Dev Diary
Two Ways to Read the Land
In most MMOs, gathering is a node you run to. A glowing rock sits on the map; you click it, you get ore, it respawns ninety seconds later, and you run the same loop until your bags are full. The only real skill is knowing the route.
We wanted gathering in Shattered Lands to feel like reading the land, and we wanted it to feel genuinely different depending on what you’re after. A herbalist brushing through a meadow shouldn’t play the same as a prospector reading a hillside for hidden ore. So we ended up building two distinct gathering models, and which one you’re using depends on the resource itself.
See it, gather it
Herbs, mushrooms, and trees grow visibly in the world. If you can see a sage plant, you can harvest it, provided you’ve trained herbalism and you’ve got a sickle in hand. Spot a birch, equip an axe, and fell it.
This is the honest half of the system: what you see is what you get. There’s no scanning and no guesswork. The skill is in knowing your plants and ranging far enough to find the good ones.
And what grows depends on where you are. Each biome has its own ecology:
- Grasslands: common mushrooms, sage, chamomile
- Meadow forests: fennel, ginseng, birch and oak
- Pine forests: wolfsbane, pine
- Jungle: rare moonflower, growing sparse and far apart
The tool matches the task. Herbs want a sickle; trees want an axe. Mushrooms you pick bare-handed. A visible common growing at your feet shouldn’t require a tool, and that small rule does a lot of work: it means a brand-new player can wander into a grassland and immediately gather something, no shopping trip required.
A harvest isn’t always one item, either. Drop tables mean a single tree can yield logs, bark, and branches; an herb might give leaves, seeds, and roots. What you walk away with has a little variety baked in.
One more thing we were deliberate about: no fixed farming routes. When you harvest a plant, it despawns and respawns somewhere else valid in the biome a few minutes later, not on the same spot. You can’t memorize a circuit and run it on autopilot. You read the land each time.
Prospect for what’s hidden
Mining and fishing are the opposite discipline. Ore doesn’t sit on the surface with a sparkle on it. You have to prospect, scanning an area to discover a hidden deposit, and only then can you work it.
Mining runs a full assay loop: prospect to find a formation, take a sample of the soil, analyze the sample to learn what’s really down there, then mine what you’ve found. The samples and survey reports are real items with their own provenance, recording who gathered them and who analyzed them, so a skilled prospector’s reports are worth something to someone else.
Fishing works the same way in spirit: read the water to find a spot, then cast your line. And it’s terrain-aware: you can only fish where there’s actually water to fish in.
Why hide it? Because some of the world’s riches should require knowledge and patience, not a glance. Hidden discovery rewards the player who learns to read terrain over the player who memorizes a map. The land doesn’t give itself up easily.
Why two models?
The rule we settled on is simple: if you can see it, gather it with the right trade skill. Visible commons, the herbs and trees anyone can spot, go through the honest see-it-gather-it path. The things that should take a prospector’s eye stay hidden behind discovery.
That leaves deliberate room for a third layer down the road: foraging, the rare hidden micro-resources that even a trained eye has to hunt for. We’ve reserved that space rather than filling it, so the system has somewhere to grow.
All of which ties back to the thing we care most about: in Shattered Lands, crafters and gatherers are first-class citizens. Gathering isn’t a chore you grind between fights. It’s a discipline with its own depth, its own knowledge, and its own way of reading the world. And the best materials, the ones master crafters want, come from the most dangerous places to find them.
Finding your way
We didn’t want “read the land” to mean “wander aimlessly,” so there are tools that scale with your expertise:
- Gathering lenses: toggle one on and harvestable plants matching your skill glow, so you can pick a meadow clean without squinting at every shrub. Run more than one lens at once if you’re a jack-of-all-trades.
- Detect abilities: a quick cast that turns you toward the nearest matching resource and tells you roughly how far. Its range grows with your skill rank, so a master herbalist senses herbs a novice would walk right past.
- Minimap markers: discovered deposits show type-specific icons, so ore, herbs, trees, and fishing spots each read at a glance.
A novice sees less of the world than a master. That’s the point.
What’s coming
Gathering is a foundation, and there’s more being built on it:
Foraging is the hidden micro-resource layer described above: rare finds that reward deep skill and exploration.
Gardening lets you plant the seeds you harvest, tend a growth cycle, and reap a crop, closing the loop from gatherer to cultivator.
Deeper specialization: gathering skills already drive gear bonuses like gather speed and yield, and specialization paths will let you commit to mastery in a tradeskill the way a combatant commits to a weapon.