Tamriel Tomes Season Zero Developer Update
The Elder Scrolls Online: Ghostly Privateers Pack · published
Last week, ESO opened the first page on the Tome of Dawn and Dusk with the launch of Season Zero. Since then, the development team has been paying close attention to the community’s reaction to the new reward system and has some information to share about Tamriel Tomes at the end of a Season.
Hi everyone, and welcome to an early discussion for the recent launch of Tamriel Tomes. It's been just over a week since its release, and we'd like to share some early thoughts, learnings, and planned updates. We've been reading your feedback, watching community-created videos, laughing at memes you've posted, looking at data, and joining you in Tamriel. (And we've been impressed, almost scarily impressed, with the speed at which many of you have descended into the Gold Coast, Hew's Bane, and Wrothgar to lay waste to foes for the new Seasonal Challenge that came online this week.)
A small disclaimer before we begin: While we'll be talking about early updates and reactions to Tamriel Tomes today, we expect other parts of the system to take a bit longer to "breathe" and to fully understand how they've landed.
Questions like:
- "Is there enough variety for the Weekly Challenges?"
- "Are certain Challenges unpopular and frequently re-rolled or avoided?"
- "Does the pace of earning Tome Points feel right and rewarding?"
- And others...
These are all examples of areas we are watching closely—both from feedback you all share with us and from mountains of data that we're diving into. We believe ESO is at its best when we take risks and evolve, and we'll continue to listen and improve upon what's worked well and what hasn't with the launch of Tamriel Tomes and Season Zero.
With that, let's get into some of our early updates and learnings!
Tomes at the End of Season
One area that we've seen many questions on is what happens at the end of a Season and the transition to a new Season. Specifically, you all want to know more regarding the reward auto-claimer, the Tome Points roll-over cap, and how challenges work with multiple Tomes. We agree this should have been communicated better, and we would like to clarify how it works, why we've made these decisions, and tell you about a few future updates that we're currently discussing.
Roll-Over Cap
As the end of a Season transitions to the start of a new one, a maximum of 2,000 Tome Points roll over to the next Tamriel Tome. These Tome Points are available immediately and provide a head start into the new Season.
One of our goals with Tamriel Tomes is supporting flexibility, including:
- In how you can progress, whether you favor Weekly Challenges that are focused more on Crafting, prefer to earn Tome Points through besting others in Cyrodiil, want to team up with friends to conquer Group Dungeons or Trials, and more.
- In the pacing of progressing the Tome, allowing Weekly Challenges to accumulate up to 12 and making select Seasonal Challenges remain available for long durations.
- In how you obtain rewards. You may like all of a Tome’s offerings or only a select few, and so you can choose what you like as pages unlock automatically by doing Challenges.
The decisions we've made to support this flexibility open up many paths for you to accrue a considerable number of Tome Points that far exceed the number needed for all the rewards on a Tome. Because we want to give you the option of a head start on the next Season if you have Tome Points left over, you can roll over a certain number of them to explore the next Season's updated Challenges and rewards.
In development, we discussed other ways to strike this balance of wide paths for progression and encouraging future Season play, such as implementing a hard cap on Tome Points that you can carry at any given time, but we believed that would feel considerably worse. We were already removing this for Event Tickets (now Trade Bars!) and thought it would reduce the fun of picking out the rewards you like most on a Tome.
We've seen the sentiment and feedback on this, and we agree that we can make this better. We're planning to make a change to this in Update 50 before Season Zero ends, where Tome Points in excess of the roll-over cap are automatically converted to gold after the reward auto-claimer is complete. We believe this helps provide value to excess Tome Points in the transition to a new Season. We are still working to determine this ratio and will update you when we do.
End of Season Reward Auto-Claimer
Also occurring at the end of a Season is a reward auto-claimer. This uses excess Tome Points above the roll-over cap to automatically claim rewards on the current Season's Tamriel Tome. Our goal is to help minimize rewards you may miss out on in the transition into a new Season, especially if you stick with the free Tamriel Tome and don't upgrade to Premium. For example, if you forget to redeem rewards before the Season ends and you're on vacation, auto-claim kicks in. We’ve designed it to prioritize high-value rewards like collectibles and currencies, rather than spending your points on consumables. Here's how it will work in practice:
- The auto-claimer obtains rewards on the outgoing Season's Tamriel Tome, using Tome Points that are more than the 2,000 roll-over cap.
- Claim Order of Auto-Claimer
- It claims rewards starting with the "base" pages of a Tome (for example, pages 1 through 10 of Season Zero), starting with the highest page number unlocked and going in reverse to the lowest page number.
- After this, it claims rewards from the "bonus" pages of a Tome (for example, the final two unnumbered pages of Season Zero).
- It claims rewards starting with the Premium side first on a given page.
- Once rewards on the Premium side are claimed, it claims rewards on the free side of a given page. If you don’t own the Premium Tome, it immediately goes to the free side instead.
At the beginning of a new Season, you'll receive a visual summary that shows what rewards the auto-claimer has claimed. You can check this out on the upcoming PTS for Update 50, where we'll be testing to make sure it functions smoothly and can gather feedback ahead of Season Zero ending this July. We've also seen initial sentiment that some would prefer to opt out of the auto-claimer. We don't have any updates to share on that front, but we are discussing potential long-term improvements and appreciate it being raised!
If you own a Season's Premium Tome, you can continue to come back to it to unlock rewards at any point.
How Challenges Work with Multiple Premium Tomes
We've also seen some questions wondering how the Challenge system works with multiple-owned Premium Tomes in the future.
To be clear, no Challenges are attached to specific Tomes. This means that you can use the five Weekly Challenges every week or the new Seasonal Challenges to progress any Tome and the Tome Points you earn will unlock pages on any owned Tamriel Tome.
- For example, if you own the Premium Tamriel Tome for Season Zero, Season One, and Season Two, and you earn 1,000 Tome Points, those 1,000 Tome Points progress the page unlocks for all three. You can then spend those Tome Points how you wish on any unlocked page.
As additional Tamriel Tomes open up, we'll watch for feedback and data on how it feels to progress multiple Premium Tomes at once.
Refunding Tome Point Caches
We've seen the sentiment widely that the information on the roll-over cap and auto-claimer was not clear at the beginning of the Season, and that you may have decided to use any owned Caches of Tome Points differently if this was clearer. We acknowledge this and plan to open the ability for you to request from CS a one-time exchange of unspent Tome Points back into Caches of Tome Points, beginning on April 2 and ending on April 30.
You can request to have available Tome Points removed from your account in increments of 2,000, to be replaced with Caches of Tome Points, up to a maximum of the Caches that you originally had on April 2, 2026. Caches of Tome Points don't expire and can be carried over freely from Season to Season.
You can contact Customer Support here if you would like to have Caches of Tome Points refunded to your account.
Known Issues and Upcoming Fixes
We continue to track known issues and provide status updates on them in our Forum Tracker. Of note:
- Some Challenges were not behaving properly!
- The following Challenges should begin appearing in the Weekly Challenge Pool later in April when their fix rolls out in our next incremental patch (April 20):
- Defeat the Serpent of Sanctum Ophidia
- Defeat the Symphony of Blades, the Lava Queen, or Molag Kena
- Capture an Imperial City District
Update 50 Improvements
With Update 50 coming this June and arriving on the PTS on April 13, we'd like to share some additional details on what's coming to Tamriel Tomes soon.
Additional Rerolls for Gold
With sharp eyes, you may have noticed that some non-English in-game help articles mentioned that you can reroll Weekly Challenges for gold. This didn't make it into launch but will arrive with Update 50. Here's how it works:
- You'll continue to earn five free Weekly Challenge rerolls every week, accumulating up to 12.
- If you run out of these rerolls, you can obtain additional ones by spending gold. You can do this entirely within the Challenge Menu screen. These additional rerolls start at 500 gold and increase in cost up to a maximum of 10,000 gold. This cost will reset back to 500 gold every Tuesday after the weekly rollover.
Our goal is to provide additional ways to customize the experience for progressing the Tome, whether you reroll for Challenges that fit your playstyle more or you want to try for duplicate Challenges you can progress simultaneously.
New Repeat Functionality for Weekly Challenges
We're also introducing new functionality for the repeatability of our Weekly Challenges in Update 50. After you have unlocked the bonus pages of the current Season's Tamriel Tome (for Season Zero, the final two unnumbered pages that unlock with 20,000 Tome Points earned), the next weekly reset grants you something new: you can complete all your Weekly Challenges twice as many times.
- For example, if you unlock the bonus pages and receive the "Complete 1 Group Dungeon" Weekly Challenge in the next weekly reset, you can complete it up to six total times for a total of 750 Tome Points (as opposed to the usual three total times for 375 Tome Points in total). This added repeatability on Weekly Challenges remains for the duration of the Season in which you've unlocked the current Tamriel Tome's bonus pages.
Our goal with this is to provide additional room in how you want to finish your Tamriel Tome, as it effectively doubles the possible amount earnable by Weekly Challenges. This should allow you to get more progress out of Challenges you prefer or take an additional break knowing you can come back to a greater trove of possible Tome Points from Weekly Challenges before the Season’s end. Or in the future, it gives you a way to expedite and catch up on multiple owned past Premium Tomes and claim their rewards.
We want to be clear: this is in no way a requirement to finish a Tamriel Tome. The overall progression of the Tamriel Tome is not balanced for this to be necessary, and this is intended to be added flexibility toward the end of a Season. We'll be keeping a close eye on the sentiment for this, as well as looking into the data when it launches to make sure this lands properly as bonus functionality.
UI Improvements
In Update 50, we also plan to deliver some of the first UI improvements for the Tamriel Tome. These are certainly not the last of them since we plan to discuss larger ideas and will read through your feedback to help inform the direction we take for the future.
- You will be able to choose to claim all completed Challenges at once. (You can continue to claim individual Challenges as well).
- Minor polish on how reward tooltips appear when viewing the Tome in quick preview mode.
Final Thoughts
With a shift as big as Seasons and the new Tamriel Tomes system, we expect some things won’t land perfectly right away. We've already moved quickly on improvements driven by your feedback, while giving other changes time to settle and breathe as we refine them. You'll see much of what we talked about here roll out for testing within Update 50's PTS cycle. We’re excited to shape this together with all of you to make it the best it can be. Thank you, and we’ll see you in Tamriel!