Gathering

Working resource nodes, the eight gathering skills, fishing with rod and line, and finding treasure with search and dig.

Ore seams, timber stands, herb beds, fishing spots and grazing animals are placed in particular 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 crafting.

Separately, search and dig turn up buried treasure and coin in areas stocked with it, and the fish command lands whole fish to sell or keep.

The eight gathering skills#

Two more verbs need no skill or tool: drawwater for fresh water, sea water and sea salt, and salvage for scrap from broken junk.

Each skill runs from 1 to 100 and levels on its own, apart from your character level and the other skills. glevel shows your levels and the experience to the next.

A gather pays 5 + resource level experience. Gathering something more than four levels below your skill pays less: 80% at 5 to 9 levels below, 50% at 10 to 14, 20% at 15 to 24 and 5% at 25 or more, and never less than 1. A double yield still pays for one gather.

Each level takes three times as many gathers at your own level as a crafting level takes crafts: twelve at level 1, thirty six at level 10 and 171 at level 40.

Gathering#

gather on its own opens the gathering panel, with your skills and what each can gather. Each verb on its own, such as mine or chop, lists what it can take in the room. gather <resource> works anything here with its own verb, and each verb takes its own resources, as in mine copper and chop oak. Part of a name is enough. scan spends a few seconds surveying the room and shows the resources within your skill range.

Before work starts the game checks that the resource is here and not used up, that your skill is high enough and that you carry the right tool. Tools are carried in your pack, not wielded.

A gather takes 10 seconds, with a message halfway through. Leaving the room breaks it off, and dying or falling unconscious ends it. You can gather one thing at a time.

A pull usually yields one unit. Luck gives a chance of two, and both come out of what the node holds. A warrener's Green Thumb adds to that chance when harvesting, foraging and chopping.

Hides, bone and meat come from corpses with skin <corpse> and butcher <corpse>. You can skin a corpse up to ten levels above your Skinning level.

Tools#

A gathering tool starts at 100 durability and loses one point with every successful gather. At zero it breaks and is gone, so carry a spare on a long trip. A tool's description gives its condition: perfect, good, worn, battered or near breaking. A merchant's mend can set a worn tool right before it breaks.

Nodes and regrowth#

Rooms declare which resources they hold. Some hold a fixed list. Others hold a weighted pool and roll two to four resources from it to be the ones present now, so a pool mine can hold different seams at different times.

A node grows back one unit every 600 seconds, up to the most its current roll allows. When every resource in a pool room's roll has been worked down to nothing, the room rolls a fresh selection, so a mine stripped bare can come back holding something else.

Some rare resources come alongside a common one rather than being placed on their own. A mine rich enough to hold adamant may also turn up platinum ore, moonstone, opal, topaz, amethyst, onyx, garnet, turquoise or cinnabar. Pastures with coarse wool sometimes give fine wool, and goat pastures sometimes give raw silk or cashmere. Spidersilk comes from webbed places and from skinning spiders.

Resource levels#

Every resource has a level in its gathering skill. A selection:

The resource wallet#

Gathered materials are counts in a wallet, not objects. They weigh nothing, stack without limit, and cannot be dropped or lost. 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.

resources shows what you hold, and resources <category> one section. Name a single resource, such as resources yarrow, to see how many you hold and every recipe that uses it. Crafted parts such as ingots work too, and also say where they are made.

trade moves wallet materials to another player. A direct trade give needs them in the same room.

Fishing with rod and line#

fish is a different thing from gathering fish into your wallet. It casts a line and lands whole fish as items, which you can sell to a fishmonger or keep. You need a rod or pole of your own, in your pack or in hand, and water to fish in.

When a fish takes the hook, reel it in. A fish left alone too long breaks free. A longer cast reaches deeper water, where the rarer fish are.

Every rod and pole is bought, and each also counts as the fishing rod that gather needs:

A pole wears with use and in the end breaks. A merchant can mend and reline a worn or broken pole, and merchants also sell tackle: lures for rarer fish, stronger lines, bait and better poles. Only the best piece of each kind you carry counts, bait is used up one cast at a time, and a lure can be lost with a fish that breaks away.

Each fish you land is worth as much experience as a creature of your own level. You can land half your level in fish a day, and never fewer than five; after that you are fed up with fishing until the day is out. When The Shoals Are Running world event is on, fish bite far more often. A fishmonger pays far better for fish than a shop pays for found goods; see economy.

Search and dig#

search and bare dig hunt for treasure rather than resources, in any room of an area that has a treasure table.

Each entry in a table is an item or a range of coin, with its own chance. When you search or dig, every entry rolls on its own, so one sweep can turn up several things 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. Nobody else in the room sees you search or dig.

Search and dig have separate tables and separate limits, so using up one does not use up the other.

Once a cycle#

You get one roll per room for each kind in each cycle. Search a room, and searching it again finds nothing until the cycle resets.

The cycle runs on the area's creature respawn clock. If the area is registered with the spawn system, its respawn delay is the cycle; otherwise the area's own respawn rate; failing both, 300 seconds. It is never shorter than 10 seconds.

Luck helps with dry runs. When a search finds nothing, there is a chance the room is not locked and you may look again at once, and you are told that something glints at the edge of your vision. This only ever rescues a failure and never doubles a find. Luck also raises each entry's chance a little, and gives coin finds a chance to roll twice and keep the better result, never past the table's maximum.

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

Recipe scrolls#

On top of the treasure table, a fresh search has a 0.8% chance and a fresh dig a 1.2% chance of turning up a crafting recipe scroll. This roll happens everywhere, not only in stocked areas, and keeps its own once a cycle limit, so it does not compete with the treasure table.

The recipe suits where you are standing. The game reads the richest gathering node in the room, or else the toughest creature there, and picks a recipe at or below that level. Recipes you already know are never chosen.

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

Collector catalysts#

The roaming collectors who trade weapons for trophies also want one rare local find with the trophies: a catalyst matched to the metal they work, such as a river pearl or mithril filings. Each collector's catalyst turns up only in that collector's own hunting ground, through search or bare dig, and one is spent with every trade. The collector's price list names the catalyst and how many you carry.

Related#

• Crafting
• Economy
• Progression