# Gathering

Everything in the economy starts with **gathering**. Walk up to a node, press **E**, and you pull raw material out of the world.

There are **no tools**. Nothing to buy, nothing to equip, nothing to wear out. Walk up and press E.

## The materials

The floor is the price a vendor will always pay, no matter what.

| Material | Where | Time | Yield | XP | Floor |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| **Sap** | the Foal Pen and the Hollow | 2.5s | 2 | 6 | 2 gloo |
| **Scrap** | the Ashfell, the Dead Forest, and the Arena | 2.0s | 2 | 5 | 4 |
| **Hide** | nearly everywhere, the Dead Forest included | 3.0s | 1 | 8 | 5 |
| **Straw** | the Field, and nowhere else | 2.0s | 2 | 4 | 1 |
| **Water** | the **springs** in the Foal Pen, the Shore, and Knacker's Pass | 3.0s | 1 | 8 | 2 |
| **Frozen sap** | Knacker's Pass, and nowhere else | 3.0s | 2 | 8 | no floor |

**Water** is the one that matters: it feeds [every brick ever fired](/gluebook/gluniverse-the-brick-economy), and the world can only hold 42,000 of it at a time.

Five raw materials are **not gathered at any node**.

- **Bone** comes off [creatures](/gluebook/gluniverse-creatures) and out of the kiln, two fishbone into one. The old bone digs are dormant.
- **Fishbone** comes only off the fish in [the Ocean](/gluebook/gluniverse-ocean).
- **Iron fittings** and **keystone** are drops, off frontier creatures and off [Lil Knacker](/gluebook/gluniverse-knackers-pass).
- **Horse shit** left the ground on 15 August 2026. No node in the world gives it any more. It comes from a [stable](/gluebook/gluniverse-build-a-stable) and from [the activity bar](/gluebook/gluniverse-activity-bar), and nowhere else. See [Horse Shit and How You Earn It](/gluebook/gluniverse-horse-shit).

The floor is a promise, not a ceiling: on the [Exchange](/gluebook/gluniverse-economy) the market decides what they are really worth. Two things have **no floor at all**, frozen sap and the [relics](/gluebook/gluniverse-scarcity), so no vendor will buy them and they trade player to player only.

## It takes a beat, and it costs you

Every pull costs **8 stamina** and takes its time. Your **Speed** shortens the cast, half a percent a point, down to a floor of half a second. Your **Power** pulls more from the tougher nodes, a percent per point above the node's requirement.

Walk more than a couple of tiles away mid-pull and the cast breaks. And a node is **one soul at a time**: while somebody is working it, everyone else is told it is busy.

## Seven materials regrow, four do not

This is the most important rule in the world, and it changed on **10 August 2026**. Before that date every material sat in a fixed pool that only ever emptied, and by that morning the world had genuinely run out of ground.

**Seven materials are renewable now.** Sap, straw, water, hide and scrap regrow at their nodes. Bone regrows off kills and the kiln. Horse shit is made by stables and by playing. None of them empties forever. Each one carries a **world ceiling** on how much may be **held at once**, and while the world sits at that ceiling nobody gets any until some of it is spent.

| Renewable | The world may hold |
|---|---|
| Straw | 68,000 |
| Sap | 60,000 |
| Hide | 57,000 |
| Water | 42,000 |
| Scrap | 39,000 |
| Horse shit | 35,000 |
| Bone | 9,000 |

**Four materials are still finite forever.** Frozen sap, fishbone, iron fittings and keystone sit in fixed pools, zone by zone, and every unit taken is gone. When a pool hits zero that material is gone from that ground for good, and no node or drop there will ever give it again.

## What a ceiling counts

A ceiling is not a pool, and the difference is the whole reason the world came back to life.

A ceiling counts material **sitting in bags, stashes, chests, tents, resting sell orders and on the ground**. Material bound inside something you **crafted** is invisible to it. So the moment you fire three shit into a brick, or spend bone on a charm, the world's count drops by what you used and the room reopens for somebody else's node.

**The world only regrows what players consume.** An economy that only holds is an economy that stops.

## How a node refills

A renewable node accrues **20 an hour**, up to **60** waiting at that node. Work it dry and it comes back on its own.

A node also **cools down for 45 seconds** after each pull. That is not a refill and it makes no new material: it is only there so one person cannot stand on a node and drain it before anyone else gets a look. And a node is **one soul at a time**: while somebody is working it, everyone else is told it is busy.

A finite node has no refill at all. The frozen sap on Knacker's Pass draws its zone's pool down and never gets it back.

## Nodes move when they come back

A node that has been worked does not return to the same tile. When it comes back it **shifts to a new spot nearby**: up to 10 tiles from where it was first laid down, always at least 2 tiles from where it just was, and never right on top of another node or an exit.

So there is no fixed route to memorise. The zone you learned yesterday still holds the same materials, but you have to look for them. Walking the ground is how you find them, which is the point.

## Your day

Two daily limits can stop you. Both are per wallet, and both turn at **midnight UTC**.

**The daily allowance** is the big one: **150 units, plus 50 more for every level you have, counted up to level 30**. So a level 10 soul can pull 650 a day, a level 25 soul 1,400, and a level 30 soul 1,650, which is where it stops. It counts **gathering and creature loot together**, so you cannot dodge it by killing instead of digging, and it covers every material the world keeps a count of.

**The per material day** is the second one, and only the renewables carry it:

| Material | Most one wallet may take in a day |
|---|---|
| Sap, straw | 400 |
| Water, hide, scrap | 300 |
| Bone | 150 |
| Horse shit | no gather limit, because there is nothing to gather. See [the activity bar](/gluebook/gluniverse-activity-bar) |

Whichever of the two is tighter is the one that stops you.

Two things never spend either limit: what your **stable** produces while you are away, and what the **activity bar** pays you. Passive income should never cost you your active day. The guided prologue is exempt from all of it.

## Your share of what is left

There is one more bound on a renewable, and it is not a number you can look up. **Whatever you take, you always leave at least 85% of the room you found for everyone else.**

Your share of the world's remaining headroom is **15%**, measured against what there was when you started taking today. It is what stops one wallet emptying the room the morning after a big burn, and it is why raising a ceiling has never just handed the same few wallets the new units.

It does not turn over at midnight, because it is not a day. It moves as items enter and leave the world, so a share that is spent now can open again this afternoon when somebody crafts.

## When something stops you, ask it why

Several different limits can refuse the same pull, and they mean completely different things. Your day. A material's day. Your share of the room. A finite zone whose pool has run out. Or the world sitting at a renewable's ceiling, which is nobody's fault and is not fixed by waiting for midnight.

**Click the refusal and the limits window opens.** It shows every live limit, what you have used against it, how full the world is, what your stable is doing, what is left in this zone, how full your bag is, and when your day turns over. It computes nothing of its own: it is showing you the same numbers the world used when it said no.

Next: [Crafting](/gluebook/gluniverse-crafting).