Foraging & herbs

Toggle Search Mode with its key (End by default in recent builds; check your key bindings) or from the menu. A circle around you shows the search radius; items appear as you walk slowly through it. Foraging skill, the Herbalist trait, daylight and good eyesight make the circle bigger; darkness, rain on your glasses, panic and tiredness shrink it. Picking things up trains Foraging.

Hidden categories without their own label also turn up: forest rarities (traps, bags, tents, even a stone axe), medical supplies, ammunition, bones, clothing, junk food and bait.

Poultice recipes come from the Herbalist trait or the Wilderness Survival magazine; you also need a mortar and pestle. All herbs can be dried for winter. Treatments are on health.

Costs 4 points. Gives +1 Foraging, a slightly bigger search radius, a 15% better chance of finding medicinal plants and 5% better for berries, mushrooms and herbs, labels poisonous food, and unlocks the poultices. The Park Ranger gets it free. The magazine teaches the recipes but not the bonuses. See traits.

The map is painted with foraging zones, and each zone has its own loot weights and its own icon density, which is how many items can be on the ground at once. Density refills over game days, so a worked-out patch comes back. Weights are relative, not percentages: a zone with berries at 30 simply rolls berries more often than one at 10.

Wild eggs, dead squirrels and dead rabbits never spawn in town or trailer-park zones, while dead rats are most common in town. Logs appear in forest zones only. Roads are the odd one out: their stones weight is far above every other zone, so a gravel verge is the fastest place to fill a bag with rocks.

Our pick for a base: a house on the edge of town with forest on one side and farmland on the other. You can reach every zone type in a ten-minute walk without crossing the main street.

Build 42 made foraging the main source of early crafting stock. The Firewood and Stones focus categories open at Foraging 0, so a new character can gather everything below on day one.

• Twigs and tree branches appear in every zone, strongest in forest and vegetation. Twigs are campfire fuel and tinder; branches become handles, spears and stone axes.
• Logs show up in forest zones only, and rarely. Chop trees for bulk.
• Pine cones run September to December and are good fuel. Firewood of all kinds gets a bonus in autumn.
• Stone is found year-round in every zone, with roads far ahead of the rest. Snow roughly halves the chance. The Mason trait adds a large Stones bonus.
• Flint nodules and sharp flint flakes share the Stones focus. Knap a nodule with a stone hammer or knapping tool to get flakes, then a flake and a branch make the crude stone axe, and flakes feed the whole knapping tree.
• Clay also sits in the Stones category in groups of 2 to 4, weighted towards forest and farmland. Lighter brown clay ground can be dug with a shovel into an empty sack, and unpacking a sack gives 8 clay.

Bait

Worms, crickets, grasshoppers and cockroaches all work as fishing and stick-trap bait, and worms can be found from Foraging 0. They run March to November and rain is the best time: worms get a large rain bonus and insects a smaller one. A composter also has a chance to produce a worm each time it converts rotten food. Caterpillars, millipedes and slugs do not count as bait.

Set Search Focus to Stones on a rainy walk along a gravel road and you come home with stone, flint and clay in one trip. Our view is that this beats any shop for a first kiln.

The search circle starts at 3 tiles with no skill and grows about 0.7 tiles per Foraging level, so 10 tiles at level 10, with a hard cap of 15 after bonuses. Everything else is a multiplier on that base. These figures come from the wiki's radius tables, and a few may have shifted slightly in Build 42.

Movement and light

• Aiming (holding the attack stance) gives +33%, sneaking +10%, walking nothing. Running or sprinting removes the bonus entirely and running for long switches Search Mode off.
• Darkness can cut the radius by up to 95%. Past a 50% penalty new icons stop appearing and the minimum circle drops to 1.5 tiles. Any light source removes the darkness penalty.
• Rain penalises the circle; an umbrella removes 90% of that penalty.
• Clothing over the eyes is the silent killer: head, face and eyes covered is about -75%, face and eyes -50%, face only -20%, and the total clothing penalty caps at -95%. Take the balaclava off.

Who sees furthest

The outdoor occupations also ignore a share of the weather and darkness penalties, Park Ranger the most. See traits and occupations for point costs.