How to plant food valheim

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.

List of Valheim seeds and where to find them

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.

As you progress through Valheim, you’re going to need to expand your diet. The berries, raw mushrooms, and charred meats of your paleolithic age might have sufficed for taking on Eikthyr in the meadows. But now that you’re looking at longer journeys and bigger bosses, you’re going to need more stamina and improved health. That means it’s time to start working on getting vegetables and carbohydrates in your diet and learning how to plant crops in Valheim.

To begin your agrarian adventures, you’re going to need three things: plants or seeds, the cultivator tool, and a hoe.

Craft a hoe

Required materials:

With a hoe tool, you can flatten an area you would like to farm in. With the device equipped, right-click and select flatten the ground. The circle indicator on the ground will show you the area that will get smoothed out once you left-click.

Keep in mind that the hoe can only flatten ground to a certain extent. If you try and flatten over a large mound or raise a deep divot, the ground may not flatten properly. You might need to hit the bump with a pickaxe and smooth over it again in these cases.

In small pits, use the hoe’s raise ground feature, and smooth it over when the dip is closer to level.

While it is not essential to flatten the earth you’ll be farming; it is hugely advantageous for harvest and replanting.

Craft a cultivator

Required materials:

You’ll learn how to craft the cultivator when you pick up or craft a bronze bar at your forge. Depending on your farming operation’s size, you might want to upgrade your cultivator at the forge for an extra three bronze and core wood.

While you have the cultivator in hand, you can right-click to bring up its options, which are tilling, replanting grass, and planting various seeds and seed plants.

Tilling soil in Valheim

Using the cultivator’s tilling option will display a patch of ground in a circle where you have placed the mouse. Left-clicking will remove grass and change the ground into tilled land where you can plant seeds or replant vegetables.

Planting seeds in Valheim

You can find carrot seeds in the black forests and turnip seeds in the swamp biome. Once you have some seeds, you can select the plant carrot or turnip option with the cultivator equipped.

You will see the seedling in blue in areas where you can plant and red in places you can’t. Ensure you till the ground, clear it of debris, remove steep slopes.

While you can place the plants directly beside one another, you must leave a half foundation space between plants if you want them to grow evenly. If a plant is too close to another, its growth will stall, and your crop production will become staggered. 

Both carrots and turnips will take a little over two in-game days to grow. Longer if you plant crops too close to one another.

Seeding carrots and turnips in Valheim

If you’ve only looted a few wild seeds, you can use the cultivator to replant a harvested vegetable as a seed plant. With either carrots or turnips in your inventory, right-click and select the seed plant.

Much the same as planting seeds, you can now left-click to replant the vegetable. After two in-game days, you can come back to harvest the plants for three seeds apiece.

You can use this process to increase your seed stock massively. The same rules as seed planting apply. Leave a little room between plants for efficient growth.

Planting flax and barley in Valheim

Flax and barley have a different life cycle to vegetables and a few extra rules to follow. To begin with, you will have to acquire both from fuling villages in the Plains biome.

You can find flax growing in patches around the villages. However, you can only loot barley from fulings corpses and the containers inside the village’s fenceline.

You can only grow flax and barley in the Plains biome. While you can plant it in the Meadows, the plant will instantly die.

Unlike vegetables, you don’t need seeds to plant either crop. With either flax or barley in your inventory, you can choose to replant the crop with a cultivator tool. A replanted barley or flax plant will yield two more plants when harvested. 

Both flax and barley will take a little over two in-game days to develop. Much like the vegetables, you’ll need to leave a small amount of room between each plant or risk staggering their growth.

Harvesting in Valheim

To harvest complete crops, you can simply press E on the plant to pull it out of the ground. If you have inventory space, you will immediately draw the yield into your storage. 

It’s unnecessary to click each plant as you can hold E and mouse over each plant or walk around constantly pulling up any planted crops. 

You can harvest taller crops like flax and barley by swinging weapons through them. The most efficient weapon to this end is to use the atgeir’s alternative fire; a whirlwind swing.

Crop rotation in Valheim

It’s essential to keep an eye on your seed levels, as without proper monitoring, you might find yourself with no seeds or very few. Any time this happens, you will need to run several seed-plant crops, which means a minimum of several hours without any plant food output.

We recommend an alternating cycle of plants and plant seeds to ensure you stay on top of your seed levels.

This process is much more straightforward with barley and flax, as you can simply replant until you’re happy with the amount of crop planted. Harvest and use half, then replant the rest for consistent crop output.

Greater health, greater wealth

With a steady supply of vegetables, bread, wraps, and mead, you’ll find your Vikings substantially more capable than they were in the early game. Not only will these refined foods give you better stats, but they will also give you those stats for much longer.

So get you there, and build a massive farm for you or your clan.