The Elder Scrolls Online devs hired a modder from one of its most popular addons to fine-tune its housing tools: 'it was really cool to get James on the team'

Earlier this month, I had the pleasure of talking with a few of the asset wizards behind The Elder Scrolls Online's player housing community. And they are, in a word, powerful. They've been creating everything from ice cream parlours, to pachinko machines, to just straight-up Howl's Moving Castle—all by clipping premade game assets into each other («cobbling»). It's some wild stuff. That skull in the image above? That's not a fully-fledged in-game asset, that's a bunch of rocks shoved into each other.

I also spoke to Rich Lambert, the game's creative director who (among other things) revealed to me that the folks over at Zenimax actually scoped out and hired one of the game's housing modders to help work on those systems.

If you're confused as to how modding works in an MMORPG, the dev team allows addons on a case-by-case basis. For example, Lambert told me about a magic carpet mod that lets players fly around their homes while they're building, rapidly moving an object under their feet: «It doesn't hurt anything outside of the house, so we're okay with that kind of stuff.»

Lambert also tells me that his team has looked to said modding community not just for ideas, but for talent, as well: «We're doing a lot of things to make the tools better … we ended up hiring the addon author for one of the most popular housing addons—hired him a number of years ago, and he's been focused on building those tools into ESO (and other things, not just housing).»

James Sammartino is now a UI engineer, but back in the day he was Cardinal05, co-creator of Essential Housing Tools—a mod that let players do all sorts of helpful things that weren't available when it was released. Lambert says his team's «taken a number of things from there, like being able to group assets and move them all at once and things like that.

»We ended up hiring him as one of our UI engineers—he's obviously super passionate about the community and super passionate about ESO. It was really cool to get him on the