Thanks for coming back and giving it another go! I really appreciate your time and your feedback.
Gathering - Yes, I am struggling with the timer, I might change it for stability so you can increase the overall time that you can explore/gather for, which may help guide your exploration. I am also working on making the gathering more streamlined and simple.
Defence - again you have great thoughts here I am trying to decide on both as currently to fight you need to look up which means that adding platforming or trying to forget about collecting to focus on fighting is hard and something I will have experiment with.
Thank you again for playing and such kind comments about the game and the visuals.