Gathering is the main way for players to get Food and Material for Crafting, as well as some Collectibles such as keycoins and painted beetles. Depending on the season, time of day, and the pet completing the task, different items may be available, but the vast majority of drops are available all-day, year-round, for any kind of pet.
Hunting gives most meat Food items and animal-based crafting material like bones, furs, teeth, etc., as well as occasionally live young animals that your pets can tend to while assigned to Husbandry. At the end of a Hunting shift you can engage in a short minigame (like the classic game Duck Hunt, but with your pet instead of the dog, a bow instead of a gun, and winged boars instead of ducks) to gain additional rewards.
Farming gives plants of almost any type. At the start of a Farming shift you need to purchase seeds from a random selection and place them on a grid with randomly generated water, sand, mud, clay, silt, peat, snow, and ash tiles, each of which affect seeds and tiles around them in unique ways. Crops cross-breed and mutate over the course of a shift, and at the end you recieve your harvest which may be Food items, plant Materials, live insects, or in rare cases Companion drops like Pupkin, Crowtato, or Ladybeet.
Fishing gives seafood-based Food items and animal-based crafting material which Hunting doesn't. Much like Hunting, Fishing occasionally provides living fish you can raise in Husbandry, but it also provides "buried treasure" items, such as pearls, which can't be obtained anywhere else. Like Hunting, at the end of a shift you can engage in a short Fishing minigame to earn extra rewards; unlike the Hunting minigame, though, the Fishing minigame is widely reviled for its high difficulty, long wait time between bites, and unintuitive cues, making it highly frustrating for new players until they learn the intricacies of the game and can consistently get a high enough score to qualify for high-tier treasure.
Husbandry is unique among the Gathering tasks in that you can't initially assign a pet to it until you've already set up your Home and own at least 1 domestic animal. Once you do, you can assign a pet to Husbandry to care for all domestic livestock you own. This gives rewards based on the livestock you own, including some Hunting and Fishing drops and rare items like truffles, but the most commonly sought-after rewards are milk, eggs, and honey. It's also possible to find new young livestock to increase the size of your herd / flock / school / swarm further, up to a limit dependent on what you have set up at your Home. There's no limit to the number of Barns, Coops, Pastures, Ponds, Vivariums, and Hives you can construct, meaning you can pull in some ludicrous hauls with the proper setup, but the cost to develop and maintain land & facilities does increase roughly logarithmically so it can become untenable if you're not consistently re-investing in your livestock. There's an optional animal care minigame you can do at any time your pet is in a Husbandry shift, brushing and cleaning any number of livestock, but is has no known effect on drops from the task.
Mining gives metal ores, gems, geodes, coal, most basic building materials except for wood, and one of the most critical food items in the game--salt. At the end of a shift, you can open your geodes in a minigame remniscent of many gacha games, complete with options to open 10 at a time for a bonus reward and dramatic visuals for rare drops. This is purely cosmetic, however, and if you choose to skip this "minigame" you get the same rewards as if you engage in the geode-breaking sequence.
Wandering gives a random selection of items that your pet could conceivably find while just... walking around! Keycoins are a rare collectible that can only be found by Wandering (and, technically, high-level Smithing for a few of the rarer coins), meaning that the task will always have some die-hard fans, but most of the other items you get from this Task can be easily found elsewhere or have been so devalued at this point that it's easier to simply barter them from another player. You'll need plenty of spiderwebs, driftwood, and non-truffle mushrooms at some point, though, so it may be worth it to send your pets on Wandering every once in a while pre-emptively so you're prepared for higher building costs later. The occasional rare drops among the trash also make it a compelling gamble for players with plenty of basic resources, with an incredibly small chance of getting priceless drops such as a new pet or a Molding Clay. There is no minigame for Wandering, but you can view your pet's travels at any time and see some cute visuals of the environments of Everywhere.
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