Botany
Botany (formerly known as Foraging) allows one to harvest the herbs that grow throughout Egypt.
Learning Botany
Botany is automatically learned by identifying 25 different species of plants. Click on a plant to begin the Botany task and acquire Botany level 0. After identifying 25 plants you will advance to Botany level 1.
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 |
|
Actions
| Action | XP Value |
|---|---|
| Successfully Forage a Herb | 5 |
| Eat a herb fresh from the ground | 1 |
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
May require some Javascript to be fully functional.
Both of these tools are updated regularly from data sourced from the below Google Docs Spreadsheet.
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."