The Elder Scrolls Online features a gathering and crafting system that is no less impressive for not requiring you to taste test ingredients to figure out what they do. ESO is clearly ready to put Skyrim behind The Elder Scrolls franchise, even if Bethesda isn’t.
Its crafting system is also much more expansive than what players saw in Skyrim: players can pick up alchemy, blacksmithing, clothing, enchanting, provisioning, woodworking, jewelry crafting, and antiquity, with each crafting class offering a unique benefit to players.
Every crafting class also has unique craftable furniture items. Players will need to unlock the furniture item’s recipe or blueprint before being able to craft them, but a blacksmithing station cannot be used to craft a carpenter’s furniture item and vice versa. Still, messing around with the crafting menus can lead to some very interesting details coming to light.
Take the Target Skeleton, Humanoid furniture item, for example. It’s a legendary quality recipe that is exactly what it sounds like—a big honking skeleton you can put in your house if you were so inclined. Plenty of uses for that, to be sure. However, the most notable thing about this furniture item is that it requires 206 bones to craft—in other words, the normal amount of bones the average adult human is expected to have in their body.
Oh, we’re born with 270 and some adults may end up with between 206 and 210 bones—with an additional one depending on the mood—but most people enter adulthood with 206. This being the Elder Scrolls, we can assume that the skeleton belongs to one of the humanoid races: Nords, Redguards, and Bretons.
Considering how biologically distinct the other Elder Scrolls races are, it’s more than likely that they have somewhere outside the 206-210 range of bones in the human skeleton. It would definitely be interesting for ESO to implement different skeletons based on race, and considering that a good amount of crafting revolves around creating items based on the various races’ aesthetic sensibilities anyways, such a thing wouldn’t be too much of a stretch.
However, implementing that may be more work than its worth. One human anatomy reference is already quite a lot of fun—there’s no need to run the joke into the ground.
