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My friend and I are both newbies to ESO, but we've been enjoying it a lot, playing together as our own little group. The other day, though, we found a complete clash between what he saw on his screen, and what I saw on mine. He'd read up on crafting, and told me I needed to go to the Mages Guild and the Fighters Guild in Vivec City in order to speak to certain NPCs (I don't have their names) who would 'certify' me for alchemy and blacksmithing. (He said with their certification I'd be able to gather the necessary materials more easily.)

So we both went together, first to the Mages Guild. But when he showed me the corner where the Alchemy 'certifier' was sitting, I couldn’t see anyone! He kept telling me the NPC was "right there", but he wasn't—not on my screen. We then went to the Fighters Guild—and the same thing happened: he showed me where he could see the NPC, but I couldn’t see anyone.

Later I tried this on my own, and would you believe, when I reached the Mages Guild there was another player character standing exactly where my friend had done, looking into an empty corner. A few minutes later I followed this player to the Fighters Guild, and the same happened. He was apparently interacting with NPCs I couldn’t see.

I wondered if this might because I had to complete some prerequisite first, like gathering the first set of materials myself; but my friend insisted that, as he'd understood it, the purpose of getting certified was to make the actual gathering process easier for newcomers to crafting. So that didn't make sense…

Can anyone explain this? Do we somehow have different versions of the game??! I'm playing on a Mac and he's on a PC: are those two versions not properly synced?

Another little discrepancy that makes me wonder if we have different versions of the game is that he sent me a number of soul gems so that I could revive on the spot when killed instead of at the nearest Wayshrine. So I did that several times. Then he asked how many soul gems I had left—and it was exactly the same number: none had been used up. He found this hard to believe, because when he chooses the 'E' option to revive, it uses up a soul gem!

If anyone can shed some light on these puzzling discrepancies, we'd be very grateful! In particular I'm hoping I'm not at a disadvantage now with the crafting, since I haven't been able to get certified…

Thanks!

First of all, your character needs to be Level 6 or higher before they can get certified for crafting writs, so if the character you were on hadn't reached Level 6 yet then that might be why you couldn't see the NPCs.

Now, if your character was already Level 6 or above, the NPCs will not be in the Mages Guild and Fighters Guild anymore if you'd previously spoken with them to start the certification process. Instead, they should be near the banking kiosk, in the general vicinity of the woodworking station IIRC.

But I'm guessing your character was probably below Level 6.

Thanks for that reply, which explains everything perfectly! Funny that we'd thought up all sorts of possible explanations, but a minimum level hadn't occurred to us: He was over 6, I was still at 5.

I've now levelled up, and before seeing your reply I'd been back to the guilds and found the certifiers—which I thought was because by then I'd done some crafting on my own! But obviously it was a simple matter of levelling.

Thanks for putting us straight!

You're welcome! I actually ran into this issue myself when I decided to start doing daily writs on my alts, and most of them were still L3, L4, or L5 because I hadn't been questing with them yet; I'd basically created them so each could get a different free inn room, then was using some of them as mule characters to hold excess inventory items. As soon as I decided to use them to earn gold each day by doing writs, I got confused that most of them couldn't find the crafting certifiers anywhere.

That's interesting, how you set up your alts. Forgive my ignorance, but were the free inn rooms and using them as mules connected? How did you transfer inventory items between characters? Did you use that also for crafting materials, or were you on ESO Plus with the limitless crafting bag? Thanks for your advice!

There are currently 7 inn rooms that you can get for free:

(1) Mara's Kiss Inn Room, in Vulkhel Guard, Auridon
(2) The Rosy Lion, in Daggerfall, Glenumbra
(3) The Ebony Flask Inn Room, in Ebonheart, Stonefalls
(4) Saint Delyn Penthouse, in Vivec City, Vvardenfell (if you have access to ESO:Morrowind)
(5) Golden Gryphon Garret, in Alinor, Summerset (if you have access to ESO:Summerset)
(6) Sugar Bowl Suite, in Rimmen, Northern Elsweyr (if you have access to ESO:Elsweyr)
(7) Snowmelt Suite, in Solitude, Western Skyrim (if you have access to ESO:Greymoor)

To obtain one of these inn rooms for free, you need to talk to the NPC who is hanging around the entrance to that room (if it hasn't been obtained yet), but it must be on a character who hasn't yet visited any player housing that you already own. Note that obtaining a free inn room counts as visiting an owned player housing, so once a given character has obtained one of the inn rooms for free, you'll need to use another character to get another inn room for free. So the steps would be as follows:

(1) Create a character. Your character's location after playing through or skipping the tutorial will depend on which chapters you've got, if any.
(2) Go to the entrance of the inn room that's in whatever zone your character started in, talk to the NPC who's trying to find someone to stay in the room for free, and accept her offer.
(3) Create another character. After playing or skipping the tutorial, stay away from the inn room you already own. Instead, head to the nearest wayshrine and travel to whichever zone you want to get a free inn room in next.
(4) The wayshrine might not take you to the city with the free inn room, so you might need to travel on foot to the right city. Find the inn, talk to the NPC, and accept her offer.
(5) Repeat steps 3 and 4 as many times as needed to collect all of the free inn rooms that are available to you.

Mule characters have no direct connection to creating characters for getting all of the free inn rooms that you have access to, although it's definitely handy to use them as mules if you're low on inventory space and don't have ESO+.

You get only one bank account per server for your entire account, so all of your characters on a given server (i.e., PC NA, or PC EU, or PS NA, or PS EU, or XB NA, or XB EU) have to share the same bank account. That reduces the overall amount of items you can store, in the sense that you can't multiply the maximum bank account size times the number of characters you have-- but it also gives you an easy way to pass items from one character to another, since one character can deposit items in the bank and then other characters can withdraw those items.

You can also acquire up to 8 storage chests to store items in-- 4 that hold 30 items each, and 4 that hold 60 items each-- and the storage chests provide an additional way to pass items from one character to another.

Hey, thanks for this fantastic information! So, can the free rooms be used by any character in your account? What is the main value of having them? (Sorry, newbie question again!)

And with the mules, what you're saying is that all your characters can deposit crafting items in the shared bank account, which any of them can withdraw from? This could be very valuable for my friend, who can't manage ESO+ yet. And the storage chests—where would they be, in the bank? Or the free rooms? Do they have to be purchased?

Thanks again for taking the time to give us this info.

For me, the main value of player housing is having places you can teleport to for free from nearly anywhere; there are some places you can't simply teleport out of-- such as Cyrodiil and the Imperial City-- but for the most part you can teleport from just about anywhere, either to a known wayshrine, dungeon, or trial, or to a player housing.

But teleporting to a wayshrine costs a fee in gold-- unless you teleport from wayshrine to wayshrine, which is free-- and the fee increases with each teleport (then slowly decreases back to the initial price if you don't keep teleporting).

Teleporting to player housing is free, and you can teleport to your own housing, or to the housing of friends, guildmates, or fellow group members.

You can even teleport to housing you don't own yet, which lets you preview the housing in case you want to buy it, although that works a bit differently in that when you exit the housing you end up back where you were before-- which can be handy if you get a bounty in the city and want a place to hide from the guards while your bounty decreases; just teleport to housing you don't own yet, to preview it, and hang out there until your bounty goes away (which might take a while depending on the size of your bounty and whether you've acquired the passive skill that makes your bounty dissipate faster), and then exit the housing and you'll be back in the city so you can continue whatever you were doing.

In contrast, if you teleport to your own housing, exiting the housing will put you outside of the housing in whatever zone the housing is located in, so it gives you a convenient way teleport to that zone. And then all you need to do is go to the nearest wayshrine and you can teleport to any other known wayshrine for free. Some housing is really convenient for that purpose, because there's a wayshrine not far from the housing. Other housing is really convenient for other things, such as having a merchant or bank nearby, or having an outlaws refuge nearby, or having crafting stations nearby, or being close to the major crafting dropoff crates for your alliance, etc.

Teleporting to the housing of a friend, guildmate, or group member works differently, depending on whether or not you have access to whichever zone their housing is in.

If you do have access to that zone, exiting the housing will put you outside the housing in that zone, just as though it were your own housing.

But if you don't have access to the zone because it's part of a DLC or chapter that you haven't purchased yet, exiting the housing will return you back to where you were before, just as though you were previewing housing that you don't own.

Another benefit of housing is that it gives you a place where you can put certain things you've acquired in the game. Note that most things-- weapons, armor, food and drink, treasure, etc.-- cannot simply be placed in housing as they can in other TES games. But certain types of items-- furnishings, trophies, mementos, storage chests, assistants, pets, mounts, etc.-- can be placed in housing as decorations, objects you can interact with, etc.

You can craft furnishing items yourself if you know their recipe (or blueprint, pattern, praxis, etc.) and have the required crafting materials and crafting skills, or you can buy furnishings from NPC merchants, guild traders, and the Crown Store. Occasionally you can even find certain furnishing items out in the wild, such as in treasure chests, in nodes for raw materials, in gunny sacks while fishing, etc.

Most furnishings are just for show, but some can be interacted with in useful ways. For instance, you can purchase crafting stations and put them in your housing for making gear or provisions, doing writs, researching traits, or deconstructing gear. You can purchase a merchant assistant or banking assistant and put them in your housing so you or your guests can sell unwanted items or access your bank accounts. Note that these assistants can also be summoned and used out in the world-- except when you're in certain locations, such as Cyrodiil or the Imperial City-- but placing them in your housing as though they were furnishings will let other players use them when visiting your housing. This can be handy if you don't have crafting tables or NPC assistants but your friends or guildmates do, because you can visit their housing to use their crafting stations, NPC assistants, transmute station, etc.

Storage chests are a special type of furnishing that let you store items that can't normally be placed in housing, such as your excess gear or crafting materials-- unless you have ESO+, in which case your crafting materials go in your crafting bag. This gives you some inventory space beyond your account's bank space and your characters' inventory space. Storage chests are part of your Collections, so you automatically carry them around with you wherever you go, as is the case with pets, mounts, trophies, mementos, assistants, etc. However, you can't access your storage chests out in the world to put things in or take things out; you must first put a storage chest down, which you can only do in your housing.

If your character is running low on inventory space while you're adventuring in the world, there are a couple of ways you can use housing to free up some space. (There's also a trick that lets you return afterward to wherever you were, which I'll talk about in a minute.) For example, if you don't have the NPC assistants yet, but a friend or guildmate does, you can teleport to their housing to sell stuff you don't need or to put it in your bank account. Or, if you have storage chests that aren't already completely filled, you can teleport to your housing so you can access your storage chests. Or, if you, a friend, a guildmate, or a group member have crafting stations in your housing, you can teleport to the housing so you can deconstruct any gear you don't want to keep-- which is more useful if you have ESO+, since the crafting materials that you recover from deconstructing the gear will go into your crafting bag rather than taking up inventory space.

Teleporting to housing while adventuring can also be handy if you need to craft something (such as food or drink) in a hurry for whatever you were doing, or to pull gear out of a storage chest so you can switch gear before a fight, or to pull things out of your bank account (if you don't have the banking assistant yourself), or to switch to a different mundus stone, etc.

Remember that exiting your own housing-- or housing you're visiting in a zone you have access to-- will put you outside the entrance to that housing, whereas exiting housing you're previewing for possible purchase will return you to wherever you were. You can use this as a way to visit your own or someone else's housing for whatever you need to do (hide from the guards, store or retrieve gear, change mundus stones, etc.) and then return to your previous location so you can resume whatever it was you were doing. The trick is to teleport to your housing (or your friend's, guildmate's, or group member's), do whatever you need to do, then teleport from there (without exiting first) to an unowned housing to preview it for possible purchase, then exit the unowned housing. Most of the time this will put you right back where you were in the world so you can resume whatever you were doing. However, there are some locations, such as dungeons, where (IIRC) teleporting out and then trying to return back will place you at the entrance to the dungeon rather than at the specific point you were at.

Wow, thank you so much for taking the time for these very useful detailed explanations. I think my friend and I are going to benefit a lot from them. (Funnily enough, I'd just written to tell him about the one drawback of the free teleport to your own house/room—namely that when you exit you're in that location and have to make your own way back to wherever you were before — and then I saw your post above with the solution to exactly that problem!)

Well, you've widened our horizons quite significantly in the areas of housing, materials storage, managing crafting, getting around Tamriel, and so on. We really appreciate that! Now to go out and put it into practice. It's possible that we may be back with the occasional further question, but you've given us a great start!