Foraging

Foraging is a personal strategic activity performed in the acting character's current authoritative vicinity. It never chooses a nearby biome or creates a travel excursion. Settlement, exact case-site, and en-route camp coordinates are supported; active movement, tactical encounters, unresolved strategic encounters, unlocated characters, and stale locations are rejected.

The browser gateway samples the immutable final terrain pack at that coordinate and attests the package digest, coordinate, location context, normalized Plains/Forest/Hills/Wetlands mixture, wet/coast access, and cultivation bit. The reducer accepts this only from the registered gateway, requires terrain routing schema 6 through gateway contract version 3, re-derives the character's location, and rejects stale digests or mismatched coordinates/context. A browser never supplies a trusted cultivated boolean.

Resolution

The dialog exposes exactly five stable source categories, in order: High Game, Low Game, Fish, Harmful Beasts, and Plants. The year-round resource catalog is in adventuresim_core::foraging::FORAGE_RESOURCES; every resource belongs to one category. Seasonality is explicitly deferred until a strategic season model exists. Processed charcoal, vinegar, oatmeal, and rosewater and non-plant honey are not forage targets.

Searches last 1–24 whole hours. Rarity supplies a price-independent base discovery rate. The acting character's local weighted Terrain check can add at most 50% to discovery and yield. Multiple targets divide one time budget. Discovery frequency scales with the fraction of local terrain matching the resource's habitat; a trace of forest no longer grants full forest output, but a successful find retains the resource's ordinary per-discovery yield. Wet-ground and coast attestations count as complete matching microhabitats. Only the routing pack's authoritative wetland coverage contributes Wetlands skill weight. The broader river-or-wet-ground microhabitat boolean remains a resource-availability signal and is intentionally not converted into an invented wetland area fraction. Food alone receives a 1.75× subsistence calibration: an eight-hour low-skill search for the best food in an ideal habitat averages roughly the 2,000 kcal spent during that interval. Medicinal rarity is unchanged. Sources are canonicalized before resolution. One search budget is divided first among selected categories and then among the locally available resources inside each category. Adding more plant resources therefore cannot manufacture more search time. The reducer chooses and privately persists unpredictable entropy; once that seed is chosen, replay from the private authority is deterministic. A completed search may find nothing.

Food uses validated individual food-lot creation, retaining catalog mass, calories, value, and contamination. Herbalist ingredients use validated fungible stacks. Yields are never truncated for carrying capacity; ordinary encumbrance consequences apply afterward.

Actual elapsed time is clipped once at the existing injury/disease boundary. That elapsed time is conserved over concrete Plains, Forest, Hills, and Wetlands training according to the normalized local mixture. Terrain has no stored parent value, and settlement illegality does not turn training into Urban. Checks and training use the same aptitude-capped, injury-adjusted path as travel. Foraging never adds raw attributes to a check, never stores correlated hours, and routes rejected above-cap training into mastery enjoyment.

Legality

Foraging is illegal at a settlement or in a cultivated square. High Game, Low Game, Fish, and Plants also require a license granted by the character's currently presented, active, dues-current profession; Harmful Beasts requires none. The Lodge of the Hart King grants the common licenses at every rank, while High Game is reserved to Master rank. Licenses are global for now and deliberately ignore local recognition and political boundaries.

Unlicensed sources remain selectable as poaching. A completed illegal search makes one deterministic Stealth check, even when several selected sources are unlicensed or settlement/cultivated illegality also applies. Cultivated ground and otherwise-legal wilderness poaching start at DC 1.75; settlement exposure starts at DC 2.50; the worse base applies, plus 0.075 per hour after the first, capped at 4.50. Failure subtracts exactly 1.0 from CharacterVirtue; success avoids the loss. This never changes notoriety. An interrupted search creates no partial yield. If illegal work consumed any time, it still makes exactly one exposure check using the actual elapsed duration and applies the same Virtue consequence on failure.

The reducer accepts stable category IDs rather than item IDs and retains those selected source IDs in one private replay authority row per character. The gateway-only projection omits seed, coordinates, context, DC, roll, and direct Virtue state, and exposes only the exact opaque request's player-safe result.