Nightingale - Why Desert is the best Biome

In Nightingale early access there are three Biomes: Desert, Forest, and Swamp.

Each has pros and cons but especially for the early game, Desert is the best biome if you like farming materials and crafting because of Automaton Rooks.

Automatons in the desert are the golden machines that buzz around. The skinny ones just collect materials. The rounder ones (Rooks) go around breaking ores and chopping trees so that the skinny ones (Pawns) can collect them and ultimately put them in the pillar-like Automaton Chests.

Even if you can only harvest low-tier Trees and Ore with low-gear-score tools, you can still get very high tier Trees and Ore if they exist in the Realm, by doing this:

• Unequip your Recruitable NPC's weapon so that they can't attack.
• Run up and hit a Rook. That should get them to chase you.
• Their attack is a radius energy burst with an easy tell and it's easy to just run out of range because the Rook stands still to initiate the attack.
• They can actually chase you quite a long distance, which is really handy!
• UPDATE: Looks like there was a stealth nerf to their chase distance. If they give up pursuit, try whacking them again instead of letting them just run back to where they started.
• Go and stand next to a Tree or Ore that you want to harvest.
• Gear Score requirement doesn't matter.
• The Rook will come up to you and initiate it's attack. Move out of the way and back to the Tree or Ore. The Rook's attack will damage the resource and eventually break it down into pieces you can pick up.
• Sometimes it won't work -- a stubborn tree simply won't get chopped down. After maybe 5+ tries, just accept that it's bugged and move to the next resource.
• When you are done, get your Mining Pick out and defeat the Rook.

It doesn't seem to work for plants you manually pick up or harvest with a sickle.

In this video you can see that sometimes for unclear reasons it just doesn't work but other times, even on the same type of resource, it works just fine.

Automatons tend to be plentiful in the Desert, but there obviously aren't lots of materials lying around or in the Automaton Chests either. This seems to be because they are only active when you are close by. At a distance, the game probably doesn't waste resources figuring out what they are doing when you are too far to see them.

If you just hang around and follow them, the Rooks will harvest Trees and Ore, leaving the materials (and potentially Essence) lying around. Grabbing them does not anger the Automatons but it seems if you take something out of the Automaton Chest, that can get Rooks to attack you, although they might need to be close by when you do it.