Harvest

Harvest is a gardening mechanic (thankfully a lot less gardening than when it was a league) where you enter a sacred grove and kill plots of monsters to collect lifeforce, a currency used at the Horticrafting Station or sold directly at Faustus. It is now one of the lower investment mechanics to run and pairs well with other strategies without taking up many scarab slots.

3.28 Changes

The most popular Harvest strategy from previous leagues, using the Horned Scarab of Awakening combined with the atlas map craft of imbued harvest to get massive crop rotation explosions has been removed.

Harvest without awakening is still viable. Crop rotation remains intact and doubling is still strong as long as scarab costs are reasonable. The ceiling is lower but the floor is relatively unchanged for low investment.

How Harvest Works

When you encounter a Sacred Grove in your map you enter a separate garden instance containing plots of monsters in three colors: yellow (Vivid), blue (Primal) and purple (Wild). Killing these plots drops lifeforce.

Each color of lifeforce corresponds to different crafting options. Lifeforce sells quickly at Faustus making it a reliable and consistent currency source.

Sacred Blossoms drop occasionally from unique harvest monsters (tier 4 seeds) and can be sold or used to access the Oshabi boss fight which drops Crystallised Lifeforce, also sellable at Faustus. Oshabi frequently drops Shako which makes the fight worth running just for the fun of ID'ing a shako.

Strategies

No Crop Rotation

The simpler approach. Enter the grove, pick whichever plot looks best, kill it and collect lifeforce. No special decisions required beyond choosing the highest value plot available. Good for players who want harvest rewards without learning crop rotation.

Crop Rotation

When you kill a plot of one color there is a chance to upgrade plots of all other colors. This creates a compounding effect where killing smaller plots of colors you do not want boosts the plots of the color you are targeting.

Kill the colors you do not want first to boost the color you are targeting, then collect the upgraded plots at the end. Crop rotation is not complicated once you run a few groves and get a feel for the layout scouting.

Personal note: Harvest pairs well with other strategies as map layout is irrelevant to harvest success, the grove generates independently. Only one scarab slot needed which makes it an easy add to almost any strategy.

Atlas Tree

The atlas tree for harvest has two meaningful decision points.

• Crop Rotation nodes: Fundamentally changes how you run the mechanic. Skip entirely if you are not doing crop rotation.
• Vivid / Wild / Primal Drought nodes: Reduce the chance of specific colors appearing in your grove. For no crop rotation: reduce the colors you do not want to see more of your target color. For crop rotation: reduce the color you actually want to farm so you have more other color plots to kill and trigger the boost. A common setup is to take all three notables going up through the yellow middle path then looping back down on blue and purple.

Scarabs

• Harvest Scarab: Guarantees a harvest encounter. Useful if you are not investing atlas points into harvest chance, but generally redundant if you have the tree set up properly.
• Harvest Scarab of Doubling: Doubles lifeforce from the grove. Essentially mandatory for anyone targeting lifeforce as a primary currency source as long as the scarab cost is in line with lifeforce prices.
• Harvest Scarab of Cornucopia: Guarantees a harvest boss encounter, providing a reliable source of Sacred Blossoms and a solid amount of lifeforce. Does not work with crop rotation.

Complementary Mechanics

• Expedition: Pairs naturally with Harvest. Both mechanics reward high pack size from well rolled maps so you get compounding value from investing in map rolling without splitting your scarab budget significantly. Running both together on the same maps is one of the more efficient hybrid strategies for mid investment farming.