Bag Space in ESO: How to Maximize your Inventory Size

Anyone who has played ESO can tell how important bag or inventory space is. Maximizing your inventory size is a huge quality of life improvement.

If you are the same type of player as myself, you loot just about everything in Elder Scrolls Online. No crate or barrel escapes my keen eye. They must be opened and looted! Every. Single. One.

This kind of playstyle does cause a problem. And that is the lack of bag space. There’s a couple of tricks to increase your inventory size – you can even go beyond the indended inventory limits temporarily.

This guide will focus on inventory, bank and bag space in ESO.

Inventory Slots – get familiar with Pack Merchants

A banner next to a pack merchant’s shop. Look for these!

Every character in Elder Scrolls Online has access to 60 inventory slots by default. You can increase the number of inventory slots by buying pack upgrades. These are bought from Pack Merchants, who are usually found in every major city. The first city you arrive in after the Wailing Prison will have a Pack Merchant vendor.

Aldmeri Dominion bag vendor location

• Quaranon: The Handy Haversack in Vulkhel Guard, Auridon

Daggerfall Covenant bag vendor location

• Nurisipa: Next to a cart close to the Bank of Daggerfall in Daggerfall, Glenumbra

Ebonheart Pact bag vendor location

• Adjold: Davon’s Watch Market District in Davon’s Watch, Stonefalls

The icon at the bottom represents a pack merchant vendor.

Do note that there’s pack merchants in almost every major city in Tamriel, the above are merely the pack merchants in the first major zone you arrive in.

Upgrading your bags increases their size by 10. You can buy inventory space up to 110 slots just by purchasing pack upgrades from pack merchants. Pack Merchants, like other vendors in ESO usually have a banner next to their store. Hovering over shops on your map will also show the pack merchant icon.

The first inventory upgrade to 70 slots costs 400 gold and the cost ramps up quite rapidly, as you can see in the table below. You can upgrade your bags like this all the way to 110 inventory slots, and the last upgrade costs 19,200 gold.

Carrying Capacity – Feed your mount wisely

The second way to increase the number of your inventory slots has nothing to do with pack vendors  or bags, but your mounts.

Mounts in ESO have a progression system called Diet. (I won’t venture too deep into mounts on this article but you can expect a mount guide soon enough.)

Your mount can be fed every 20 hours at a stable master, and you can feed the mount a total of 49 times.

The key here is that feeding your mount Oats will increase its carrying capacity by 1. As long as you have that mount active at the Stables, the carrying capacity is directly transferred to your character, effectively increasing your inventory slots by the same amount.

• Feeding your mount oats costs 250 gold a pop.
• To maximize your inventory, you’ll be feeding your horse oats 49 times, which puts the total cost of increasing your horse’s carrying capacity to 12,250 gold.
• To max out carrying capacity as quickly as possible, you need to feed your horse every 20 hours.
• If you do this perfectly, you can max out your horse’s carrying capacity in 980 hours, or a little less than 41 days time.

If you want to be efficient, you should NOT feed Oats to just any mount. The Draft Horse costs 42,700 gold and has a default carrying capacity of 10, which is higher than any other mount in ESO right now. Ideally you want to have a Draft Horse with maxed out carrying capacity, because in the end you’ll be able to gain 10 more inventory slots. You can choose to feed Oats to your Imperial Horse as well, but in the end you will always end up with 10 less inventory slots.

Bank Space – One Bank per Account

The third way to gain more inventory space is using your bank. The default amount of bank slots is 60. Just like upgrading your inventory, upgrading your bank space costs gold. You can get more bank slots by talking to a banker NPC. The first upgrade costs 1,000 gold and ramps up rapidly all the way to 85,000 gold per bank upgrade.

You can have a maximum of 240 bank slots in ESO. Upgrading your bank all the way costs 768,500 gold! This is the biggest gold sink in game by far.

It needs to be noted that your bank space is shared between all of your account’s characters. This is both a good thing and a bad thing.

It’s a good thing because it allows you to have all of your items in the bank, ready to be used by all your characters. No need to switch between your alts. This makes crafting very easy, because you can just dump your crafting material in the bank and use them on any character you want.

It’s a bad thing because it severely limits your overall bank space. If every character had their own bank, I doubt you would ever have inventory space issues in ESO.

Guild Banks – limited use

The fourth way is taking advantage of guild banks. For an individual player, this may not be an option. Whilst you can create a guild by yourself for free, you need 10 members in your guild to gain access to the guild bank.

You can only ever be the guildmaster of one guild at a time on your account, too. So you’ll realistically only be able to have full control over one guild bank, and even then you need 9 other willing players to join your guild.

Due to the nature of guild banks, it’s probably not something that the majority of us can rely on, especially players who prefer to do their own thing.

Mule Characters or Alts

The fifth way may seem obvious, but there really is a need for inventory mules in ESO. There’s so many different crafting materials in game that you can’t possibly have all of them in your shared bank at the same time.

As an example I have an alt which is holding all of my enchanting runestones. I’m planning on using them a bit later on in the game, and right now the runes on their own are taking more than 40 slots in my inventory.

Unlimited bag space with Mails

There’s a little trick you can do to gain unlimited amount of bag space. It does require a friend you can trust or a mule account.

How does it work? You can take advantage of the mail system in game. Send a mail with a bunch of items to your trusted friend / your mule account. Your friend then returns the mail to you. You have to do it like this, because you’re unable to send mails between your own characters. This way you can access the items in your mail, which by the way is accessible from anywhere in game – no mailboxes needed. Sending a mail to someone has no delay, but there is a small delay for returned mails, usually 5-10 minutes.

Returning mails is not exactly a very convenient way to store your items, but it does work. The mails expire in 30 days. Don’t let your valuable items rest in the mail for longer than that, or you’ll see them magically disappear.