There are five resources in Dawn of Fantasy: food,wood,stone,gold and crowns or influence. All resources but crowns can be gathered from a players homeland in a standard "select villager and click on berry busy/stone mine" etc style of game play. Stone and Gold nodes glitter with their respective colors making it easy to find them. Berry bushes are covered in little red dots. Hunting is apparently only in season in Gokholm where marauders enjoy hunting and harvesting deer
All villagers will by default drop their resources at the nearest drop point from when they finished filling their inventory. Horse carts are useful for allowing villagers to drop their resource bundles at the cart to cut down on their commute back to the town center. Elves use the treant as a mobile drop site but because elves used magic to transport resources from the elven wardens to the great tree it's not as needed. Orc villagers use the huts they build for pop as drop sites or their great hut so often you'll see a hut or two near a particlulary valuable resource node. Both Humans and Orcs will use a horse cart if one is nearby.
Crowns or influence as it's also called can be misunderstood so here a simple (somewhat) explanation. Crowns is the only resource not able to be gathered by villagers. All upgrades require 1 or 2 crowns and resources. Some upgrades like walls around a player's settlement will take 4-24 crowns per upgrade. Crowns are gained in a variety of ways, from pvp (the winner gets 100% and the loser 50% of the crown value for the battle), to quests and sieging NPC major cities. The only other way of getting crowns is to buy them from the in game shop. Crowns can be used to purchase elite troops of dwarves or dragons as well. Going forward DLC packs and xpacks will also be purchasable with in game crowns. Many new players are alarmed at seeing crowns for sale in the in game shop assuming that this is a sneaky cash cow. However veteran players have been known to amass hundreds of crowns simply from pvp and sieging NPC towns.