How To Farm In Elin

Farming in Elin is 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 them withering and losing most of their produce.

You can check 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 to add 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 or expand 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 can grow. Take some time to clear out all the wild plants from your base and then implement 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.

• Expanding a territory with your maid lets you spend a few gold bars for a larger map and more fertility. You’ll need to clear out the weeds and overgrowth on your new land, or you can find yourself having less fertility than you started with.
• Land deeds and relocation deeds can be used together to claim fertile forest and plains territories and then relocate them next to your main base. Fertility is calculated per map, so it’s cheaper to have several farms than to keep upgrading one to the absolute limit.

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 seeds from already planted crops and wild plants you encounter.

You cannot collect seeds and food from the same plant, so you’ll find that about 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 adventuring makes 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:

• Most standard crops can be found via harvest quests in the nearby towns. You’ll get a karma penalty for trying to take home crops harvested in these quests but there is no penalty for collecting seeds.
• Some seeds can be stolen from crops growing in settlements. The Merchants’ Guild has cotton, Yowyn has wheat, and Mifu Village grows rice.
• Devotees of Kumiromi can produce seeds from rotting food, and from feeding fruit to their fairy companion. This is the only way of gaining rainbow fruit seeds besides stealing them from other players’ houses.
• The Ecopo merchant in Yowyn sells upgraded seeds for Ecopo tickets. This is useful if you’re looking to cultivate a specific strain.

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, the foods grown on your land will surpass anything available in even the high-level shops.

When you harvest the seeds of a crop you planted it 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 benefits instead 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 process and can be used together.

Crops can be watered once per day with 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 can 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.

• Wheat and rice can both be planted in paddy fields. They’ll grow more quickly as if they were watered every day.
• The Ether Disease “living humidifier” greatly increases the chance of rain. On rainy days all your crops are watered automatically.

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 corpses and 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 item freezes 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.

• Sleeping passes time quickly but requires you to spend your stamina before you can sleep again. Any crafting recipe that accepts large item stacks can quickly expand your entire stamina bar, letting you speed through days. Alternatively, you can burn out your stamina with a training dummy and improve your combat skills.
• Overworld travel takes a long time if you don’t have the Seven League Boots. Taking on delivery and escort quests is a good way to quickly move time forward, and takes very little input if you use fast travel to avoid encounters.

How To Create Irrigated Fields

You can create new water sources using a bottomless pot of water. This is how you make paddy fields for wheat and rice or create convenient 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 low 20s capacity of most bottomless pots is enough to irrigate small farms if you aren’t planning on using paddy fields.
• Ice Clay has over double the capacity of typical dirt clay and can be easily sourced by digging in any snow biome.
• Rubynus and other precious materials can make pots able to hold 200+ water blocks but require some convoluted strategies to make gemstones and metals into pottery clay.

The process of making a water pot with a capacity in the hundreds isn’t needed unless you’re planning to grow lots of rice and wheat. Those are the two most useful crops, so here it is just in case:

• Purchase a dye from the trader in Olvina made from diamonds, mithril, or any similarly fancy material.
• Using a flooring workshop, convert the dye into carpet.
• Enter a non-base map and place down the carpet tiles.
• Cast meteor to set the carpet on fire. If you don’t know the spell, you can use a scroll.
• Use a shovel to dig up the ash, which will give you soil made from your carpet material.
• Mix your special soil into clay and use it to craft your water pot.
• Walk to the nearest coastline and put a sizable dent in the ocean.

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, and future 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 to leave it on all the time at every settlement. The way it works is as follows:

• Crops growing on your land are automatically harvested if they’re near a farming sign.
• This automatic harvest happens several days more slowly than if you harvested them yourself.
• Crops are automatically replanted without consuming seeds from your storage.
• Seeds can be leveled up by delegated farming but only gain one level at a time, compared to the ten levels they can gain if you do it all manually.
• Adjacent crops from different strains will get unified to whichever crop is higher level. This saves on inventory space for multiple types of the same crop but can delete a useful strain if they’re planted next to each other.

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:

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, but a solo adventurer can focus on what benefits their playstyle.

How To Grow Plants In Winter

Your fairy companion will give you a warning that winter 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 are not technically plants but are accepted in most vegetable dishes and do not require light to grow.
• Sun lamps can be crafted at a machine table and provide sunlight to a wide area. They can be used without electricity but cover a much smaller area.

Mushrooms having no light requirements also means they can be grown in caves or inside a tent that 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 to mine or wish for a sun crystal. Caravan master Nino at the Tinker’s Camp sells the recipe for sun lamps, and you can 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:

• Look for resident jobs that provide Power Generation as a benefit. You’re guaranteed to get one such villager in Demitas, who joins via the main quest.
• A Mason’s Table allows you to craft the Wheel of Pain. Placing a resident on it generates electricity but prevents them from working.
• You can wish for a generator. This does not require any residents, but if you already used your wish for a sun crystal you’ll need to wait an entire year.
• Miral’s shop offers a tent upgrade that adds a small amount of power generation.