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Forage is a bit lean at upper levels at the moment, so lets submit some ideas!

Here's some guidelines from Niamh:

Hey guys! This are my guidelines for foraging additions. Hope it helps!

a) What Goes Where: The key word in "flavor foraging" is "flavor." Objects should be feasible for the location they are added to - something an NPC would regularly drop or lose track of there, something produced there where an excess might be lost (a granary might have a few fronds of of wheat, for example), or something that could be found organically (a seed, a certain kind of animal part) in the location.

b) Lore: At the higher levels of Forage (master and up), it should be possible to find rarer, stranger items. City Lore should be added to the room to explain it; don't tell the player what's there, tell them the story of why something along those lines could be.

c) Crafting: Generally speaking, inexpensive crafting ingredients should be used for forageables rather than any sort of finished product - there may be rare exceptions where appropriate, as long as the rest of the guidelines are applied.

d) Wilderness Scarcity: As sectors already have standard forageables, be scarce with adding flavor forageables to wilderness rooms. Check to make sure it isn't already covered before making additions.

e) Realism: Bear in mind that each forageable item can be foraged 3 times until the room is too picked over. There are some things that just don't make sense to add anywhere; books, for example, should always be avoided. No one could find 3 copies of the same discarded book (books are rare and expensive as it is) in the same place multiple times. That logic should kept in mind for all forageable items. Could it be found there three times by a truly dedicated forager?

Skill < 36: Objects should be 5 silver or less from NPC vendors.
Skill < 50: Objects should be 20 silver or less from NPC vendors.
Skill < 60: 50 silver or less from NPC vendors, add City Lore.
Grandmaster: Objects can be strange or rare, and should have City Lore.

Should we open up a second thread for ... idea with more things to be done with the items you can forage now? As more uses for some of the items might boost their usefulness even if they aren't "worth" more.

I think that could fall fine under this thread!

perhaps something like a recipe for turning thrown horseshoes and other useless foragable metal items into iron bars?

Considering someone just got caught botting and abusing the system for these items , I'd be very, very hesitant suggesting any sort of expensive higher level items whatsoever. The concept of adding rare and expensive items that individually have City Lore attached to them being able to just be found in the wilderness by someone basically just wandering around and pressing a button doesn't sit too terribly well with me.

Rothgar wrote:Considering someone just got caught botting and abusing the system for these items , I'd be very, very hesitant suggesting any sort of expensive higher level items whatsoever. The concept of adding rare and expensive items that individually have City Lore attached to them being able to just be found in the wilderness by someone basically just wandering around and pressing a button doesn't sit too terribly well with me.

To contrast this opinion, I'm very much in favor of those rare and potentially expensive items for GM foragers. Botting is against the rules as it is, so I don't think we should be dictating game policy around those who would be breaking the rules by using the system. What could be done is, for the highest value items, create a character-bound timer that keeps them from being found more than, like, every OOC week or month or whatever, something to this extent so you can't just hash out a wealth of items outside of RP interaction.

Could even make a pevent-like system that requires people to be RPing while foraging to get GM-level drops!

To address Rothgar's concerns --

The individual who was botting was doing so for silver, not items. Allowing a silver coin as a rare was a mistake I won't be forgetting. Too tempting with silver scarcity considered.

I think you might have seen "strange or rare" in my guidelines and gotten brow-furrowy, which is reasonable enough all things considered. If it helps, the guidelines for flavor foraging are my own personal notes, so they aren't particularly detailed on what constitutes rare or strange, and what either of those things mean in relation to the rest of the game world. No one will ever be able to forage up bars of gold or anything genuinely expensive, as that's not what foraging is. Foraged items must be reasonable to be found 3x a day in the same location hidden in the landscape, be that landscape a forest, swamp, city street, etc. City lore is fantastic to explain how that's the case for thing's that aren't "a pile of leaves" in a forest.

One of my favorite suggestions was for a room that's described as having cherry trees all around -- a unique mid-level foraging item in that room is now cherries.

An example of a Grandmaster unique or rare forageable with City Lore might be: A wishing well in the Vavardi Quarter where people have visited for centuries and dropped in painted stones, and the painted stones would be the forageable.

There can't be foraged items with high values, as that tends to go against what foraging is (poking around for trash to upcycle, nature's -- or city's -- bounty, or "found treasures" like the example of the painted stone). At the highest ranked skill levels we're at 50s or below value if it were sold from an NPC shop. To put that into perspective, a log of common wood from an NPC shop is 65. I would probably price the painted stones at about 45 from an NPC shop (10s or so from a PC) due to its uniqueness. At the end of the day, though, it's just a prop. Little things that make the world seem more alive.

Tldr: Hope the added information helps assuage Rothgar's worries, and I'm looking forward to getting some suggestions for late-stage forageables in here!

So ... not a new idea item but to kick off ideas, I'll keep this as my suggested use post.

1 - a clump of grass - is found in various places. Using a craft search, this item currently has no use.

Suggestions:

- A low or no-skill Herbalism craft to "Dry Hay" to turn the clump of grass into - a small mound of hay - that can be used to feed livestock. That would make this item useful.

Clump of grass now used as a catalyst with animal manure to create compost - unskilled recipe.

Could items that have been junked have a small chance of being foraged?

Geras wrote:Could items that have been junked have a small chance of being foraged?

That probably couldn't be done with the current forage system, though it would be neat for use in the city dump.