Resource gathering
Players collect raw materials from the environment — chopping wood, mining ore, harvesting plants — as the foundational input for crafting, building, and progression. Minecraft's punch-a-tree-to-start loop and Rust's scavenge-or-die opening moments both make gathering the literal first verb a player learns, establishing the game's core rhythm before any other system comes online. Designers use resource gathering to create a tangible, hands-on connection between the world and the player's capabilities (everything you build traces back to something you physically collected), to pace early-game progression through material scarcity, and to give the environment itself value beyond scenery. Key decisions: tool requirements and tiers (better tools gather faster or unlock rarer materials), respawn/depletion rules for nodes, gathering speed and whether it's a skill (timing-based) or purely time-based, and how gathering scales as automation systems come online later. Pitfall: gathering that stays manually tedious deep into the late game, with no automation or efficiency unlocks, turns a satisfying early loop into an unwelcome chore once the player has moved on to more complex goals.
- Dev effort: Small
- Timing: Real-time or turn-based
- Common in: survival, sandbox