Gathering

Harvesting resource nodes, the eight gathering skills, and finding treasure with search and dig.

Raw materials are pulled out of the world by hand. Ore seams, timber stands, herb beds, fishing spots and grazing animals are all placed in specific rooms, and each is worked with its own verb and its own tool. What you gather goes into a resource wallet rather than your inventory, and feeds directly into crafting.

Separately, search and dig turn up buried treasure and coin in areas that have been stocked with it.

The Eight Gathering Skills#

Two further verbs need no skill or tool: drawwater for fresh and sea water, and salvage for breaking down scrap.

Each skill runs from 1 to a cap of 100 and levels independently of your character level and of every other gathering skill. A level costs 100 x level experience to reach. Use prodskills to see where you stand.

Experience per pull is small and scales with the tier of what you took. Flint or plain stone pays 1, most common resources pay 2 or 3, iron ore pays 4, silver and obsidian pay 6, cut gemstones pay 8, mithril pays 10 and adamant pays 14.

Gathering#

gather on its own opens the gathering interface. Each verb used bare, such as mine or chop, lists what is available in the room for that method. gather <resource> works on anything present using its natural verb, and the specific verbs work the same way with their own resource, so mine copper and chop oak both do what you would expect.

Before work starts the game checks that the resource is present and not depleted, that your skill in the relevant discipline is high enough, and that you are carrying the right tool.

A gather takes 10 seconds, with a progress message halfway through. Leaving the room breaks your concentration and abandons the attempt; dying or falling unconscious ends it. You may only gather one thing at a time.

A successful pull normally yields one unit. Luck gives a chance of coming away with two instead, which draws the seam down twice as fast rather than conjuring anything, and the extra is announced when it happens.

Tools#

Every tool starts with 100 durability and loses one point on every successful gather. When it reaches zero it breaks and is destroyed, so carry a spare if you plan a long trip. A tool's description tells you its condition: perfect, good, worn, battered, or near breaking.

Nodes and Regeneration#

Rooms declare which resources they hold. Some rooms carry a fixed list; others carry a weighted pool, and roll between two and four distinct resources from that pool to be the ones currently present. A room's rolled selection is what you can actually work, so two visits to the same mine may offer different seams.

Nodes replenish one unit every 600 seconds, up to the maximum the current roll allows. When every rolled resource in a pool room has been exhausted, the room rolls a fresh selection.

Certain rare resources ride along with a more common sibling rather than being placed on their own. Any mine rich enough to carry adamant may also turn up platinum ore, moonstone, opal, topaz, onyx, garnet or turquoise. Pastures that produce coarse wool sometimes give fine wool, and those that produce goat hair sometimes give raw silk or spidersilk.

Resource Levels#

Every resource carries a level requirement in its gathering skill. A representative selection:

The Resource Wallet#

Gathered materials are not physical objects. They are counts held in a wallet, which means they are weightless, they stack without limit, and they cannot be dropped or lost on the floor. They are sorted into nine categories: Metals and Stone, Timber and Fiber, Hide and Bone, Cloth and Fleece, Herbs and Fungi, Food and Grain, Meat and Fish, Water and Shell, and Salvage.

Use resources to see everything you hold, or resources <category> for one section.

To give resources to another player, use trade. You can hand them over directly to someone in the same room with trade give <player> <amount> <resource>, or send an offer with trade offer <player> <amount> <resource> which the other player must confirm using trade accept <player>. Offers expire after five minutes. trade pending lists offers waiting on you, and trade decline <player> or trade cancel clear them.

Search and Dig#

search and bare dig are treasure hunting rather than resource gathering, and they work on any room in an area that has been stocked with a treasure table.

Each table is a list of entries. An entry is either a specific item or a range of coin, and each carries its own find chance. When you search or dig, every entry in that table rolls independently, so a single sweep can turn up several things at once, or nothing at all. Items go into your hands, or fall at your feet if you are carrying too much. Coin is paid straight to you.

Search and dig have separate tables and are gated separately, so exhausting one does not exhaust the other.

The Anti-Farm Rule#

You get one roll per room per kind per cycle. Search a room, and searching it again finds nothing until the cycle resets, no matter how long you stand there.

The cycle runs on the same clock as the area's creature respawns. If the area is registered with the spawn system, its respawn delay is the cycle length; otherwise the area's configured respawn rate is used; and failing both, the cycle is 300 seconds. The minimum is 10 seconds.

Luck softens dry runs. On a search that finds nothing, there is a chance the once-per-cycle lock is never taken and you may look again immediately. It announces itself when it happens: something glints at the edge of your vision. This only ever rescues a failure and can never multiply a successful haul. Luck also nudges each entry's find chance upward in proportion, and gives coin finds a chance to reroll and keep the better of two results, which never exceeds the maximum the table allows.

In areas with no treasure table configured, search falls back to whatever the room itself describes, and dig falls through to ordinary gathering.

Recipe Scrolls#

Layered on top of the treasure table, a fresh search has a 0.8 per cent chance and a fresh dig a 1.2 per cent chance of turning up a crafting recipe scroll. This roll happens everywhere, not only in stocked areas, and it is gated by its own once-per-room-per-cycle memory, so it does not compete with the treasure table.

The recipe is chosen to suit where you are standing. The game reads the richest gathering node in the room, falling back to the toughest creature present, and picks a recipe at or below that level. Recipes you already know are excluded, so a find is never wasted.

dig <resource> with an argument is ordinary gathering and does not roll for treasure. Only bare dig does.

Related#

• Crafting
• Economy
• Progression