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.
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 will look for tiles of the types you've ticked.
Farm Lowest Resource changes the logic rather than adding to it. Instead of working through your ticked list, 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.
Marches
Marches sets how many march slots gathering is allowed to use. 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. Leaving one slot free means you still have something to send at a rally, a tribe mine, or anything else that comes up. If the account is a pure farm and nothing else touches its marches, let gathering have all of them.
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 concurrency if the machine can take it, so each account waits less for a turn.
- 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
Marches don't go out at all. 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.
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.