You make a skill check to collect valuable materials and objects from one or more dead or helpless creatures. This task requires at least 1 minute to perform, and can take up to 1 hour for large carcasses or groups of creatures.

The skill(s) you can use for a Harvest check are listed in the creature’s stat block. Survival is one of the standard skills used to collect parts from mostly-natural animals and plant monsters, but many different skills can be used depending on the creature, what valuables are on or inside it, and what kind of knowledge or techniques are needed to extract those valuables.

A player can only make a single Harvest check before the body parts lose their potency, so Harvesting creatures with completely different skill requirements is (usually) impossible, and requires the aid of an ally to Harvest the creatures that you don’t have time to address.

Immediately after combat ends, you and your party must decide which newly-dead nearby creatures you wish to Harvest. A player can choose to Harvest as many corpses as they wish, but multiple players can only Harvest the same corpse if it is sufficiently large enough that they don’t interfere with one another, as follows:

• Gargantuan or larger: up to 6 players can Harvest from the corpse at once.
• Huge: up to 4 players can Harvest from the corpse at once.
• Large: up to 3 players can Harvest from the corpse at once.
• Medium: up to 2 players can Harvest from the corpse at once.
• Small or smaller: only 1 player can Harvest from the corpse.

Each player who is Harvesting makes a skill check to Harvest, using one of the possible skills listed in the stat block(s) of the creatures that they are Harvesting. They then subtract the Base Harvest DC from their result, and then as many different items from the creature(s)’ loot table as they can without reducing their Harvest check result below 0.

A player can choose to Harvest multiple units of the same item, though items with a limit listed in the loot table (i.e. “Limit 2” for a pair of eyes, or “Limit 1” for a gizzard) can only be gained that many times at most. For each unit of an item a character Harvests, they subtract that item’s Harvest DC from their check result.

For example, a party of adventurers has just killed a Young Frostwyrm and are intent on selling as much of the corpse as possible to the merchants in a nearby town. This is the dragon’s loot table:

Young Frostwyrm (Base Harvest DC 5, Wylding Lore or Survival)

• Icy Hide: DC 3, Limit 3, Common Water/Earth component, 10gp & Bulk 1 each.
• Dragon Bones: DC 10, Limit 3, Uncommon Thaumic/Wild component, 100gp & Bulk 2 each.
• Freezing Gland: DC 10, limit 1, Uncommon Water/Thaumic component, 100gp & Bulk 1 each.

Gale, a Druid, makes a Survival check to Harvest the Frostwyrm and gets a result of 28. She subtracts the Base Harvest DC of 5 from her result, giving her 23 (28 - 5 = 23). She decides she wants the Icy Gland, and subtracts the DC of that component (23 - 10 = 13). She can’t take more than one gland from the creature due to the “limit 1” clause on that item in the loot table. Then she decides that she wants two of the Dragon Bone components, and subtracts twice their DC of 5 each from the roll (13 - (5x2) = 3). That’s as much as she can take from the dragon’s corpse without reducing her result below 0, and so she can’t Harvest any more components. She gets 1x Icy Gland and 2x Dragon Bones out of the process, which are sure to fetch a good price in town.

However, because the Young Frostwyrm is a Medium creature, two players can Harvest from it at once, so the party’s Warlock Matteo joins Gale in Harvesting the dragon. He rolls a Wylding Lore check to Harvest the beast, scoring a more modest 16. First, he subtracts the Base Harvest DC of 5 from his result (16 - 5 = 11). Then he decides that he wants to make a suit of dragon hide armor, extracting three units of Freezing Hide, subtracting that component’s DC from his total roll three times (11 - 3 - 3 -3 = 2). That’s as much as he can Harvest, as anything else will reduce his result below 0.