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Len’s Island: how to start and tend to the farm of your dreams

Len’s Island shows you how to fight and lets you explore to your heart’s content, but let me show you how to farm.

Developed by Flow Studio, isometric survival and building game, Len’s Island even has a farming system. Unlike its combat or gathering systems, there’s no pop-up tooltips that tell you how to get started, or what tools you might need. If you’re anything like me, you might have missed something. Something pretty damn important.

One of the only problems I ran into when starting to build up my base in Len’s Island was, embarrassingly, working out how to farm. For hours on end I waited for my precious blueberries to grow, only for… nothing to happen. I even tried building a well and endlessly clicking on it in the hopes that it would magically grow my berries.

But finally, lo and behold, the answer was right in front of me. The whole time. If you’re in the same boat and unsure of how to get your Len’s Island garden thriving in general, I’m here to help.

Len’s Island farming: the essentials

Start with a house. It doesn’t have to be a mansion, or overly fancy with ornate walls. It can be as simple as two wooden square foundations. No walls, no windows, just flooring. Slap those bad boys down. Throw a bed in there while you’re at it, and save your game.

Next is the workbench, your first priority. This will let you start learning how to craft new things different doors or a sword or a watering can. And if you’re wondering, yes, this is exactly the tool I needed and completely missed. To build a workbench you’ll need 12 spare parts, 10 plant fibres, and 50 wood.

After that, let’s throw some Wood Frame Farms down. Each one lets you plant 9 seeds at a time, at the cost of 1 plant resource (be it roses, blueberries, etc.). These cost a mere 15 plant fibres and 30 wood each. Cheap, easy, and upgradeable later.

You’ll want a Basic Watering Can next, which can be learned through the workbench. It’s the second tab at the top and in that smaller menu, the second tab to the right. Creating one of these costs 8 plant fibres, 15 wood, and 5 iron shards. No shards, you say? I’ve got you covered.

If you haven’t snagged any shards just yet, there’s three solutions. You can dip into town and pay for some at the Blacksmith, which is the quickest and easiest method, if expensive. Or, you can dip down into the caves. Here there are certain rocks embedded with smaller, sharp rocks, which you can mine for stone and iron shards straight away. Alternatively, you can also mine for some coal (which has round rocks embedded into the stone instead) and create a Refinery.

I’d recommend the latter. A Refinery will cost you 80 stone, 35 spare parts, 25 coal, and 25 wood. Refineries make your life a lot easier, considering you can just chuck some plain stone in with some wood and cook your own iron shards whenever. Limestone also creates glass and clay gives you gems to sell, so this is definitely the best long-term solution.

Last, but probably most importantly, you’ll need a Bore Well. Once your watering can is equipped, one click of your well will fill it up entirely for use. These cost 10 limestone, 50 stone, 15 wood, and 25 plant fibres to create. Not too bad, if you ask me.

https://twitter.com/Jade_Playsgames/status/1462489260209192975

Semi-automatic watering

So you’ve got all that covered already? Oh, alright. But have you started streamlining things? If not, I’m about to make your life so much easier. Len’s Island has the niftiest little system that’ll cut your farming time in half. If not more.

Upgrade your workbench to level 2 firstly. That’ll cost you 40 plant fibre, 200 wood, 70 spare parts and 45 iron shards. Once you’ve managed that, you’ll need to learn the Water Tower piece from it, which should cost around 5-10 spare parts.

Building one of those is pretty easy, now that you have that refinery from earlier. 65 iron shards, 80 spare parts, and 300 wood is a cakewalk. Just make sure you put the tower down next to your well and your farm frames.

To fill the tower, just equip your watering can, fill it up from the well and click the ‘fill’ button after pressing on the tower. Rinse and repeat until it’s completely topped up and you’re free to leave your crops alone for a few days. Just remember to resupply that water tower every so often.

Fully automated watering

Okay, so, disclaimer: I haven’t actually managed this yet myself. The last piece of this little puzzle is the Windmill structure. So far, I haven’t been able to track down where to learn it from. Mostly because upgrading my workbench to level 3 (the maximum), hasn’t given me the option. Either way, the system supposedly works as follows:

Place the windmill near your tower, farms, and well. This will make the well fill the water tower automatically and voila, your crops will be forever nourished. The windmill is also used to grind your wheat into flour and if you’ve got a fireplace, you can turn that flour into bread.

Bread is probably the best thing you can sell (that you can grow) in town for a pretty penny. If you want to get rich quick, I’m betting this is one of the most effective ways.

What should I plant?

You’ve done all of the above, or as much as you can manage, so what happens to your Len’s Island farming now? You’re looking to maximise your profits. I hear you. I have a solution for you too.

The Florist will buy all three flower types (Lavender, Roses, and Marigold) at 5 flowers for 5 coins. Simple enough to remember and a decent way to make money to start with. The Farmer’s Market works a little differently, but I’ll make it easy for you:

Item Quantity Price
Blueberries 5 3
Wheat 5 3
Bananas 5 4
Grapes 5 5
Passion fruit 5 5
Watermelon 5 5
Pumpkin 5 5
Bread 1 4

Blueberries grow the fastest for an early monetary gain. You can use the money you make with them to purchase things like pumpkins and watermelons which take slightly longer to grow, but have a much greater yield. The best, of course, is going to be bread. Not only for delving into the cave depths, but if you’re making enough wheat, you’ll be making a lot of coins too.

Hopefully all of this helps you get started on your farming adventures, and your more combat-based ones too! Having so much food on hand will absolutely make life easier in the long run. So get growing!

 

Len’s Island is available via Steam for PC and Mac on November 26.