Materials

*See also: Gathering character attribute*

## Basic Information

### Material Types

Crafting recipes have slots for material types, not specific materials. For example, any wood-type material can be used interchangeably in a wood slot in a recipe, from simple Wood to top-tier Ancient Wood. Using higher tier materials results in better crafted equipment. Each table below represents a type of material.

Most recipes also allow you to choose between multiple material types. For example, hammers can be made using wood, metal, or stone as their primary ingredient. Different material types have different general uses:

* **Wood:** Construction, shields, and weapons.
* **Fiber:** Gathering tools and ranged weapons.
* **Metal:** Weapons, Heavy armours, and shields.
* **Stone:** Construction and heavy weapons.
* **Leather:** Light armours, shields secondary, and Medium armours.
* **Thread:** Gathering tools, clothing, and Light armours.
* **Bone:** Various niche uses.
* **Gems:** Creates lightweight items with a random skill bonus. Also used in jewellery.

### Gathering

*See also: Gathering character attribute*
Materials can be gathered by characters while in your town or in a camp. They can gather from the hex they are on, and the six adjacent hexes. Your town will not have many materials in reach, so most gathering is done by expeditions of gatherers camping.

The ability to gather higher-tier materials must be unlocked through research. Unlocking a new material will add 5 units of that specific material to your settlement, which can be used to craft improved equipment, boosting research progress. Use these wisely, because the unlocked material appears somewhere on the map and it might be far away, so getting more of it could be quite difficult.

In the tables below, the Units  is the number of units gathered when a gathering task is completed. The Gathering Points  is how many points must be contributed to complete the task. The / is the number of Gathering Points required to gather a single unit.

## Food

*Main article: Food*
All foods can be eaten raw, or included in prepared food recipes.

Food is unique in that the materials do not have tiers, and the crafted recipes do not have different qualities: one unit of food is one unit of food. What is important for food is your characters having a variety of kinds (up to 10) to eat.

## Fuel

All types of fuel can be used when camping. They are also used as a crafting ingredients for equipment, and as catalysts in many crafting recipes.

Typically, ordinary Wood makes the best fuel for the base camp, and Coal or Straw (being lighter) makes for better expedition fuel, as it will allow the expedition to carry or gather more supplies. Save your higher-value woods and fiber for crafting, or for use as Catalysts after building a Smithy.

## Crafting

Crafting-type materials are only useful as part of a crafted recipe; they have no value on their own (except in a few specific trading events).

### Gems

Gems provide random bonuses to weapons, armour, and shields (but *not* jewellery or artifacts). Gems often weigh less than other materials, making them ideal to craft items for characters with low strength. In particular, combining moonstone with gems creates very powerful swords.

### Herbs

Herbs are not edible by themselves, but are used in many Food recipes. They are also occasionally needed in events about healing or wounds, so it's helpful to always have a few in your expedition's inventory. The herbs included in a Cooked or Roasted meal can count for these events (witnessed during events, but not confirmed by ingame text or the developer).

cooked & roasted meals.