Automating gathering in Viking Rise

Gathering is the action most people turn on first and the one that pays for the rest. It's also the one where the difference between a working setup and a good one is measured in whole marches sitting idle.

This guide assumes you've completed Viking Rise bot setup and have an account running.

Turning it on is not enough. With no resource ticked the bot has nothing to look for, and every pass does nothing at all — no error, no warning, just an account that looks busy and gathers nothing. This is the single most common setup mistake in the app.

What the action does

One gathering run sends out as many marches as you've allowed, then finishes. It reads how many marches are already out and how many slots you have, picks tiles matching your resource settings, and dispatches until it runs out of slots or tiles.

It does not sit and wait for marches to return. Once the slots are full there's nothing useful left to do, so the account moves on to its other actions and comes back to gathering on a later cycle.

Choosing resources

Tick the resources you want gathered: Food, Wood, Stone, Gold. Any combination works, and the bot won't touch an unticked one.

Farm Lowest Resource changes the logic rather than adding to it. Instead of working through your ticked list in order, it looks at what the account is actually short of and sends marches there. If you're the kind of player who checks their city and thinks "I need stone this week", this setting does that thinking on every cycle instead of once a week.

Use the explicit ticks when you have a specific plan — a build that needs wood, or a troop push that needs food. Use Farm Lowest when you just want the account to stay balanced without supervision.

Gather Remaining Ore picks up part-gathered ore left over on a tile.

Marches

Marches sets how many march slots gathering is allowed to use, from 1 to 5. It's a cap, not a target: the action never sends more than this, and sends fewer if you don't have the slots free.

The reason it's a cap is that gathering is rarely the only thing you want marches for. Rallies, the Staging Post, tribe mines, alliance construction and resource transfer all draw on the same pool, and whichever action runs first takes what it needs.

Leaving one slot free means you still have something to send at a rally or a bounty. If the account is a pure farm and nothing else touches its marches, let gathering have all of them.

How many slots you actually have is a property of the account and rises with your Chief's Hall. Setting Marches to 5 on an account with fewer is harmless — it just means "use them all".

Farming in tribe territory only

With this off, the bot has two ways to find a tile: it reads the map directly, and it can fall back to the game's own in-game search.

With it on, only the direct read is used. The in-game search returns whatever tile it likes and tells you nothing about who owns the ground under it, so it can't honour the restriction and isn't used at all.

The practical effect: a pass either finds territory tiles or sends nothing. It will never quietly fall back and farm outside your territory. If your tribe holds no ground in range the bot says so and names the setting, rather than searching forever.

Keeping every slot busy

The thing that actually determines your resource income is how much of the day your march slots are full. A slot that sits empty for two hours after a march returns is two hours of nothing.

That's governed by how often the account comes back around to gathering, which in turn depends on how many other actions it runs and how many accounts share your concurrency budget. If you're running a large farm at low concurrency, each account's cycle gets longer and gathering gets less frequent — the marches still go out, just later.

If you find slots idling:

• Reduce what else the account does. Every action in the list is time the account isn't gathering.
• Raise the worker count if the machine can take it, so each account waits less for a turn — see settings.
• Add a gathering clone. You can have more than one gathering entry in the action list, each with its own settings and schedule — useful if you want a different resource mix at different times of day.

Scheduling

Like every action, gathering can be gated to particular days or a time window. Left off, it's always eligible.

Scheduling gathering is usually a mistake on a farm account — the goal is continuous throughput, and a window just creates idle hours. It earns its keep on accounts you also play yourself, where you might want the bot to stop touching your marches in the evening.

Troubleshooting

Nothing happens at all. No resource is ticked. See the warning at the top of this page.

Marches don't go out. Check the account actually has free march slots — the bot won't queue behind marches that are already out.

Fewer marches than expected. Either the Marches cap, or slots already occupied by something else, or no matching tiles found nearby for the resources you ticked.

Nothing is sent and it mentions territory. You have Farm in Tribe Territory Only on and your tribe holds no ground within range. Either take some, or switch the setting off.

Gathering succeeds but resources barely move. Usually tile level rather than the bot: low-level tiles return little regardless of how many marches you send.