Farming
Last Edited on : Apr 18, 2024, 14:30 (UTC)
This life skill consists of renting fences and installing them in the area you want, creating gardens. This will allow you to plant seeds inside and harvest what you’ve grown. What’s more, you can obtain better quality seeds through plant breeding and replant them, obtaining better results, or for example you can obtain haystacks to raise cows and produce milk.
In order to maintain your own garden, you need to prepare.
It’s not hard. Let’s begin with this step-by-step guide below.
Renting Fences
To run a garden, the most important thing you’ll need to prepare is contribution points.
Since fences are an absolute necessity for this life skill, they aren’t items that can be purchased, and instead need to be rented through NPCs. These tend to be farm owners, material vendors, and Old Moon Guild managers.
There are different types of fences, and each costs a different amount of contribution points. As with all items obtained with contribution points, fences can be returned to get the contribution points back.
➤ You can read more about contribution points in the [Contribution] page.
The following table shows the different types of fences available, and how to obtain them.
|
Item Name |
Maximum Crop Yield |
NPC You Can Rent From / How to Obtain |
|
Shabby Fence |
1 |
Reward from quest [Farming] Because I Like You, given by NPC Jemkas Wyrmsbane once you reach the beginner 7 level in the gathering life skill |
|
Small Fence |
4 |
[3 contribution points needed] Martina Finto (Finto Farm), Mael Costa (Costa Farm), Enzo (Dias Farm), Difry Hussey (Altinova) |
|
Plain Fence |
7 |
[6 contribution points needed] Paola Toscani (Toscani Farm), Mercianne Moretti (Moretti Plantation), Norma Leight (Northern Wheat Plantation), Goolie Gianin (Gianin Farm), Mayeri (Trent), Finlin (Tarif) |
|
Strong Fence |
10 |
[10 contribution points needed] Zaaira (Velia), Flaviano (Heidel), Geranoa (Calpheon City), Lashir (Altinova), Purajin (Valencia City), Kara (Grána), Derjeen (Duvencrune), Jorjua (O'draxxia), Tulga (Eilton) |
|
Old Moon Fence |
10 |
[Farming level master 1 & 10 contribution points needed] Klau (Velia), Stee (Heidel), Lajee (Calpheon City), Jak (Altinova), Sahin (Valencia City), Zya (Grána), Taya (Duvencrune), Mene (O'draxxia), Ploux (Eilton) |
|
Finto's Strong Fence |
10 |
Reward from quest [Farming] Master of Farming, given by NPC Martina Finto, from questline [Life] Finto Family’s Fence Support starting at NPC Liana once you’re Lv. 20 or above.
Reward from quest Booze Side Dishes, given by NPC Klau in a questline after you’ve completed [Farming] Master of Farming. |
|
Klau's Old Moon Fence |
10 |
Reward from quest New Fence, Worn Fence, given by NPC Klau once you’ve completed [Farming] Master of Farming and are at farming level master 1 or above.
Reward from quest New Fence, Worn Fence II, given by NPC Klau once you’ve completed Booze Side Dishes and are at farming level master 1 or above. |
◆ What is the difference between a strong fence and an Old Moon fence?
The more plants one can put in a fenced garden, the larger this one is, and thus the more space it takes.
You can have a maximum of 10 fenced gardens, and it is suggested to have all of them together in the same area. Due to this, you might find yourself without the necessary space to install all your fences together, one next to the other.
That’s where the Old Moon fences come into play. They cost the same as a strong fence, allow you to have the same number of plants in them, and take much less space than a strong fence.
However, keep in mind that while you can rent an Old Moon fence at any point, you won’t be able to install and use them until your character has reached farming master 1.
Installing Fences
After you rent fences, you can install them in non-safe zone areas. These make up most of the world of Black Desert.
In order to install a fence, right-click the fence in your character’s inventory. This will take you to the Place Mode view. There, you can place fences in the location you want with your cursor.
Avoid obstacles like rocks and trees when you install a fence. Additionally, it is more convenient to place fences close to an area you visit frequently to speed up harvesting.
In the Place Mode view, you can place fences only in areas where the (install) box pops up in green.
When you have completed installing a fence, move within the borders of the fence that you just placed and press the R key to start managing your garden.
Planting Seeds
If you have your garden ready, the next step is to plant seeds.
You can obtain seeds gathering from bushes and plants, buy them from an NPC, or receive them as quest rewards. Haystacks can be obtained by drying x50 weeds.
You can mainly plant / install seeds, hyphae, and haystacks in your gardens.
Planting seeds is similar to installing furniture in a house. At the top left corner of the screen, you will see the available slots for planting. Select a seed from the window to the right and then click the area of the garden you want it planted in.
Note that there is a limited total number of slots when you plant seeds in a garden. These depend on the type of fence you have, as detailed in the previous section.
Each seed type’s item description will let you know how many slots they take up. You’ll need to take this into account when you are planting.
As seen in the picture above, haystacks take up 4 slots.
When you are done planting a seed, the plant / hypha / haystack will display with 0% growth. It will grow nicely as time goes by.
Crop Management
If you’re done planting, now it’s time to manage your crops.
Crops are sensitive to humidity and temperature. They are also vulnerable to attacks from pests, blights, and birds.
You will periodically need to prune your crops, and make sure that they have enough water.
Using fertilizer will speed up the growth rate as well.
Pest blights and the need for pruning your crops will appear randomly with a fixed chance.
If you run into these problems, the crop’s growth rate drops significantly, so you need to make sure to resolve these issues quickly or the crop will suffer from halted growth.
Pruning and killing insects will reward farming EXP.
Additionally, you may randomly obtain valuable items such as black crystal shards.
If your fence icon turns red in the World Map screen (hotkey: M), it indicates that there is a problem you need to attend to in your garden.
If the yellow growth bar turns red, it indicates there is a problem with the plant, such as a pest infection caused by blight, or entangled branches.
In these cases, approach the crop, and interact with it (hotkey: R) to prune or kill the insects in it. These actions consume 1 energy.
Tip!
For your convenience, here are some gadgets that you can install in your garden to protect your crops.
First, a scarecrow will keep attacking birds away. This means crops will grow quicker.
After that, an irrigation system. As mentioned before, you need to feed enough water to your crops to boost their growth rate. If you install an irrigation system, you won’t have to worry as much about a possible water shortage.
In order to obtain these installable objects, you need to purchase a town house and set it as a carpentry workshop. After this, send a worker to craft the item in the workshop.
The crop on the left has no scarecrow and no irrigation system. It can’t protect against birds, and also has low water absorption.
Meanwhile, the crop on the right is protected from birds and has a stable water absorption rate.
There are a couple of activities you can do yourself to help the crop you’ve planted grow.
There are a couple of activities you can do yourself to help the crop you’ve planted grow.
If the crop needs water and it hasn’t rained lately, get some distilled water (or purified water) ready in your inventory and take it to your garden. You can right-click on the item and the crop will be watered.
You can also use fertilizer in the same way in order to boost the growth rate.
In order to obtain distilled water, purchase an empty bottle from any Material Vendor NPC and go to the nearest river to fill it, which will result in a bottle of river water. After this, bring up the Processing window (hotkey: L) and heat it up, which will give you distilled water.
Similar to that, you can instead filter the bottle of river water to obtain purified water. While the filtering process is dependent on the weather, it can net you additional items such as alluvial gold.
The simplest fertilizer, inorganic fertilizer, can be obtained through drying grains such as wheat or barley. This is also done in the Processing window, via the drying option.
Better types of fertilizer can be obtained by processing inorganic fertilizer further. Shaking it with leavening agent will result in byproduct fertilizer, and shaking this with any source of water (distilled water for example) will result in the best type of fertilizer: organic fertilizer.
Lastly, if you find all these methods too burdensome (having to water the crops, fertilize the soil, ward off bird attacks, prune the plants, and fight off blights), you can send a worker to do the work for you, or just leave the garden unattended and hope for the best.
If you send a worker, they’ll have trouble taking care of the moisture level or bird attacks, but will take care of pruning and killing insects, which will help you conveniently run your garden and have a more consistent growth rate on all your plants.
Leaving the garden unattended means leaving your crops to be eaten by birds or insects.
If unattended, your crops will take longer to grow to 100%, but it also means that you can do other things in the meantime.
You can choose your strategy according to your own preferences.
Click the Garden icon on the top left part of the screen, below your health bar to view the list of gardens you have installed. Then click the Worker icon to send a worker to your garden.
You require a single worker for each fenced garden you install, and when you start out it may be difficult to assign them to this task due to a lack of enough workers, or contribution points for their lodging. Thus, we recommend you take care of your gardens yourself as you begin your adventure, and then assign workers to take care of them for you once you’ve established your own place in the world of Black Desert.
➤ You can read more about how to obtain and manage workers in the [Workers] page.
The My Gardens window will help you keep track of the status of your installed fences. It will show you the territory each fence is in, as well as let you create a path to their location. It will also tell you the type of fence, the type of crop you have in it, if a worker is currently assigned to it, and additionally it will also warn you with a yellow and red icon when the Scheduled Removal Time reaches 7 days and 2 days, respectively.
Harvesting
Regardless of how you manage your crops, when their growth reaches 100% you will be able to harvest them.
Although the growth value goes up to 200%, you can harvest your crop at any point after 100% with no losses.
Crop harvesting is divided into general harvesting and plant breeding.
The first allows you to reap the ‘fruits’ from your crops. A potato or citron from a plant, mushrooms from a hypha, or meat and milk from haystacks.
The second allows you to try breeding your seeds to obtain a higher quality version of them.
Once you succeed in plant breeding, you can obtain from a single seed of the same quality, to several seeds of a better quality.
There are no penalties for attempting plant breeding at any % above 100%.
On the left, with general harvesting you can obtain, for example, onions. On the right, with plant breeding you can obtain the same or better quality seeds of the crop you planted.
When you harvest your crops, you may obtain blush leaves. This is one of the items that are considered to be byproducts from life skill activities. You can exchange them for other useful items at the designated NPC.
Demolishing
If you don’t use a fence for 2 weeks after installing it, it will be demolished automatically.
Planting new crops in the fence will renew the timer for its demolition back to 2 weeks.
When demolished, please note that any crops that are not harvested will be removed as well. This means the crops will be deleted, and cannot be recovered.
Demolished fences will be sent to the town storage in the nearest town available.
You can demolish the fence yourself if there are no crops in the garden. The fence you demolish this way is sent to your character’s inventory. This way you can take the fence with you and install it wherever else you want, or return it to the NPC you rented it from.
Mysterious Seed
Mysterious seeds can be obtained with a low chance through plant breeding.
If you process a mysterious seed and special or magical crop seeds together through shaking, you can obtain mysterious crop seeds, which can yield more crops when harvested.
Mysterious crop seeds will take up 5 times the normal amount of slots needed when planting in a garden. However the yield is that much greater, so it has the same effect as planting many crops. However, keep in mind that plant breeding will not result in further mysterious crop seeds. As such, mysterious seeds are not a renewable resource, but one time use only.
Since it takes up more slots in your garden, it can reduce the time you have to spend on maintaining your garden.
When breeding mysterious crop seeds, you can gain a sizable amount of fruits with a fixed chance. If you’re looking for ingredients needed in alchemy, it can be a good option to use the mysterious seeds you obtain.
Magical Seed
Magical seeds are precious seeds only obtainable by those that are at farming level of artisan 1 or higher.
If you have reached this level and do crop breeding to improve the quality of seeds you have, you can obtain its magical variant. Similar to mysterious seeds, magical seeds take up 5 times the normal slots required in your garden, meaning that harvesting magical seed crops is equivalent to planting 5 normal seeds.
At first glance, it will be hard to tell the difference between mysterious and magical seeds. A quick way to differentiate them is by their icon. Mysterious seeds portray a glowing aura around the seed that magical seed icons lack.
Mysterious seeds can only be obtained with a low chance randomly by breeding, so it is hard to sustain long cycles of farming with only them.
On the other hand, 1 or more magical seeds can be obtained by breeding with a fixed chance, so they’re self-sustainable.
Another notable difference between them is that, while breeding mysterious seeds will guarantee you fruits needed for alchemy, breeding magical seeds will only give you the fruits randomly at a certain chance. Thus, there are pros and cons to harvesting and breeding either type of seed.
If you’ve reached the artisan 1 level of farming and want to take less time planting, harvesting, and breeding, then we recommend the use of magical seeds. Conversely, if you haven’t reached this life skill level or if you need alchemy ingredients, then employ mysterious seeds as much as you can.
◈ Special to Magical
If you’re in need of magical seeds, you can try shaking x1 special seed, x2 mysterious seeds, and x10 purified water together. This will result in a magical seed, and the same applies for hyphas.
Old Moon Fence
If you have reached the master 1 farming level, it will become even easier to farm by making use of a convenient new fence that has been introduced earlier in this page.
You can talk to the Old Moon Manager NPC in each major town and rent an Old Moon fence with contribution points. Like the strong fence, the Old Moon fence allows 10 slots for your crops. However, its size is much smaller, so installing it and maintaining your garden is more convenient.
To rent an Old Moon fence, you will need 10 contribution points.
Since it still counts towards your fence rental limit, if you’re already using 10 strong fences, you must return them before you can rent any Old Moon fence.
You can talk to the Old Moon managers in each town to rent this type of fence. If you don’t know the location of any of these NPCs, please search it by using the Find the NPC feature, the looking glass icon you can find to the left of your minimap.
The Old Moon fence is only about half the size of the strong fence, but allows you to plant the same amount of crops!
Farming Quests
One can accept farming-related quests from a variety of NPCs in the world of Black Desert.
For example, Liana, located in all major towns, will offer you the quest [Farming] Know Anything About Farming? once you’ve reached Lv. 20. This questline will teach you the basics of farming and reward you with a nice, one-of-a-kind, fence.
Starting at farming level beginner 10, you can do leap quests. It requires some time and effort to complete these quests, but for rewards, you can obtain contribution EXP, farming EXP, as well as rare items like sharp black crystal shards.
Once you’re at this farming level, summon the Black Spirit and check its guide menu, where you can find the available leap quests for all life skills. You can be guided to the NPC you can receive the quests from more easily by simply pressing them from the list.
* The content of the game guide may differ from the actual game content, depending on the update and content changes.