Farming is one of the two main gameplay components of Elysian Fields, and arguably the more calmer and grounded of two. Naturally, as the name implies, this involves elements of farming on your little planet orb (Plorb). This includes maintaining things such as crops, orchards and farm animals, both land and water based.

So, how do you farm? Simple! Your plorb features various regions (Unlockable over time with money and resources), and each region has a number of empty plots, ripe for specialization. There are four base plot times you can specialize into:

Fields – For planted crops

Orchards – For tree-based crops

Pens – For land-based animals

Ponds – For water-based animals

Once you’ve specialized a plot, it’s time to fill it! You have a sizable inventory that can be filled full of stuff (Don’t worry, you can’t hurt your back, even if you’re carrying eight trees, fourteen chickens and some space ship parts. Space technology solves that!), and from that you can plant or place that stuff into the various plots. Crops, when planted, slowly grow over time and can be harvested when they’re fully grown, while animals will slowly produce resources over time like eggs and wool. Don’t worry about your little animal pals, you cannot harm them when getting resources, we’re in the distant future and all animals produce sustainable regenerating products!

But your job isn’t over when you’ve planted your crops and placed your animals. You still have to make sure the soil is properly fertilized for your plants to grow bigger, and animals need to be fed and returned to their pens should they escape. Unfed and unmaintained animals will eventually leave your plorb entirely of their own volition, so you’ve got to make sure they remain happy (Animals won’t die, they’ll just migrate to a plorb with better accommodation. You’re more like a landlord to them). Animals also slowly age over time, and retired farm animals eventually leave to go towards a farm animal retirement sanctuary, so be sure to raise their children and grand children too!

Still, we want the farming aspect to be relatively low maintenance for you, and you can reduce that maintenance further using money and resources gained. Using these, you can manufacture upgrades for your plots, which improve general plot health – taller fences to stop your sheep escaping and sprinklers for your crops, for example – and even start automating things such as automatically harvesting and replanting crops. Be aware though, automation isn’t a straight upgrade – there’s nothing like a person’s direct maintenance for the best yields.

Over time things can and will change. You might want to swap an orchard out for an animal pen, for example, and you’re able to do that at any time – minus a small cost. Eventually, though, you’ll start getting into the more lucrative resources, such as electric sheep wool (Do they dream of androids?), flaming hog lava (Great for heating!) and the mysterious ‘void’ resources. Animals and crops can be swapped out at any time, although be aware that pens and ponds only really accept one type of animal, while crops are placed in rows that can be mixed and matched. With proper maintenance and control, your dusty little orb can become a farming powerhouse, netting you tons of cash and resources, which can then be used to manage the space exploration section of the game, but that’s for another post.

We hope this has been a bit insightful into part of what we want Elysian Fields to be. What we’ve written here is what we’re aiming towards at the moment, but things may change if we find other things to be more fun. We hope to bring you even more details about Elysian Fields soon.

– Team Novadawn