Chopping trees and breaking rock
Chop trees and break rocks with a hatchet or pickaxe in your bag. The farther from towns, the better the wood, ore and gems.
Walk up to a tree or a boulder. When the prompt shows, press F to start: you swing again and again, and every swing puts wood or stone in your bag. Press F again to stop. Moving, being hit or a full bag stops you too, and you keep everything you gathered. You cannot gather while mounted or swimming.
You need the right tool in your bag (you never have to equip it): a hatchet for trees and a pickaxe for rock. Shops sell the plain ones; Truesteel, Galvor, Mithril and Adamant ones for tiers 2 to 5 are made by Axe and Hammer Smithing at a forge. A tool's tier is the best tier of tree or rock it can work, and your Logging or Mining level must have opened that tier too.
| Node | Each swing gives | Lasts | Grows back |
|---|---|---|---|
| Tree | 1 Lumber. A better tree also gives 1 of its own wood: Oak (tier 2), Bronzewood (3), Wormwood (4) or Elderheart (5). | 6 to 10 swings | 45 minutes |
| Rock | 1 Stone, and Ore one swing in four. A richer seam also gives 1 Coal (tier 2), Galvor Ore (3), Mithril (4) or Adamant (5), and 3 swings in 100 a gem: Agate, Onyx, Diamond or Bloodstone by its tier. From tier 3, about one swing in three also gives 1 Coal. | 4 to 8 swings | 30 minutes |
A swing takes 4 seconds at a tree and 4.5 at a rock, up to a third less as your profession rises to 100.
A tree you finish falls and leaves a stump and a log; a spent rock shrinks with each swing and crumbles to a pile. Everyone sees it, and it stays that way, even through a restart, until it grows back. A tree comes back as a sapling first.
Better ground, better materials
Every place has a tier from 1 to 5. It rises by one at 500 m, 1,400 m and 2,800 m from the nearest settlement; by one on low-magic ground and by two on dead ground; and by one in deserts, tundra, wetland and rainforest, by two on a glacier. Out there about a third of the trees and rocks are of that tier and the rest are plain. The prompt names a node's tier. On the Haven nothing is above tier 2. The spoil heap in a mine's yard is worked like a rock: tier 4 at a Mithril mine and tier 5 at an Adamant mine, whoever holds the tower.
An of Plenty enchantment on what you wear gives a chance of one more with every swing. See Enchantments and masterwork.
Prospecting and rich veins
Type /prospect with a pickaxe, a sickle or a hatchet in your bag and stand still for 5 seconds: you learn the best rock, herb patch or tree within 400 m, its material and tier, and it is marked on your map. To choose, type /prospect mining, /prospect herbalism or /prospect logging.
Every province has one rich vein, about 150 m across, where every rock is a tier better than the ground around it. It moves every 6 hours. From Mining 55, prospecting for rock also tells you where your province's vein lies now and rings it on the world map's Rich veins layer.