farming.

(And yes, I know I could also buy stuff off the Crown store. But without committing to ESO+, I have only 500 crowns to spend, so I ain’t dropping those on something unless it’s absolutely critical. And I don’t know yet whether I like this game well enough to throw it money on a regularly scheduled basis. I want to get a sense of what I can do with the money I’ve already paid into it just by buying the base game.)

Relatedly, just trying to get a feel for what the point of having someplace to stay is if you can’t actually store stuff. That’s about 85 percent of the point for me for all the houses you can get in Skyrim, i.e., places to keep your stuff. With ESO apparently you can’t drop stuff, so you can’t just chuck stuff on the floor of your brand new unfurnished inn room. And while I’m seeing on the wiki that there are ways to get chests and coffers, this requires either a) I get to level 18, b) I advance in crafting far enough to get master crafting writ vouchers, or c) I throw money at the Crowns store.

Hrmpfh. I suspect this question of “no, you can’t use your house for storage” kind of ties into what I was speculating about with how the game doesn’t let you drop stuff. I.e., if millions of players have tens of millions of objects to track, that is a whole helluva lot of data. And I can kind of see why they’d want players to pay more to get access to more storage space, because that is an impact on servers, even powerful ones.

That said: it’s still kind of annoying as a player experience, regardless of whether I understand it from a technical one. 😉

But ah well. I’m also certainly long familiar with starting Skyrim with having to be judicious with how much crap I’m accumulating. Same deal with Morrowind. I’ll just have to be very careful for a while with this character and not overload her backpack or her banking space!

And I’m likewise certainly familiar with having to grind through the lower levels of crafting to get up to speed enough to make cool things. And during this round of play, I got in at least some basic practice with all of the various kinds of crafting tables in Alinor’s market. I’m starting to get an idea of how deconstruction works, and researching.

What I’m not able to do yet is improve things, but at least I found how the UI for that is launched. There are additional materials I’m going to need to actually improve things properly though.

With all this crafting, I did of course also need materials. So I went out to explore around Alinor some more, and try to find materials to harvest. This included multiple types of plants and other ingredients (a couple of which were familiar from Skyrim, like Namira’s Rot), and many of which were not (like Jute, Dragonthorn, Lady’s Smock, etc.). And I did find multiple sources of iron ore and raw maple.

Killed a whole bunch of dire wolves, a few Night Runners, a few welwas, and at least one imp as well, and that was also a semi-regular source of rawhide and other potentially useful things. Every so often I got an actual item I could take back to deconstruct.

And last but not least, there was all the stuff in the freebie event box. That got me a lot more crafting materials, as well as some things to let me set up my own crafting stations in my living spaces. Excellent.

There were also several sets of armor, which looked pretty damned cool. But Cync has also just sent me a set of custom built armor, which I’m going to be wearing as soon as I hit level 8. And see previous commentary re: limited storage space–if I need to be crafting, I can’t have my inventory space eaten by gear I’m not actually going to use. So I expect all the freebie gear items are going to wind up broken down for crafting research purposes.

I will, however, certainly take screenshots of them all before I destroy them. 😀

Next time

I am absolutely going to do more inventory management, and I think another visit to the pack merchant is in order, to work on bumping up my pack slots. And I need to take proper screenshots of the freebie armor sets, then work on breaking them down for research!

Paul’s time and inclination depending, he and I may also get around to doing more actual questing. Here’s hoping!

Screenshots

Editing to add

• 11/23/2023: Restored missing gallery.