Have you ever played a farming sim like Stardew Valley or Story of Seasons and thought hmmm I need more action? Well enter Sakuna: Of Rice And Ruin a farming sim that’s half intricate rice growing and half frantic 2D combat.

Developed by Edelweiss the developers behind the original Harvest Moon series. Sakuna: Of Rice and Ruin has you play as a spoiled harvest goddess named Sakuna who is banished to an island with a handful of outcast humans. Serving her divine repentance on this mysterious island you have to battle it out with the hordes of demons while keeping yourself fed. And because you’re a harvest goddess your power comes from the harvest of the rice. The better your harvest the more powerful Sakuna becomes.

Sakuna: Of Rice and Ruin has a surprisingly detailed and complex rice growing mechanic. This isn’t some plant and pull kind of farm. Each step of the process from the planting, growing and harvesting of the field is meticulous and important. Affecting how well your crop will turn out in the long run. In this guide, we’ll cover the basics, the steps you need to take and what actions to do to maximise that rice yield.

The Importance of Rice Quality & Quantity

Rice is directly tied to improving Sakuna’s stats, if you want to level up and get stronger you’re not going to by grinding battle levels but by focusing on growing rice instead. The better the quality of rice the stronger Sakuna becomes. But with better quality rice comes a lower yield. You’ll need quality for battle and quantity for trade and food.

The more rice you have the more dishes you can cook and trade with. When you cook and eat you get food buffs which will help you fight off those demons. There are a variety of dishes you can make for different food buffs. Eating dinner every night refills your hunger meter, which serves as your health reservoir. Stay out too long or take enough damage, and your fullness will run out, meaning you no longer regenerate health until you eat again.

Seasons

The game is split into twelve-day cycles, with each season – Spring, Summer and Autumn taking up three. The last three days are dedicated to Winter a non-growing rice season.

In these three days, you need to balance your exploration, hunting and foraging with the rice farming chores back at your home base. Every season has its own steps required to see a bountiful harvest. In Spring you’ll need to make sure your seeds are grown and planted out in the field. In Summer and Autumn, you’ll be maintaining water levels as well as determining what items and enemy modifiers might be found when exploring. Explore too much and you won’t have your rice ready before winter comes.

Step 1: Plough The Field

Remove rocks and plough the rice field with your hoe to prepare an environment where rice can easily grow. The better you plough, the better the rice plant’s roots will spread and grow. And the harder it’ll be for weeds to take root. You’ll want to till as much of the field as well as you can.

Step 2: Sort The Rice Seeds

Prior to placing your rice seeds in the seedling box, you put them in a bucket of water to sort out the seeds. Either use saltwater or mud to sort your seeds and choose how much mud you want to pour into the bucket. The more mud you pour, the higher the quality of the rice will be, as it allows the lower quality rice to rise from the bottom of the bucket. But this does make the yield a little smaller, so you’ll want to decide on whether you want to have more rice or if you’d like to have higher potentials for stat boosts.

Step 3: Grow The Seeds

After the seeds are sorted, the seedlings will be placed in the seedling box and you’ll need to wait for them to grow a bit before they can be planted. You can choose in this case to grow the seedlings thickly with a lesser quality outcome. Or to grow them thinly, further apart resulting in less seedlings but those of a better quality.