Gathering and materials
You begin in a shirt, pants and sandals, with an empty backpack and no gold. What you hold decides what the world gives you.
How to gather
Point at a rock, a tree, a plant or a lake. A ring shows under it with its name and what working it would give with what you hold, or why it won't. Click it, or press G (□ on the pad, which works the nearest thing it can), and your character walks over and gets to work. Step away to stop. Loose stones on the ground are picked up at once, and now and then one is flint.
Each patch holds only so much. Work a tree out of wood and it falls; work a rock out and it crumbles away. Both grow back after about ten minutes.
What each tool gives
| In your hands | A tree | A rock | A plant |
|---|---|---|---|
| Nothing | Sticks | Stones, sometimes flint | Herbs |
| An axe | Logs (Lumberjacking) | Nothing, and the axe wears | Plant fibre |
| A pick | Plant fibre, torn from the bark | Stone and ore (Mining) | Herbs |
| A blade | Nothing, and it dulls | Nothing, and it wears | The most fibre, sometimes flax |
| A fishing pole | Only a pole fishes, at a lake or pond | ||
With your hands empty, the best proper tool in your backpack is used. The wrong tool gives little, wears out three times faster, and the message tells you which tool you wanted.
The four gathering skills
- Mining: stone, copper, tin, coal, iron, silver and gold, the four elemental ores, Seamsteel, and gems from amber up to star sapphire.
- Lumberjacking: logs and kindling; frostwood in the cold lands once you are good at it.
- Herbalism: garlic, ginseng, blood moss, nightshade, mandrake, fibre, and moonpetals, which bloom only at night.
- Fishing: each land's own fish, black pearls, message bottles, big fish, and the occasional soggy boot. Some catches need deep water.
Every try trains the skill. A better skill makes rarer finds more likely. Farming and ranching have their own place: see Villages, farms and raids.
From wood to Seamsteel
Each step up gives you a faster, tougher tool and opens a harder ore. A pick must be hard enough to break an ore, and your Mining must be high enough to find it. A vein too hard for your pick gives you plain stone.
- Hands. Sticks, stones and flint.
- Wood. A wooden knife, axe, pickaxe, club or sword, made by hand from sticks.
- Stone. Flint and stone tools. They break into copper, tin and coal.
- Copper and bronze. Smelt copper at a forge. Bronze is copper and tin together. Your first smith's hammer is three copper ingots beaten into one.
- Iron and silver. Iron opens gold and silver.
- Steel. Iron and coal, made at a forge.
- The elemental metals. Ember-iron for fire, tide-silver for water, deep-iron for earth and sky-iron for air, each from its own coloured vein.
- Seamsteel. The rarest metal, hidden in the veins where the seam runs through the rock.
The harder the metal, the better what you make from it: copper weapons hit a little softer than iron, steel a little harder, and Seamsteel hardest of all.
In the lore, every new material is something that came through a seam. More of them will come with new seasons. Coming