Elder Scrolls Online (Part V): Getting Around in Tamriel

on August 31, 2021 in Elder Scrolls Online, ESO, Hints and Tips

If you did not skip the tutorial, you will choose where you are going to start the game. This will be one of the three starting islands if you decided to do the alliance storyline, or one of the chapter expansions otherwise.

If you skipped the tutorial, the game is going to drop you at the start of the most recent chapter expansion you own. If you own Blackwood (the most recent for anyone), you will be dropped outside of Lleyawin in Blackwood. Working backward from that, Greymoor will start you in Western Skyrim, Elsweyr will start you in Northern Elsweyr (Anequina), Summerset will start you just outside of Shimerene on Summerset Isle, and Morrowind will start you near Seyda Neen on Vvardenfell. If you only have the base game, then you will be dropped on Kenarthi’s Roost (Aldmeri Dominion), Stros M’kai (Daggerfall Covenant), or Bleakrock Isle (Ebonhart Pact), depending on your alliance.

You will be a Level 1 character, but you will have the Soul Magic skill line unlocked. This skill line normally unlocks when you complete “Soul Shriven in Coldharbour” if you did the tutorial but is a freebie for those who skip it. You will have a weapon appropriate to your class, so a Sorcerer will have a staff of some sort while other classes would have a melee weapon, but that weapon’s skill line will not unlock until you kill something. Killing something will likely give you an immediate level-up since you only need 70 XP for the first level gain. You do not have any armor, so plan on having a hodge-podge of armor pieces until you can craft your own set.

Wherever you decided to go, your first job is going to be to find a Wayshrine. These are the fast-travel points in ESO and there will be at least one near your initial destination. For now, don’t interact with anyone, especially if they have a marker of some sort over their head. Your quest log can only hold 25 entries and we don’t want to clutter it up right off the bat with stuff you aren’t going to follow up on soon; there will be enough of that in due course. The reason for finding a Wayshrine is to set a respawn point. We do not expect that anything bad is going to happen because everything is close to your level since the “One Tamriel” update, but let’s not tempt the RNG gods.

Since the Wayshrine is handy, let’s deal with fast travel. You will mostly fast-travel by interacting with a Wayshrine. When you do this, you can fast-travel to any known Wayshrine at no cost but you cannot fast-travel to Wayshrines you have not yet discovered. All characters automatically “know” the location of one Wayshrine in each of the major provinces, so you are not confined to the zone in which the game dropped you. Wayshrines in secondary provinces will need to be discovered, however.

You can fast-travel to any known Wayshrine from just about anywhere in the game for a small bit of gold. I say “just about anywhere” because I have not found a place where you could not fast travel from the map if you are not in combat, but that doesn’t mean that such places don’t exist. If you have added friends in the game, you can fast-travel to the Wayshrine closest to their location whether you have discovered that Wayshrine or not (you will discover it as soon as you arrive).

Fast travelling from the map instead of from a Wayshrine operates on a cooldown timer. The first time you do it, you will pay a bit of leveled gold (50 to 150 golds). You can do it again immediately but note that the cost skyrockets. It starts dropping at the rate of a gold piece every few seconds before eventually returning to whatever the original cost was within a few minutes. Since you’re just starting out and gold is going to be in short supply, so let’s not waste it on unnecessary jumping around.

There are about ten or twelve inn rooms scattered throughout the game which will count as a home, and you can fast-travel to any home you own at no cost. If you are trying to save a few golds, travel to your inn room and head for the Wayshrine where you can fast-travel normally. Traveling to a home starts the cooldown timer but saves you the small bit of gold that you would normally pay to travel without a Wayshrine.

The first inn room a character accepts is a freebie and the rest will cost about 3000 gold each. Most will be relatively close to a Wayshrine, though. The inn room in Rimmen (Northern Elsweyr) is probably the most conveniently located since it drops in an exterior area (no additional loading screen to get outside) with the Wayshrine just down the stairs, the crafting area on the other side of the Wayshrine, the bank up the stairs to your right as you come down from your inn room, and a full range of merchants near the bank.

Now that you know how to get around, let’s deal with getting you set up and equipped.

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