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Item Farming - TV Tropes

  • ️Tue Dec 21 2010

Items can be used for many things. But sometimes you need to get a lot of them for various situations. So what do you do? You go Item Farming.

Item farming is where you use various methods to gain items, like killing enemies for their random drops or go Video Game Stealing to grind for various items. This can also include going around and exploring various places to collect items.

Since this is done in almost all MMORPGs, no straight MMORPG examples please. (Notable subversions are fine.)

Sister trope of Level Grinding and Money Grinding. In many cases, That One Component will require a lot of this.

Examples:

  • In the Atelier Series, you need to farm items to find ingredients for your items.
  • In the mid-to-late game of Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night, where money is plentiful and there is comparably little to spend it on, the most efficient way of item farming is to buy items and equipment and then break them down into items with Alkahest to use its base ingredients to make new things. It's also handy for 100% Completion as craftable weapons and items don't get added to the store if you find them — only if you make them yourself.
  • Players in Borderlands 2 can farm for very powerful or useful 'Legendary' weapons and equipment from enemies that usually have ludicrously low drop rates for those items. So it's a bit less boring, there are various involved ways to make the odds of a good item better, for instance feeding kills to a berserk Goliath to make it level higher.
  • Castlevania: Circle of the Moon: All equipment, including spells, is randomly dropped from enemies. To make matters worse, many bosses are very difficult to beat without certain spells or being up-to-date on your equipment. If you want to survive, you can expect to be doing a lot of farming.
  • Happens a lot in things like Farmville and Mafia Wars, you need to repeatedly do jobs to get the loot items needed to do the new jobs. Gets ridiculous towards later goals.
  • Dragon Quest IX has a LOT of this, particularly if you want to get (closer) to 100% Completion. There are locations on the map where items can be collected, reappearing after a while, Random Drops from enemies (including very difficult Optional Bosses), items found in blue chests (some of which have a 1% chance of appearing in Rank 10 chests, the rarest), items obtained from completing quests (some of which require connecting with other players) AND items that can only be found through DLC. And some of these items must then be transformed through alchemy.
  • Dungeon Maker II: The Hidden War: Food is one of the biggest instances, since the players raise their stats by eating and most food items have to be gathered from dungeon creatures. It's also required to grind for items to boost the stats of some items, such as shields and the stat-boosting root sprites. There's also a lot of farming required to gain normal items too, thanks to a system where the drop rate of an item is much lower until after the first time you collect that item.
  • Invoked in Eternal Darkness when a note from Edward Roivas says that you'll have to find 88 keys around the mansion to unlock the next chapter - and you unlock the chapter by closely examining a piano.
  • Earthlock: Weapons and potions are crafted from plants that you harvest at base camp. They drop 3, 6 or 10 items depending on how often you harvest them, and after reaching 10 they will eventually drop a seed for a more powerful version.
  • The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind has an example that crosses over with 20 Bear Asses in the Bloodmoon expansion. An armorer tasks you with hunting Snow Bears and Snow Wolves for their pelts. He will then turn those pelts into Snow Bear or Snow Wolf armor (medium armor and light armor, respectively) which is high quality and comes with a useful Resist Frost enchantment built in. To get both sets, you'll need 22 of each type of pelt. Snow Bears and Snow Wolves are uncommon enemies and are not guaranteed to drop a pelt upon death. Happy hunting.
  • Fate/Grand Order: This is what players do 90% of the time, since skills can only be upgraded by using materials, and many Servants need an obnoxious number of materials. The drop rates of obtaining the materials isn't particularly great, so it takes ages to max out a Servants skills. This trope even applies to Level Grinding, since the only way to level up Servants is by using EXP cards that can be dropped by the Hand enemies. While every Hand enemy that appear in Daily Quests will drop an EXP card, each quest has at least two to three different classes of enemies and they drop only the respective class EXP card, so for cost efficient leveling, you still need to rely on RNG to level up a Servant. Events allow players to farm currency to buy materials from event shops, or play missions to get materials as rewards or fight certain enemies that drop lots of good materials.
  • Final Fantasy has numerous examples of this over its long history.
    • Final Fantasy II has Imperial Captains occupying the city of Fynn, near the start of the game. Talking to one (which you're explicitly warned not to do) initiates a battle and—if you're underlevelled—a prompt reload. If you can defeat them, either by being overlevelled or exploiting Minwu's spells, they have a good chance of dropping a Disc-One Nuke bow or the Game-Breaker Toad spell.
    • One of the earlier examples is the best equipment in Final Fantasy IV—not just the infamous Pink Tails and Adamant Armor combo, but also gear like Crystal Rings, Ribbons, Wyvern Lances, and Dragon Whiskers, all found from rare drops from enemies ranging from semi-rare to ludicrously rare. Also added to this are the Golden and Silver Apples and Soma Drops, consumable items that permanently boost HP and MP. the DS version added even more ludicrously rare tail/armor combos, as well as Rainbow Pudding, necessary for That One Sidequest. Basically, if you are interested in 100% Completion in Final Fantasy IV, you're going to spend a looooooong time parked in dungeons with Sirens.
    • In Final Fantasy V, enemies in the Pyramid of Moore can be farmed for Elixirs, and enemies in the Phoenix Tower can be farmed for the best Dancer equipment and Ribbons.
    • Final Fantasy VI gives us the Ragnarok Esper's special ability, Metamorphosis, which transforms an enemy into an item and is a good source for more rare equipment, like Safety Bits and Ribbons. The downside is that in order to take advantage of this, the player is going to spend a very long time farming on the Veldt.
    • Final Fantasy VII has enemies that can, if killed using the weak Morph command, be turned into items. Most notable in this regard are the Sunken Gelnika enemies, the majority of which turn into valuable Rare Candies that permanently boost stats.
    • Enemies in Final Fantasy VIII can be turned into Cards, which can subsequently be refined into spells that can be junctioned to your characters' stats to boost them and add effects to their attacks and attributes while handily avoiding the Level Scaling penalties—it's a Min Maxer's dream come true!
    • The items you can use to upgrade and modify your weapons and armor and upgrade your Aeons' stats and abilities in Final Fantasy X you can generally only get by stealing from or bribing particular monsters, in addition to the standards drops and whatnot—particularly, Level 3 Keyspheres. If the player didn't take the opportunity to steal a bunch of them from a boss, they're going to spend quite some time in Zanarkand Ruins looking for the monsters that rarely drop them.
    • Most obvious is Final Fantasy XII, in which the only way to get usable amounts of money is to sell loot from monsters. There's also this Bazaar thing, which allows the player to unlock certain maybe rare, maybe valuable items. The best items might require multiples of items only available via the Bazaar, making the full recipe be something like 21 Bear Behinds, 39 Ursus Buttocks, 9 Rare Vicious Monster Ultra Rare Drop Fangs and so on. There is also Zodiac Age version with trial mode, where you can steal various useful things from enemies such as Wyrmhero Blade from Famfrit at stage 50 (ie. available much sooner than in base game), but only with 6% success rate at most.
    • Final Fantasy Tactics A2 uses the Bazaar system for all equipment, but gives no no control over what items you're getting, so it only kind of counts.
    • Final Fantasy XIII is similar to XII in that all money comes from Shop Fodder, and you need certain specific items for Item Crafting—most notably, the catalysts that transform weapons into their ultimate forms. Either you pay millions of gil for a single one of them, or you farm the terrifying turtle monsters, whose rare drop is the catalyst.
    • Final Fantasy XIV plays the trope straight with the rare and exotic items and gear, but the majority of the gear you obtain from quest rewards or dungeon loot are easily obtainable so that you don't have to grind for equipment just to be able to take on the main content.
    • In Theatrhythm Final Fantasy, a Rhythm Game spin-off, playable characters are unlocked by collecting specifically coloured Crystal Shards, which are randomly dropped by bosses in randomly-generated Dark Notes. So if you want, say, Kain on your team, you'll have to be doubly or triply lucky. This is thankfully made easier in the sequel, where the shards are much easier to get (you're guaranteed to get at least 3 from beating most Chaos Maps, you can get an infinite amount of them from Rhytmia rewards and you always get ones you don't currently have all of with the possible exception of Black Shards and if you're not having luck with your own maps, you can always ask for someone to help you by having them attach a map you need which you can then get by playing online with them), you only need half as many to unlock a character in general and you can get several at the same time. Finally, when you collect enough shards to unlock a character, you generally can choose one out of several characters that're unlocked with shards of that color, although in exchange, all the characters outside of the 4 you choose initially need to be unlocked seperately, as opposed to the representative characters of each game being available at the start.
  • In Granblue Fantasy, uncapping characters, (and the final uncaps of weapons and summons) require a number of materials found by completing quests, and defeating enemies... And they are element-specific. Additionally, Showdowns and Events feature items, weapons, and summons which can only be obtained by collecting and trading quantities of event-specific materials.
  • Grim Dawn has Monster Infrequent items that drop only from certain enemy types or bosses. These items have both their own inherent properties and the normal Randomly Generated Loot modifiers, so finding a MI with the right affixes can require a lot of farming. A similar amount of farming is needed for rare crafting materials and components.
  • Zig-zagged in the Gundam Breaker games. Getting parts is relatively easy—they can be broken off your opponents regularly, and destroying an opponent will often reward parts of that machine, and enemies come at you in droves. It's not hard to amass at least some parts of a Mobile Suit by the end of a mission, and if all you want is part of a particular suit, you can buy it in the store after collecting a few bits of it. Building most of the Mobile Suits in the game is not hard. The real challenge is grinding for good parts, because the odds are that any given part that Randomly Drops will be Shop Fodder. At least you can fuse parts together to increase their rarity and transfer abilities between them, but that still requires getting higher tiered parts in the first place to sacrifice as upgrades for the part you want to enhance. The generosity with drops and requirements for fusion will vary from game to game in the series, and as such, so will the amount of grinding required.
  • I Woke Up As a Dungeon, Now What?: Most of this setting's economy is built around harvesting items from dungeons, both by drops from their minions and by loot from the treasure chests. On a couple of occasions, Taylor has to set up operations to let the villagers butcher her minions in an almost industrial fashion because they need large quantities of some specific monster part in a hurry.
  • The Legend of Zelda:
    • This is how boat and train upgrades are obtained in Phantom Hourglass and Spirit Tracks respectively, which imples collecting Shop Fodder. In the former game, fully completing a new set for your ship implies getting eight new vehicle pieces, and good luck repeating the process with every set available. The latter game makes it easier with each train set having only four pieces each.
    • The Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword: Link's equipment can be upgraded in the Bazaar with materials (some of which are gathered while exploring the overworld and dungeons, and others are obtained by defeating certain enemies); namely, you can upgrade your shields, ammunition wallets, and some of your major items. Meanwhile, you need some bugs (and a Net to catch them with) to upgrade your potions. Fortunately, there's an equippable medal that increases the rate of item dropping, while another medal helps you pinpoint the location of insects in yout map.
    • The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild: Gathering field items and enemy drops is useful to upgrade equipment with the Great Fairies, while edible items are collected to cook recipes. You can also use bugs and enemy drops to prepare elixirs that grant buffs.
  • Lufia:
  • Master of the Monster Lair: Owen and Kate raise their stats by eating food. Almost all decent food requires at least one ingredient you can't purchase in town. Half the time, fighting an enemy gets you equipment or Shop Fodder rather than the food you're looking for.
  • Every Metroid game to-date has featured some manner of enemy that infinitely and repeatedly spawns from a fixed piece of level architecture and, typically, hurls itself at Samus, starting with the Zeb enemies from the original Metroid. These things are utterly ideal to use to farm health and missile pickups, especially since the first game lacked recharge points and would start you with only 30 energy no matter how many energy tanks you possessed. Later games have since included places and pickups that fully restore energy, which are placed strategically about levels and often before each boss, but these infinite-spawning enemies persist and are now often deliberately placed in difficult areas to give Samus an opportunity to recharge on the fly.
  • Might and Magic: Some items and all spells can be bought, but most of the cool stuff can only be collected from dead high-level monsters. A twist: monster drops are determined randomly when you loot the corpse, so by saving just before looting, you can reload and try again if you were dissatisfied with the take. If you are determined enough, you can use the fact that some creatures occasionally dropp more than one item (the corpse doesn't vanish after the first drop) to outfit your whole party with super items from one dead dragon... if you have the patience. Regarding spells, there is an exception in VI - the strongest spell of Dark Magic, Dark Containment, can be obtained only from Obelisk Puzzle treasure in single copy. If, for whatever reason, you want more, be ready for some farming.
  • Minecraft:
    • Players who want a reliable food source can set up literal crop farms that can be harvested for wheat, carrots, potatoes or beetroots. There are also pumpkins and watermelons whose harvest can be automated thanks to the magic of pistons. With 1.21 adding the Crafter, which can automatically craft farmed items, a fully automatic AFK Pumpkin Pie farm is entirely possible now, turning said item — which is an excellent food source but so cumbersome to craft it wasn't worth using — into one of the best food sources in the game since it can now be generated in massive quantities by simply building a machine and waiting.
    • Chickens lay eggs every so often, and those eggs have a 1/8 chance of hatching a new chicken if thrown. This means with a gaggle of chickens, a redstone contraption to gather and spit eggs via hoppers and droppers, and some carefully-placed lava, you can have a machine that generates cooked chickens for you and all you have to do is wait.
    • Foxes will pluck sweet berries from their bushes. So by trapping a fox or two in a small enclosure of them, with a minecart hopper underneath to take the berries from the foxes, you'll create a never-ending stream of sweet berries. True, they're trash as a food source but master-level butchers will pay an emerald for 10 and the design is infinitely scalable (you just need to find two foxes, and breeding will do the rest) — this makes them one of the most efficient sources of money in the game barring downright obscene sources like Raid Farms (see below) that are generally Awesome, but Impractical.
    • A similar contraption allows you to trap several villagers and a zombie in an enclosure where said villagers will continually summon iron golems in a "kill box" that guides them into lava and kills them, generating an infinite stream of iron ingots.
    • Players can construct colossal Mob Towers, which are focused mob-spawn areas, and Mob Grinders, to kill off the resulting mobs. These can produce (in extreme cases) hundreds of items per minute and allow the player to just stand there and gain items. The most helpful drops include gunpowder, arrows, and Ender Pearls. Notably, XP is not given, and players either have to modify their designs to only mostly-kill mobs (so the players can land the final blow), or just do without.
    • Monster Spawners, which appear naturally in the game and can spawn zombies, skeletons, and spiders in the Overworld, and Blazes in The Nether, can similarly be used to create Mob Farms by hollowing out an area around it, using water (or lava in The Nether) to guide the constantly spawning mobs into a kill box, and then finishing them off. As Blazes are one of the more dangerous foes in the game but drop the ever-important Blaze Rods used for brewing and getting to The End, this tactic is practically a necessity in a long-term world.
    • For basic resources, grinding materials to build with is generally satisfying as digging for resources is the way to find hidden underground areas. By following a vein of diorite or granite, or digging deep for cobbled deepslate, you run a very strong chance of finding a massive underground area like a Deep Dark with an Ancient City, a mineshaft full of treasure and free mine tracks, a lava lake, or a room full of amethyst. It's actually rather rare to not find such a thing while digging for resources, thus the game handily combines item farming with exploration in this regard.
    • And for the truly decadent, is the Raid Farm. The design takes tons of resources, expertise, and time to put together, to the point even highly-skilled players often use downloadable schematics to build them. The result is a downright preposterous quantity of emeralds and Totems of Undying, so many in fact that you're basically invincible and emerald blocks will become a common building resource for anyone who puts this Awesome, but Impractical monstrosity together.
  • Monster Hunter, in addition to the carves and rewards from hunted Monsters (and severed parts thereof), also has ores, plant materials, fish and insects which need to be mined, picked, or caught during the course of the hunt. Monster Hunter 2 (dos) adds options of the player to hire people to work for you to gather these materials while you hunt, making gaining even rare stuff much easier.
  • Prevalent in Path of Exile. Each Optional Boss has a few proprietary unique items that only they can drop. There are also the Divination Cards, which will drop only in specific area and can be traded in sets for a specific reward.
  • The loot system at the end of a heist in PAYDAY 2 gives either money, weapon mods, masks, or mask mods from picking cards with random results. Players have farmed short and easy heists to get the cards quickly every time.
  • Pokémon:
    • Starting with Pokémon Ruby and Sapphire one can easily re-teach Pokémon moves of their respective natural learnsets, but the NPC's services come at a price: depending on which game you play they want either Heart Scales or Mushrooms. Getting these requires the Player to hunt for either Luvdisc (for Heart Scales), digging them up in the Underground (Gen IV only) or battling Paras/Parasect (for Mushrooms), hoping the encountered 'mon has the desired item and catching them/ using moves to get enemies' items. Given the usefulness of these items, some ambitious move restructuring would involve scooping these little creatures up by the teamful. It was possible to have Pokémon relearn moves in Gen II as well, but it required a N64, Pokémon Stadium 2, a Transfer Pak to transfer your team over, beating the Elite 4 plus Champion using all six of your Pokémon at least once in battle...all for one single 'mon to be able to remember one move and finally transferring your team back to your GB cartridge if you so desired. It's been simplified since, no doubt. Berries come in handy, too, particularly since a Pokémon can use it, rather than forcing you to spend a turn using a Full Heal or other status-healing item. The Lum Berry in particular is useful since it can cure any status problem. Unfortunately, this berry takes several days (in real time!) to grow.
    • There are a few items that some wild Pokémon may hold that are worth farming out, including Shop Fodder, the aforementioned berries and items to trade for move tutors, held items that can make the game much easier, and even in a couple of cases otherwise one-of-a-kind evolution items (like, as of Generation IV, the chance that a wild Relicanth could hold a DeepSeaScale). A player particularly intent on getting those items can do various Elite Tweaks to cut down on how long and how much is spent to farm these (the most popular of which is to put a fainted Butterfreenote  first in the team and something with Frisk and Thiefnote  second).
  • Happens all the time in Ratchet & Clank, especially if you want all the weapons, upgrades, items, and equipment, you need to grind through side games and levels to afford the bolts for everything, lest you want to keep going through New Game Plus over and over. This however is not necessary for completion (though the game will be a lot harder if you've not saved up for the stronger weapons). On the other hand, in several games, you can collect Shop Fodder for money. Ratchet & Clank: Going Commando has two areas where you are required to gather a number of crystals to proceed (ten in the first area then twenty-five out of a hundred in the second area) in order to give these crystals to get required gadgets and level progression. The spare crystals you've not gathered can then be later gathered for money, an amount that's increased tenfold in the New Game Plus. Since Going Commando, the series has worked to alleviate this with the Death Course and Arena battles, which can be refought for extra bolts, and a Bolt Multiplier in New Game Plus, which increases as you kill enemies (but resets when you take damage).
  • A large portion of Recettear: An Item Shop's Tale is geared to item gathering in dungeons. Then there's being selling what you've farmed.
  • Once you get to Chapter 3-1 of Resident Evil 5, the game's difficulty tips its hat and bids you farewell. The chapter starts you out in a vast lake on a boat with tons of goodies and a free rocket launcher to collect and, once you figure out the enemy spawn points, it's entirely possible to go through without encountering a single enemy. All in all you can make close to $25,000 dollars without firing a single bullet and, since the game doesn't take items away when you quit a chapter, feel free to replay it as many times as you want for unlimited money and rocket launchers.
  • The skill system in Rogue Galaxy requires you to find certain items and use them to learn/power up your skills. Most can be found in chests or bought in shops, the rest require you to rely on monster drops. Probably the most egregious example are the Lucky Clover; every character requires several of them (some characters up to a half dozen) and you only find about half of the amount you need during the course of the game. To find the rest you need to kill a specific somewhat rare monster that has a drop rate of less than 5%. It gets even better if you wait until later in the game and go back later. The list of enemies that can be encountered is expanded, meaning that the enemy you want to encounter has an even lower chance of even appearing. (much less dropping anything)
  • Shin Megami Tensei:
    • If you want to make good equipment in Shin Megami Tensei: Strange Journey, you're going to spend a lot of time wandering around looking for forma.
    • Shin Megami Tensei IMAGINE removes the need to farm monsters by letting players gather "remains of Tokyo" (basically, refuse) which can be sold to NPCs or recycled to craft weapons.This is surprisingly the fastest way to earn money:completing a level 70-ish dungeon rewards the player with the equivalent of 20-30.000 Macca, while the same amount can be gathered in about 15 minutes while standing in a level 14 zone.
  • Sonic Adventure and its sequel Sonic Adventure 2 require you to constantly play through old levels to get rings to use as money to buy equipment and items to improve your Chao. Though the Chao themselves are in no way necessary to advance in the game, they are necessary for 100% Completion, and some players are only interested in the Chao to begin with.
  • Often necessary for crafting/upgrading certain items and equipment in Tales of Vesperia.
  • Valheim:
    • Obtaining coal to smelt metal is a time-consuming process (obtained by cooking food for too long, putting wood into a kiln, or killing Surtlings). Since surtlings die if standing in water and their spawn locations are on tiny islands, many players have taken to digging out the area around the flame spouts and regularly collecting the coal that accumulates there.
    • Some enemies regularly spawn from special structures. With low-tier gear, you're better off avoiding them or destroying them for their unique materials, but at higher levels (when you can kill a newly-spawned enemy before a new one spawns) they're a valuable source of raw material, and the main difficulty becomes the enemies accidentally killing their own spawner.
  • Warframehas copious Item Crafting requiring loads of resources that are hard to acquire if you're aren't searching every nook and corner for crates to break and lockers to open. Getting just the blueprints for some of the warframes requires fighting the same boss at least three times.
  • The World Ends with You:
    • Many pins have abysmally low drop rates, but it's very easy to raise the drop rate, by either lowering your own level, or fighting multiple enemies at a time. Once you hit the Absurdly Low Level Cap and pick up the "chain 16" sticker, there are only two drops in the entire game that can't be raised to 100%. The real grinding is Stat Grinding, so that you can actually win the 16-round battles against the most powerful enemies in the game at level 1.
    • You can't replay the game's chapters to get more Scarletites through story events, and you need this item to get postgame improvements (like being able to chain more than 4 battles together). The only way to get more is by farming Dark Matter... which is only dropped by Reaper Beat, Taboo Minamimoto, and Draco Cantus. The first two are HopelessBossFights that you have to WIN this time and the last is the Final Boss, who can only be fought after fighting three other bosses and forces the player to watch the long ending and credits afterwards (except on iOS, which allows you to skip it). To make it even worse, they're dropped in pathetically low percentages on high difficulties, meaning chaining multiple battles is necessary to raise the drop rate.