Four skills gather: Mining, Woodcutting, Foraging and Fishing. Three make something of what you gather: Cooking, Construction and Refining.
Each one levels on its own, from 1 to 45, and they are per character.
Open the Life Skills panel to see every skill, what it can work right now, and what each node yields.
Gathering nodes sit out in the world, not at a station — you go to them.
Every node has a band: the minimum skill level needed to work it. Copper starts at Mining 1, loomstone at Mining 40. Below the band you cannot work it at all, and the prompt tells you the level you need.
The band is the only gate. There are no tools to buy and nothing to equip.
Press E and a timing bar appears just above your hotbar with a GOLD MARK on it. Press E a second time while the bar is filling across that mark and you land a Perfect: half again as much from that swing, rounded up, so a node that would have given 1 gives 2.
Mining, Woodcutting and Foraging put the mark in the same place every single time — learn the beat once and you keep it. Fishing is the odd one out: the mark is hidden and moves every cast, and it lights up with a sound the moment the fish bites. That is the only difference between casting a rod and swinging a pickaxe.
Missing costs you nothing. No lost swing, no lost stamina, no lost node — you simply get the ordinary yield. Working the bar is always better and never required, which is also why Harvest mode gathers at the plain rate while it runs on its own.
The bonus is on what you gather, not on experience — a Perfect fills your bag faster, not your skill bar.
Every swing, cast or cut spends 1 stamina. You bank up to 1,000 and receive 100 a day.
The bigger source is Eloria's Favor. Every point of Favor you burn while hunting also banks a point of stamina, one for one — so the people who fight have plenty to gather with.
Favor stops burning once your stamina is full, so nothing is ever wasted.
Copper and iron in the forest, then deepstone, runestone and voidglass, up to tideglass and loomstone in the Sundering.
Ore feeds Refining, which turns it into what the Potential board consumes, and Construction parts for your guild hall.
Woodcutting runs birchwood through to weavewood; Foraging picks sunpetal, bittermoss, gloomcap and the rest where you would expect to find them.
Logs go to Construction. Herbs go to Cooking.
Fishing spots sit on open water and are worked from the bank — you cast across, you do not wade in.
Walk up to a spot and press E to start. Once you are fishing you stay fishing: each catch rolls on its own, so leave it running. Moving away ends it, and you simply press E again.
Riverfin and silverscale live in the shallows; abysspike and sunmaw want worse water.
Dishes are real buffs, not snacks: hearty stew, scholar's tea, hunter's skewer, angler's chowder, misty grog, cleric's broth, tidewater tonic and emberwine.
A dish you eat shows in your active effects with the food's own icon and its own timer, so you can always see what is running.
Recipes are in the Life Skills panel, and a recipe card tells you what the dish does before you commit the ingredients.
Construction makes cut blocks, iron braces and reinforced beams — the parts your guild spends on its Towers.
Refining turns raw ore into the material the Potential board consumes. Both share the same stamina pool as gathering.
A button greys out when you are short of materials, and the card shows exactly what is missing.
You do not have to stand there for it. Press Q to start auto-combat, then H until the badge reads Harvest, and your character gathers on its own — walking node to node, respecting bands, spending the same stamina.
The medallion beside the Auto Hunt button chooses which nodes it takes. See Auto-Combat for the rest.
Written for game version 0.2.17. Found something out of date? Tell us on Discord.
Echoes of Creation is a free-to-play online 3D action RPG for Windows.