Moonlight Peaks farming is the main point and core gameplay of the game. It is standard farming sim stuff: dig, plant, water, harvest. But Blood Grapes replace turnips, and you’re casting spells instead of just refilling a watering can. So it’s more gothic. Here’s everything you need to know about your farm and livestock.
What You’ll Read:
How to Get Farming Tools & How to Plant Crops
Your uncle Viktor is the one who teaches you to farm. You get these tools on a quick-access wheel (hold the right shoulder button on Switch): shovel, watering can, axe, pickaxe, scythe, a broken wand.
Your first quest is to grow Blood Grape seeds (which takes 5 days) and turn them into red wine. Dig a patch with the shovel to plant the seeds and water them every night. No hoe here, just the shovel doubles up!
You have to water every crop every night, and the watering can isn’t always precise about which squares it hits. So make sure you water everywhere. Lastly, refill at the river until you’ve built a well.
Moonlight Peaks has a four-month calendar, and each month is a season: Spring, Summer, Fall, and Winter. Most crops only grow in specific seasons. But unlike most farming sims, if a crop is close to harvest when the season changes, it doesn’t just wither. The ripe fruits drop, and anything not near harvest dies and needs to be cleared.
Farming Time Management
Clearing land costs stamina, and there are a lot of trees and rocks scattered over your starting plot. So you’ll finish your stamina before evening even hits (at least I did). Eating refills it, but early recipes are limited, and buying premade food is expensive. So what can you do?
Foraging flowers and beach shells costs almost no stamina and is an easy way to scrape together gold before your farm generates real income. Don’t hoard them for later; you’ll need the cash now. Wood and stone, on the other hand, are worth holding onto.
One in-game day is 15 minutes by default, but early on, you unlock the option to shorten it to 10 or stretch it to 25 minutes. If you run out of stamina entirely, you can always sleep, but you won’t wake up again until 6 p.m. the next night. Because you know, you’re a vampire.
Read our Moonlight Peaks Stamina Guide to learn how to manage your stamina in 2 minutes!
Pro-Tip: Plant during a Full Moon, and your crops come in noticeably faster, so that’s your window for rushing anything high-value. And New Moon nights (on the other hand) should be for plants that prefer the dark.
How to Unlock Magic Spells
You can use your wand after the Dinner Party event. After that, Luna notices your wand is broken and points you to Sabrina. Although it’s actually Noel who fixes it at the end, with duct tape! All of them are Moonlight Peaks Bachelors, by the way. I’m just saying.
Your first spell is Aquaflux, the self-watering can mentioned above. To cast any spell, you pull up the wand’s circle menu and trace the correct shape with the D-pad (handheld) or your joy-con/mouse (docked). Forget a pattern? Check your spellbook under the ‘-‘ menu.
Growing Magical Crops
Regular watering cans don’t work on Magical crops. They need Aquaflux, a spell you unlock later. This spell has a mana bar below your stamina, and it only refills by one star per night of sleep. Food and drinks that restore mana exist, but they’re rare early on. So you can’t just spam spells like Harry Potter. It can also water your regular crops. But that’s like washing your car with bottled water!
Magical crops also have their own quirks. Some, like a Venus flytrap, need bugs or fish fed to them instead of water. Others act like a sprinkler and water the crops around them, while a few do the opposite and dry out nearby soil. It’s fun to experiment with them. So just plant and watch what happens.
Using the Hellkitten Morph for Farming
There are four event strings tied to unlocking a Hellkitten morph: A Bridge Too Far, Tension in the Crest Garden, A Croak and a Crest, and The Dinner Party. Once you’ve finished these, you can turn into a Hellkitten by pressing the left shoulder button on the wheel.
How is that useful for farming besides being cool? Well, you move noticeably faster, and if you press Y, you dig patches of dirt without a shovel, at a fraction of the stamina cost.
How to Build a Barn and Raise Animals
You need a barn to own animals. Buy one from Ridge with coins and materials. Once it’s built, you can buy animals from Luna. Moonlight Peaks animals are basically regular cows and sheep who went to a Halloween party. They are called Cheeken, Draculamb, Cowcula, Stoney, Rabbicula, and Piggoat.
Animals give you milk, wool, and fertilizer, and the fertilizer alone is worth it since it increases crop quality. They are also very easy to care for. You can stack several days of food at once to feed them and pet or collect products like wool and Cowcula milk through the dialogue menu.
Other Moonlight Peaks Farming Features
Luna also hands you the blueprints for a herb garden, a drying rack, and an enchanted mortar through a letter. Don’t place herb gardens against each other. Each one has four sow spots, and if you box them in side by side, you won’t be able to reach all four.
A bee hive is available early, too. Put it in the middle of your fields for better access. Plus, you get to watch the bees work in the beehive. Once you’ve planted crops, grab a scarecrow from Viktor’s suggestion and place it nearby. It only protects a fixed area, so place it close to what you’re actually growing.
Making a Profit: Processing Crops and Machines
Raw crops barely sell for anything, so I recommend processing everything. The keg turns Blood Grapes into wine (slow, high value) or juice (fast, lower value). The same goes for turning milk into cheese or fruit into jam. Although I recommend always keeping at least one grape aside for Orlock before you keg the rest.
Other machines expand what you can make: the refiner turns wood into planks and fiber into fodder. The furnace makes charcoal from wood and bars or glass from ore. The jam maker needs sugar for every recipe, which isn’t easy to find early on, so it’s mostly unused at first. The mana extractor, once unlocked, helps you refill that mana bar faster than sleeping alone.
Once you produce products, you can sell everything through Chester, who is a living chest, by the way. Also, don’t forget to pet him/it. (I dare you.) By now, you should be rich enough to ignore diamonds.
If you’ve made it this far, you probably got the hang of Moonlight Peaks farming. But I know there are still lots of details that you might want to know. So write your questions in the comments. OH, and by the way, what’s your farm name? I’m looking for cool ones.
