Gathering
Gathering is how resources enter your economy in Dawn of Embers. On land all gathering is done by Villagers; at sea, fishing ships catch fish (see Naval).
The key rule: resources are carried, not credited on the spot. A villager fills a load at a resource, walks it to a building that accepts that resource, and only then is it added to your stockpile. Placing drop-off camps close to resources is what keeps an economy fast.
Villagers
Villagers are trained at the Town Hall. Male and female villagers are identical in game terms.
| Cost | Train time | Population | Hit points |
|---|---|---|---|
| 50 Food | 12 s | 1 | 60 |
The gathering cycle
- Order. Right-click a resource with villagers selected. Each resource has room for only as many workers as fit around it. If you order more villagers than fit, the closest ones take the spots and the rest go to other nearby resources of the same kind. If there is none nearby, they crowd onto the nearest one rather than walking across the map.
- Work. At the resource the villager works in ticks: one tick every 1 second, taking 10 of the resource per tick.
- Full load. A villager carries up to 100 at a time, so an ordinary load takes about 10 seconds of work.
- Return. With a full load the villager walks to the nearest finished building you own that accepts that resource and drops it off. The resource is added to your stockpile at that moment.
- Repeat. The villager goes back to the same resource. If it has run out, the villager looks for the nearest resource of the same kind and carries on.
Details
- Partial loads. If a resource runs out mid-load, the villager delivers the part-load rather than throwing it away.
- No drop-off. If no finished building accepts the load, the villager stops and waits, holding the load. It is delivered once a suitable building exists and the villager is given a new gather order.
- Changing jobs. A villager carrying one resource that is ordered onto a different one delivers its current load first, then goes. If nothing can accept the old load, it is discarded.
- Unfinished buildings are not drop-off points. A camp starts accepting deliveries only when its construction is complete.
- Only your own buildings accept your deliveries; you cannot drop off at an ally's camp.
- Used-up resources (trees, berry bushes, stone and gold deposits, carcasses) disappear. Farm fields and the panning water do not.
Drop-off buildings
| Resource | Drop-off buildings |
|---|---|
| Wood (trees) | Woodcutters Camp, Town Hall |
| Stone | Mining Camp, Town Hall |
| Gold (deposits) | Mining Camp, Town Hall, Sifting Station |
| Gold (panned) | Sifting Station (also any other Gold drop-off) |
| Food: berries and farms | Farmers Camp, Gatherers Camp, Town Hall |
| Food: hunted game | Hunters Camp, Town Hall |
| Food: fish | Fishing Docks (by fishing ship) |
Wood
Villagers chop a standing tree first; after a few seconds of chopping it falls, and they keep working the fallen trunk until it is used up. One tree holds 500 Wood. With one villager the tree stands for about 7.5 seconds of chopping; several villagers on one trunk bring it down faster.
Berries
Berry bushes give Food. Every unit of berry Food also brings home 0.5 Fibre, so a full load of 100 Food also banks 50 Fibre.
Farming
A Farm Plot is a renewable field.
- Where: select a finished Farmers Camp and use its farm button; farm plots do not appear in the main build menu. A plot must be placed within 24 m of one of your finished Farmers Camps.
- Cost: 200 Wood to build (30 s).
- Capacity: a new field holds 400 Food.
- Rate: farming is deliberately slower than picking berries. A farmer's work tick is stretched 7.2 times (one tick of 10 Food about every 7.2 seconds of work).
- Fibre: every unit of farm Food also brings home 0.2 Fibre (20 Fibre per 100 Food).
- Private: only the owner can order villagers onto a field, and villagers never wander onto a field on their own.
- Growth stages: the plot shows a ripe crop while it holds more than half its Food, a half-cut crop at half or less, and a bare fallow field when empty.
Reseeding
An empty field is fallow, not destroyed. Reseeding it costs 80 Wood and refills it to 400 Food.
- Automatic reseeding: when a field you are farming runs empty, your farmer pays the reseed automatically and keeps working. If you do not have enough Wood, the farmer stops beside the field and you get a notice: "A farm field is empty and there is not enough wood to reseed it."
- Ordering villagers onto a fallow field also reseeds it, for the same Wood.
Hunting
Wild animals roam the map in herds. Any villager can hunt: order it onto an animal like any other resource.
- The villager closes in. Some species flee when a unit comes near; after a limited number of flights they stop, exhausted, until they calm down.
- Within reach, the villager spends a few seconds killing the animal, which then dies where it stands and becomes a carcass.
- The carcass is gathered like any other resource. It yields Food plus Leather as a byproduct.
- A carcass that nobody gathers decays and disappears (150 s by default).
Animals that are killed are slowly replaced: when a species has fewer animals than the map started with, one returns after a set time, away from any units.
Species
The game has five species. The values below are the ones the game's animal table was set up with; they may have been tuned since.
| Species | Food | Leather | Flees? | Kill time |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Deer | 100 | 20 | Yes (from 9 m) | 2.5 s |
| Boar | 150 | 25 | No | 3.5 s |
| Sheep | 80 | 10 | No | 2.5 s |
| Hare | 40 | 5 | Yes (from 7 m) | 1.5 s |
| Turkey | 60 | 0 | Yes (from 6 m) | 2.0 s |
Leather is collected in proportion to the Food taken: a Deer's carcass gives 0.2 Leather per Food. Hunted animals give no Fibre.
Game is dropped off at a Hunters Camp or the Town Hall.
Computer players do not hunt.
Panning for gold
A Sifting Station is built on a river shore. When it is finished, villagers can be ordered onto the water beside it to pan for gold.
- Panning never runs out.
- It is slow: 100 Gold per minute of working time per villager (one Gold about every 0.6 s), compared with 10 Gold per second from a gold deposit.
- A station has room for up to 16 panners, depending on how much usable shoreline it has. This is a hard limit: villagers ordered beyond it are not started and carry on with what they were doing.
- A panning job never wanders: if the station is destroyed or the water cannot be reached, the villager stops instead of walking off to a gold deposit.
- Panned gold is dropped off at the Sifting Station (or any other building that accepts Gold).
Fishing
Fish are caught by fishing ships, not villagers, and delivered to the Fishing Docks. Fish count as Food and give no byproduct. See Naval.
Gathering bonuses
Some upgrades and player Callings raise gathering. Two values can change:
- the amount per tick, which also enlarges a villager's load by the same factor (for example, a 1.2× bonus makes a full load 120 instead of 100);
- the speed of ticks.
Each point spent on the Gathering upgrade adds +10% to the amount and +5% to the speed. Callings that boost gathering multiply on top of this.