Item farming

Item farming is a term in video games where players fight enemies over and over with intent to amass items that enemy may drop. Item farming is usually done to acquire particularly rare and powerful items that are difficult or impossible to acquire through other means, or for the sake of efficiency and/or cost-effectiveness.
Item farming may also be done to acquire items and equipment not available for purchase until later in the game. In games where items can be found to raise stats, farming such items allows the player to slowly max out their party's stats with patience.
==Appearances==
===Final Fantasy===
===Final Fantasy II===
===Final Fantasy III===
The Steal ability was introduced, which allows items to be acquired in new ways other than random drops.
===Final Fantasy IV===
Items that permanently raise stats were introduced. The Soma Drop increases max MP by 10, while the Silver Apple and Golden Apple raise max HP by 50 and 100, respectively. These items are very rare and are only rarely dropped by enemies.
====Final Fantasy IV -Interlude-====
Stat raising items returns as rare drops from enemies. There are a select few stronger weapons that can only be obtained from enemies in the final dungeon, these are more powerful than the ones found inside the treasure chests.
====Final Fantasy IV: The After Years====
Challenge Dungeons are featured, which reward the party a random treasure at the end of the dungeon. Some of the treasures are not unique, such as X-Potions, which allows the player to repeat Challenge Dungeons as much as they wish to farm them.
In the Wii release, the random number generator could be "fixed" to guarantee a 100% certainty of the enemy party dropping a particular item, as long as the player had their party at the right levels, equipped with the right equipment, and used the right actions in battle. Most documented instances of this no longer work on the PSP version.
===Final Fantasy V===
The Barrier Tower has two monster-in-a-box chests that may contain a Red Dragon battle who has Flame Ring as a rare steal. The player can steal multiples if they run from the battle after stealing and then try opening the monster-in-a-box again.
===Final Fantasy VI===
This game introduced several new ways to farm useful items. Dragon's Neck Coliseum allows the player to bet items and equipment as wagers to win superior items and equipment, allowing the exchange of otherwise unique equipment pieces for others and the upgrading of some purchasable items into better ones.
The Auction House allows certain Relics to be bought, some of which cannot be purchased from shops.
The Ragnarok summon uses Metamorphose when summoned, randomly turning an enemy into one of four items, many of which are otherwise unique and some of which cannot be acquired even in the Coliseum, such as the Growth Egg.
===Final Fantasy VII===
Every enemy in the Sunken Gelnika can be turned into a Source item using the Morph ability, Sources being useful items that increase stats when used. Morph normally comes with a 1/8 damage penalty, making it difficult to finish off enemies with, but Yuffie's Conformer ignores this penalty and does full damage. The Mega All Materia can help this by letting Yuffie use Morph on all enemies at once. Gravity-type attacks and (for Unknown 3 and Serpent) the L4 Suicide ability can also be used to weaken enemies until just one more hit from Morph will kill them.
L4 Suicide can also be useful for morphing enemies in other areas into items, such as the Corel Area's Beachplugs into Turbo Ethers or the Mt. Corel reactor's Bagnadranas into Guard Sources.
===Final Fantasy VIII===
In addition to Mug to steal items and winning items from enemies, Triple Triad and refine abilities allow items to be amassed in new ways. Refine allows the player to turn Triple Triad cards and items into other items or magic spells, which can then be further converted.
Thus in addition to farming items from enemies, the player can use Quezacotl's Card and Card Mod abilities to turn enemies into useful Triple Triad cards and refine them into more items, as well as play Triple Triad to win useful cards. During the endgame the player can challenge the Card Club members aboard the Ragnarok (if they completed the CC quest earlier) and win unlimited level 8–10 cards.
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After Rinoa has learned Angelo Search and she is in the party, Angelo will keep searching for items infinitely many times even in the same battle as long as the battle simply goes on forever. If the player finds an enemy that does not fight back, they can leave the game on, e.g. overnight, to accumulate various items. Enemies that can be used for this are the UFO? special battle above the Grandidi Forest, and LV30+ Turtapod in Esthar City overworld; after the Turtapod takes a defensive stance, the player can confuse it, and it will never take on an attacking phase unless attacked first.
This still works in the Remastered, where the player can also use the x3 speed boost.
There is an exploit in farming the usually rare item Aegis Amulet from the UFO? by defeating it with the auto-triggered Phoenix and then fleeing. The battle is not considered won even if the player gets the battle spoils, allowing for the player to defeat it again.
===Final Fantasy IX===
This game allows Zidane Tribal to use the Detect ability to sense what items an enemy has to be stolen. Because Zidane is almost always in the player's party as the party leader, many bosses have powerful equipment to Steal that will not be available until much later in the game.
===Final Fantasy X===
Enemies can be stolen from multiple times and the first attempt will always succeed, though the success rate of Steal decreases with each success. Items can also be stolen in multiples, making item farming quicker compared to past games. As a compromise, the purpose of most items—to be used to customize abilities onto equipment and teach aeons abilities—often requires several dozen of an item to be done.
Dark Matters, a notably rare item used for customizing Break Damage Limit to weapons and Ribbon to armor, can be farmed in two ways. Since all Monster Arena Conquest enemies drop Dark Matter as a rare drop, repeatedly defeating simple enemies in one hit, such as Vidatu and Sleep Sprout, preferably with the First Strike ability, is a good way of doing it. A fully-powered Masamune comes equipped with First Strike, and its unique damage formula allows it to reliably do 99,999 damage when Auron is at low HP.
An alternative in the International, PAL and HD Remaster versions is to defeat Dark Yojimbo. The player can defeat him four times and then reset the encounters by saving and resetting the game, exiting the Cavern of the Stolen Fayth, or entering the blitzball menu. While this has seven times the likelihood of obtaining Dark Matter (as well as Master Spheres and armor with Ribbon and Break HP Limit), most parties would take longer to defeat Yojimbo once than to defeat a large number of Monster Arena enemies with 99,999 HP or less.
===Final Fantasy XI===
===Final Fantasy XII===
The player can chain enemies of the same type by killing them in sequence without killing a new enemy type in the process. As chain level increases the drop rates of enemies increases and they may drop more than one item at a time. Many areas allow the amassing of items quickly be rapidly chaining like-type enemies in the region.
Item farming is subject to a glitch that allows items to be farmed from unique enemies when normally they could only be Stolen from or Poached once. When the player kills an enemy near the exit of an area and leaves the area before the display showing the Exp and LP won from that enemy appears, they will earn credit for the kill but the enemy will respawn at full health when the player re-enters the previous area, allowing them to stolen from and/or poached again. This also has the effect of allowing otherwise unique enemies to be chained, increasing the odds of their dropping items as described above.
High Arcana is a coveted item for the bazaar. There are couple ways the player can go about farming it. The player could repeatedly steal from Adrammelech, and leave the area and try again, replenishing the Esper's steal stock. The player can also farm it from respawning Rare Game, Etherian being a good choice for how easily it respawns. After Etherian has been killed, the player can simply zone out and return to the area, and it will respawn in the middle.
The player can repeatedly steal Feystones from a Crystalbug by stealing, exiting the room, and returning and stealing again.
In The Zodiac Age version, the player can exploit the auto-save function for item farming. When an enemy dies, the player can collect its loot. With the auto-save, the player can try repeatedly at the same loot till get the loot drop they want. If the loot drop wasn't the desired item, the player can reload the auto-save and kill the enemy again, for a chance if a different loot drop. The player can even time their zoning out of the area so that the enemy only needs one more hit to die. This trick is useful for enemies that rarely spawn or that take a long time to kill.
It is possible to farm items from the Trial Mode in The Zodiac Age version. For example, if the player wants Ribbons from floor 49, they should steal one, beat the floor, and go to the next one. At floor 50, the player should exit back to the title screen, load their game save to lose the trial progress (the player keeps the Ribbon). The player can save their game, return to the title screen, and try the Trial Mode again from floor 49.
===Final Fantasy XIII===
To farm for Dark Matter and Gold Nuggets, the best place is in the valley of Eastern Tors on the Archylte Steppe behind two Long Gui. After killing the three Shaolong Gui there, the player can exit where the save station is, stick to the wall at the right and jump onto it to find one more Shaolong Gui, wipe it out and return to the three newly respawned Shaolong Gui in the valley. It will not be possible to obtain both a Dark Matter and a Golden Nugget at the same battle. Rare drop have higher priority than common and have 5x better chance to drop when the battle is 5-starred.
====Final Fantasy XIII-2====
===Final Fantasy XIV===
===Final Fantasy XV===
The hunt for the cockatrices (accepted from the Crow's Nest Diner at Coernix Station - Alstor) can be used to repeatedly fight cockatrices to farm their crests for an Expericast catalyst for elemancy. The player can lock onto their heads and use weapons good for appendage breaking or simply warp-strike from a distance.
===Final Fantasy Record Keeper===
All enemies have the inherent potential to drop a piece of equipment or a synthesis item, with or without a small sum of Gil, if they drop anything at all. Otherwise, they may drop a consumable such as a Potion or an Ether, which is applied immediately.
As of Series 3, all but five Daily Dungeons have been built for item farming; of those five, two are specific to level grinding, another two are for gil farming, and the last allows the player to amass Gysahl Greens for Fat Chocobo's Gysahl Exchange. Summon Orbs, previously rare and available chiefly in events, can now be obtained in the Netherbeast Cavern on Thursdays.
Category:Recurring gameplay components
Category:Items
Category:Character growth techniques