One of the key features of Elder Scrolls Online is its exploration aspect. While many players enjoy wandering around aimlessly and discovering quests, dungeons and other goodies by themselves, skyshards are often too important for character development to be skipped. Unless you follow our maps with outlined skyshard locations you will miss some of them guaranteed, so even if you decide to explore things by yourself be sure to at least bookmark our maps for later use.
All skyshards for all zones listed below are located and indicated on our maps, but if you have trouble finding any of them be sure to ask! You can use the following links to view skyshard maps for selected zones:
| Aldmeri Dominion: | Daggerfall Covenant: | Ebonheart Pact: |
| Khenarthi’s Roost (6) | Stros M’Kai (3) | Bleakrock Isle (3) |
| Auridon (16) | Betnikh (3) | Bal Foyen (3) |
| Grahtwood (16) | Glenumbra (16) | Stonefalls (16) |
| Greenshade (16) | Stormhaven (16) | Deshaan (16) |
| Malabal Tor (16) | Alik’r Desert (16) | Shadowfen (16) |
| Reaper’s March (16) | Bangkorai (16) | Eastmarch (16) |
| Rivenspire (16) | The Rift (16) |
* 86 skyshards per faction, and 258 total for all factions.
Shared zones:
- Blackwood (18)
- Clockwork City (6)
- Coldharbour (16)
- Craglorn (12)
- Elsweyr (18 Northern, 6 Southern)
- Galen and Y’ffelon (6)
- Gold Coast (6)
- Hew’s Bane (6)
- High Isle & Amenos (18)
- Murkmire (6)
- Summerset (18)
- Telvanni Peninsula and Apocrypha (18 total, 7 in Telvanni Peninsula and 11 in Apocrypha)
- The Deadlands & Fargrave (5+1)
- The Reach & Arkthzand Cavern (3+3)
- Vvardenfell (18)
- West Weald (18)
- Western Skyrim & Blackreach (11 Western Skyrim, 7 Blackreach)
- Wrothgar (17)
PvP areas:
- Cyrodiil (46)
- Imperial City (6)
- Imperial City Sewers (7)
Shared zones include over 200 skyshards, and PvP zones 59. You can pick up a total of over 500 skyshards across all zones, which can provide well over 150 skill points.
Tip: you can use this SkyShards addon to display exact locations of all skyshards on your in-game map. It also works with the minimap addon I recommended in this article, where you can also find out how to install ESO interface addons.
Skyshard Basics
Skyshards can be found in every zone in The Elder Scrolls Online, including the tutorial. To save you the trouble of doing math yourself, you can find more than 500 skyshards at this point, giving you well over one hundred skill points. For every 3 sky shards you collect you will gain 1 skill point. As you can imagine, it takes quite awhile to find over 500 skyshards, so we hope our maps with their locations will be helpful.
Skyshards can be very important to find, especially early on while leveling. Having additional skill points enables unlocking and using more and varied abilities. Furthermore, being able to morph the abilities earlier can help a great deal with leveling or doing group dungeons. ESO also has seven different crafting skill lines available, all of which can be helpful too. Because of this, there’s always going to be a shortage of skill points, despite characters being able to obtain over 300 points to distribute at endgame.
Locating Skyshards
The unmistakable glow makes finding skyshards easy when outside, but can be more difficult to spot while underground.
Finding skyshards with our maps is certainly easier than trying to find every one of them by yourself. Nevertheless, you will often come across them randomly while doing quests or exploring zones.
In outdoor locations skyshards are usually very easy to spot due to their noticeable glow, however nearly half of all skyshards are located in underground areas — usually public dungeons and delves. Every delve and public dungeon has one skyshard.
See: Delve & Public Dungeon Maps with locations of bosses and skyshards.
All public group dungeons award you with a skyshard as well, giving you yet another reason to make friends and complete almost or all content in every zone.
Since Elsweyr Chapter release, skyshard achievements are account wide and shared with all your characters. However, your alt characters unfortunately need to either spend real money to get skyshards automatically unlocked, or pick them up themselves. Since Deadlands DLC release in 2021, skyshards are also displayed in the in-game compass and map, but only when you are near them.
If you do find yourself unable to locate certain skyshards but don’t want to use our “spoilers”, you can check your in-game “Journal” from time to time as it can contain tips and hints about skyshard locations.
For those who want a spoiler-free experience but still don’t want to miss out on any additional skill points, my recommendation is to simply explore the zone in its entirety and complete all quests and dungeons. Once you do all that, refer to our maps and go find all the skyshards you may have missed.
I checked a skyshard and found that it had been used already. A few minutes later two guys came along and were both able to acquire it. What’s going on?
Also, how long do they take to reset?
Each character can only pick up a specific skyshard once. They never reset. If it appears “used” already as you said (i.e. not glowing) then you already picked that one up.