The Elder Scrolls Online

The Elder Scrolls Online is a game with two clocks. One is yours: the hours you put into quests, dungeons and the crafting bench, which pay out the moment you spend them. The other belongs to the game, and it keeps ticking after you log off. A stable will only feed your horse once a day. A blacksmith researching a trait might not hear back for a couple of days. A hireling drops off ingredients overnight whether you were there or not. Our guides for this game split along that seam, so this page is arranged the same way: what a fresh character can do today, what only finishes after days have passed, and what is still waiting once the level counter reads 50.

Today: your first hours on Bleakrock Isle

If the question is what to do first, the answer is the island. Bleakrock sits off the northeast coast of Skyrim, and our Bleakrock quests guide walks all five of its major quests in order, from the boat across to the evacuation that carries you to the next zone. One of the five, The Missing of Bleakrock, is really a chain of seven smaller errands: turning three of a woman's friends back from skeevers, a frozen man's guessing game in a bear cave, a bandit camp infiltrated in a bandit's disguise, a burning box, a lost dog, a hunt and a spider nest. The page's own advice is to get this early grind out of the way quickly, and the rewards tell you why it is worth finishing rather than skipping: 516 gold across the quests that state a payout, plus the Shield of Darj, a one-handed hammer called Bonesplitter and Seyne's Bootknife, a dagger. The enemies the page names along the way are level 4 skeletons and spiders, bears in a cave, bandits, Covenant soldiers in a tower, a level 4 Deathclaw and a necromancer in a dungeon's main chamber, and its one piece of combat advice, to keep blocking and stunning, is given for the Deathclaw.

Today: picking a class, starting with the Nightblade

The one class we cover in depth is the Nightblade, and our Nightblade builds guide lays out its three skill lines with an ultimate, five actives and four passives apiece: Assassination for raw damage and buffs, with Death Stroke at the top and a passive that refunds magicka on a kill; Shadow for holding an area while invisible, built around Consuming Darkness and a fear; and Siphoning for damage over time that heals you back, led by Strife and Agony. Below that are four complete builds, a single-target damage dealer that swaps between one-handed weapons such as daggers, a self-healing bruiser for long fights, a Flying Blade build that opens every fight with Reaper's Mark and carries a tank rotation as a fallback, and a healer on a restoration staff that still contributes damage. Read the Choosing your Role section before you commit points; the page's argument is that a Nightblade deals solid damage whichever line you invest in, so the real choice is between stealth, control and sustain.

Today: leveling faster than the game expects

Our power leveling guide is honest that rushing makes the game less appealing, then tells you how anyway. The two multipliers are an in-game marriage, worth a 10 percent experience bonus to both partners but gated behind an Imperial Edition item, and the Explorer Armor, which raises the bonus for discovering new areas by half. Books are a trap in one sense and a gift in another: interacting with them never raises your level, but it can hand you a skill or a recipe. The rest is company and targets, since a partner clears dungeons far faster and the Dark Anchors scattered around the world act as mini-bosses with experience and items attached. All of this is play time with nothing to wait for, which is why it sits at the bottom of our mechanics guide, the article that ranks the six systems we cover by how much of each runs on the game's clock.

Today: crafting you can finish before bed

Three of the game's six professions have a page here, and for the work done at the bench itself none of the three pages puts any wait between holding the ingredients and holding the result. Provisioning is cooking at any town's fire pot, and the rule that matters is that you cannot improvise: no recipe, no dish. Our provisioning guide explains the skill line, why food decides fights, and why one-use recipes with permanent effects are worth keeping rather than selling. The dishes themselves are in our crafting recipes list, which runs to well over 150 named foods and drinks in six groups (soups, breads, grilled dishes, wine, spirits and beer) with the ingredients for each and, for all but six entries, the buff it gives. The single-stat dishes climb on a ladder with the recipe's level, from a +42 boost on a level 1 pork soup up to +306 on a level 45 stew, the two-stat dishes sit above that and top out at +312 on a VR 5 sweetroll, and the drinks follow the same shape from +2 recovery to +13 at VR5. The list also tucks in five alchemy potion combinations and a short note each on clothing and woodworking.

Enchanting is the second of the three. Our enchanting guide is mostly a translation table: the runestones from blue, yellow and red nodes that set a glyph's level, effect and quality, and the trial-and-error at an Enchanter's Station that reveals what each one means. Blacksmithing is the third, and the one with an exception: forging and improving carry no timer on the page, but research does, and that belongs to the next section. Our blacksmithing guide takes you from mining ore with no skill required, through the four-part creation menu, to improving gear with tempers where the odds start at 20 percent for the first step and fall to 5 percent for the last, unless you stack enough tempers to make it certain.

After days: the things you cannot hurry

Two systems ignore how much time you have this evening. The first is the horse. Our mounts guide prices the five horses, from the 17,200-gold Common Horse (or its one-gold Imperial Edition twin) up to the three 42,700-gold animals that specialise in speed, stamina or carrying capacity, and then explains the part that matters: a horse is fed once a day, each feeding nudges one attribute by one, and it will only eat fifty times. Buy early, because the calendar is the real cost. The second is blacksmithing research. Applying a trait means researching an item that already has it, and the page warns that each one might not finish for a couple of days, across sixteen trait gems; the Metallurgy passive is the lever the page offers for shortening it. Sitting alongside both are the hirelings, a passive in each of the blacksmithing, enchanting and provisioning lines that fetches ore, runestones or ingredients for you; the enchanting and provisioning pages say theirs keep working while you are offline, and provisioning's runs once a day.

Along the road: locks, chests and better loot

Between the timers there are chests. Our lockpicking guide covers the five-cylinder minigame, the timer that runs while you work it, the option to force a lock when the timer is nearly out, and the cooldown every lock carries, during which it cannot be picked. The encouraging part is that the skill improves on failures as well as successes, so the harder chests, which hold the better loot, get easier simply by trying, and if a wandering enemy interrupts you the game keeps your progress on that lock.

At level 50: what is still waiting

Our level 50 end-game guide argues that the cap is where a second game starts. Player-versus-player becomes worth it once you hold full gear, including some Legendaries, and the opposition is as high-level as you are. Leveling itself carries on as Veteran levels, earned the same way as before, and it unlocks new zones with their own enemies and quests plus dungeons whose items only Veteran characters can use. Skyshards become the answer to a permanent skill point shortage: the page counts more than 300 of them across Tamriel, three for every point, with some hidden inside guilds and behind dungeon bosses. And if you never touched crafting, this is when the page suggests picking one of the six professions and deconstructing, researching and improving your way to Legendary gear.

Where our coverage stops

Being plain about the gaps: we have no page on alchemy, clothing or woodworking beyond the short notes in the recipes list, no Skyshard locations map even though the end-game guide points to one, nothing on becoming a werewolf or a vampire, and no class other than the Nightblade. Several of our pages mention those guides in passing; they have not been written here yet. What is here is enough for a first character to leave Bleakrock with a plan, put a horse and a research queue on the game's clock, and know what the game has kept back for level 50.