How to Plant

Farming and Gardening work differently from Crafting and Enchanting. To use these skills, go to one of the planting fields (either on Hart’s Isle or in Mithuth). Click on the field. A green panel will pop up. If you just want a list of recipes, you can click that button. However, if you want to plant something, you will need to buy one or more planting rows. The first row is free: click on the Buy button to receive it. Each additional row costs 100g more than the previous (i.e., it costs 100 x your current number of owned rows).



To plant something, you will need seeds and essences. As with regular crafting, hovering your cursor over the hammer in the recipe list will show you the necessary components. Seeds can be purchased from seed merchants; there is one standing nearby each field. You will also need to receive a component bag, if you do not already have one. To receive one, go to the green planting panel (clicking on the field) and type in a row number; be sure you already own at least one row. Then click Plant. You will receive a bag. Close the window and fill your bag with seeds and essences. When you go back into the panel, type a row number and click Plant. You will be shown the recipes that you are currently able to work with.

Once you have planted something, you will have to wait a period of time before reaping. You can show your row status, which will tell you how long you have to wait for each row. When a row is ready to reap, type in its number and click Reap. The results will appear in the combat log window.

Planting difficulty is determined by a number of factors, including two "invisible" factors: soil and planting time. Some recipes are best planted in Mithuth; others are best on Hart’s. In addition, most recipes have a time of day for planting during which they are more likely to be successful. None of this information is shown; you must find it out for yourself!

How to Gather

In addition to regular crafting, the Herb Lore skill is also useful for gathering herbs from Sunbright Island and Kortuga. To do this, find one of the herb plants in those areas and click on it. The name of the plant will tell you what you can gather, as well as the basic difficulty level for gathering that particular herb.

The herb yields will rotate. Every 15 minutes, the system rolls d100 against an ever increasing chance of rotation. If the herb yield rotates, the name and difficulty will change.

If the herb yield does not rotate, the total quantity of gatherable herbs in that spot will go up by 1. If you exhaust the number of herbs that can be gathered, you will have to wait 15 minutes for the yield either to go up by 1 or to switch to a new herb.

Gathering herbs in daylight hours is easiest. Twilight and dawn gathering is harder.

Night gathering is hardest. (This is reversed for Underdark races.)

How to Fish

The first step is to acquire a fishing pole (fresh- or saltwater catches) or fishing trap reel (shellfish and crustaceans). These can be made from Woodworking and Engineering, respectively. Some poles and reels are of higher quality, providing skill bonuses when they are used. Fishing trap reels are harder to use, with the basic item having a -20 skill penalty attached to it. (Higher quality reels can bring that penalty down to -12.) This may seem counterintuitive and contrary to reality (setting fishing traps doesn’t require practice the
way angling does), but it works this way—for Fishing subsystem purposes—because shellfish and crustaceans are considerably more valuable than fish. One way to RP the discrepancy is to suppose that these specially engineered fishing traps (which are attached to the end of the reel you are holding) are designed to trap only things for which they have been properly (and carefully) calibrated.

Once you have a pole or reel (hereafter just "pole"), you must then locate a fishing spot. These are identifiable as rocks underneath the water’s edge in various locations around Haven. Freshwater fishing spots are found in lakes and rivers; saltwater fishing spots are on beaches.

To begin fishing, equip and then activate the pole. Target and click on the fishing spot. This will begin a fishing attempt that will last anywhere from 1 to 60 seconds. At the end of this time, you will be informed of the result. If you succeed, you will receive a fish. The value of the fish depends on the margin of success of your skill roll—that is, the difference between your roll and your effective skill level. The default modifier for freshwater fishing is a -1 penalty. The default for saltwater is -2. The default for crustacean and shellfish trapping is -3 (which is added to the penalty attached to the fishing trap reel you are using).

Each use of a pole uses up one charge. Poles start with fifty charges. Every area has the potential to become over-fished. If that happens, you will have to wait for the fish population to return before you can successfully fish again. Every time you fish (successfully or not), a counter goes up by 1. Once it hits 20, the area is over-fished, and all fishing spots of the same type (freshwater or saltwater) in that area will stop giving fish.

The counter drops by 1 every 3 minutes, never going below 0. It therefore takes a full hour for an area to recover completely. However, you may fish any time the counter is below 20, whether or not it has hit 20 recently. Practically speaking, this means that once you have hit the limit, you can only fish once every three minutes. Bear in mind that if there is more than one fishing PC in the area, the counter will go up more rapidly.

Once you have successfully fished, you can use Cooking to grill or otherwise cook the fish to produce meals that provide experience bonus tokens. The meals may be sold or given out to others, but once they are eaten (activated) the xp tokens are Cursed and therefore non-transferable. You may only have one token of each type in your inventory at one time, and only one of these tokens will be active.

How to Mine/Prospect (beta)

The Prospecting skill is used for mining in the Kortugan Caves and the Vermin Cave (on Goblin Island). You will need to have a prospector’s pick, which can be crafted by someone with the Armoury: Melee Weapons skill. Equip the pick and approach a mining point (marked “Ore”). Click on the mining point. Your Prospecting skill roll may be modified depending on the quality of the prospector’s pick (currently there is only one quality, with no modifier).

If your roll is successful, there will be a 25% chance of receiving a gem, metal or essence. If your roll is unsuccessful, your pick may break. (If your roll is a critical failure, your pick will definitely break.) The quality of the gem, metal or essence that you may receive depends on your effective Prospecting skill and whether or not you critically succeeded. In addition, the Vermin Cave naturally produces lower quality results.