Ability Breakdown & Details

Forage is an underutilized skill that is granted to Scouts. Similar to the artisan "sample" skill, foraging allows you to scrounge the immediate area for food and drink. This food and drink provides different buffs, such as temporary strength increases, HAM penalty reducers and other effects that have multiple benefits. At this time you don't receive XP from successful forage and these remains a request of the Scouting community.You can also forage lairs, which provide you with interesting items such as bees and eggs. The eggs are useful in some kinds of crafting, and can be sold. Bees can be placed into a creature habitat craftable by artisans. While these don’t benefit you directly, they do provide some interesting visual affects and may make you a few bucks selling to loot collectors.

The Scouting community feels that Forage has not lived up to its original design premise, which was to create incentives for Scouts to explore the landscape. We are working hard with the Devs to turn forage into a useful feature that provides useable loot and food items in line with the player crafted consumables that have become a key factor in the game.

Using Forage

1. Forage must be done outside and can only be initiated while not moving.

2. Forage zones are pockets made 20 meters from the next one. In these pockets, a player may forage for goods and when successful, the pocket is depleted. If the player wishes to gain more foraged items they will have to move to the next pocket to forage. When you get the "There is nothing to forage in this area." message, you must move at least 20m off to get a new area. These pockets will regenerate over time.

Each "area" has 4 forage slots. You can only have 4 successful forages in an area, No matter if you forage 1, 2, 3 items at once. Once you hit the 4th success that area is dry. The area will regenerate items at a rate of roughly 1 per 5min. So if you say get 4 successes in a row, you will not get a success for another 2mins or so.

3. Forage succes increases as the player gains more forage skill. At master scout, the forage success is higher and the the number of items the player is supposed to receive is increased to a maximum of 3 in a single forage. Items are chosen randomly although fishing bait seems to be rather commonly obtained. Successes include discards and multiple-item forages (which count as one success.) Your failure rate doubles (no matter what planet you're on) when you're around cities or structures (player or NPC).

Maximum items:

1 Item at Survival I. Foraging +5
2 Items at Survival III. Foraging +25
3 Items at Master Scout. Foraging +50

Rare items (was never implemented in game):

Ranger: Frontiering I. Foraging +65

Foragable Items

So, what are these 16 unique items? Glad you asked! I have them all compiled in a nice list for you.

Fishing Bait (Found 1-5 uses each, 1-2 with Scout w/Survival I, 4-5 with Master Ranger)

1. Insect Bait
2. Worm Bait
3. Grub bait

Edibles

These have a filling of 75

4. Alever Tweth'pek = Action +100, 100s Mind + 25, 100s

5. Esost'Ew Zann = Health +50, 700s Action +50, 700s Mind +50, 700s

6. Flurr-Cle Onion = Mind +500, 60s

7. Jar of Foraged Berries = Health +100, 300s

8. Jar of Foraged Bugs = Action +100, 300s

9. Jar of Foraged Fungus = Health +50, 250s Mind +100, 250s

10. Jar of Foraged Grubs = Action +10, 10s Mind +60, 10s

11. Ko-Do Fruit = Action +50, 250s Mind +50, 250s

12. Maroj Melon = Health +50, 150s Mind +50, 150s

13. Schule Nef = Mind +50, 400s

14. Sijjo Sewi = Action +100, 200s

15. Sosi Hodor = Health +120, 400s Mind +50, 400s

16. Wild Snaff = Health +50, 50s Action +150, 50s Mind +50, 50s

Anectdotal account of foraging success rates:

People were telling me that they rarely, if ever, have made mutliple-item forages. Now, I had made quite a few two and three item forages in my lifetime, so I could not quite see why they weren't. So I did a bit experimenting. I took only two planets, Endor and Tatooine, just because their vegetation is so radically different. I plan to repeat this on other planets, when I have the time.

Now, I didn't give the developers enough credit. I didn't think the foraging would be that much different, just because I couldn't quite believe that the foraging system was that complex. They said it, themselves, that it was a low priority and so I underestimated them, thinking they hadn't put that much time into it before.

Boy was I wrong!

Endor and Tatooine are radically different, as far as the mutliple-item foraging is concerned.

I only did one multiple-item forage on Tatooine (for 3 items), out of 100 logged attempts.

On Endor, I did two 3-item forages, and three 2-item forages, out of 100 logged attempts.

They also differ on which item you're more likely to find.

On Endor, you're more likely to find Maroj Melons, Wild Snaffs, Ko-Do Fruits, Sosi Hodors, Jars of Berries and Jars of Bugs.

On Tatooine, you're more likely to find Sijjo Sewi, Worm Bait, Insect Bait, and Flurr-Cle Onion.

Schule Nefs, Alever Tweth'peks, and Jars of Fungus were pretty common on both. Etost'ew Zanns and Jars of Grubs, weren't.

Now, this is either unique to each planet, or planet type. For instance, Lok might yield the same as Tatooine, and Yavin IV the same as Endor.

There's a good 10% chance of getting items discarded on both planets.

You also have a 20% chance of failure on both planets as a Master Ranger (which I think is a bit too much.)

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