A trade is a second job you keep beside your class. Some trades gather from the world and some make things from what the others bring in. You can take up every one of them on one character, and none of them costs you anything in a fight. Trades lists them all.
How a trade works
Each trade starts with a short quest, and whoever gives it hands you your first tool. The tool has a slot of its own on the Trades tab of your equipment, so you keep your weapon and armour on while you carry it.
Walk up to something you can work and press F, or tap the prompt on a phone. The tool appears in your hands while you work and is put away when you stop.
A trade has its own level, separate from your class. Working raises it and fighting does nothing for it. As a trade grows it earns points for a small tree of passives, and the Trades Guide in the game shows what you can work, where to find it, what it needs and what it is for. For the making trades it shows everything they can make and where each material comes from, so you can follow a recipe back to the vein, the tree or the creature that starts it.
Gathering
Stand beside a vein or a notched tree, swing, and the ore or the timber is in your bag when the bar fills. The rarer kinds lie further from town, in wilder country and deeper places, and resources are found where the monsters are a match for them.
Fishing has a rhythm of its own. Cast where fish are moving under the water and wait for the bite. A bar appears with a needle sweeping across it, and you press F while the needle is inside the marked zone. A miss costs nothing, so cast again. Every water wants its own bait, which you wear rather than use up.
Making
The making trades work at stations: a furnace and an anvil, a sewing table, a workbench. Open one like a shop, pick what to make, and work it while the bar fills. Every piece you make raises your level in that trade, and higher levels open harder work. The more skilled you are than a piece asks, the more often it comes out finer than anything a stall sells.
Better tools are made
Better tools are not bought. Each one is made from what the tool before it gathers, so the trades feed one another as you climb. A smith needs a carpenter's boards for a handle, a carpenter needs a smith's nails, and every better tool reaches resources the last one could not.
Good to know
- Nodes run out and come back. A vein or a tree gives a handful and then looks worked out. Leave it a while and it is ready again.
- The tool has to be up to it. A tougher resource asks for both your trade level and a good enough tool.
- Moving stops the work. So does being hit or starting a fight. You lose the time and nothing else.
- Two people can share a vein. Whoever finishes the last piece gets it.
Next: trades, how crafting works, or back to the guides.