Dragon Nest (Part Five)

Farming, Fishing & Cooking

Once you've reached level 24 and arrived at Saint Haven, you will then be able to access the Farming District via the Channel List.

Activities you can do in this farming district includes farming, fishing and cooking. And the general idea behind these activities is that you grow and fish for ingredients which are used in cooking various kinds of food items.

These food items, when consumed, will in turn bestow upon your character various kinds of effects such as recovering HP/MP and giving temporary boosts to stats. But before you can start doing these activities, you will need to find the Farm Manager and pick up the quests he gives in order to get the respective "Secondary Skills" (Farming, Fishing and Cooking).

Farming

The first few things you will need before you can go out to plant your first crop are the following:

• Sickle - You will need this tool in order to harvest your crops. Once you've acquired one, there is no need to buy any more of it as it lasts forever.
  
• Seed - Naturally, you can't grow anything without its seeds right? Anyway, there are all kinds of seeds you can buy from the farm manager. Each of these seeds will produce ingredients you would need for a particular kind of cooking recipe. And the way things work, each of the seeds would have a certain farming level requirement before you can grow them and they would all have varied growth durations before you can harvest them.
  
• Watering Can - There are three sizes of watering cans, small (restores 100 water), medium (restores 1000 water) and large (restores 100000 water). These watering cans are used to replenish the "water reservoir" of the crop to prevent them from dying. And the way these watering cans work is sort of like HP and MP potions. Each time you use one of these watering cans, they will restore the said amount of water into the crop's "water reservoir".
  

In essence, the farming system kind of works like the popular Facebook App called "Farmville".

Anyway, once you've bought the necessary items from the farm manager, you will then need to proceed to the portal as shown above to enter a farming zone. Although there are quite a few of these farming zones, it is shared with all the players of Dragon Nest so most of the time, you won't be able to find much space for you to grow your crops. Hence I need to remind you not to buy too many seeds or you will have trouble using them up.

Once you've managed to find an empty plot, click on it and the seed planting window will pop up. And upon selecting the seed to plant, you will then be able to see the current status of your crop as shown above. The last thing you would need to do is to watch over your crop and prevent it from dying due to a lack of water. You can do so by replenishing its water reservoir with a watering can.

Upon finishing its growth cycle, the crop will then become ready for harvest. And after you've harvested the crop, it will then appear in your farm storage and stay there for 15 days before disappearing. To access this farm storage and retrieve your crop, just visit the "Farm Manager" which can be found in the same zone.

Watering Can Conversion Table

Watering Can	Time increase in
	s	min, s	hr, min, s
Small	10 s	-	-
Medium	100 s	1 min 40 s	-
Large	10000 s	166 min 40 s	2 hrs 46 mins 40 s

Due to the difficulty in knowing how much water you will need for a crop, I have supplied the above conversion table for your ease. Basically, you will just need to know the difference in time between how long your water reservoir can last and the time until harvest. From there, you can roughly know the quantities and types of watering cans you will need to feed your crop with.

In the above example of the Red Beard Seed, there is a 6 second difference. This means that I need to add in water to sustain the crop for at least 7 seconds more. To do that, I can just use a small watering can and it will increase the time the crop's water reservoir can last by 10 seconds (which is more than enough time for the crop to fully mature).

If the time difference is in the range of minutes, I would suggest that you use the medium watering cans. And if its in the range of hours, the large watering cans would be your best bet. Although you technically just need enough water in the crop's reservoir to last 1 second more than it takes for it to mature, I would personally rather you add too much water into the crop's reservoir than adding too little and have the crop die.

The above screenshot is a small test I did. I had added just enough water to the crop's reservoir so that it lasts just as long as it took to mature but in the end, the crop failed to mature and still died instead.

Lastly, you can add in more water to the crop's reservoir so long as its current water amount is less than the maximum it can hold regardless of the size of the watering can (even if it means that it will overshoot the maximum). However, once it overshoots the maximum, you will not be able to add in any more water until it once again becomes less than the max.

Fishing
To do some fishing, you will first need to acquire a fishing rod and some bait from the Farm Manager outside of the farming zone (the one where you buy tools, seeds and recipes).

After purchasing some, head back into the farming zone and then move over close to the edge of the river. Next, open up your skills window and look for the "Secondary Skills" tab. Click upon the "Fish" button to initiate the fishing sequence.

There are two kinds of fishing sequence, Auto and Manual. Auto fishing is great for leaving your character to fish without you watching over it while manual fishing's advantage is that you can fish faster.

As you can see, in both of the images, there is a yellowish bar that increases slowly. The moment it fills completely, your character will then be allowed to pull the fishing rod up and obtain any fish or item (if any). For auto fishing, this will be done automatically while manual fishing would require that you right click on the mouse to do so. At any point in time, you can switch between the two fishing sequences via the button in the middle of the fishing window, but please note that when you do so, you would lose any progress you had on the yellowish bar.

The tip to increasing the rate at which this yellowish bar progresses (while fishing manually) is to watch out for the second bar below it. While this second bar is increasing, whenever you click and hold the left mouse button, the progress on this second bar will stop and start to decrease instead.

And on this second bar, there are three zones, two blue (left & right-most) and one red (middle). So the aim is to time when to click and hold the left mouse button, so as to maintain the progress within this "red zone". The better you are at it, the faster the yellowish bar will fill up. And that's basically how the fishing system works.

But apart from knowing how to fish, you would also need to know where to fish in order to get the kinds of fishes you would need as ingredients for a particular cooking recipe. And to know that, you would need to find one of the signboards as shown in the above picture.

Basically, the whole farming zone has four fishing districts labelled No. 1 to No. 4. And each of these districts would hold their own kinds of fishes (which may or may not be in common).

As you can see, there are three grades of fishes that you can get, "Magic", "Rare" and "Epic". In each of these three grades, there are a number of fish's names. Each of these names represents a different fish that is part of a particular cooking recipe.

The general idea is that you cannot control which particular fish you want to get. Additionally, you will require higher fishing levels in order to get a more decent chance of getting the rare and epic grade fishes. So in the end, you will just have to bring in tons of bait and then keep on fishing in order to get a decent quantity of the fish that you want as ingredients.

Cooking
Cooking, in my opinion, is most probably the easiest of the three activities. For once you've acquired all the necessary ingredients, all you have left to do is to click away mindlessly to produce the end product (food item).

Before you can start cooking, you will first need to purchase some extra items (apart from the ingredients), namely, cooking utensils and cooking recipes. These items can simply be bought at the same farm manager which sells you your farming tools and seeds.

Next, you will then need to add the cooking recipes to your cook book. You can do so by calling out your secondary skills window (just like when you did for fishing). Now, click on the "Cook" button instead of the "Fish" button and then add the bought recipes to the list of dishes you can cook.

After adding the recipes to your cook book, you may now proceed to making these dishes as long as you have the necessary ingredients in your inventory.

My last word of advice for you with regards to cooking is to pay attention to the ingredients required. As far as I know, seasonings can be bought at the farm manager where you buy cooking utensils while broths need to be made via cooking.

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