Manual

Gathering Trade Skills
Gathering trade skills let you harvest raw materials from the environment.
Throughout the game world, there are mineral nodes, plants, and animal corpses.
These objects can be harvested to gather ore and stones, herbs, and skins.
Using a Gathering Trade Skill
Any time you mouse over a resource, a gathering icon appears by your cursor. Mousing
over a mineral node brings up a pickaxe cursor; mousing over a plant brings up a flower
cursor; and mousing over a skinnable corpse brings up a skinning knife cursor.
The tool tip that appears when you mouse over the resource tells you the name of
the resource and the name of the skill necessary for harvesting it. The skill name
appears in a different color, depending on how difficult the resource is to harvest.
If you do not have the skill at all, then the color of the skill name is red, meaning
you can’t harvest it. The name is also red if you have the skill, but the resource is
beyond your skill level to gather. In that case, you must improve your skill level
before you can successfully harvest the resource.
Improving Your Gathering Trade Skill
As with all trade skills, you can improve your trade skill by using it. Every time you
harvest a resource using your gathering skill, you have a chance of increasing your
skill by one.
The color, and therefore difficulty, of the skill name in the tool tip tells you how
likely you are to improve your skill when you harvest it. The more difficult the
resource is to harvest, the more likely you are to gain a skill point when you do so.
The levels of difficulty, from least to most, are as follows: gray, green, yellow,
orange, and red. If you harvest a yellow or orange resource, you will usually gain a
skill increase. If you harvest a green resource, you will rarely get a skill increase,
and if you harvest a gray resource, you will never get a skill increase. Red
resources, of course, cannot be harvested at your current skill level.
As you improve your gathering skill level, you will eventually be able to harvest
more difficult resources.
Buying Ingredients
Many production trade skills require certain trade supplies in addition to the other
blueprint ingredients. For the tailoring trade skill, you always need thread to sew
together the cloth pieces, while many blacksmithing recipes require flux to remove
the impurities of the metals.
These trade supplies can be purchased from a trade supply vendor, who can often
be found in any major city or town.