One of my favorite things about ESO is that it allows us to customize and improve our gaming experience through addons. Getting started with (and finding!) addons can be challenging, so I’ve written this guide to try and make the process a little less daunting. To get started with addons, visit our Getting Started page!
If Minion breaks or otherwise needs to be reinstalled, hit up our Troubleshooting page.
Note: Installing every single addon I’ve listed here is almost definitely not a good idea.
Truly an opinion piece, but this is my list of addons that I cannot live without.
| Name | Section |
|---|---|
| Advanced Filters | Inventory and Items |
| Bandits UI | Character Info and UI Tweaks |
| Beam Me Up | Maps and Locations |
| Character Knowledge | Character Info and UI Tweaks |
| Circonian’s Addon Selector | Miscellaneous |
| Display Leads | Miscellaneous |
| Inventory Insight | Inventory and Items |
| Item Set Browser | Inventory and Items |
| Kyzderp’s Derps | Miscellaneous |
| Loot Log | Character Info and UI Tweaks |
| Map Pins | Maps and Locations |
| Ody’s Support Icons | Groups and Guilds |
| pChat | Character Info and UI Tweaks |
| Perfect Pixel | Character Info and UI Tweaks |
| Personal Assistant | Inventory and Items |
| Simple Daily Craft | Crafting/Daily Writs |
| tralce’s Collectible Keybinds | Miscellaneous |
| Votan’s Minimap | Maps and Locations |
This section contains user interface overhauls and addons that either add or better organize information about your characters.
- UI overhaul that has replaced LUI and AUI for me. TONS of features. Much cleaner and more informational. Includes minimap which is lighter than Votan’s. Takes a minute to set up but very worth it.
Caro’s Skill and Champion Point Saver
- Originally a workaround for that time that ZOS force-respecced everyone like 8 times, I now find it useful to copy skill and CP loadouts between characters and armory builds.
- Part of code65536’s Extended Journal, this addon tracks known Recipes, Furnishing Plans, and Motifs across multiple characters and accounts.
- Show updates about your Endeavor progress in the chat window.
- Part of code65536’s Extended Journal, this addon tracks known collectibles from in-game events.
- Adds lots of useful information to the default FPS/Ping panel, including weapon condition, soul gems, horse training, and way more.
- Chat overhaul. See it to believe it. Look at the Recommended Game Settings to learn how to make @names show up in guild chat with pChat.
- Overhauls nearly every window that can display items. See screenshots.
- A great unified UI to view your veteran dungeon and trial achievements. Start the quest for green checkmarks today!
- Window to display every Skyshard and skill point in the game and how many you’ve collected.
- A nice replacement for the base game quest tracker that displays multiple quests and optionally hides quests you want hidden, AND MORE.
- Quick overview of your characters and what dailies they can do, plus nearly every bit of information about all of them.
This section contains addons that track combat data, add notifications about mechanics, or otherwise improve the combat experience.
General combat addons
- Notifications, alerts, and countdowns for some PvE mechanics.
- An extension for Code’s.
- VERY detailed analysis of every fight.
- Track your heavy swings, ability cooldowns and cast/channels all in one bar to help you perfect your rotation timing and take advantage of ability queuing with live latency information.
- Lots of extra useful combat alerts and icons for Ody
- This addon displays both of your ability bars at the same time.
- Excellent taunt tracker for tanks.
Trial addons
- Alerts and Ody icons for Dreadsail Reef mechanics.
- Alerts and Ody icons for Rockgrove mechanics.
- More alerts in combat. Especially useful in Trials.
This section contains addons that improve the overall Companion experience.
- Adds a little toolbar and a tooltip with useful info about your active Companion — XP, Rapport, and more!
- Reduces many of the annoyances that come with companions, such as preventing looting bugs with Mirri out, or interacting with them accidentally.
IsJusta Companion UI Enhancements
- Better companion health bar, numeric rapport info, more.
Slash Shop, Fence, and Bank (and More)
- If you like slash commands, use this to summon your Companions with a slash command!
- Heavily inspired by, and forked from, code65536’s memento addon, this addon adds keybinds for many collectibles, including but not limited to the Antiquarian’s Eye, Assistants, Companions, and many mementos.
This section contains addons specific to crafting
Autocrafting
Lazy Learning
- Efficiently auto-learn Enchantment phrases.
- Efficiently auto-learn Alchemy reagent effects.
Daily Writs
Note: I now recommend Simple Daily Craft over the others in this section.
- Auto-craft alchemy daily writs.
- Auto-craft provisioning daily writs.
- Auto-craft blacksmithing, clothing, woodworking, jewelry, and enchanting daily writs.
- A new contender, Simple Daily Craft aims to replace Dolgubon’s Lazy Writ Crafter, Daily Alchemy, and Daily Provisioning. It also has a couple neat little features, like a notification to indicate that you’ve walked far enough away from a Survey for it to reset, and a master writ turn in automator.
Bulk Crafting
- For master crafters, this lets you queue up whole sets of gear to autocraft. Now with food, drink, and furnishing support!
- An extension for WritWorthy that marks the status of your held master writs.
- Auto-craft master writs, get an idea of how much writs cost to craft, quickly see if you’re able to craft your master writ, and more.
Research
- A full featured research helper which shines in its ability to mark duplicate research items.
- One of the only good research trackers with a grid. Like CraftStore, but doesn’t lag your game to death.
Crafting UI Improvements
- Simple. Tiny. Just save up to six favorite alchemy recipes.
- Handy UI for Enchanting.
- Literally just makes enchantments show up in their quality (White, Green, Blue, Purple, Gold) color on tooltips.
- An excellent Alchemy crafting system, and helps you discover those missing alchemy traits.
- Craftable furnishings and provisioning recipes show up in the color of their item quality in craft lists.
This section contains addons that generally improve the fishing experience.
- Simply displays a count of your current bait when looking at a fishing hole.
- Useful window to show what fish you need for the fishing achievement.
- Blinking hook symbol when it’s time to reel in. Also, hook symbol on the map for any discovered fishing spots.
This section contains addons that generally improve the group and guild UIs.
- Automatically send group invites based on text in chat. Type x to join!
- Simple. Lets you choose a default guild bank.
FCO Guild Bank/Guild Store Quick Select
- Use keys to change your guild bank or store rather than the drop down menu.
- Automatically donate gold to guild(s) of your choice on a schedule when visiting a guild bank.
- Especially useful if you’re in more than one guild. Adds a button to the Guild screen that travels you to the guild hall. Also adds a chat command
/gh(1-5)that quickly teleports you to that guild’s hall. Other addons do this, but this one does it very well.
- Adds hovering icons for group leads, tanks, and healers by default. Extra options for DPS, Companions, Assistants, dead players, and more!
This section contains addons that improve guild stores, check prices, track sales data, and generally improve the guild store UI.
Note: I try very hard to remain impartial about price addons, but I feel it’s very important to emphasize a serious shortcoming with Master Merchant. Though it is inarguably more feature-rich than ATT, its method of storing sales data is wildly less efficient than ATT’s method. This introduces a not insignificant amount of lag, especially on login, and its dependency, LibHistoire, is quite often responsible for those crashes to desktop that don’t display an error. Consider using ATT unless you have a really good reason to use MM. Read more on the Price Checking Addons page.
- Similar to, but faster and less laggy than Master Merchant. Monitors guilds you’re in for purchase and sale data. Display item prices, and so much more. Read a comparison between, and instructions for, ATT, MM, and TTC here.
- Complete overhaul of the default (awful) Guild Store UI. Needs lots of dependencies, but if you buy and sell a lot, this is a must.
- The best of both worlds, and great for beginners and advanced traders alike! Collects and displays both sales and listing metrics.
- Very similar in functionality to ATT, but far more mature, more feature-rich, and in many opinions, slower. Read a comparison between, and instructions for, ATT, MM, and TTC here.
- Quickly look up and track the price of items in guild stores. This is backed by the TTC Website, and displays the prices that items have been listed for, but not necessarily what they’ve sold for. Read a comparison between, and instructions for, ATT, MM, and TTC here.
Tamriel Trade Centre Companion
- Great if you like MM’s guild store extensions and inventory pricing but don’t like MM. Source that info from TTC.
This section contains addons which make housing easier.
- Very comprehensive home building tool set. Automatic building, advanced alignment. The Attunables section of the Guild Hall was built with this. Also, create, view, and share visual effects, from lighting, to text, to portals to other houses! Hit up the Recommended Game Settings page to set up the client! Seriously, set up the client.
- A portable database of every furnishing in the game.
- Use furniture to fly around in your own home. Good for decorating.
- Want to use a spare house or several as storage for extra furnishings? This addon automates that.
- Port to any house of any user, permissions permitting! Also, set favorite houses, and keybinds for them.
This section contains addons that improve inventory UIs, track items across characters, houses, and accounts, auto-bank, and so much more.
- Add a whole lot more filtering options to inventories, banks, and more. Supports a vast array of plugins.
- Shift+Click on items to link them in chat.
- Sorts your banks, chests, inventory, and more into very helpful categories. Highly customizable.
- Less necessary now with the Armory, but lets you swap gear and skills on the fly.
- Allows access to the ESO+ Craft Bag from just about anywhere it should have been available from all along — banks, guild banks, mail, trades, and more.
- Perform actions on all visible items in your inventory: deconstruct, bank, unbank, sell, fence, and more!
- A walking database of all of those funny Sell to Merchant Treasure items that are obtained mostly through stealing. Collect them all!
- Lock items with icons, rules, and more. Never again accidentally deconstruct something you wanted to keep! Takes a hot minute to set up but extremely worth it.
- Much more intuitive Split Stack window.
- Second inventory window that shows items in your bag, bank, craft bag, houses, house banks, and alts so you can quickly find that missing item, or take stock of everything you own.
- Part of code65536’s Extended Journal. A database of ESO set items you can walk around with. Helps track Set Collections. Advanced search. Item linking.
- Part of code65536’s Extended Journal. A lot more powerful than Group Loot Notifier. Logs your personal loot and the group’s loot.
- Type
/llfor an amazing loot report,/ltto post a list of already collected set items to chat to facilitate trading,/buncto automatically bind all uncollected set items to you.
- Does a lot. Auto mark as junk, auto deposit and withdraw based on rules, auto repair, auto weapon recharge, and much more.
This section contains addons which add pins to maps and compasses, automate travel, display resource node spawns, and more.
- Travel to undiscovered waysrines via guildmates, friends, and group members. Partially port to every known player in a zone to unlock wayshrines. Easily travel to zones with leads, maps, and surveys. Visit your owned homes with greater ease.
HarvestMap and HarvestMap-Data
- Similar to ResourceRadar, but vastly more complex. Shines in its ability to calculate farming routes and display possible chest and heavy sack spawn locations.
- Adds TONS of pins to your map, including Skyshards, LoreBooks, bosses, and so much more. Absolutely essential.
- Puts an exclamation point icon anywhere there might be an unfinished quest. Good for completionists. Doesn’t seem to work some zones.
- No more Keen Eye skills! RR will put a pip above any usable resource node nearby, and on the map. I used to use HarvestMap but honestly this is FAR more useful and more lightweight.
- Groups the “Locations” tab in the map by alliance.
- Absolutely indispensable minimap.
This section contains addons which can generally improve the Player-vs-Player experience.
- CyrHUD allows you to see the current action in Cyrodiil. It shows you what is being attacked, who is attacking, how many siege they have on each side, whether the location has been flagged yet or not, and for how long it has been sieged. PvPers use this to know where the enemy is at and can gauge their numbers and better prepare for an assault, defense, or counter-attack strategy.
- View the range of a forward camp before you place it.
Greyskull: Weapon/Spell Damage Meter
- Customizable power meter.
- Just read the ESOUI page. Too much to list here.
- See how squishy a player is at a glance.
his section lists all addons which don’t strictly fit in any of the other categories.
- Claims your Crown Store Daily Reward for you so you don’t have to enter the menu.
- Automatically train your mount when you visit the Stablemaster.
- Filter out and hide addon errors.
- Allows you to create profiles of addons to swap between on one or more characters.
- An Antiquities must-have. List of where leads drop from, where you can scry them, what they are, and more.
- Tracks in-game events, displays info about them, notifies about ticket counts, adds a chat command for an active event’s xp buff, and way more.
- Replaces the shaking pin animation with a nice green checkmark when lockpicking.
- Automatically slots the third and fourth slots of your Craft Champion tree depending on what you’re doing.
- Whole bunch of random features. Read the esoui page.
- Lets you shut off annoying messages, hide wayshrines on the Tamriel map, and much more.
- Allows you to blacklist containers, NPC, and anything else interactable. I use it to prevent interaction with stealables and NPCs while doing daily writs.
- Confirm by sneaking or double tapping E in order to steal.
- Adds a button to your mail screen that takes all items from mails and deletes them.
Slash Shop, Fence, and Bank (and More)
- If you like slash commands, use this to summon your Companions, Assistants, and more with a slash command!
- Maintain all (or some!) settings the same between multiple characters — Interface, Combat, Nameplates and more. Janky but works.
- A must-have if you can’t resist a five-finger discount. Adds a thievery info panel, toggles auto-steal depending on if you’re sneaking. Way more.
- Heavily inspired by, and forked from, code65536’s memento addon, this addon adds keybinds for many collectibles, including but not limited to the Antiquarian’s Eye, Assistants, Companions, and many mementos. Now has binds for mounting a group member’s multi-rider mount, and selecting Random and Random Favorite mounts!
- A work in progress. Allow you to change mounts, non-combat pets, and polymorphs with a keybinding.
- Redesign the Addon menu. Manage addons and their libraries with a single click. Easily see unneeded libraries. Much more.
- Simply re-categorizes the quests in your map quests tab.
- Account-wide key bindings. Useful if you have more than one character.
Any member can request an addon be added to the WtU Website, and most of them will be listed here. Just DM @tralce to have an addon added to this list.
- Saves Cosutmes, Pets, Mounts, and more along your Armory builds. Also lets you lock Armory builds.
- Change your compass’s color to red when you’re in combat. Great for noticing a mob has spotted you, or when all enemies are finally dead.
- Unsheathe your weapon automatically when you sprint, roll, or crouch.
- A decent alternative to Votan’s MiniMap. Try it out. You might like it better.
- Calculates the gold value of your inventory based on current TTC market rates to determine an approximate net worth for your account.
- Roleplay addon that gives your character a “personality” by playing emotes/mementos while idle. Perfect for creating your own unique personality, or if you just want to bucket scream like tralce.
- Take screenshots without the UI.
- Quickly destroy unwanted items with a keybind (except treasure maps, which you send to tralce, right?)
- No more character turning around when opening menus. Walk, ride, and fish with menus open.
- Share your build in a single screenshot. Theorycraft with skills. More.
- Custom books added to ESO. Allows for you to write your own lorebooks too.
A lot of websites like to recommend the same, cookie cutter batch of addons. Because of this, some of these addons have become extremely popular. The aim of this post is to reduce some of that, and to draw attention to some lesser-known, but vastly superior alternatives. This is a bit of an opinion piece in some cases, but it’s mostly based on facts and not my opinion.
| Addon | Alternatives |
|---|---|
| AUI | Bandits UI³ |
| Advanced Filters | Base Game⁴ |
| AlphaGear | Bandits Gear Manager⁵ / Wizards Wardrobe |
| Azurah | Bandits UI³ |
| Bandits Loot Manager | Personal Assistant |
| CraftStore | Character Knowledge, Trait Buddy, Item Set Browser, Enchant Maker |
| Destinations | Map Pins¹ |
| Dressing Room | Bandits Gear Manager⁵ / Wizards Wardrobe |
| LUI Extended | Bandits UI³ |
| LoreBooks | Map Pins¹ |
| Lost Treasure | Map Pins¹ |
| Master Merchant | Arkadius’ Trade Tools² |
| SkyShards | Map Pins¹ |
| Srendarr | Base Game⁴ / Bandits UI³ |
| Unknown Tracker | Character Knowledge |
| Wykkyd Toolbar | Info Panel |
Notes
- Map Pins not only does what all these standalone addons do, it has fewer dependencies, does even more, and is updated more frequently.
- See the Price-Checking Addons page for more in-depth information.
- Bandits UI is smaller and faster, but incorporates the same features as, the addons I’ve listed here.
- These features were added to the base game and you therefore have little to no reason to use them anymore.
- Bandits Gear Manager is far lighter weight and less laggy and buggy than either of these popular addons, and though Wizards Wardrobe is rather heavy by comparison, its automatic management of gear makes up for it.