Valheim farming: Tips, tricks, and everything you need to know

Valheim is the Viking survival simulator we didn’t know we wanted. Dropped in a mythological Norse world, you’re left with nothing but the clothes on your back and a request from Odin to conquer all of the forsaken beasts that roam across the land. Easy, right?

While you explore the tenth Norse world, you might notice that food resources are scarce. If only there was a way to grow your own crops. Well, as luck would have it, you can do just that in Valheim. With just a bit of elbow grease, you can turn almost any area into farmable land. Here’s everything you need to know about farming in Valheim.

Before you can start farming in Valheim, you’ll need to find the most important part — the seeds. You’ll find various seeds as you explore the biomes, loot chests, and explore dungeons. They don’t spoil and they’re pretty light, so make sure you hold onto any seeds you might find.

Here are the seeds available in the game right now:

You can also grow Barley and Flax, but they don’t require a seed to grow. They can both be found in the Plains.

You may have come across seeds in your travels, but you can’t exactly start farming until you’ve made a few important discoveries. First, you’ll have to unlock the Cultivator, and that recipe won’t unlock you’ve acquired Core Wood, and Core Wood can be found by chopping Pine Trees down with a Bronze Axe.

In order to get a Bronze Axe, you’ll need Bronze. Bronze can be crafted by combining two Copper and one Tin at the Forge, and you can’t get Copper or Tin until you mine some Copper Ore and Tin Ore using the Pickaxe you can craft after beating Eikthyr. You then have to smelt it down in the Smelter, and you’ll only get the Smelter recipe by acquiring a Surtling Core. So, as you can see, there are a few things you need to do before you’re ready to farm.

Once you do have the Cultivator recipe, you can craft it by using ten pieces of Core Wood and five Bronze. Equip the Cultivator and use to tool to till the soil and plant any seeds in your inventory.

Where to build your farm, how to plant seeds

So you’ve got your seeds, and you’ve got your tool, so you’re ready to farm, right? Well not quite. While you can build a farm anywhere, you’re gonna have to give your location some thought before you start farming. There are currently five fully developed biomes to explore: Meadows, Black Forest, Plains, Mountains, and Swamp.

Every Biome isn’t made the same, however. You can’t grow everything everywhere. After some trial and error, we discovered that you can’t grow certain crops in these environments.

It turns out that the Plains can grow every crop right now, but the Black Forest and the Meadows are a close second and are more accessible than the Plains biome.

Once you’ve set up camp, it’s a good idea to build your farm nearby. Use the Cultivator to till the soil, and try to give your crops a little bit of space so that they have room to grow. I like to a wooden fence around my farm, but it’s not a requirement. Once your crops have been planted and are healthy, you have to wait for them to grow.

How to harvest crops in Valheim

Now that your farm is all together, you’ll just need to give your farm time to grow. Each crop takes about three to four in-game days to grow. If you’re playing by yourself, you can just jump into a nearby bed and catch up on your sleep. You can check on the status of your crops by hovering your cursor over them. Once the crop is fully grown, you can harvest it.

Now that you have some crops, you can use the Carrots and Turnips to craft Carrot Stew and Turnip Stew respectively. You can also rebury them to grow your own Carrot Seed or Turnip Seeds. You’ll earn three seeds from each crop harvested this way.

Flax can be used to make linen to craft certain clothes at the Artisan Table, and Barley can be processed in the Windmill to create Barley Flour, which can then be used to make other foods, like Bread or Lox Meat Pie.

Eat up, Viking. You’ll need your strength

Those are the basics tips and tricks you’ll need to start a farm in Valheim. While it may seem like a daunting task at first, growing your own food is an essential part to surviving Valheim’s unforgiving world. Be sure to take a look at our Valheim hunting guide to learn everything there is to know about staying topped up on food. It may be early, but Valheim is shaping up to be one of the best survival games on the PC.