Gathering

Gathering is how you collect materials without fighting. Most materials for alchemy and crafting come from here. It opens at Lv4.

How it works

Choose a region under Gather in the main menu and set a number of steps, and you'll harvest materials as you walk. There's no combat.

There are four gathering grounds per city, sixty-four in all. Each region favors certain categories — there are five: Herbs · Minerals · Marine · Crystals · Sundries. Check which category the material you need belongs to, then pick your region.

Proficiency

Repeating the same category raises your proficiency in it. Proficiency builds separately for each category, so focusing on one category pays off faster than dabbling in several.

Proficiency decides two things.

• Whether you can harvest it — each tier has a required rank. If you fall short, that resource just brushes past you (the whole step is wasted).
• Whether you fumble it — when you've only just reached the required rank, you'll fail about three times in ten. Failures drop with each rank you gain, and with around six ranks to spare you stop failing entirely.

Even when you fail, you don't get the resource but still earn about half the proficiency.

So resources from a newly unlocked tier will keep slipping through your fingers for a while. That's not a bug; it's by design. Gather a little more and it steadies.

What you get

You'll get materials matching the region's tier, with the occasional item from one tier higher mixed in.

Low-tier materials come several at a time. That's so you won't run short even if you breeze through the early stages.

Auto-gather

Gathering can run automatically too, and just like Explore there are two ways to pay.

• Gold — charged per step. The longer the run, the pricier the later steps. Upgrading the Tea House at your Outpost lowers the cost.
• Auto-Gather steps — deducted one-for-one per step, with no Gold spent. The price doesn't rise for long runs.

Either way, you pay everything up front when you set out, with no refunds. Details are in Currencies & Passes.

What you won't find here

Essences don't come from gathering. You have to disenchant gear, defeat monsters, or buy them from a traveling Merchant.