Gathering

One half of the essential industry loop of Rhizome, gathering is a general term that refers to the process of collecting raw material from the environment in order to eventually produce components, and then finalized crafts. Gathering is governed by several different skills and typically falls into two stages -- searching for raw material, and gathering it. Rarely, your search will turn up loose materials that you can simply pick up off the ground, but in most cases, instead you will uncover a node (or produce a 'node' in the form of killing an animal, e.g., its corpse).

Search the room      Skill           Stats      Then work the node   Tool needed
forage [keyword]     harvesting      AGI, INT   harvest <plant>      none
prospect [keyword]   mining          END, WIS   mine <ore node>      pickaxe
survey [keyword]     lumberjacking   STR, WIS   fell <tree>          felling axe
(a corpse)           skinning        AGI, INT   skin <corpse>        skinning knife
cast [direction]     fishing         STR, WIS   (varies)             fishing pole

You can search a room twice for materials, before having to move on, forcing gatherers to move around the map and potentially into harm's way. Each room has a per-character cooldown, so groups of gatherers won't step on each other's toes as a communal activity. Typing a gathering search command like forage by itself will allow you to search randomly, but you can also forage <keyword> in order to look for something specifically. Your ability to find specific things is based on how skilled you are in that discipline of gathering; areas have specific materials available in them, and among those that are available where you are gathering, some are rarer and harder to find. When you uncover a node, it won't last; you have about two minutes to commit to gathering from it, otherwise it will despawn to prevent unnecessary clutter.

Once you have found a node, you can work material from it, assuming you have the right skill and tools. You must be standing, you must have the tool in hand. A node may have multiple different types of raw materials (e.g., hide and meat, gems and ore, flowers and roots) that are rolled independently during harvesting. The quality of what you gather is capped by the maximum quality of the specific item, but your skill determines how close you get to that cap. For example, a novice butcher skinning a rare and highly valuable corpse can produce a very low quality hide and meats because of their inexperience. Conversely, a master butcher will always maximize the quality from a low quality animal, but won't exceed that maximum... which will be quite low.

Failing to harvest anything, e.g., failing all possible rolls, will destroy the node with nothing rendered. Plants and ore veins can potentially be harvested from multiple times before they are exhausted. Trees can only be felled once, obviously. Harvesting from a node will use your movement cooldown to prevent people from rapidly buzzsawing their way across the map by chaining movement and harvest commands.

Training gathering skills is gated on the quality of the material you are finding. With low skills, finding and gathering low quality materials is ample, but at high skills, you cannot train on low quality materials. You will have to expedition to farther corners of the world and more fraught locations to find rarer materials to adequately train yourself to mastery.

Fishing is slightly different -- you cast your rod in a direction, and then reel in fish. Quality of the fish is based on your skills as above, though how you harvest it depends on other factors -- you can butcher it with skinning, cook it whole with cooking, or (in the future) use it in aquaculture with farming.