Black Desert/Gathering
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Gathering
the skill everything else is built on
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| Type | Life skill |
|---|---|
| Practiced | Outdoors, anywhere the world provides material |
| Tools | Hoe, pickaxe, lumbering axe, butcher knife, tanning knife, fluid collector |
| Costs | Energy, though less as skill rises |
| Minigame | Green Thumb, for a tenfold return |
| Gear | Manos and Preonne, for rarity and efficiency |
| Supplies | Alchemy, cooking and processing |
| Related | Farming, the cultivated equivalent |
Gathering is the skill that supplies most of the others in Black Desert, a life skill in which an adventurer takes raw material directly out of the landscape rather than growing or buying it.
Almost everything made in the game starts here. Herbs and sap become elixirs through alchemy, meat and crops become food through cooking, and ore and timber become the refined stock that processing turns into everything else.
It is also the skill that most rewards equipment. A gatherer in the right gear collects more, collects rarer things and spends less energy doing it, so the gap between a casual gatherer and a committed one is unusually wide.
1 Tools✎
What an adventurer can take from a given object depends entirely on which tool is in hand, and the same tree yields logs, timber or sap depending only on which tool is used.
| Tool | What it takes |
|---|---|
| Hoe | Herbs, wild herbs and mushrooms, which can also be picked by hand without any tool at all. |
| Pickaxe | Ore from mineral deposits, and crystals and ore from desert sand. |
| Lumbering axe | Logs and timber from trees. |
| Fluid collector | Sap from trees, blood from animals and water from a river or a puddle. |
| Butcher knife | Meat from a carcass. |
| Tanning knife | Hides and feathers from a carcass. |
2 Energy✎
Every gather costs energy from a pool that refills slowly, which is the real limit on how much an adventurer can collect in a sitting rather than the time it takes.
Skill loosens that limit. As gathering level rises the chance of collecting without spending anything at all increases, so an experienced gatherer works through the same pool considerably further than a beginner does.
3 Green Thumb✎
The Green Thumb minigame is what turns gathering from a trickle into a harvest. It appears as a short skill test suited to the tool in hand, timing for lumbering, direction for mining, precision for tanning.
The odds are set generously. Success costs ten energy and returns ten times the usual amount, while failure costs a single point, so an adventurer who plays it consistently comes out far ahead even when they miss.
4 Rarity and finds✎
Mastery governs what turns up rather than how much. Higher mastery raises the chance of the special and rare materials that recipes higher up the chain depend on, and Manos and Preonne equipment raise it further.
Two things appear unpredictably while gathering. Fairy's Breath can be traded in for resources or experience, and Buried Traces open into chests holding materials worth considerably more than the gather that revealed them.