Foraging Guide

The Foraging skill allows you to gather essential items like alchemical ingredients, food ingredients, logs (for heat or crafting).

Gear and Enchants

Foraging is a fairly simple skill so your main equipment isn't going to be anything crazy

The 3 pieces of the foraging armor set: Lumberjack's hat, Lumberjack's vest, and Lumberjack's trousers; One of the baseline metal hatchets or a Grovekeeper; A piece of jewelry with Haste; A piece of jewelry with Gathering (augmented Prismatic ring gives gathering stats so, ideally, you have one of these); Boots or Gloves with Naturalist (increases the chance to get chests (during fishing), nests (during foraging), or geodes (during mining)); Boots or Gloves with any of the following enchants explained in detail below Enlightenment, Prolonging, Treasure hunter One of the 4 skilling capes: Cloak of Many Pockets, Flamboyant cape, Camo Cloak, or Cloak of the Void (explained in detail below); One of the Bags of holding (Small bag of holding, Bag of holding, or Large bag of holding), or either of Adventurer's backpacks (Newbie Adventurer's Backpack, Dwarven Adventurer's Backpack).

Gear Priority list

In order of importance from most to least

Hatchet (normal hatchet first); Lumberjack's set; The Grovekeeper (to replace normal hatchet later on); Black opal jewelry or up with Haste; Black opal jewelry or up with Gathering; Boots/Gloves with Naturalist; Bag of Holding or Backpack; One of the four capes; Boots or Gloves with one of the secondary enchants; Mining or fishing tool with Archeology explained below.

Which Enchants?

Foraging has quite a few enchants that can be interchanged depending on what you want, they are all fairly balanced so it mostly depends on how you want to play:

Hatchet and Armor Enchants

The main foraging enchants are Nature, Seed Harvesting, and Herbalist. These enchants are pre-installed when you craft the Lumberjack armor set and all influence the type and quality of foraging nodes you will find in various gathering locations. Each of these enchants unlock the higher tier nodes that relate to them, if you are missing one of these on your hatchet or armor you will not see many of the related node and will not get its higher tier items. Usually its best to keep these as they are for a balanced item gain. The most important of these is the Nature enchant as the logs are used for heat and crafting and are always in high demand, many people will put this on their Hatchet for a higher quantity and quality of log related nodes. If you do use one of these three on your hatchet make sure to switch out the same enchant on one of your armor pieces to one of the next enchants: Root digging and Embers.

Root digging allows you to gain gems and fertilizer during foraging, while Embers is for the player who wants to gain heat passively while foraging (while still getting the logs). Depending on your needs, you will use different combinations of Nature, Embers, Herbalist, Seed Harvesting, and Root Digging.

Also, there is Archaeology enchant that allows you to passively gain junk (useless) items that you can sell to vendor for some coins. You can install this enchant on your hatchet; however, you may also add it to your tackle box/pickaxe and it will still trigger during foraging activities.

Boot/Glove enchant

The very first enchant you should install on your gloves/boots is Naturalist as this enchant increases your chances to get chests from gathering activities (you may get greater and normal nests from foraging, greater or normal geodes from mining, and ancient or normal treasure chests from fishing).

As for the enchant on your other piece of gear, it is pretty easy to decide: Treasure Hunter if you are foraging in the Living Forest, Prolonging if you are using buff stacks (as Prolonging has a chance to save your buff stack per action while still letting you have the full buff effect), and Enlightenment if you wish to get more Nature essence, since it is one of the harder essences to get passively.

Which cape to use

For every zone that is not Living Forest you want to use either the Cloak of Many Pockets or Cloak of the Void depending on how rich you are (you can always start with Many Pockets cloak and then replace it with Void one later on), the extra levels of haste are much better than the effective levels you get from the other two.

For Living Forest it is a bit more complicated, as Spriggans have the best loot out of all 3 dangerous gathering locations: Sageberry seeds, Mysterious seeds, all logs, Ancient Nature Amulet, and Sylvan Staff being the most notable.It is almost always worth running Flamboyant Cape as this increases encounters and even allows elite spriggans to spawn; however, if you want to focus on Elder logs or Lotus flower gains, you can run Camo Cloak to minimize the encounters. The 3rd option is to run either of the haste capes to get a balance of both gathering mats and encounters.

Bag or Backpack

Small Bag of Holding, Bag of Holding, and Large Bag of Holding are the go-to backpacks whenever you wish to gather for items, as these force the max roll of gathered items per action. How it works: for example, you decide to gather some Ghost Shrooms in Fungal Grotto and you have a Small Bag of Holding equipped. In this case, you can get 1 to 5 shrooms per action; however, thanks to the bag you have, there is a 33% chance that you will get 5 shrooms per action. With Large Bag, you will always have max number of items gathered per action.

As for Newbie and Dwarven Adventurer's Backpacks, these are useful when you wish to gain more shards (for example, when you want to have foraging gear upgrades faster), but be mindful that these backpacks without augments actually decrease your effective gathering levels, which in turn decreases the gathering speeds. Please note that these backpacks of high augment levels can actually increase effective gathering levels.

Priority for augmenting

The most important augments are going to be on your Lumberjack set and your hatchet, because the set and The Grovekeeper use shards. Unfortunately, you are limited in how fast you can augment these (due to 1 shard being gained per 5 minutes of foraging); thus, its best to prioritize the set and only get and augment The Grovekeeper when you get the crafting materials for it from Greater Nests. If you don't have a Grovekeeper, your hatchet should be upgraded alongside the armor.

The next impactful augments are going to be the bag/backpack and capes. Small, normal and Big Bags of Holding receive a boost of 0.25, 0.5, and 1 levels (respectively) of foraging per augment. The small and regular bag of holding get upgraded at +5 and +10 and these should be prioritized as the enchant and augment bonuses increase.

Newbie and Dwarven Adventurer's Backpacks give negative levels, especially the dwarven, giving -20 at +0, so though expensive, these can be augmented alongside the capes. Lastly, prismatic ring gives 1 foraging level per augment level and is worth augmenting if you are maxed out on everything else.

General Tips

Embers gives you heat and keeps the logs safe, allowing you to increase

Dangerous Encounters

Talents

Affixes

Extra tips and advice

Useful terminology