System mechanic — added v223 · pays nothing, on purpose
The Second Cut
One harvest tick per node, never the same node twice — the exact habit the game spent two hundred versions training into you
Having found the game's blind spot for combat with The Stand, the same question turned up a second answer that had been sitting in plain sight even longer: gathering. Every character has swung an axe or a pick thousands of times, and in all that time nothing had ever looked at the act of harvesting itself. Nodes in this world are genuinely infinite — ores never deplete and trees are never destroyed — and a harvest channel stays open on one node for as long as you hold the key within ten metres of it. Put those two facts together and the gathering loop the game has always shipped is: find one tree, stand in front of it, hold the key until you're bored. There's no wrong way to do it, because there's no way to do it at all.
What a cut is, and what a run is
A cut is one harvest tick taken off one node. A run is a sequence of cuts in which no node is ever cut twice. Take a second tick off a tree or rock you've already taken from and the run is over — not the tick itself, and not the wood or ore you just gained, which stays exactly as earned. The run simply ends, and the next cut starts a fresh one at nothing.
The whole discipline follows from that one rule: you have to break your own harvest channel after every single tick and physically move to another node, which is precisely the habit two centuries' worth of versions have trained out of a player. A forest stops being one tree repeated indefinitely — a chunk can hold eleven separate gatherable nodes, and keeping a run alive means actually knowing which of them you've already been to.
What ends a run before it counts
- A second cut is the fail state, and the common one. The ordinary, deeply ingrained thing to do at a tree — keep chopping — is exactly what ends a run.
- Dying ends it. Respawning scatters you across the world, and you wouldn't remember the grove afterward regardless.
- Flying ends it. Hopping from node to node through the air deletes the walk that is the only thing making the rule cost anything.
What it deliberately doesn't do
- No counter on screen. You're never shown how long a run is, which nodes are spent, or how close you are to your own best. Remembering the trees you've been to is the entire activity — the moment a used node looked any different from a fresh one, the whole thing would be free.
- No marker, no highlight, no map pin, no trail. Nodes are identical and stay identical, used or not.
- It never announces itself when a run starts, and can't be declared in advance. A run under six nodes ends in total silence — a player who just wants some wood never hears a single word about any of this.
- No timer and no leash, ever. Stop for an hour, go fight something, sail somewhere, sleep, come back later — a run doesn't decay or expire, and can't be lost by simply walking away. Only a second cut ends it.
- Pays absolutely nothing. No coin, items, experience, stats, drops, reputation, or faster gathering speed, at any run length. Yields, tick speeds, and ore chances are completely untouched.
Version history
- v223 — added. Ships exactly as described above, one version after The Stand found the same blind spot in combat.
Trivia
- Before this shipped, there was no lifetime gathering record of any kind anywhere in a save — no mined tally, no chopped tally, no harvest counter — measured directly rather than assumed: a field named for exactly that purpose existed in the save structure, but every single writer to it had been disabled since a very early version.