Starting
Do I need ... early on?
A mount
No, you don't, if you don't plan to head to Cyrodiil early and all you want is PvP. A mount is mandatory in Cyrodiil if you want to join a raid there. For questing it's just convenience and you might even run past a nice view. Only thing that really pays if you have a mount early, is, that you can start with riding training.
Buff food or beverages
Buff food enhances your Attributes for some time. The buff ranges from one attribute to all three at once, depending on quallity mostly. Beverages provide a regeneration boost in the same manner. And no, you don't need those early on. Food and beverages can be crafted via Provisioning by the way. There is also enough lying around everywhere though that's basically junk food, means: crappy buffs, but better than nothing.
Don't wonder about different food or beverage types having the same effect.
Enchantments and potions
Nice to have in the beginning, not necessary though. If you find glyphs just apply them to your favourite piece of gear. There is a destinction between armour, weapon and jewelry glyphs. Apply them by rightclicking gear, chosing enchant and picking a glyph.
Concerning potions you will find potions for your level if you kill mobs your level. Use them. No need for advanced alchemy in the beginning.
Things you want to start early with
Research
As far as I remember there is a tutorial now which tells you how to research traits on items. What it fails to clearly communicate with you is how frikkin' long it takes to research them all. The more traits you unlocked on an item the longer it takes to finish research on the next. the ninth trait takes about two month real time to unlock. You are able to research 3 traits at once for each blacksmithing, woodworking and clothing IF you have maxed out the research passive for a craft. There are 14 clothing items, 14 blacksmithing items and 6 woodworking items. You can research 9 traits for each item and only 3 of them simultanously. Do the math.
Fortunately the research timers do not stop when logged out.
Riding training aka horse feeding
Many people still say "horse feeding" which was acurate back in the days, but they changed the system and since you now train your character and not your mount anymore, "Riding training" is the correct term.
As soon as you have a mount, train Riding Skills. Those are Speed, Stamina and Bagspace. You can apply one point on one of those "skills" and then suffer a cooldown of 20 hours. Points cost a fixed amount of gold and Riding Skills are the same for every mount this character rides. Speed does what it says, Stamina determines how long your mount can sprint and also, how fast you are knocked out of the saddle if you are attacked while riding. Bagspace simply enhances your character's bagspace, mounted or unmounted. Each Riding Skill can me trained to a maximum value of 60.
Gear
In the beginning your gear is crap of course. You can wear gear you loot from enemies. Try to stick the armour type your character needs (light for magicka users, medium for stamina damage dealers and heavy for tanks for a start). It may not be much of a difference in the beginning but you start levelling up armour types.
An alternative for pickup gear is crafting it yourself. Every character is able to craft gear for the lower levels, you just need the materials.
Another alternative, one that is much too easy and effective in my opinion, is stealing. Stolen gear always scales to your level and on top it looks better most of the times. Don't wonder if your level 4 armour looks like high end gear. You will also have a hard time finding belts and light jerkins, but the rest should be available on the market. Just don't get caught.
Crafting
First things first again: we can't craft jewelry.
The three gearcrafting crafts
I will not go so far and explain the whole crafting system here, just the basics.
There are three crafts in the game for crafting gear. Those are:
- Clothing, for crafting light and medium armour
- Blacksmithing, for crafting heavy armour and all melee weapons
- Woodworking, for crafting bows, staves and shields
For those three you can also learn crafting styles which come in Motif Books. The blue ones are for the main races in the game (except Imperial) and are pretty common and not expensive. They can be found in many containers. Purple Motif Books are harder to find, more expensive and exotic. Imperial style is a golden Motif Book which is hard to find and still pretty expensive. Many non-basic Motif Books come page by page. Gotta catch em all!
Prices vary depending on the latest fashion and dropchances of course, but don't fall for scammers who want to sell blue motif books for astronomical prices, which start at 500g or something at the moment. Blue Motif Books are giveaways or about 200g or so.
A little hint: when you are in a Dwemer Ruin, loot every single container you find. Apart from alchemical water and junk you can find blue motifs and parts from the Dwemer Motif Book in there. And I bet also a few more surprises.
Raw materials for those crafts can harvested in the game world (wood, frabric and metal by nodes, leather by killing certain animals). Those have to be refined though. 10 pieces of raw material can be refined to a smaller amount of refined material and you also might find items like tempers while doing so. Refined material can also be gained by deconstructing items or by buying them from other players. Since stolen items match your level, you can farm these materials by stealing items and deconstructing them. Different zones have different raw material nodes/drops. You won't find anything else but the iron, jute, maple and rawhide scraps in the starting zone for example.
The three others
- Provisioning is used to "craft" buff food and beverages. In order to do that you have to find recipes and ingredients. Loot lots of containers everywhere or take a look at guildstores. Some ingredients can also be bought at the local grocer.
- Alchemy is used to craft potions which replenish attributes, buff up different stats, apply effects like invisibility and speed and well, also to kill yourself... Potions have positive effects, but can also have negative ones, which are avoidable though. Each reagent has four traits, which can also be negative. If you mix reagents the matching traits become an effect of the potion. The water you add determines the potion's level.
Reagents can be found everywhere in the game world. Some of them can be sold to other players for a nice amount of gold. Collect and sell these for some starting gold. Columbine, Cornflower, Bugloss and Lady's Smock come to my mind.
- Enchanting! It's crafting glyphs. In order to craft a glyph you need three runes of different types. The Aspect rune (round, red farming node), which determines the quality of the glyph, the Essence rune (trapeze, yellow farming node) which determines the effect, and a Potency rune (square, blue farming node) for determining the level and if the rune adds (e.g. elemental damage) or subtracts (e.g. attribute leech) something.
Hint: if you find a Kuta (which is a gold quality Aspect rune), do not give it away easily. Keep it for your later high end gear or sell it for about 8k (at the moment at least).
There are glyphs for armour, weapons and jewelry. Which type a glyph is, depends on the Essence and potency runes used. Once applied an enchantment can be changed by just applying another glyph. Weapon enchantments are the only ones that need to be charges regularly. This is done by filled soulgems (which are also used to revive your character). Rightclick the weapon and select charge.
