Botany
- "Botany" redirects here. For the Botany task, see Botany (task).
Botany (formerly known as Foraging) allows one to eat and harvest the many herbs that grow throughout Egypt.
Learning Botany
Click on any plant and examine it. Then, you must visit a School of Natural Philosophy to start learning Botany. You will begin at level 0. Identify 25 different species of plants within a time limit, and return to the School to advance to level 1. Once you reach Botany 2 the University of Body teaches levels 3 and 4. XP toward Botany 2 is gained by eating herbs, successfully foraging herbs, planting flowers, and harvesting moss from aqueduct towers.
Foraging Herbs
Clicking on an unknown herb will give its name as "some kind of herb". At Botany level 1, a menu titled "Foraging..." will appear on the herb. If you harvest the herb correctly you will receive 1-7 herbs in your inventory and the plant will disappear. You can look up the correct forage method for all the known herbs in the Herbs reference, or via third-party utilities that provide the ability to search by plant color, stem type, leaves, etc.
Foraging Memory
At Botany level 2, you gain the ability to memorize the proper foraging methods for herbs. To memorize a foraging method one must successfully forage that herb 7 consecutive times, with no errors. If you select an incorrect option, the counter resets, and you must successfully forage it another 7 times.
Eating an herb fresh off the ground does not interfere with the memorization counter.
Once you memorize the forage method for an herb, the sub-menu of forage method options will disappear, and it will be replaced with a menu option that says, for example, "Forage this Wild Lettuce."
Levels
| Level | To Acquire | Unlocks |
|---|---|---|
| 0 | Examine Plant |
|
| 1 | Identify 25 Plants |
|
| 2 | 5800xp OR 10 each of Ashoka, Fumitory, Ilex, Orange Sweetgrass, Sweetsop, Yellow Tristeria; cost decreases based on xp earned |
|
| 3 | 6000 |
|
| 4 | 8000 |
|
Actions
| Action | XP Value |
|---|---|
| Successfully forage a herb | 5 |
| Eat a herb fresh from the ground | 1 |
| Plant a flower | 100 |
| Harvest moss from an aqueduct | 3 per db of Moss |
Harvesting
There are fourteen ways to harvest the herbs:
- Cut away the outer stem
- Harvest the root pith
- Trim the root fibers
- Snip the leaf stems
- Peel back the stem base
- Scrape off the stem pith
- Remove the tap root
- Pick out the seeds
- Gather the seedpods
- Crush the stems
- Pluck the leaves
- Collect the fruit
- Squeeze out the sap
- Scrape away the leaf hairs
List of Herbs
See Herbs or one of the Third-Party Utilities listed below.
Third-Party Utilities
Cegaiel
This tool is updated regularly with data sourced from Herb Database in this wiki.
Google Docs
A Google Docs Spreadsheet is available to share foraging discoveries. This page has a limit of 100 concurrent users, so please close your browser when you are finished looking up or adding information to the page to allow others to access it.
Desert Helper Alexa Skill
Users of Alexa devices can enable the free Desert Helper skill. The skill answers requests such as "Alexa, ask Desert Helper how to forage Royal Rosemary." The skill is currently being updated for T9 and will be available soon.