By LongBeam·Published
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Gathering and crafting in Scars of Honor are built around interactive mini-games rather than click-and-wait timers. This guide explains the gathering professions and their distinct mini-games, the crafting professions and their quality tiers, the cooking mini-game, the expertise system, tools, node sizes, and how crafted gear gets its stats. It is drawn from the developer stream with lead game designer Alex Turoffiev and two community overviews of the first playtest.
Early-playtest caveat. Scars of Honor is in early development as of 2026. The systems below come from a development build and the lead designer repeatedly stressed it is "not a final product." Exact numbers (slot counts, difficulty levels, stat rolls, timings) are examples shown on stream and will be balanced and may change. Treat developer statements about future plans as design intent, subject to change, not confirmed live behavior.
Every gathering and crafting activity is a fully interactive mini-game. The design team set out to make these feel different from each other and from "boring clicking of the mouse button" — some test precision, some test reaction, some require timing. The developers gave three reasons for this approach: it makes gathering an actual game rather than watching a loading bar; it is one of several layers meant to make life harder for bots in a free-to-play game; and it keeps the in-game economy healthy by preventing effortless AFK farming.
The team was also clear that gathering and crafting are optional. They do not want to force every player to spend time in these systems — you can also get gear by buying from other players, looting, or fighting more mobs for gold. That said, the best gear in the game is intended to come from a combination of gathering, fighting the toughest enemies, and crafting.
Three gathering mini-games were developed at the time of the stream: mining, woodcutting, and fishing. Each is deliberately distinct in both feel and controls.
Mining was the first mini-game made and was designed to be the most relaxing and easiest. You click at the right moment to strike, hitting the weakest spot on the rock — striking from different sides toward wherever the next weakest spot is. There is a normal hit and a critical hit: if you hit the center of the target, you deal double damage to the node. You press the right mouse button once, on the right moment, to land each strike.
Woodcutting is about hitting the same place every time, which the designer noted "is not as easy as it sounds." When the bar appears you press and hold the right mouse button, then release to land the marker on the spot where it previously landed. Landing it precisely is a perfect hit. This is a press-and-hold control, distinct from mining's single-click timing. As a side note on accessibility, the designer pointed out woodcutting is audible enough that you can play it largely by sound — matching the timing of your first hit.
Fishing shown on stream is spear fishing: you throw a spear at the fish and then steer the struggle. It is not played with the mouse — you control it with the A and D keys, pulling against the fish's movement and reacting to where it goes. Crucially the control has weight/inertia: you must be careful not to push too quickly in one direction, time your movements, and sometimes for harder catches even hold slightly in the direction you expect the fish to move rather than keeping it perfectly centered. The lead designer called it his favorite and "by far the hardest." A fishing-pole alternative was being created at the time of the stream but spear fishing was what was shown.
Crafting professions confirmed across the sources are blacksmithing (smithing), cooking, and alchemy. All gathering activities feed into these: the materials you mine, chop, and fish are what cooking, alchemy, and blacksmithing consume.
At the forge you can craft all kinds of gear — weapons, armor, and the gathering tools themselves. The recipe screen shows the resources needed at the bottom plus a gold requirement, with filters to sort recipes. The blacksmithing mini-game is a timing game: you press at the right moment, and hitting "perfect" multiple times in a row produces a higher-quality, sometimes rare, item. Blacksmithing items come in two quality levels: basic and good.
Unlike blacksmithing's two versions, cooking and alchemy each have four different quality versions of an item. Better performance in the mini-game yields better properties on the food or potion. These professions also connect the gathering activities most strongly — cooking pulls ingredients from fishing and from herbs/mushrooms, and alchemy converts herbs, fish, and rarer components into potions and elixirs.
Cooking is described as the most complex of the mini-games. You can set up cooking at any safe spot outside combat by placing a portable cauldron. It combines two challenges at once:
Speed and accuracy both matter: the faster and more accurately you cook, the higher the quality of the result (for example, a plain "crayfish stew" can become a "delicious" version). Doing it faster is riskier because rushing can put an ingredient in at the wrong temperature or burn the whole batch and waste the materials. Even if the timer runs out, you can still get a potion or dish if the ingredients went in at the right temperatures — it will just be the lowest quality. Earlier in development the temperature was not shown on the interface at all; on-screen pointers were added to hint the current temperature. Some of the most complex recipes can yield up to five products at once.
Every profession has its own expertise levels, and each mini-game has many difficulty levels — the lead designer stated each mini-game has about 20 difficulty levels. Higher expertise gives two benefits: the mini-games become easier (for example, the "perfect" zone in the crafting timing game gets wider and easier to hit as you progress), and you unlock higher-tier recipes and resources.
There is an important catch: as you climb, the things you craft get harder faster than your expertise eases them. Even though your expertise is rising, the difficulty of higher-tier items rises more, so late-game crafting becomes more challenging overall. At present this means raising difficulty rather than introducing new mechanics — more complex multi-step crafting mini-games for high-tier gear were discussed as a possible later addition, not something in the build. To craft the best item you need very high expertise and good player skill. Progression is "learning by doing" — you start with basic recipes and work up step by step. The designer expected mastering a single profession to take a lot of time but said it should not run into thousands of hours.
Gathering and crafting use tools (such as a pickaxe or wood axe) that you can craft yourself. Better tools have higher efficiency and higher durability, and harder/higher-tier nodes need better tools. Tools wear down: failing a mini-game burns durability, and in crafting, fully failing a mini-game (not just missing a round) costs you part of the resources. In gathering, if you miss you can simply repeat the mini-game, but failing too much breaks your tools without enough payoff, so it is up to you whether to attempt nodes above your expertise and tool level.
Importantly, gathering tools give no combat stats. The team deliberately decided tools only affect efficiency and durability — there will be no fishing rod that grants strength or similar. Gathering equipment is kept for gathering and combat equipment for combat.
Nodes come in multiple sizes — described in the community overview as small, medium, large, and massive. Small, medium, and large nodes can be gathered solo; a massive node requires at least two players gathering together, and the more players join, the easier it gets. The developer refers to these multi-player versions as "party nodes."
The design intent is to reward playing together — better rare chances on party nodes are a deliberate incentive to gather with friends. One creator noted a balance risk: if massive nodes are clearly the best, players may ignore small nodes entirely. The developer was firmly against forcing mini-games to be party-only, wanting solo play to remain viable.
Nodes do not always appear on the exact same spots. Each region has a set of preset positions where nodes can spawn, but their presence is not guaranteed on every spot every time — you may have to work a zone before finding what you want, and bigger nodes are rarer. Because nodes respawn, spending time in a zone will eventually yield the better sizes, and with luck you can find big nodes immediately. The spawn system is dynamic and adapts to server activity to balance scarcity and abundance. Combined with the server-authoritative design and the mini-games, this is meant to make it harder for bots to automate routes between nodes.
Crafted gear uses RNG stat rolls. A crafted item can roll a handful of different attributes, each within a range of points — one creator's crafted bow rolled critical hit damage at 34 when it could have been around 17. Better performance in the crafting mini-game (more "perfects," ideally three perfects in a row in the timing game) pushes toward better quality and better rolls, so you do not always get the best item each time you craft. There is no guarantee of a perfect item; chasing a maximum roll takes more attempts and time than settling for a merely good one. Gear and tools also appear to carry a gear score. Notably, a crafted item records the name of the crafter — the team added this as an emotional touch; a crafting date is not stored yet but could be added.
The inventory is split into separate tabs by item type — equipment, consumables (food), materials (crafting ingredients), and miscellaneous. Each tab holds roughly 30 slots, for about 120 slots total shown in the build. Stack sizes depend on the item (weapons are unique and do not stack; most materials, potions, and food stack, though current stack values are intentionally low). The team confirmed there will be no buyable bag space — extra inventory space will not be sold.
The developers framed gathering and crafting as a "survival feeling" layer — preparation with good food and potions should matter — but not the central pillar of the MMO, and never pay-to-win in a free-to-play game. As design intent subject to change: party crafting is not in the game yet (party gathering is) but has been discussed and is planned; gathering-specific "scars" (passive perks) do not exist yet but the designer would like to add some via mini-bosses rather than leveling; AFK/automated gathering via minions was considered only as a possible distant late-game idea and rejected for now, partly because anything AFK is "the perfect recipe for botting." Additional professions and mini-games are planned over time.
