Provisioning

Provisioning is the cooking profession in Elder Scrolls Online. Provisioners can cook food and drinks which provide buffs that last anywhere between 30 minutes and 2 hours in ESO. As of Patch 1.0.4, it provisioning buffs persist through deaths just like Mundus Stone buffs. It’s unclear whether this is intended or not. You can only have one provisioning consumable buff active at a time.

This guide is still work-in-progress, but will serve as a source of general provisioning information for now.

Provisioning Tips

• Anyone can work on their Provisioning skill if they have the required provisioning recipes and ingredients. To prepare food or drinks you have to be at a cooking fire. These can be found in most inns and towns, but also out in the world at bandit camps and so on.
• The main source of ingredients for provisioning are different containers found in Tamriel and its towns, such as barrels, crates, and produce baskets.  Because of this, you should loot every single container you can get your hands on. Enabling auto-loot from gameplay settings helps a lot with this. Levelling provisioning will be very easy if you collect all the ingredients you can find. The only downside of this is that your inventory or bank space will be stretched.
• It’s good to keep in mind that in ESO, you can deposit your ingredients or materials in a bank and still be able to use them at a crafting station, in this case a cooking fire. This allows you to keep your stash of ingredients permanently in a bank, not taking any space from your personal inventory.

Provisioning Recipes

Provisioning recipes are found in containers such as dressers, nightstands, cabinets and trunks. They also drop as loot from enemies. The recipes you’re able to get from the containers depends on your character’s level and the alliance you’re playing in.

The best way to get provisioning recipes is finding a building with as many dressers, nightstands, cabinets and trunks as possible, and then looting it over and over again. Container loot is instanced, so you can log out and log in back to reset the containers.

Many provisioning recipes are Alliance specific. It means you can only get these recipes from the relevant Alliance zones. Many of the ingredients also only drop in specific alliance zones. You can, however, bank the recipes and then learn them on another character in a different alliance.

See our Provisioning Recipe Master List for a full list of provisioning recipes in ESO.

You might also be interested in our provisioning ingredients guide.

Provisioning Recipe Types and Buffs

You can cook food and brew drinks. There’s three types of both.

The effects each type of food/drinks have isn’t this black and white, but is accurate for the low provisioning ranks. Later in the game you’ll be able to cook breads and pies which increase all Health, Stamina and Magicka instead of just Health, for example.

Provisioning Skill Line

Provisioning Skill Line gives a number of bonuses to Provisioning. Some of these skills are vital in order to advance as a cook.

Recipe Quality allows the player to use higher quality recipes, which will naturally yield higher quality food and drinks. A casual provisioner will be fine without investing skill points in this passive, but if you want to get the most out of cooking, you’ll want to take a look at this skill.

Recipe Improvement increases the level of food and drinks you can craft. By default, you’ll be able to craft food and drinks up to level 19. To be able to craft higher level food or drinks, this is the passive you need to invest skill points in. In order to craft the highest level food/drinks, you are required to use five skill points on this passive alone.

Gourmand is an useful passive because it increases the duration of food buffs. It simply means you need to consume less food to maintain 100% uptime on your food buffs.

Connoisseur works just like Gourmand does, except it affects the duration of drink buffs instead of food.

Chef is a very nice passive skill to have for Provisioning. It creates up to three extra servings of any food recipe. Even if there is an abundance of food ingredients in ESO, this passive on its own means you need to find three times less ingredients to create the same amount of food than you would without it.

Brewer does to drinks what Chef passive does to food – it enables you to create up to three extra servings of drinks from a single drink recipe.

Hireling simply sends you food and drink ingredients every day. The value of this passive depends largely on how much time you have at your hands. The less time you can spend in game, the more valuable this passive becomes.