Welcome to Elderfield Beginner Guide: Your First Week

The first three things you do

Elderfield hands you a farm that is not usable yet. Three things happen before anything else works.

1. Clear the tentacles, then till

Every plot starts occupied by Ghost Tentacles. Cleansing Balm removes them, and only then can the Basic Gardening Hoe till the soil. Fallow ground has to be tilled before it accepts fertilizer or seed, and a tile can only be watered after seeds are in it — watering bare tilled soil does nothing.

2. Plant wheat before anything expensive

Wheat Seed costs 5g and grows in four nights, and wheat is the input for Dough at the Furnace, which is the base of the early cooking chain. The crop table lists grow nights, yields and the sell price at each quality tier for all 38 seeds — the practical read is that cheap fast crops fund the expensive slow ones, not the other way round.

Two rules decide whether your farm actually produces:

• Grow time is counted in nights, not days. A 4-night crop planted on day 1 is harvestable on day 5.
• Unwatered crops do not die, they just do not grow. Skipping a watering costs you a night. The day flips at midnight whether or not you have gone to bed.

3. Take Farmer Hans’s first task

Bring one wheat to Farmer Hans at the Farmhouse and The Farmer’s Path completes, which hands you a Grinder and opens Chef Elroy’s recipe shop. That single task is the gate on most early crafting, so do it before you start exploring. The rest of the chain is on the task list.

What to do with the rest of week one

Get the fishing rod. Fisherman Herb gives you the Old Fishing Rod the first time you talk to him at the Lakefront. Bait decides what bites — worms and leeches pull different fish out of the same water. The fish table has every catch by spot with its bait and sell prices.

Start gifting early. Hearts move on gifts, and gift preferences are per-resident with a universal fallback. Because cooked dishes and fish carry a large share of the loved entries, your farm output doubles as your social currency. See the gift guide before you hand over something a villager hates — hated gifts move the meter backwards.

Scarecrows before crows. Crows eat growing crops on plots with no scarecrow in range; fully grown crops are safe. Different scarecrows have different chances to scare them off.

Do not spend keys on the wrong door. The Basic Skeleton Key and the Small Mine Key are consumed on use. The key list says what each one opens.

Combat: the one rule that matters

Walking into a creature starts a turn-based fight. Every enemy has an element and a weakness, and hitting the weakness is worth far more than raw attack. A Shopper on the first mall floor has 28 HP; the same creature deeper in has 40 and hits harder. Check the bestiary for the area you are about to enter, then forge a weapon of the matching type on the crafting page.

Rituals are taught, not levelled. Warp — which sends you home — is taught free by a shopper in the Ultra Video store at the mall. Grab it early; it saves an in-game hour every time you overextend.

Mistakes that cost you days

• Sleeping late repeatedly. Sleep deprivation stacks modifiers the longer you stay awake, and sleep events fire when you finally go to bed. The events page lists what each one does.
• Investigating mysteries with low Luck. Mystery rolls are weighted by Luck and can come up cursed. They also reset every time you take a bath, so they are repeatable — there is no reason to force a bad roll.
• Ignoring the newspaper. News events name a place and a thing to fix. They are a to-do list, not flavour text.
• Selling a weapon you are about to upgrade. Forge lines consume the previous tier: the Iron Staff eats your Copper Staff.

What changes at launch

Everything above is transcribed from the demo build and the community wiki that documents it. The full game arrives on September 10, 2026, and the developer has confirmed two things about it: the demo save carries over automatically, and the game never ends — there is a final boss at the end of the main task line, after which farming and side content continue. Values on this site get re-checked against the launch build in the week after release.