Professions
There are thirteen professions. Five are gathering: Mining, Logging, Herbalism, Skinning, and Fishing. Eight are production: Blacksmithing, Leatherworking, Tailoring, Woodworking, Alchemy, Cooking, Jewelcraft and Scribing.
Anyone can learn every profession. Skill only grows by doing the work: gathering trains the gathering skill, picking up a beast's hide trains Skinning, and crafting trains its profession while a recipe is still new to you. There is no energy, no timer and no daily limit.
Ranks are Novice, Apprentice, Journeyman, Expert, Master and Grandmaster. The Professions tab of your Character window (K) shows your skill. Learn broadly, master narrowly: only two production professions can reach Master rank.
Gathering needs the profession's tool in your Tool slot (see "Gathering"), and the tool also makes the skill grow a little faster.
Keys: K
Gathering
Resource spots have a faint glint: herb patches, ore, fieldstone, peat, deadfalls and more. Click one and stand still for a couple of seconds while you gather. Moving, attacking or casting stops it.
You need the right tool in your hand: a Herb Sickle for herbs, a Miner's Pick for ore, stone and peat, a Hand Hatchet for wood. You hold one tool at a time in the Tool slot (click a tool in your pack to take it up), so choose what you mean to gather. Provisioners such as Mairéad sell tools, and a quest that asks you to gather gives you the tool if you have none.
Nodes are shared, but what you take is your own. When you gather a node it runs dry for you only, and grows back after a minute and a half. Other players are not affected, and a party does not multiply what you get.
Skin beasts you have killed by picking up what they leave. Each region of the Wending Marches has its own ore, wood and herbs for its band of levels, and its creatures drop that tier's hide.
Fishing
Buy a Fishing Rod from a provisioner and take it up in your Tool slot. Then stand at the edge of water and right-click the water to cast. No bait is needed.
Rings of ripples on the water mark good fishing spots, a few in each zone with fishable water. Cast onto the ripples and the fish bite sooner, the better fish come more often and old boots less.
Wait without moving. When a fish bites, the float splashes and a "!" shows over it: press Space or click at once to reel in. Too early scares the fish off; too late and it gets away.
Streams and pools give perch, trout and, for a skilled fisher, salmon. The sea off Saltreach, Dunhallow and the Grey Isles gives mackerel, cod and sea bass; the Drowned Fens give eels; the Frostmere gives pike and ice char. Better fish need more Fishing skill, and every catch raises it.
Cook fish at a cooking fire: Grilled Fish, and Fisher's Chowder once your Cooking is good enough.
Keys: Space
Crafting and stations
Press C to open the crafting window. Pick a profession and a recipe, then choose how many to make, up to 20 at once. Crafting is deterministic: a recipe never fails, and it always gives the same thing.
You make things at a station, and you must stand close to it: a Forge, a Cooking Fire, a Workbench or an Herbalist's Table. The window tells you which one a recipe wants. Materials come from your pack, then your Vault, then your Bank.
From level 20 up there are recipes for every weapon and armour piece in each band of ten levels. Choose the tier chip (Lv 20, 30, ... 90, then Veteran, Master and Pinnacle) in the window. Tier 20 needs skill 25, and each tier above needs 25 more. The top bands also want Heartstone Cores, dropped by the toughest creatures on the Heartstone Edge and by raid bosses.
Crafted items remember who made them. You can also make furniture for your home.
Keys: C