Farming is something you are going to be doing the whole game as a source of food in Valheim and for growing a certain late-game material. Before you can farm you will have to get yourself a tool called a Cultivator. With the Cultivator you can turn regular dirt and grassland into farmable areas. You can also plant seeds and start farms with the Cultivator.
This guide will tell you everything you need to know about starting a farm in Valheim. It is intended for players who are stuck near the start of the game and haven’t figured out how to start planting crops and growing things on a farm. Read on for more information if you want to start a farming like in Valheim!
What You Need To Farm
Before you start farming in Valheim you will first need a few things to get started. You have to know that you cannot start farming straight away in Valheim. In fact you probably won’t start farming until many hours into the game! To start farming you will need to have already collect both Copper, Tin and forged them into Bronze. You will also need to find seeds in order to start farming depending on what you want to plant. After gathering all of the necessary items you will also need a patch of land to start farming on. Preferably somewhere in the meadows to no enemies will come knocking at your door disrupting your crops!
Getting a Cultivator
The process of farming is not an easy task in Valheim. To begin with you are going to have to get your hands on a Cultivator. To craft a Cultivator you will have to find a great deal of other items beforehand. You will need to process some Copper and Tin ore through the smelter. To do this you will obviously have to seek out and bring those materials back to base.
To craft a Smelter you will have to seek out and loot Surtling Cores. You can click the links provided in this article to find out how exactly to find each resource and how to get them. There will be a section at the bottom of the article with helpful links for each step of the way.
Once you have the required materials you are still not done! You are going to have to craft yourself a Forge using some copper bars. Then once you have the forge, make some bronze allow using copper and tin at the forge. At this point the crafting menu for the Cultivator should show up in your Forge UI menu.
As you can see you will have to use 5 units of Core wood and 5 units of Bronze to craft the Cultivator. You can get bronze through the Forge UI by bringing in 2 Copper and 1 Tin. You can obtain core wood from the Black Forest by cutting down Pine trees.
This is a pretty intense task that requires a bit of grinding. In the best case enlist a couple of friends to help you gather the materials, or join an already established server and try to use some advanced materials if they are further along than you.
Using the Cultivator
Once you have a Cultivator, equip it by moving it into one of the quick bar slots at the top of the inventory. These are the numbered slots which correlate to the numbers on your keyboard.
The Cultivator works in a very similar way to the Hammer and the Hoe. Using the Right-Click button on your mouse you can open up the action menu in which you will decide what you want to do with the Cultivator. You will see a few options depending on what seeds you have.
You can select the ‘Cultivate’ option which will till the soil and create land in which you can plant things. After selecting this option, left-click on the ground and it will turn it into tilled, farmable soil.
The next option is to create grass. If you tilled soil by accident and want to change it back to grass, you can select this option to convert any piece of dirt into grass again.
The next options will depend on what you have in your inventory. In this example we are going to be planting Carrots. If you have Carrot seeds in your inventory, you will have to select them from the Cultivator menu to put them in the ground. Select the carrot seeds and place them in your tilled dirt. You do not have to water the carrots, they will simply grow on their own and take an amount of time to be ready to pick.
Make sure you leave the carrots enough space to grow. If you put them too close together you will see that they don’t have enough room to grow.
Now you just have to wait! Farming requires patience. It will take a couple of days for your carrots to grow but once you have them you have that feeling of creating your own food! There nothing better than creating your own sustainable food source in Valheim. Well other than crushing the skulls of Odin’s enemies maybe…
Getting More Seeds With the Cultivator
Once you have grown your own vegetables and plants such as carrots or turnips with the cultivator, you can replant these to get more seeds. Once you have a fully grown carrot in you inventory open up the action menu for the cultivator and select the seeding carrot/turnip option.
This will consume one of your vegetable and allow you to reproduce many seeds and thus more product for you to farm. Each time you replant a carrot as a seed you will get 3 carrot seeds back. It is a good idea to keep at least a couple of fresh carrots around so that you can regrow them and make a little seed farm along with your regular Valheim farm. You can essentially create an unlimited supply of carrots and turnips by replanting one of the vegetables you have harvested to get more seeds.
These plants are farmed and grow like the other regular plants, just when you interact with them, instead of farming fresh produce you will be farming seeds that can be replanted.
How to Plant Trees in Valheim
By utilizing the Cultivator tool in Valheim you can not only plant crops like carrots and turnips but also trees. You can plant pine trees for a good Core Wood supply and even plant birch seeds in order to get a lot of Fine wood growing near your base. There is a different tree seed for each tree type in Valheim and in order to plant and grow a tree you sill have to collect that specific tree seed.
To get tree seeds just keep cutting down the trees. You will randomly get the seed when you cut down the tree and have it fall. As far as I’ve seen cutting up stumps hasn’t resulted in getting any tree seeds. You can plant trees in any biome even if they don’t grow there originally.
At this point in the game you can only collect beech seeds and pine seeds and grow those types of trees. You cannot currently get birch seeds or oak tree seeds in Valheim. As the game is in early access, we are expecting these birch and oak seeds to be added in a later update for the game. That is is the developers actually intended fine wood trees to be able to be planted and farmed.
I have been growing Pine trees and beech trees in the meadows biome by my base. You can follow the same method to planting carrot seeds to plant regular tree seeds too. They are just in the planting menu of the cultivator.
Farming Flax in Valheim
Once the player has reached the plains biome and are at that stage of the game they may discover another resource known as flax. Flax, is a plant with strong fibers which can be found in the plains if the players searches fuling camps.
Flax, once collected, can be used with the cultivator in order to create more flax. Each time the player plants flax and lets it grow, they will be able to harvest 2 units of flax, meaning they can essentially double their supply every time they decide to farm it. Farming flax is like farming any other type of resource in Valheim, you do not need to water it or do anything to aid its growth.
Flax can be harvested very easily by using the secondary attack with the atgeir.
I hope this guide helped you learn how to farm in Valheim. Are you happy with the farming mechanics in Valheim? What other activities would you like to see in the game apart from fishing building and farming? Let me know in the comments below.
Helpful Links for Farming: