Guide

Introduction
This guide serves players through the first stages of the game.

The game also has in-game help, which progressively grows as you unlock more features. It is recommended to read the different help dialogs in the game as well, they are their own guide. Any dialog that appeared, will become available under "help" in the game settings. The more you play, the more topics appear there.

Obviously this guide contains spoilers! It's up to you whether you like spoilers or prefer to avoid them, this guide is roughly in chronological order so it's possible to read up to the part you're interested in. It's possible some sections occur earlier or later than you encounter them in the game since the order in which things happen may depend on what your strategy.

Just Starting
At the start of the game, you have an empty field. The goal at this point is to collect enough seeds to plant your first crop. Click the ferns that spawn until you have 10 seeds.

With 10 seeds, you can plant your first crop, a watercress. The watercress will continuously produce seeds, but will wither after a while. Plant 5 watercress, and the first upgrades will unlock. You can upgrade watercress production for 100 seeds.

At this point you can upgrade the watercress production to get more seed income, and you can plant the entire first full of watercress to receive an achievement. Achievements give a small production boost.

The goal now is to reach 1000 seeds, which allows you to unlock the first permanent plant, the blackberry. Permanent plants don't wither like watercress do.

Initially the blackberry is relatively expensive compared to watercress, so keep planting more watercress and upgrading watercress in addition to a few blackberries to get the best income. After a while, you can save 10,000 seeds and upgrading blackberries becomes possible, and there comes a point where the blackberries give more income than the watercress do.

At that point, watercress take on an entirely new function in the game: copying income from other plants. If you plant a watercress next to a blackberry, it will copy the production. Copying works best if there is only 1, or 2, watercress in the field. If there are more watercress, they get overwhelmed and don't copy as much. A good layout at this point has 4 blackberries surrounding a watercress, and more blackberries in the rest of the field.

Now it's time to save up 40K seeds to unlock the next berry, blueberry. Unlocking blueberry becomes worth it once the blackberry upgrade is more expensive than 40K.

Blueberries are similar to blackberries, they just produce more, and are more expensive. You can replace blackberries in the field by blueberries by deleting the blackberries first, or using the "replace" option in the dialog you get when clicking a blackberry.

Mushrooms
After you plant your first blueberry, two new unlocks become visible: champignon and cranberry. The aim now is to unlock the champignons, a new type of crop: mushroom. Cranberry is just a more expensive berry similar to blackberry and blueberry.

Champignons produces spores, rather than seeds. But champignons must be planted next to a berry, and will consume part, or all, of the seed outcome of that berry. So a champignon can't be planted alone, ensure there's at least one berry next to it. Ensure there are also berries that don't touch champignons, to ensure you get some seed income you can use for upgrades and more crops as well.

Once you have a successful champignon, the tree will notice the spores, and a digit "0" appears below the tree. Spores make the tree level up. Initially this goes very slow. Aim for getting cranberry unlocked, and plant a cranberry next to the mushroom: the blueberry doesn't produce enough seeds for the mushroom to have full production capacity. The cranberry, however, does. Upgrading the mushroom is useful, but only once it has enough seeds available: upgrading the mushroom not only increases its production, but also its seeds consumption. Once you have a cranberry, you can easily upgrade the mushroom, making sure to also upgrade the cranberry if the mushroom starts to consume too much.

Once the mushroom produces enough spores, the tree will start leveling up to level 1, level 2, ..., but the cost increases 9-fold each time, so reaching higher levels is hard for now. For now, the tree gives a small production boost whenever it levels.

Flowers
After you plant your first cranberry, two more unlocks become visible: clover, and currant. Currant is another more expensive higher tier berry, and clover is another new type of crop: a flower.

Aim to get enough seeds to unlock and plant a clover: when you plant a clover, it will increase the production of its 4 neighbors. Ideally, each clover should touch 4 berries, and each berry should touch 4 clovers, when possible, to maximize production. Similarly, plant clovers next to the mushroom to increase its production. Clovers also increase the production of the mushroom, so ensure the berry the mushroom gets its seeds form also has clovers.

So there are a lot of different neighbor-interactions in the field now, here a summary so far:


 * Watercress next to berries effectively doubles the production of each berry. This also works with a mushroom by the way, but is not recommended. Also, ensure to have no more than 1 or 2 such watercress, more get penalized.
 * Mushroom must be next to a berry to consume seeds and produce spores that level up the tree
 * Clovers must be next to berries and mushrooms to boost their production

Leveling Up The Tree
The goal now is to keep leveling up the tree, and unlock higher tiers of berries, mushrooms and flowers.

As the tree levels up, it drops a new resource, called resin. You cannot use it yet now.

As the tree levels up, it will unlock several upgrades and abilities:

At level 2, it unlocks the sun ability. This is an active ability that can be activated at any time, but then has a cooldown to recharge, increasing berry production.

At level 3, it unlocks the "fern choice" upgrade, this allows to choose between either more resources per fern, or have the ferns spawn less often, which is more suitable for more idle play.

At level 4, it unlocks mist, which is another weather ability similar to sun, increasing mushroom spore production, without increasing their consumption.

At level 5, it drops a fruit. Fruits are a new type of item, with their own inventory in a new tab labeled "fruit". Fruits have a random set of abilities. You can keep a fruit active in the "stored fruits' inventory, by highlighting the triangular arrow above it. The boost described in the fruit is then active, and increases your production, weather, growing speed, or whatever other effect your fruit has. Better fruits will drop later. Fruits are described more later in this guide, since at this point you have only one and cannot upgrade it yet.

At level 6, it unlocks the rainbow ability, another weather ability that boost flowers, and so indirectly boosts both seeds and spores at the same time.

At level 8, it unlocks another choice upgrade, "weather choice". Here too you can choose between a choice for more active play, and one for more passive play.

At level 10, the tree unlocks transcension. At this point, you can choose to transcend, described in a next section, or continue playing more. Transcending will unlock the resin, for ethereal uses.

You can choose to play more without transcending for now, but leveling up the tree will go slower and slower, and next berries/mushrooms/flowers that unlock get less and less affordable.

It is possible to reach tree level 15 in a reasonable time, though consider transcending already anyway, since transcending makes it easier to reach level 15 next time.

When is a good time to transcend? usually when the amount of resin/hour starts dropping. You can see the resin/hour value in a tooltip over the resin indicator at the top of the screen, or in its dialog when clicking it.

Nettles
Nettles unlock after you planted your first second-tier mushroom, the matsutake.

Nettles give a boost to neighboring mushrooms, and only to mushrooms. They hurt other plants instead! Don't touch berries or flowers with nettles if you can avoid it, because flowers and berries will lose significant production capability.

Nettles are very good for mushrooms though: they boost the production without increasing mushroom consumption.

In addition, the nettle boost is its own separate multiplier from flowers. That means that you should aim to get both a nettle and a flower next to a mushroom. A mushroom without both flower and nettle will significantly hold you back, in this game you must always use all multipliers you can get in combination, not including one will be like playing the game with an entire series of upgrades missing.

The ethereal farm discord contains channels dedicated to field layouts, to find good possible ways to place those mushrooms, nettles, flowers, berries, etc... together.

Transcension
Transcending will restart the game from scratch, with the field with all crops, crop upgrades, seeds and spores reset to zero.

However, you will receive the resin that the tree produced, and unlock a new ethereal field, in the ethereal field tab. The ethereal field allows to plant ethereal crops, that give permanent benefits to the basic field.

The ethereal field never resets (unless you choose to rearrange its crops yourself), it will last through transcensions.

If you transcended at level 10, you should have around 10 resin now. This allows to plant an ethereal blackberry, or an ethereal fern. The ethereal blackberry is recommended, as this will give a 25% boost to the seeds production in the main field. The ethereal fern gives some starting resources, which slightly speeds up the beginning part of the game where you have to collect ferns. This one is more of a quality of life thing to get a bit later, the blackberry is more useful for your second run.

If you transcended at a level higher than 10, you may have more resin, if you have more than 20, you may be able to plant both an ethereal blackberry and fern, or plant a single ethereal mushroom, or plant a single ethereal blackberry (or fern) and do one ethereal upgrade (see next section). The mushroom is not recommended, 20 resin can be better spent, berries are usually better, the mushroom becomes worth it once the berry gets too expensive, given that each ethereal berry makes the next one one expensive.

In the ethereal field, you can always delete crops to get 100% of the resin back. However, you can only do a limited amount of deletes per day (it uses ethereal delete tokens). This encourages some planning of your ethereal field layout, but still allows to change it when really needed. You cannot delete a crop that you planted during this transcend, so it's not posible to plant an ethereal fern now, collect its 10 seeds, and then delete it again to plant an ethereal blackberry instead.

After you planted the ethereal crop, you can play the main game again, to reach tree level 10 again, a bit faster now thanks to the ethereal boost. Not only the ethereal berry gives a boost, the transcension also gave an achievement that gives another 10% production boost, and if any resin remains, the unspent resin also provides a small boost.

The ethereal clover and white lotus are good, but more expensive, so it takes several more runs before you can start affording those. The flower boosts flowers in the main field, while the lotus boosts the ethereal crops in the ethereal field. So the lotus acts like the flower does in the main field, but then to ethereal crops: ideally, your ethereal field has an alternative checkerboard pattern of lotuses and other crops (berries, mushrooms, basic flowers), but lotuses get very expensive very fast so this is only feasible much later in the game.

Ethereal Upgrades
After you planted your first ethereal crop, the ethereal upgrades tab unlocks. This is another kind of thing you can spend resin on. Unlike the field, resin spent in the ethereal upgrades tab is permanently lost.

If you spent all your resin in the ethereal field, you can't do an ethereal upgrade yet now, but after next transcend you can. For 10 resin, Basic tree boost bonus is worth it, the season upgrades work as well but only work 1/4th of the time.

Eventually, you'll want to unlock the mistletoe for 25 resin (see a later section). And once you manage to collect 100 resin, you can get the 6x6 field size. The 6x6 field size is good, but don't drop everything to get that one, it's not worth deleting all your ethereal crops to afford the 6x6 field because then you'll be filling the 6x6 field with low production crops.

Seasons
As you notice after transcending a few times, the season changes every day. Each season has its own special properties:


 * Spring: spring gives a boost to flowers, so indirectly boosts both seeds and spores production
 * Summer: this boosts seeds only, summer is an ok season to get seeds for getting higher level crops, but not the best season of the lot
 * Autumn: autumn boost everything mushroom and mistletoe related. Mushrooms produce more spores without consuming more, and mistletoes produce more twigs (see next section for mistletoes). This season can speed up twigs collecting (see next section)
 * Winter: this seems like a harsh season: only crops next to the trees do well, crops not next to the tree produce less. However, with ethereal winter upgrades, this can become one of the best seasons: not only is the winter tree warmth boost quite large, but in addition the tree produces more resin in winter. Winter requires a different field layout than other seasons, due to the tree warmth effect.

You can upgrade the seasons with ethereal upgrades. This improves their effect significantly. These upgrades are very much worth it, but just remember each one is only useful for 1/4th of the game, since the other 3/4th are other seasons.

Mistletoes
Once you unlock mistletoes, you can get twigs.

You unlock mistletoes for 25 resin as an ethereal upgrade. This is very much worth it. Once you got mistletoes, they unlock in the main field whenever you plant a blueberry. Mistletoes must surround the tree, and having more than one will reduce the resin income and increase the spores cost for leveling the tree.

When the tree levels up with mistletoes active, you get twigs. Twigs will level up the ethereal tree. Twigs act like the spores do in the main field, but instead the act upon the ethereal tree, and stay through transcensions.

Leveling up the ethereal tree will unlock new ethereal crops, and new ethereal upgrades. It's a slow process, but its' worth it.

During autumn, it's worth surrounding the entire tree with mistletoes, autumn then gives a large speedup in leveling up the ethereal tree.

To progress, keep doing runs, ensure to plant at least 1 mistletoe (and as many as possible in autumn, but perhaps none in winter) until reaching ethereal tree level 1.

Fruits and Fusing
Fruits drop at every tree level that ends in 5 (level 5, 15, 25, ...). Higher level trees drop higher tier fruits: initially zinc and bronze fruits, but later on silver, electrum, gold, ... fruits. Higher tier fruits have more abilities and higher boosts for the abilities.

TODO: essence, fusing, ...

Rocks Challenge
TODO

Beehives
When you reach daisies in the game, you unlock the bee challenge!

The bee challenge guide: TODO!

When you successfully finish the challenge, you get beehives! Beehives will unlock every time after you planted a daisy from now on. Beehives boost flowers. So now the neighbor interaction is: beehives boost flowers, and flowers in turn boost berries and muchrooms. This changes what an optimal field layout looks like.

The ethereal farm discord channel contains dedicated to field layouts for your field size, with and without beehives.

Ethereal Tree Level 1
TODO

Automaton and Blueprints
TODO

Ethereal Tree Level 2
TODO

Auto-upgrade
TODO

Ethereal Tree Level 3
TODO

Auto-plant
TODO

Ethereal Tree Level 4
TODO

Auto-unlock
Auto-unlock combined with auto-upgrade and auto-plant allows completely automated runs, from start to the point where you want to transcend

TODO