Mechanics

Tamriel keeps running after you log out, and the six systems on our pages are where that shows. A few of them have no waiting written into them anywhere on our pages, so they go as fast as you can bring the materials. Others hand you a timer and stop caring how much gold or free time you have. This guide sorts them by how much of each one happens on the game's clock rather than on yours, starting with the one paced entirely by the calendar and ending with the one that is entirely your own hours.

The horse lives on a calendar

Nothing else on our pages is as stubborn about real time as a mount. Stables sit in the major cities under a horse icon on the map, and they will sell you one of five horses: the brown Common Horse at 17,200 gold, a white version of the same animal that comes with the Imperial Edition for a single gold piece, and three 42,700-gold specialists. The black Draft Horse adds 10 to your inventory capacity, the Light Horse is the quickest at 25 percent speed, and the Gaited Horse trades capacity for 20 stamina so it can gallop further between rests.

Then the waiting starts. Once a day the stable offers to feed your horse, and each feeding moves a single stat: an apple for one percent of speed, hay for one point of stamina, oats for one point of capacity. A horse accepts fifty feedings in its life and the level cap is 50, which is why the mounts page warns that you cannot max every attribute; the same arithmetic means the horse you want is at least fifty days away from the horse you bought.

Research is the blacksmith's long wait

Almost nothing at a blacksmithing station comes with a wait on our page. Mining needs no skill or tools, ores sit in rocky ground near mountains, and ten of them are enough to start turning into ingots (you always get fewer ingots than ore). Extraction turns ore and other materials into ingots and ingredients on the spot, destruction does the same to weapons and armor you already own, and extraction raises your crafting skill even when it yields nothing. Creation is a menu with four sections, type, material, style and trait, and pouring more material into an item makes it stronger.

The exception is research. To put a trait on something you forge, you first research an item that already carries it, and our blacksmithing page says plainly that this takes a while and might run to a couple of days, during which you get on with other things. There are sixteen traits to chase, eight for weapons and eight for armor, each tied to a gem such as Ruby for Precise or Sardonyx for Reinforced, so a full set of research is not something one session can finish. Metallurgy, a three-rank passive, is the lever the page gives for shortening it.

Improvement carries no timer on the page, but it is risky: a failed attempt can break the item, and the cure is stacking tempers until the odds reach 100 percent or ranking up Temper Expertise. Bear in mind that racial styles gate what you can forge at all, and an Imperial cannot make elven gear until a Racial Motif Book teaches the style.

What turns up while you are logged out

Three of the professions on our pages carry a hireling passive, and two of those pages say it works when you do not. Enchanting's Hireling gathers runestones even when you are offline. Provisioning's Hireling collects food and drink ingredients while you are offline too, and that page adds a rule of its own: it can be used once per day. That once-a-day rule is what puts provisioning's hireling squarely on the calendar, with enchanting's beside it as the other passive that keeps working after you log off; each is a skill point spent on tomorrow, and the reward for logging back in. Blacksmithing has the Miner Hireling, three ranks of a worker who fetches ore for you, and that is all its page says, so whether it runs to the same schedule is something the page leaves open.

Lockpicking runs on seconds

Lockpicking sits above the two bench professions because every part of it runs against a timer, even though that timer is counted in seconds rather than days. A locked chest shows its lock level and offers two verbs, pick or force. Picking opens a view of five spring-loaded cylinders with a timer already running: press each cylinder down with your lock-pick and move to the next one straight away, because hesitating snaps the pick and resets what you had. When the timer is nearly out, forcing the lock is worth a try even though it does not always work. Every lock also carries a cooldown of its own, a stretch during which it cannot be picked at all, so a stubborn chest is not something you can hammer at without pause.

Two things soften that. Your skill rises whether an attempt succeeds or fails, so high-security chests get easier the more you bother with them, and being interrupted by a wandering NPC or another player does not cost you anything, since the game saves your progress on that lock while you deal with them. Carry plenty of picks, found in the world or bought from vendors, and expect the hardest locks to guard the best loot.

Enchanting and cooking wait only on ingredients

A glyph needs one runestone of each of three kinds, and our enchanting page maps them to the nodes they come from: Potency runes from blue nodes set the level (fourteen additive and fourteen subtractive), Essence runes from yellow nodes set the effect (seventeen are listed, from Oko for Health to Rakeipa for Fire), and the five Aspect runes from red nodes set the quality, from white Ta up to gold Kuta. Your character does not know what any of them do until you combine them at an Enchanter's Station; a successful trial creates the glyph and translates all three runes for good. Breaking a glyph back down does not give back exactly what went into it, and applying one is a matter of selecting an item in your inventory and choosing Enchant.

Provisioning is the same shape with a cooking fire instead of a station. You cannot discover a dish by throwing ingredients into the pot, so it is recipe first, ingredients second, and the fire pot in any town does the rest, with no waiting mentioned anywhere on the page. Six categories cover the buffs: soups and stews raise magicka, bread and pies raise health, grilled dishes raise stamina, and beer, spirits and wine restore health, stamina and magicka respectively. Our crafting recipes list holds 167 named dishes and drinks across those headings, each with its ingredients and all but six of them with the buff it gives. What does run on a timer here is the food itself, which has a cooldown once eaten, and the Gourmand and Connoisseur passives exist to stretch how long a meal or a drink lasts. Keep the one-use recipes rather than selling them; they have no second copy anywhere and their effects are permanent.

Leveling is the only one that is purely yours

Nothing on the power leveling page waits for a day to pass, because each method on it works on hours you were going to spend anyway. Marrying another player gives both of you 10 percent bonus experience on everything, though the ceremony needs an item that only ships with the Imperial Edition. Books do not raise your level, but interacting with one as you pass can teach a skill or a crafting recipe. Discovering a new area pays experience on its own, and the Explorer Armor lifts that bonus by 50 percent. Beyond that it is the obvious things done faster: a partner for dungeons, bosses, and the Dark Anchors that behave like mini-bosses and drop items on top of the experience, all on a build you have actually tested.

Reaching 50 does not stop the counter, it renames it: our level 50 end-game guide explains Veteran leveling and the Skyshards that turn into skill points three at a time. For where these systems sit in a whole first playthrough, from the starter island to the crafting bench, start with our Elder Scrolls Online guide.