Now, managing your own plorb is great and all, but basic plot setups aren’t fantastic, and things can certainly be improved. How, you ask? By using you’re collected resources to make upgrades of course!

In Elysian Fields, almost everything can be upgraded, be it animal pens and crop fields, to your ship, yourself and even your own workshop tools! To upgrade, simply head over to your workshop with some materials in hand – say from managing your farms or mining in space – and get to work!

Your workshop contains a number of machines, left over from the old owner of this plorb, including a saw bench for handling wooden materials, a furnace and metal working station for handling metals, an electronics bench for handling circuitry and a 3D material printer for creating complex products. Luckily, most of this work is automated – all you need to use these machines are the raw materials, a recipe and some time. Select your recipe, wait a short while, and enjoy your new products!

Some examples of upgrades would include such things as better fences for animal pens, soil monitors for fields and automatic resource collectors to remove the tedium of visiting each plot in turn. Unfortunately, your workshop machines as they start out are not perfect, and some recipes prove far too complex, so why not upgrade those as well? Obviously you can just buy upgrades from the market, but these feature a massive price markup, and some upgrades can only be created by your own hands at any rate, so it’s best to invest in your own workshop. And who knows, you might make some new discoveries along the way?

Products are not just for upgrading, though. Raw resources that have been refined tend to be worth more than their raw counterpart, and if you plan on maximizing profit on the trading markets, it would be wise to at least refine your metal ores into metal ingots. Upgrades themselves also tend to be worth more than their constituent parts, but the market buys them at a greatly reduced value if it even buys them at all, so it’s probably not worth the effort for a tiny bit of extra cash unless you happen to have surplus.

So that’s it for this week. We know this was a small update, but crafting and upgrading are planned to play a pretty large role in Elysian Fields, primarily facilitating the farming side of the game, rather than the ship exploration part, although some ship upgrades will also require crafting, and many crafting resources require ship exploration, such as mining asteroids or raiding treasure plorbs. Wait, but what are treasure plorbs? You’ll have to find out in a future update!

-Team Novadawn