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Farming inElinis one of the key pillars of gameplay. It’s a vital method for raising your attributes, gaining money, and crafting useful equipment. Craftable travel rations are also a requirement for using the game’s fast travel system, saving you time spent trekking through the wilderness.
This guide will cover how the different mechanics such as fertility and crop levels work, alongside how to grow crops in winter and where you can find the exotic seeds needed to grow the more powerful plants. Armed with a good understanding of crop rotations and nutrition, you’ll have more strength for conquering dungeons.
How Fertility Works
One of the early pitfalls most players will run into when starting a farm is the fertility system. Planting more crops than the land can sustain will result in themwithering and losing most of their produce.
You cancheck the fertility of your land at a home board, and the top page will give you a warning if you are over your fertility limit. Middle-clicking on your status bar will allow you toadd a display for the fertility of your current map.
Fertility is increased by land modifiers such as fertile (the starting meadow has this) alongside the soil level. You can improve the soil by recruiting farmers and gardeners or by learning it from a policy book and spending gold to level it up manually.
A common trap for new players is planting too many crops:Seeds do not consume fertility until they take root,so it’s easy to plant too many and then lose most of them when harvesting. You’ll want to check the fertility requirements of the seeds orexpand your farming patches slowly to ensure you don’t overstep your maximum fertility.
Fertility is consumed by pretty much all plants. Grass doesn’t cause problems but any wildflowers, trees, and weeds will be cutting into the number of crops you’re able to grow. Take some time to clear out all the wild plants from your base and thenimplement the Weed Pulling policy at a home board.This will mostly prevent them from returning, but you can also place down floors to further reduce the number of weeds.
The final method for improving fertility is to buy more land.
How To Get Better Seeds
You’ll be given a starting pack of seeds by Loytel, but these won’t last you long by themselves.A sickle is used to gather seedsfrom already planted crops and wild plants you encounter.
You cannot collect seeds and food from the same plant, so you’ll find thatabout half of your crops need to be used for replanting.Fruit trees ignore this rule and will consistently drop fruit, lumber and seeds.
Bringing your sickle when adventuringmakes it very easy to get common seeds. Flowers, Api nuts, and crim bushes will all be present in your starting meadow and the surrounding lands. More complex seeds require you to explore further:
How To Upgrade Seeds
The plants you grow at the start of the game are no different from the versions available from traders and villages. With a bit of investment in your farm, thefoods grown on your land will surpass anything available in even the high-level shops.
When you harvest the seeds of a crop you plantedit will become upgraded. This increases the level of the seed and gives it a boost in the attributes of the crop. The attribute boost can be one of the attribute potentials or the rich collagen bonus that gives charisma experience.Rich collagen is hidden from characters without the gourmet feat,so an upgraded seed with no visible trait will always have this bonus.
Seeds are only upgraded for crops you planted yourself.You cannot get upgraded seeds when harvesting in villages or moongates.
Once a seed has been upgraded for the first time,future levels will only improve its existing benefitsinstead of adding new ones. To gain a variety of attributes from your crops, you’ll need to grow a variety of crops.
Inedible plants are also impacted by seed levels.Upgrading trees gives you higher quality wood,with better sell prices and more traits. You’ll also gain more logs per tree at high levels. A high-level cotton and lumber farm can train your carpentry and weaving skills, alongside giving you expensive products to sell.
The maximum level of a seed is equal to your farming skill,but the attribute bonuses won’t be upgraded beyond seven levels. This means farming levels beyond 70 offer fewer benefits.
How To Grow Crops Faster
There are two modifiers the player can apply to grow plants more quickly:Using fertilizer and watering will both speed up the processand can be used together.
Crops can be watered once per daywith a watering can. This takes off a chunk of the growth time and adds up if you do it frequently. Use a bottomless pot of water to create water sources next to your farmland, so you may quickly refill the watering can.
We found that higher quality materials create watering cans with higher capacity.Don’t think too hard about the implications of a watering can made from solid ether, it has triple the carrying capacity!
There are also a few ways you can skip out on watering, reducing the micromanagement on your farming plot but also denying you the farming experience it would give.
The second tool for increasing growth speed is fertilizer. You get this from the compost bin.Configure the auto-dump settings to accept rotten food and spare corpsesand you’ll be swimming in fertilizer.
Fertilizer can be applied to a crop only once and lasts for the life of the plant.This makes it very effective on fruit trees.
The Defertilizer item is produced by mixing fertilizer with garbage. This itemfreezes a plant at its current growth state.This lets you create ornamental gardens and trees that won’t wither.
None of these methods can grow plants instantly, so even a dedicated farmer will find themselves with periods of free time.
Plants grow according to the in-game calendar and most crops take one or more weeks to grow. If you return to your farm between dungeon runs, you’ll find very little growth since that activity doesn’t pass many days.
How To Create Irrigated Fields
You cancreate new water sources using a bottomless pot of water. This is how you make paddy fields for wheat and rice or createconvenient spots for refilling your watering can. The pot isn’t bottomless but instead carries water source blocks, so you’ll need to walk to a nearby lake or coast to fill it. It is improved by material quality but requires some hoop jumping as clays typically have a hardness in the single digits.
The process of making a water pot with a capacity in the hundreds isn’t needed unlessyou’re planning togrow lots of rice and wheat.Those are the two most useful crops, so here it is just in case:
Sadly, this highly convoluted crafting trick doesn’t help with most other recipes. It’s still nice if you want to bake cookies in a Mithril oven, andfuture updates may add more uses for adamantine bricks.
If the meteor spell sets you on fire,you can put yourself out with a watering can.This does lower your electricity resistance for a time, but you’re unlikely to find Thunder Dragons in the starting region.
How To Use Delegated Farming
Delegated farming is one of the first civic policies you’ll gain access to and has no cost, meaning you’re liable toleave it on all the time at every settlement.The way it works is as follows:
A farming sign typically covers 25 tiles.If you fence or wall off an area,it will cover the entire room.
Delegated farming does its best work when used under the right conditions. Here are some of the best uses of delegated farming:
Fast Growing
Mushrooms
Mushrooms grow in only one day, so can be time-consuming to constantly harvest and replant.
High-level Crops
NA
Delegated farming ismuch worse than the player at improving seedsand can also overflow the containers if it rapidly adds new strains and level variants of the crops.
Crops That Don’t Spoil
Rice, Wheat, Cotton
A delegated rice farm grows quickly with irrigation and you canleave it for months at a timewithout worry.
Complex Crops
Corn, Grapes, Rainbow Fruit
Crops that leave the plant behind when picked can be harvested by the player and then delegated farming will replant the seed from the surviving plant. Thisgives you the full harvest sizebut saves you from having to gauge the ratio of crops to harvest into produce or convert into seeds.
Best Crops To Grow
There are a few different considerations for what crops give you the best returns. Each crop offers a different assortment of attribute experience, growth potential, and fertility requirements. If you’re managing the diets of an entire adventuring party you’ll need a bit of everything, buta solo adventurer can focus on what benefits their playstyle.
Rice and Wheat
Will, Perception, Learning Potential
Straw
These two are used to craft travel rations, needed to use the fast travel system. Dough made from them isused in almost all high-level recipes.
Perception, Charisma
Rare mushroom variants
Mushrooms grow quickly, don’t need sunlight, and can be used to train cooking. Their fast growth time makes iteasy to cultivate multiple variants.
Poison mushrooms can be turned into fishing baitand rare mushrooms have extra attributes attached.
Strength, Endurance
Big leaves, Palulu wood
Strength and endurance boosts are rarein crops and the extra products can be used for carpentry. Palulu furniture has a high selling value.
Price, Rest Quality
None
Cherry is the best wood for making furniture.Most log types have only a single attribute, forcing you to choose between comfort and quality. The downside is there is nothing edible on these trees.
Strength, Endurance, Strength Potential
Pasture is inedible by itself butlets you ranch livestock. Farm animals give you access to food attributes that are hard to get from a vegetarian diet.
Magic, Perception
Honey
Honeycomb is produced in beehives according to the number of flowers you have growing. Sugary foods are thebest way to train magic,andyou can include honeycomb multiple times in a recipe by crafting it into cake dough, sugar, and honey.
Endurance Potential, Charisma, Magic
Corn gives a lot of produce per plant and its endurance potential makes it a great choice forfeeding tanky party members and mounts.
Learning, Perception Potential, Charisma Potential
Bone Needles
The learning experience is normally attached to rare foods, so rainbow fruits are one of the few farmable sources of this attribute. The downside is the plant consumes more fertility than any other crop.
Dexterity, Endurance Potential, Will Potential
Dexterity keywords are normally attached to still-moving foods. That radishes are given the attribute implies they’re hiding something.
How To Grow Plants In Winter
Your fairy companion will give you a warning thatwinter weather blocks out the sunlight needed to grow plants.Thankfully you don’t have to give up on agriculture for half the year and have a couple of different options for growing plants in winter:
Mushrooms having no light requirements also meansthey can be grown in caves or inside a tentthat you carry with you at all times. Buy one from Nino at the Tinker’s Camp and have an entire farming setup in your backpack.
Crafting a sun lamp requires you tomine orwishfor a sun crystal. Caravan master Nino at the Tinker’s Camp sells the recipe for sun lamps, and you’re able to use one of his moonstone portals to borrow a machine bench from another player’s base.Kettle’s alchemy shop can duplicate the resulting lamp.
It doesn’t matter if you lack the required blacksmithing skills to make the sun lamp. Although the lamp will have a lower sell value, it will still work.
Electricity to power the sun lamps can be gained in a few ways:
