July 2025 – MMO Juggler

ESO – Inventory Juggling

After subscribing to ESO+ for 4 years or so, I decided to let it expire and see how playing is without it.

ESO+ offers many benefits:

Access to all DLC, except the latest released one
Monthly crowns
Unlimited craft bag
Double bank space, double housing space, double transmutes
Increased progression speed (10% bonus to xp)
Costume Dyeing
Crown Store deals, exclusive items

All are useful, but some have diminishing value to me:

I buy the DLC as it is released, rather than wait for it for a year to come to ESO+.
I’ve bought all the DLC (often on sale!), using my ESO+ crowns. So I can access all DLC without the ESO+ subscription.
This is the meat of this post – I’ll expand below.
I can feel the loss of bank space, but not so much house space or transmute crystals. And one way to look at increased bank space it is just means I’m holding on to more junk that I really need to. ESO+ subscribers can get a furniture vault to hold stacks of furniture – I got mine and put a few things in before my sub expired.
Increased progression… well I have a bunch of level 50 chars so not that useful. I have 2 master crafters, and don’t plan on researching traits to make more.
Costume Dyeing? I don’t really do that. I do wear costumes but am lazy and take the default color scheme.
The Crown Store deals often are discounts on cosmetics, which I rarely get, or free housing items, which I collect but don’t really do much with.

One exception to #7 are that two recent companions were ESO+ exclusives. This is useful since companions have passives after you max their level and possibly do a few more achievements. Zereth-Var helps you see heavy sacks. Tanlorin extends the lock-picking timer.

It may sound like I’m down on ESO+ and that isn’t the case. I just figured I could save the fee IF I could deal with the most noticeable advantage – the almighty infinite craft bag. If I’m not using most of the perks, then why subscribe? I’d still buy the chapter or season content or whatever they’re calling it these days.

My plan is to get by without ESO+, but take advantage when they have the occasional “free trial” period – to stuff things into my craft bag and furniture vault.

So… about playing without the craft bag. Here is what I’m doing.

First, I had to scrub inventory, get rid of the pseudo-junk items that every character was carrying. Things like the free housing list, various potions and items from leveling up (spellcaster elixirs and warrior elixirs – the most useful potions are the generic restoration potion; bound scrolls of research or experience or skill/attribute changing). For the elixirs, I just got rid of them. For the scrolls, I collected them into the bank.

I made some chars mule certain extras like companion gear, survey reports (blacksmithing, enchanting, woodworking), and a small number of fun things like festival cosmetics (mud pies to throw, fireworks – items given out during festivals).

With that out of the way, I started the second phase of organization: use add-ons, in particular, Personal Assistant (PA).

PA is easily a top 5 must-have add-on. It does many things that I’ll get into shortly. Before this experiment, I was using PA to automatically help me keep a certain number of items in each character’s inventory. I had it deposit gold above 50K; deposit all writ vouchers, tel-var, and alliance points; keep one stack of crown restoration potions and soul gems; a minimum of 50 empty soul gems, 20 repair kits, 5 crown repair kits, 20 lockpicks; 10 each of various foods, etc. All of this can be done by hand but it is so much more convenient to have this handled every time I open a banker!

Later I also configured PA to automatically repair armor when a piece was below 10% durability.

For this no-ESO+ experiment, I additionally configured PA to help me consolidate items – auto deposit various item categories – Recipes, deposit all. Craft materials, deposit all. Survey reports, treasure maps, motifs, intricate items, and on and on – deposit all.

Then I created profile for certain characters, to override these settings. For example, my crafter automatically withdraws all materials. My main character withdraws all treasure maps and survey reports (well, the alchemy, clothing, jewelry ones).

So after spending some time configuring PA, I basically play as normal, and every time every character interacts with a bank, several transactions occur to help organize my inventory.

This worked well but there was still one problem: materials (trait items, crafting materials). If you aren’t familiar with crafting in ESO, the numbers of these items is… immense.

For example: let’s take blacksmithing, making heavy armor. If you look at the refining info halfway down the page, there are 10 different levels of materials, from iron ore to rubedite ore. But you have to refine those into ingots to make anything – so that means there are 20 blacksmithing materials.

To improve blacksmithing items, you use different materials called tempers, and there are 4 of those. So 24 blacksmithing materials.

To give blacksmithing items a trait, you’ll need to use yet another set of materials… all the materials involved are listed on the Blacksmithing Materials page, Clothing Materials page, Jewelry Materials page, or Woodworking Materials page.

It gets worse, if you want to craft a certain “style” (motif in ESO terminology), that’s another material. There are 131 and counting motifs… another style material for each one.

Wwe haven’t gotten into the dozens of alchemy materials, provisioning materials, enchanting runestones, etc.

The most common complaint of the crafting bag is that is it solves a problem that the devs have created – managing the absolutely incredible number of materials associated with crafting.

I am tackling this issue with another feature of PA – marking items as junk, and auto-selling junk. Basically, every item in my inventory or bank has to justify its presence by selling above a threshold, which I currently define as 50 gold. That is, the item must sell for 50 gold, or 10K per stack of 200. If it is less, I have PA auto-mark it as junk and also auto-sell junk every time I open a merchant.

So for my crafter, I further configured PA to auto-withdraw crafting materials (style, provisioning, enchanting, blacksmith, clothing, jewelry), and auto-mark them as junk as appropriate. Then when I visit a merchant, it auto-sells it.

This part is still under construction – as I find items below the threshold, I add a rule.

What PA does on a typical visit to a banker:

So without ESO+, my day-to-day play is roughly the same. I loot all the containers I normally would (chests, some but not all heavy sacks depending on how much of a hurry I’m in), get quest rewards, deconstruct items, etc. When I finish playing a char I would usually clean their inventory a bit – I did this before since I have a bit of OCD – visit a merchant, sell junk, visit a bank.

All of that is the same. The major difference is when I’m on my crafting characters, I’ll spend some time updating rules – going over items and make sure the materials I’m holding can justify their value. There are too many materials to dump in the bank, so the crafter is holding the enchanting, provisioning, and style items. General clothing, blacksmithing, woodworking items remain in the bank.

After much scrubbing and rules fiddling, my bank is typically between 180 and 200 items, where the max for non-ESO+ subscribers is 240. My crafter’s inventory is around 160-180, and the max is 215. The other chars are fine for space, typical inventory is around 100. The exceptions are the mule chars holding companion items or the other resource surveys I’m not doing; they are around 150 inventory.

It’s been about 5 weeks and so far it is going well. Yes it isn’t as convenient as having ESO+ but something slightly annoys me about subbing when the sole benefit I’m using is managing the crazy number of crafting items. When the next free ESO+ trial period rolls around I’ll be happy to have these items swept from my inventory into the craft bag, and I will also pack up extra furniture from various homes into the furniture vault.

Dune – Finishing up Hagga Basin

Before leaving Hagga Basin, the beginning area, I wanted to scoop up the few remaining intel points. I need those for research so it is worthwhile getting them.

According to the map, I’ve visited 6/8 of the locations, but 4 of them say I haven’t collected the intel (if I hover over the icon)! If that isn’t a map visualization bug, then it means I visited a few sites but missed getting the intel.

2 of the locations are in the upper NW of the Hagga Basin, towards the exit to Vermillious Gap. Two are a bit closer but it is still a fair amount of running…

… except now I have a sandbike which moves a LOT faster.

The sandbike is noise and/or creates a lot of vibrations (orange squiggle) showing me it is higher sandworm danger. However I move faster and spend less time in the open desert so that’s got to be an advantage.

Anyway, I picked a base which has intel I haven’t obtained, one of the two nearest the next zone. And ouch it was tough!

If an enemy kills you in this game, you have a chance to heal yourself and continue. However, incoming damage fights against the healing meter, so it is possible to lose that battle and appear at a beacon. I did that once or twice, coming back to the site and recovering my backpack, only to become overwhelmed again.

The mix of enemies included one wearing a Holtzman Shield, obvious from the blue glow surrounding them. These enemies are resistant to pistols/rifles and have to be killed using a heavy attack from a knife. The problem was that enemy plus the 4 or 5 other shooters, forcing me to fight both melee and ranged at the same time.

Eventually I beat the base by shooting the ranged enemies and/or throwing gernades at them, and when the shielded enemy ran towards me, shifting to my knife and concentrating on killing them. After rezzing then I could pick off the stragglers. I eventually cleared the base and grabbed the precious intel.

That took longer than expected so I rode my sandbike back to my base and spent a few minutes crafting more supplies. I was low on healing kits, plus my automatic rifle was nearly broken (seen above in the lower right corner of the UI, the rifle with a little bit of health left). I also needed a new cutteray, and more ammo.

So I crafted all this stuff – fortunately I had enough materials sitting around, but now I need to pay more attention to gathering again as I finish up in Hagga Basin.

Next time I plan to visit the 3 remaining bases that have intel for me. Then on to the next zone!

Dune – Crossing the Desert

The “New Beginning” story missions have you moving back and forth across the desert, learning to survive. It’s an extended tutorial of sorts, showing you how to build a base, craft gear, fight bandits, watch for sun exposure, and keep hydrated.

While running across the open desert, you’ll trigger a vibration meter after a while. The more jumpy (and red) it gets, the closer the worm. One time I crossed I stayed too long and could tell a sandworm was getting near – so I spun the camera around and waited for it to show. It was exciting and at the same time I ran to the edge of a rocky outcropping for safety.

One creepy lesson was learning how to suck the blood out of bodies… to later deposit in a purifier that takes in blood and produces water. Well, this is a desert planet, I need to drink to survive, plus I’m wearing a stillsuit that recycles… bodily fluids. No wasted liquids here!

I explored around and eventually found a trading post, for the “Touch of Civilization” mission. I accepted a side mission for the Trooper trainer, which involved disposing of 2 rivals – once completed I returned and unlocked the Trooper class.

Trooper has a very nice skill that is basically a reusable grenade – every 15 seconds, I can throw one. Maybe the cooldown lowers by spending skill points – I’ll have to spend some time looking over the skill tree. The other handy skill Troopers get early is “shigawire” which is a bit like Spiderman’s webshooter – you can shoot a line out to pull yourself.

My progress in the Mentat skill line is preserved, and I can switch classes easily – literally just pull up the screen and select which class you want current.

Later, in the “Across the Gap” mission, I was tasked with exploring a botanical lab and recovering some materials. However I explored to the top of the mountain first, and found another class trainer – the Planetologist. This was good for me because he wanted some information from the same lab I was already going into!

The exploration of the lab was quite fun. I would have taken some screenshots but it was dark inside and none would have looked good.

Along the way you can interact with recordings and help fill in a back story about how something went very wrong in the lab and the scientists aren’t quite themselves. There was some stealth, a lot of shooting with my assault rifle, and some knife fights as well.

I recovered all the goodies, unlocked Planetologist, and gained a few new crafting recipes (storyline unlocks).

So I returned to my home, where my essential machines are, and began crafting the new items – it seems I’m building a sandbike. I’m all for that, running across the desert is dangerous and I could use some faster transportation.

Unfortunately, after building the small chemical refinery, which fit neatly into one corner of my base, I need to gather more fuel cells to refine. I’ve picked up plenty of those at various bandit camps, but deposited them all into my generator to power the base (and I can’t split out the few I need for the refinery).

So I left off and next time will scrounge up some fuel cells in order to complete the current mission.