Foraging Guide
The Foraging skill allows you to gather essential items required for other skills, including Cooking ingredients, various logs, and numerous Farmable seeds.
Contents
Gear and Enchants
Foraging is a fairly simple skill with only a small amount of variation in builds.
Fixed Gear
Regardless of what your build is optimized for, the following items should always be equipped:
A hatchet, either Runite, Stygian, or ideally The Grovekeeper.
The 3 pieces of the foraging armor set: Lumberjack's Hat, Lumberjack's Vest, and Lumberjack's Trousers
A piece of jewelry with Haste and a piece of jewelry with Gathering (augmented Prismatic Ring gives a bonus to effective foraging level so, ideally, you have one of these.)
Boots or Gloves with Naturalist, which increases the chance to get chests in all gathering skills as well as the chance to convert a chest to its greater version.
Fluid Gear
Some equipment slots have multiple useful items:
Boots or Gloves, whichever does not have Naturalist, with any of the following enchants (explained in detail below): Enlightenment, Prolonging, or Treasure Hunter.
One of the skiling capes: Cloak of Many Pockets or its more powerful version, Cloak of the Void (explained in detail below); Flamboyant Cape to increase the encounter rate in Living Forest, or Camo Cloak to decrease the encouner rate.
One of the Bags of Holding to increase your effective foraging level and get more loot (Small Bag of Holding, Bag of Holding, or Large Bag of Holding), or either of Adventurer's backpacks to increase your Foraging Shard generation rate (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 prismatic jewelry with Haste and [[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, and 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 items that you can sell by typing /selltrash for some coins. You can install this enchant on your hatchet; however, you may also add it to your tackle box or 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.
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 more difficult 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 (you can always start with Many Pockets 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 Bush Seeds, Mysterious Seeds, all logs, Ancient Nature Amulet, and the 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. 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, though they would require an extremely high augment level to give a higher effective level boost than the bags of holding.
Priority for Augmenting
The most important augments are 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 and capes. Small, normal and Big Bags of Holding receive a boost of 0.25, 0.5, and 1 effective foraging levels per augment respectively. The small and regular bag of holding transform at +5 and +10, and these should be prioritized as the enchant and augment bonuses increase. If you have a backpack, do not replace the Adventurer's Boon enchant.
Newbie Adventurer's Backpack and Dwarven Adventurer's Backpack both give negative levels, especially the dwarven, giving -20 to your effective foraging level before any augments. Though expensive, these can be augmented alongside the capes, decreasing their penalty and eventually giving a positive bonus. Lastly, Prismatic Ring gives 1 effective foraging level per augment. It is worth augmenting if you are maxed out on everything else.
General Tips
The biggest thing that gives you big foraging boost is the hatchet. Getting one early speeds up your foraging + you can put useful enchants on it (like Embers for passive heat gain or Root Digging for passive gem and fertilizer gains).
Embers give you heat and keep the logs safe, allowing you to use the logs in crafting/augmenting or letting you sell them for money/burn them for more heat. Since heat is tradable, it's a good option to run Embers with something else to gain heat passively to sell/use it later.
Root Digging enchant is also generally useful, as you gain gems and fertilizers while not sacrificing anything else. Nice bonus, free money.
Dangerous Encounters
In general, it's a chance for combat during gathering in Living Forest. Usually, the game ends up evaluating your defense stats, offense stats (and if you have foraging gear on) and then decides if you won the combat (and gives you loot) or failed it (no loot). In both cases, you get delayed by 15+ seconds. The delay means you just sit there, doing nothing for 15 seconds (technically, you are foraging, but the action is taking a long time to complete).
"What's good about Dangerous Encounters then?" you might ask. The answer is: loot from Spriggans. You get all sorts of logs and you can get the items that only those enemies drop: sageberry seeds and Sylvan Staff.
Talents
Gathering Master gives 1 permanent stack of Empowered Gathering. Empowered Gathering gives 5% chance to gain 1 additional item per gathering action and rolls before Gathering. This means 5% chance to get a free item and not use nature runes in the process. - This is a big yes, since even 5% more items in 10000 actions is 500 free items.
Gathering Grandmaster gives 1 more permanent stack of Empowered Gathering and works together with Gathering Master talent. This results in level 2 Empowered Gathering permanently, which gives you 10% chance to get an item instead of 5%. - That's also a big yes.
Foraging Prodigy gives 10 foraging levels. - Since that gives better foraging speed, that's a yes.
Elven Student gives 30 foraging levels at the cost of 10 fishing and 10 mining levels. - Since this one comes with a downside, you should be 100% sure you won't need that extra speed for mining and fishing. If you don't need those skills, this is a big yes to this talent.
Foraging Grandmaster gives 5% boost to all bonus foraging levels (both from talents and equipment). This means that you squeeze more foraging levels out of your gear, lowering action time even further = more items per hour. - Also a big yes.
Fresh Forager gives 1% chance to instantly prepare a food/alchemical item. Since it does not give experience and you do not lose the item in the process, it's a small but nice bonus for chefs (or if you want to agonizingly slowly stockpile the alchemical stuff/foods for yourself/sale). - It's up to you if you want to squeeze a bit more money out of foraging, but all the talents above are at bigger priority than this one.
Affixes
Hatchet affixes
Speedster Foraging - gives a chance to clear an entire node when you find one. Due to low activation chance, it might not be worth it, but occasional node clears are a good bonus either way.
Natural Foraging - gives a chance to gain random logs (that you can get from the current zone you are in). It is a nice bonus to log gains, but foraging yield bonuses have higher activation chance and are generally better. I don't recommend taking this as there are better options available.
Foraging Yield - gives a chance to increase the item gains (by increasing the min and max gatherable items per action that activated the affix). In general, boosts item gains and together with Bags of Holding you always get maximum yield bonus. Highly recommended to take this one.
Foraging Node Size - gives a bonus to the number of actions you need to clear a foraging node. It doesn't really affect the loot gains, unless you combine this with Speedster Foraging. Even then, there are better options available.
Maximum Foraging Yield - gives a chance to increase the maximum yield of a gathering action (for example, if you gain 1-3 items per action, this affix gives you a chance to have 1-4 items per the action that activates the affix). In combination with Bags of Holding, this is a must have.
Minimum Foraging Yield - gives a chance to increase the minimum yield of a foraging action. In general, increases the minimal number of items you gain per foraging action. If you intend on using Bags of Holding, go for Maximum Yield instead.
Forager - increases your effective foraging level by the said number. In general, just faster gathering; so, if you already decided on the other affixes and don't know what else to choose, feel free to pick this one.
Ring affixes
Ultimate Gatherer - increases your gathering effective levels of your tools. Since you get big numbers on your legendary gathering tools, this one is a good choice.
Greater Chests - increases your chances to gain greater chests instead of normal ones. In general, a good thing (since you can sell them/use them for legendary tool upgrades).
Gathering Yield - increases the items yields per gathering action. In general, more items. Always good.
Quiver/Pendant affixes
Gathering Doubling - gives a chance to double the number of items you gain per gathering actions that trigger this affix, In general, a chance to get double items. Always good.
Greater Archaeology - increases the strength of your Archaeology enchant (if you have one somewhere). I believe, it increases the chances to get items/number of items you get. I suppose, it's a good thing for passive money gains.
Necklace affixes
Quick Gatherer - increases gathering speed. Pretty self-explanatory - you gather items faster. This one is a must.
Cape affixes
Sneaky Gatherer - decreaes your chance to be attacked in dangerous gathering areas. Good if you intend on gathering items there instead of grinding items from enemies.
Dangerous Gatherer - increases your chance to be attacked in dangerous gathering areas. Good if you wish to grind items drops from enemies in those areas.
Gathering Shards - gives you a chance to gain more shards during gathering (for example, gain 2 instead of 1). Good one if you aim for shard gains.
Extra tips and advice
When you are focusing on a specific type of items (logs, for example), if you do not wish to gain other type of items, you should use only one enchantment that gives hidden nodes. So, if you wish to get more logs, use Nature and makesure that you do not have Herbalist/Seed Harvesting installed anywhere else (as having them gives you a bigger pool of resource nodes game choses from, which reduces chances to get the nodes that give you the items you want).
