Daily crafting writs are the most reliable source of gold in ESO. Not the largest, not the fastest, but the most reliable — and the easiest to scale. A single character that runs all seven writs takes about ten minutes and clears 4,000–6,000g in quest gold alone, before any of the items inside the reward boxes are sold. Run them across eight characters and you're looking at 30,000–50,000g a day for an hour of work, plus a steady drip of master writ vouchers, sealed reward items, and survey reports that compound on top.
The short version: certify every character on every craft you have leveled, run the writs every day, sell the things worth selling, save the vouchers. Everything below is the math behind why that's worth doing and how to keep the per-day time cost low enough that you'll actually keep doing it.
How the rewards actually work
A daily writ pays out in three layers, and only the first one is visible at turn-in.
Quest gold. Posted on the quest summary. Scales with your character level — at CP160 (the level cap), each writ pays between 540g and 700g depending on the craft. Seven writs on one max-level character: roughly 4,200–4,800g per day.
The primary reward box. Dropped into your inventory when you turn in. Always contains a small handful of intermediate-tier crafting materials and has a chance to contain higher-value rewards — sealed master writs, surveys, motif fragments, or a glass/dwarven style item. The base contents are nearly worthless; the chance contents are where most of the value lives.
Sub-boxes inside the primary box. Some primary boxes contain a second, smaller "shipment" box that you have to open separately. New players miss these constantly. Always open every box until your inventory stops gaining items.
Of the chance rewards, two matter most:
- Sealed master writs are tradeable certificates that other players buy to complete master writs they've been given. They sell at guild traders for anywhere from 1,500g to 30,000g+ depending on the voucher count and the craft. A single sealed jewelry master writ can pay for a week of your writ-running time.
- Survey reports send you to a node-rich location with six guaranteed material nodes. Surveys aren't directly sellable, but the materials they yield are, and they refresh other gathering loops.
The base materials inside the box — improvement items, raw mats, intermediate tier components — are mostly noise on a per-day basis, but they add up to meaningful stockpile over weeks.
A quick look at current voucher prices
Sealed master writs are the single best variable lever in your writ income. If you want to see how the highest-volume sealed writs are trading right now:
30-day price history
Unknown Alchemy Writ
Current
13,575g
Median daily sale price · NA server · community data
Alchemy and Enchanting sealed writs tend to clear fastest because the master writs they fulfil are cheaper to complete than weapon or armor ones. Blacksmithing, Clothing, Woodworking, and Jewelry sealed writs sell for more per voucher but move more slowly. None of this matters for the running of writs themselves — you turn in what you get — but it shapes how you decide what to list. The slow-moving high-priced ones tie up a posting slot longer; the fast-moving cheap ones turn over your gold faster.
For everything else the writs drop, the recipes, motif fragments, and intermediate-tier mats all have current market readings on ESO Prices.
What "maximising" actually means
The lever that matters most isn't which craft you focus on or which add-ons you use — it's how many characters are certified and queued.
The per-character writ income is roughly flat across the seven crafts. The chance for a sealed master writ is the same. The quest gold is similar. So the income axis you actually control is the number of characters running writs each day.
| Characters with all 7 writs | Daily quest gold | Annualized | Daily time (with addon) |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | ~4,500g | ~1.6M | ~10 min |
| 4 | ~18,000g | ~6.5M | ~25 min |
| 8 | ~36,000g | ~13M | ~45 min |
| 16 | ~72,000g | ~26M | ~75 min |
Those are quest-gold numbers only. The item value layered on top — sealed writs, surveys, recipes, motifs — typically doubles the total. A serious eight-character writ rotation pulls roughly 60,000–80,000g per day of total realized value if you sell what's sellable promptly.
The non-obvious part: the per-character time cost drops as you add characters, because you're already at the crafting stations, already have the routine in your hands, and the marginal character only adds the time to move between stations. With Dolgubon's Lazy Writ Crafter (the standard writ-running addon), the bottleneck becomes load screens between characters, not the writs themselves.
What you need before you start
For each character you want to add to the rotation:
- All seven crafts certified. Visit the certifier NPC in any starter zone for each craft. Five minutes per craft, free XP, and the daily writ board unlocks.
- Each craft leveled high enough to accept its tier-10 writs. For Blacksmithing, Clothing, and Woodworking, that's the Metalworking / Tailoring / Woodworking passive at rank 9. For Alchemy and Enchanting, rank 50 in the skill line. Provisioning and Jewelry have their own gates.
- A bag big enough to hold seven primary reward boxes plus their contents without overflowing. ~120 inventory slots is the comfortable minimum.
- Two addons: Dolgubon's Lazy Writ Crafter to auto-accept and auto-craft the writs, and Lazy Set Crafter if you also intend to craft anything beyond writs. Both are on ESOUI.
Once a character is certified on all seven, the daily routine looks like this: log in, walk to the writ board, accept all seven, walk to each crafting station once, hit the macro key the addon listens for, turn in. Ten minutes flat per character on a maxed setup.
Reading what came out
Open every box. Sort the contents into three piles:
Sell immediately. Sealed master writs, surveys you don't want to run yourself, motif fragments, recipes you already know. Recipes are the trickiest of these — unknown recipes can be worth several thousand gold each, so check before you vendor anything. Journal's prices view tells you which is which at a glance.
Stockpile. Intermediate-tier raw mats (rubedite ore, ancestor silk, ruby ash, etc.) compound usefully if you craft gear. Improvement items (Tempering Alloy, Dreugh Wax, etc.) are some of the highest-value drops you can stockpile, since they're consumed by every gear-crafter in the game forever.
Vendor. White-quality intermediate items, the cheapest base mats below your current crafting tier. The gold-per-inventory-slot of trying to sell these on traders almost never beats vendoring them.
The single best habit you can build is sorting on the spot. Once boxes pile up in the bank "to deal with later," you've already lost the income for that week.
Common mistakes
Skipping certification on the crafts you "don't use." Provisioning takes 30 minutes to level and unlocks daily writ income on every character forever. Enchanting and Alchemy are similarly cheap. The opportunity cost of not having a craft certified is several thousand gold per day per character.
Forgetting Jewelry exists. Jewelry was added later and its writs aren't in the original tutorial flow. They drop rosin and plating — two of the highest-priced improvement items in the game. A single CP160 Jewelry writ can pay for the rest of the day's writs combined.
Holding sealed master writs "for when prices go up." Sealed writ prices are remarkably stable. Sitting on inventory just ties up trader slots. Post them, refresh when they expire, take the gold.
Running writs at sub-CP160. The quest gold scales steeply with level. A level-30 character pulls roughly a third of a CP160 character's quest gold. If a character is still leveling, it's almost always better to focus on the leveling than to detour for writs.
Trying to run more characters than the rotation supports. Eight characters of 60 minutes is a habit. Sixteen characters of two hours is a chore that you'll abandon in three weeks. Pick a rotation size you'll actually maintain. Reliable beats optimal.
Daily writs are not a get-rich strategy. They're a get-rich-slowly, get-rich-every-day strategy. The math compounds because the per-day income is small enough to feel routine and large enough to matter over the months you'll actually play. Set up the certifications once, build the ten-minute habit, and let the rotation do its work in the background of everything else you do in ESO.