Dragon Quest Builders 2 gives your green thumb a workout with its new farming features. You can create a grand farm and plant tons of different crops — each one has different requirements, and when you factor in teams of village workers, the system starts to get pretty complicated. If you’re confused, lost, or just want to know why your tomato crops aren’t growing in Dragon Quest Builders 2, we’re digging into the dirty details of the farming system to help.
And there are so many details. Chests are no longer required to store your items, you’ll only need Community Chests now. A Community Chest can be used to share food with your villagers to make them happier, or you can fill a chest with seeds and let your worker bees do all the busy work of planting crops. You can also use irrigation, fertilizer, and fences to further modify your fancy farms.
All-in-all, it’s a complicated little system. Learn about the many ins-and-outs with the full guide below.
More Dragon Quest Builders 2 guides:
The Basics Of Farming
To generate a field, you need a couple of simple ingredients — a scarecrow, a water source, and a seed. As you progress in the story, you’ll unlock characters that join your farm — these characters will automatically till your fields, generate healthy soil, and even plant seeds for you.
Let’s go over the basics of creating a field, and what you can do to improve the fields. There are lots of factors that go into creating a field, and not all of them are obvious.
Creating (And Shaping) A Field
To create a field, you need to play until you’ve unlocked your wormy party member. This monster will automatically make any soil in the scarecrow’s area healthy. A normal field is just a square around the scarecrow, but you can alter the shape of a field easily.
To increase (or change) the size of a field, you need to place wooden fencing around the entire field. You also need to place a wooden gate. If you encircle a field, you can make it as big or small as you want.
You can also easily pick-up and move the scarecrow to re-summon your worm friend and get him to re-dig any dirty he might’ve missed. Scarecrows have another important ability — you can use them to automate planting.
Harvesting Your Crops
There are only two things you need to know about harvesting — use your melee attack (not your hammer) to harvest, and each seed will only grow a certain amount of times. Seeds will not grow new plants forever, so it’s a good idea to leave some of your crops sitting until you need them.
If you want to re-collect seeds, you can use your hammer to knock out tilled earth blocks with seeds planted. When using your sword, you won’t cut down crops that are still growing. The only way to remove crops-in-progress is with the hammer.
Planting Seeds & Your Village Helpers
Seeds are rare items — they don’t last forever, so you’ll need to use seeds wisely. On the first island, you’ll encounter five types of seeds; cabbage, wheat, sugar cane, tomato, and pumpkin. Some types of seeds will only grow under specific conditions. We’ll discuss the specifics of growing each type of seed in a different entry below.
When hunting for seeds, you’ll eventually unlock a dog companion. This proud pooch will sniff out nearby seed locations. When he finds glowing spots, use your hammer to smash through the ground to dig these seeds up. If you’re in third-person mode, use [L2] to aim down.
To plant a seed, you need healthy soil (which will automatically occur once you have your worm party member) — you’ll also need tilled earth and water. Villagers will automatically till the Earth and collect water from a nearby water source to water your plants. Rain will also water your crops!
To speed up villagers, there are two tricks you can use — setting fields to specific crops, and using irrigation.
How To Make Villagers Plant Crops
To get villagers to plant crops for you, you need a Scarecrow and a Community Chest. After placing a Scarecrow, interact with the scarecrow and select any crop you’ve grown and picked so far. If you want to plant seeds you haven’t picked yet, just plant one yourself and collect it — that will unlock the seed as a crop.
Once a field is designated to a specific crop — pumpkins, for example — your villagers will begin planting empty tilled earth blocks with pumpkin seeds. You need to place pumpkin seeds in a Community Chest near the field.
How Irrigation Improves Your Farm
Your villagers will automatically collect water from your water source and water your fields. But, you can automate the process with irrigation. Dig a ditch and every block of earth adjacent to water will automatically become hydrated. This will save your villagers a lot of time every day.
Even if you don’t want to dig irrigation so it touches every part of your field, it’s still handy to have water sources that are even closer for your NPC farmers to use.
How To Plant Specialty Seeds
Most plants just need water and time to grow in a healthy field. There are some seeds that won’t grow under normal circumstances — on the first island, that’s the tomato crop and the sugar cane crop.
- How To Grow Sugar Cane: Sugar Cane needs to be planted under water. Dig a ditch and fill it with water, then plant your Sugar Cane seeds. They need to be submerged under one block of water to grow.
- How To Grow Tomatoes: Tomatoes need Planting Poles to grow. Place a Planting Pole on every block of tilled earth where a tomato seed has been planted.
Fertilizer & Worm Food Will Help You Grow Much Faster
Fertilizer is a concoction that you can place to grow your crops even faster. Worm Food is a special item you can place to turn an entire field into green, fertile grass. To craft these hard-to-get items, you need Grass Seeds, Wheat and Night Soil.
- How To Get Grass Seeds: Dropped by Muddy Hands — these enemies spawn in Furrowfield Bog.
- How To Get Night Soil: Build a restroom (place a hand towel and a pot in a small room) and your villagers will make use of the facility. Periodically stop in and interact with the pot to collect a stack of Night Soil.
Combine the two, and you can get Fertilizer, which makes the area effected grow x4 times faster.
