Making the Most of Your Time Whilst Doing Boring Tasks - Gathering

Hey, welcome to a quick little tips & tricks post that hopefully will save you some time or help you make a little bit of extra money.

As we all know gathering is one of the most boring things that we as players are tasked to do while working on our productions.  Personally, I'd rather just set up a shop and buy, buy, buy, but sometimes I'm left with no choice but to hike up my skirt and get to digging.

With the somewhat recent change to gathering that rewards a double drop when you successfully click that yellow gather line, it's become much more important to be able to hit that line consistently.  With this quick, pretty brainless tutorial, I'll show you how to up your success rate tremendously.

If you can hit the line with fairly good consistency, more than half the time, this will be a godsend to you.  If you struggle and only hit the line occasionally, maybe 10-25% of the time, hopefully this will give you more practice and you can get a little bit better at it.

Depending on the placement of the line, you typically have 6 or 7 cracks at it to hit it per gather.  For me, the further out to the edge the line appears, the easier it is for me to hit.  Other people have more luck with the line in the middle, it just varies player to player.  You need to remember that you CANNOT spam click to hit the line, there is an invisible cooldown period with each click.  As with anything, the more you practice, the more efficient you will become.

Okay, so what's the trick to increasing your efficiency to the limits shown above?  Simple.  "Cancelling".  What I do is I attempt my timed picks up to the 5th pass of the moving bar.  If I'm unable to hit it by then, I simply move away from the gatherable item so that it resets.  Then I try again.  Having the opportunity to double your drops is worth taking the extra time to Cancel, typically.  If you're there for several minutes on the same item, then yeah, maybe this isn't a good idea for you to try unless you've got patience by the boatload.  Without Cancelling, I can still hit at about a 60% rate so using this technique doesn't slow me down at all, it increases my gathering tremendously.

If you're in a high-traffic picking area like the Nox area in Uruga, or farming chests after a GM run event, this tactic is probably not best to attempt as you'll run out of resources quickly if you don't pick quickly.  However, if you have a farming spot all to yourself, you can take the time and get it right.  The Nox spot in Uruga is particularly efficient when you're alone.  If you pick all of the items on your first run through (perfectly timed or not), you're stuck waiting for the spawns to reappear.  If you take the time to do a couple of perfectly timed picks, the spawns will probably start to overlap.  Keep in mind that you've also just doubled what you would have otherwise gathered!

Here is a short video about the technique.  You can either move away from the gatherable or hit ESC to cancel the targeting on it, either variation works fine.