Outside of battling beasties and curating crops, one of the things you can do in Square Enix’s exciting RPG slash farming sim is hang out at home and make stuff. This is where Harvestella’s crafting comes in, letting you combine different materials to make something greater than the sum of its parts. Just imagine Animal Crossing, but also everything outside the island is just awful.
Or, imagine Rune Factory, which is a very similar concept, as you can see in our Rune Factory 5 review. If you’re not into the farming life, we’ve got more action coming to our Switches on the Nier Automata Switch release date, or you can check out our Nier Automata 2B and Nier Automata 9S guides if you’re a little unsure what’s going on with those weird robots.
Now, let’s get into the good stuff.
Harvestella crafting
You gain access to crafting relatively early in the game, when Cres teaches you how to use the workbench in your house. At the start of the game, you don’t have access to many crafting recipes – just essentials like the return bell that gets you home in a jiffy, and the hammer that you can use to break up small rocks on your farm.
As you progress, you learn new crafting recipes along the way, such as the repair kit that fixes bridges, and the bomb which blows up path-blocking boulders.
Crafting can only be done at the workbench in your house, and every recipe requires a specific set of materials. Each item you craft takes time, but not in the traditional sense. There’s no sitting around watching a progress bar – in fact, it all looks pretty instant on your end. But when confirming a crafting session, the game tells you how long it will take, and then the in-game clock skips forward by that much. So be wary when crafting large batches of items – you can waste a day very easily!
That’s all we’ve got on Harvestella crafting for now, but we’ll be sure to update this guide as we find more recipes. For more handy info, check out our Harvestella jobs guide to get to grips with the different roles you can play.