The sum of all resources on the map is limited. These resources can be gathered in several ways:
- Food: Foraging from bushes and certain trees; Hunting certain wild animals or slaughtering livestock, such as chickens and sheep; Fishing; Farming.
- Wood: Chopping down trees.
- Stone: Mining from stone mines.
- Metal: Mining from metal mines. (These occasionally sparkle, to make them easier to tell apart from stone mines.)
(On certain maps, you can also quickly gather a great deal of resources from special treasures found on the map, such as shipwrecks.)
Shuttling to Dropsites
When units gather a resource, there is only so much they can carry. Then they need to shuttle the resources they have gathered to a building that serves as their resource dropsite and drop it off there. Only then can they return to gather more resources.
- Civic centers and docks serve as dropsites for all four resources.
- Mills serve as dropsites for wood, stone and metal only.
- Farmsteads serve as dropsites for food.
Units automatically shuttle the resources they have been gathering to the nearest dropsite that can accept it. It might be a good idea to build dropsites near their corresponding resources, to make sure your gathering units only have to shuttle short distances, which makes gathering more efficient.