Clover Time Gathering: Which Activity Gets the Material You Need

In Clover Time, the material you need decides which gathering activity you run: wood comes from woodcutting with the Axe, potatoes from crop gathering with the Rake, and stones and ores from mining with the Pickaxe. Those three cover the verified gathering loop. Fishing is a fourth gathering activity that becomes available through progression — its mechanics live in our Clover Time fishing guide. The tools are described as being used mainly for side missions and non-combat activities rather than combat, and the recurring tip from early players is simple: grab materials while you're already exploring instead of coming back for them later.

All three tools exist specifically so you can farm resources — a tool-locations walkthrough confirms the Axe chops "any tree or log you see on the ground," the Rake handles crops, and the Pickaxe breaks rocks. If you're missing one of them, our how to get tools guide walks through each acquisition; this page sticks to what each tool does.

Woodcutting: the Axe turns trees into logs

1. Equip the Axe and walk up to a tree, then hit it repeatedly. In the beta build, trees have a small HP bar and each hit removed one point — "the bigger the tree, the higher its HP," so large trees take noticeably longer to fell than small ones.
2. When the tree breaks, logs drop onto the ground — several per tree, and "the bigger the tree, the more logs you get."
3. Pick the logs up fast. Dropped wood despawns if left sitting, a behavior players learned the hard way on their first lumberjack mission.

The logs go straight into your inventory. A firewood quest asks for five logs, and you keep the actual material after handing the quest in, so the wood stays available for crafting (a sword upgrade, for example, costs 55 wood).

Crop gathering: the Rake harvests potatoes

The crop tool is the Rake, which Lily hands over with her starting potato quest and which equips automatically. (A couple of translated gameplay videos call it a "hoe" — it's the same tool under a different translation.)

Using it at the garden plots:

1. Look for mature plants — the harvestable ones show as green leaves.
2. Press E to harvest. It takes about three presses for a potato to pop out onto the ground, which you then pick up into your inventory.
3. Mind the growth gate: immature plants can't be harvested, and a press on an undergrown plant can come up empty. Only fully grown plots yield potatoes.

Lily's first quest asks for four potatoes; one beta recording shows the hand-in paying 100 XP and 25 Yen. Like wood, quest potatoes stay in your inventory afterward and feed crafting later — including the mana crystal craft, which pairs potatoes with mana crystal fragments (more on crystals in our mana crystals guide).

Mining: the Pickaxe breaks rocks for stones and ores

The Pickaxe comes from Pip's quest, reached through the menu's NPC/quest list — the tools acquisition guide covers the route, and a beta tester is shown carrying an iron pickaxe for the job.

Mining is "basically the same mechanic as the trees... only now with stones":

1. Walk up to a rock and press E — not your click attack, a distinction one player says they kept getting wrong.
2. Keep hitting it to chip HP off the rock, one point per hit in the beta build.
3. Collect the dropped stones and ores quickly, because they despawn just like fallen logs.

The outputs are stones plus ores. A mining quest asks for five ores, and a material-route walkthrough names sulfur ore, stone ore, and metal ore as the pickaxe targets (stone and metal ore also appear in a beta tester's inventory). Where the nodes themselves spawn isn't covered by available sources, so treat specific spot claims elsewhere with suspicion.

Where gathered materials go

One distinction matters here: mining produces ores, not refined goods. Refined sulfur, metal bars, stone bricks, and coal come from smelting the mined ores in a furnace, so don't expect to pull finished bars out of a rock. The crafting table itself also lists rare, legendary, and mythical material tiers, and tools in general "allow you to collect materials that can be used for crafting weapons, equipment, fishing gear, potions, and other items." Silver ore is visible in the crafting menu, but no gathering activity is known to produce it yet. For the recipes themselves, see our Clover Time crafting guide and the materials overview.

What to keep in mind

All of the above comes from the game's beta window, when the developers were still actively building — the resource system can change, so recheck tool pairings and outputs after major updates. Only the quest counts (four potatoes, five logs, five ores) are confirmed quantities; per-hit drop amounts and gathering locations aren't. If a mechanic ever seems off, the game has a built-in in-game guide that explains tool systems, and it's worth checking before experimenting blindly.

Next step: once you know which activity your material needs, make sure you're carrying its tool — the how to get tools guide covers every acquisition in order.