Like many sandbox games before it, Valheim let its players enjoy a certain type of freedom. Want to defeat mighty bosses? You got it! Or maybe you enjoy the thrill of searching for resources and crafting only the best weapons. Heck, you can even unleash your creativity to build in-game replicas of your favorite landscapes.
There’s certainly something in this game for different types of players. One of the most common things is to build a base where you can rest after exploring every nook and cranny in this procedurally generated purgatory.
However, just like in real life, a home isn’t complete without a nearby food source. This is why you can build a Valheim farm to grow food to boost your character’s health and stamina. So to make sure you maximize your resources and take advantage of everything this game has to offer, here’s your Valheim farming guide.
Updated May 27th, 2021 by Miguel Amaro: Roughly four months after its release, Valheim is still going strong. The survival title is expected to hit eight million copies by the end of June. And while fans wait for the Hearth and Home update, here’s everything you can do to have your base ready when it arrives later this year.
11 Understand Why Is Important To Build A Farm
First things first, taking the time to create a Valheim farming isn’t a mandatory process to progress through the game and gain Odin’s favor. However, while farms are time-consuming, creating one will eventually pay off and make things so much easier for your Viking.
The big plus to farming is maximizing the bonuses you get from food. Not only will you have a nearby food source, but you can quickly gather different ingredients to make better recipes. For example, you could eat a raspberry and gain ten health and 20 stamina for 600 seconds, or have a turnip farm and cook a turnip stew, which will grant your character 50 health, 50 stamina for 1600 seconds.
10 Craft A Cultivator
Before you can go out there and start harvesting crops on your Valheim farm, you’ll need the proper tool to work the terrain so you can plant seeds in it. To do so, you’ll need to craft a Cultivator, which is a tool that’ll become available after you defeat the game’s first boss, Eikthyr.
Once you have this tool, use it on a patch of land to create arable land, then you can plant your seeds in there. Farming isn’t the only thing this tool can do, as you can also use it to regrow grass on patches of dirt.
9 Leave Some Space Between Seeds
A pivotal thing to keep in mind while Valheim farming is to leave a space between each crop you plant. They don’t require that much room, but there should be at least a 1x1 area between seeds so the crop can adequately grow. If you’re planting tree seeds, then leave a 2x2 spacing between each tree.
8 Know Where To Find Seeds
Now that the terrain is ready and you know how to plant your seeds, it’s finally time to explore around and find them. First, you should know that not every consumable item in the game is farmable. There are only five types of seeds you can get in the game’s current state (after all, Valheim is still on early access).
7 Don’t Forget To Protect Your Crops
Enemies and aggressive creatures are always lurking in this purgatory, and they would love nothing more than to destroy your precious crops and throw away all of your efforts. To prevent this, protect your farm by building fences around the terrain.
You could either use a roundpole fence (which you can craft at the workbench, and it will cost you x1 wood) or use a stakewall (which won’t deteriorate but costs x4 wood and are a little bit bigger).
6 Grow More Seeds First And Then Grow The Crop
As you know, you can obtain carrot or turnip seeds by going to their corresponding biomes. However, there’s another way to get these seeds that don’t require you to leave your Valheim farm.
All you have to do is plant a carrot or a turnip using the Cultivator to grow three seeds of whichever food you planted. So when you’re starting your farm, it is better first to produce more seeds instead of food and once you have a significant number of seeds, grow the food.
5 Keep In Mind The Each Crop Behaves Differently
If you know a little bit about farming (or maybe played Stardew Valley), you’ll know that crops can have different growing cycles, different needs and that not all seeds can thrive in the same soil.
Well, farming Valheim seeds isn’t any different. For example, carrots take four in-game days to grow fully, and there doesn’t seem to be a restriction on where to plant them. Turnips, however, will not grow on the Mountain biome.
4 Learn The Recipes
It makes no sense to create a Valheim farm and harvest crops if you don’t know the best way to use them. Right now, there are only two consumable crops: carrots and turnips.
You can use carrots to tame boars and make carrot soup (which will give you 20 health, 60 stamina for 1500 seconds). Turnips are used to feed boars and cook turnip stew (which provides you with 50 health, 50 stamina for 1600 seconds).
Learning which foods you can cook and how many benefits they’ll give you, will make things easier for you, especially in the early stages of the game. Also, make sure to have a cauldron nearby so you can actually cook these recipes.
3 Flatten The Terrain Before Using The Cultivator
Like in real life, the terrain in Valheim isn’t entirely even, so before you go and create your farm, you should first flatten the terrain where you want to place it. Why? Because a flat ground makes building easier, helps with the structure, and won’t leave your construction with weaker parts.
To make the ground flat, you’ll need a special tool called a hoe; you can craft it on the workbench and requires x5 wood and x2 stone.
2 Expand Beyond Crops
While there aren’t any cows or pigs in Valheim yet, there are other animals you could tame and integrate into your farm to have a nearby supply of raw meat or leather scraps.
In the game’s current state, there are three types of animals you can tame: boars, wolves, and loxs. Each one has a different strategy for taming them, and you can even breed some of them to have higher rarity animals on your farm.
1 Add Beehives To The Mix
Besides actual food like Blood Pudding or Fish Wraps, Meads and Wine are another type of consumable you should learn how to make. They’ll provide your Viking with powerful buffs that could reduce the impact of fire damage, restore health or even speed up stamina regeneration. Each time of drink will have a different effect, very similar to how potions work in other games.
But to make these powerful concoctions, you’ll need many ingredients, like Honey. Honey, of course, comes from bees that live in beehives. You’ll find these hives in the abandoned buildings in the Meadows, Swamp, and the Black Forest biomes.
However, this abandoned building spawn at random, so the best way to secure yourself a source of Honey is to have your own beehives in your Valheim farm. To do so you’ll need:
Once you’ve gathered all the ingredients, just head over to your farm and start placing your beehives, you’ll want to have more than once since each hive makes just one blob of Honey every 20 minutes (and will only store four at the same time).
When placing multiple beehives, leave some space between each one, so the bees have enough room to be happy. Also, just like you did with the crops, make sure the hives are protected from external threats, like Greydwarves.
