The Harvest Time

The harvest time.

(-)

[client]

At last, the time of harvest has come. It is by no means a job that I alone can handle. You get [###] gold pieces and ores if you can gather grown crops weighting [###]s.

Requirements

When you accept this quest, you will be transported to a large area filled with crop fields, pots, weak monsters, and a storage box. You have to pick the crops and drop them into the box (open it). Your ability to harvest is determined by your STR stat and your Gardening skill.

It is difficult to successfully complete this quest with less than 15 STR or high speed (although there are additional benefits that still make it worthwhile, even if if you don't succeed). It is a lot more efficient to harvest just one large crop (which are found towards the edges of the map, apparently with little relation to where the delivery chest is spawned) rather than picking smaller crops near the delivery chest, this is useful to know especially when you have low STR and no gardening skill. The crop types and size ranges are shown below:

Size	Cherry	Lemon	Grape	Lettuce	Apple	Strawberry	Melon
Extremely mini	0.1s	0.3s	0.4s	0.5s	0.5s	0.5s	0.6s
Small	0.3s	0.7s	0.9s	1.1s	1.2s	1.2s	1.5s
Handy	1.0s	2.1s	2.4s	3.1s	3.4s	3.4s	4.0s
Rather big	2.1s	4.3s	4.9s	6.3s	7.0s	7.0s	8.2s
Huge	3.6s	7.3s	8.5s	10.9s	12.0s	12.0s	14.1s
Pretty Huge	5.6s	11.3s	13.1s	16.7s	18.5s	18.5s	21.6s
Monstrous-size	8.0s	16.1s	18.7s	23.9s	26.4s	26.4s	30.9s
Bigger than a man	10.9s	21.9s	25.3s	32.3s	35.8s	35.8s	41.8s
Legendary-sized	14.2s	28.5s	33.0s	42.1s	46.6s	46.6s	54.4s

There is a time limit of 120 minutes in-game before the quest expires and you are transported out. If you succeed, you will be rewarded by talking to the quest giver. If you harvest significantly more than the amount required, you will get bonus gold. This bonus appears to be calculated as a percentage of the original reward (maximum is 3x gold reward if you deliver 3x the requested quota). Therefore, low-level harvest quests will yield lower bonus gold. The only penalty for failing this quest is fame loss.

Note that if you fulfill the quota early, leaving the quest area will nonetheless cause you to fail the quest; you have to wait for the time to run out to get your reward.

This was changed with 1.66, now exiting early counts as finishing also.

Tips

• Drop everything you don't think you'll need to use in town (which should be little more than basic equipment, and maybe a rod of teleport or monster ball if you feel lucky regarding capturing a silver cat) - you won't be leaving town long, so you shouldn't see anything swept up until you get back. Unless you have hundreds of ranks of Weight Lifting, you'll need all the cargo capacity you can get for the harder missions.

• Gardening makes picking up food faster, and this quest gives massive training to gardening. This skill will be useful in the future when you'll have your own farm.

• Keeping two or more aggressive pets around helps keep the random critters from interfering with your gardening. You will have monsters suddenly greet you while picking up heavier crops.

• It is more time-efficient to find the huge crops at the edge of the map and bring them back than it is to pick the tiny crops near the center. A couple of the largest-sized crops on a map are all you generally need.
• Note that there is apparently some correlation to where crops of the largest size spawn and where your character and the delivery chest spawns; you'll almost certainly find the largest crops at the NE, NW, SE and SW corners. Use magic to reveal the map just as you start to help you locate the fields closest to the corners, although you may still get unlucky and run into light crops like cherries or lemons.

• If you are overburdened, you will take damage that interrupts your ability to harvest, so be sure to deliver those crops off as soon as you get too burdened. It can be rewarding to save the heaviest crops for the last ones you pick from a bunch, as they will be the one to catapult you into the heavier penalties. Remember to NOT drop harvested crops on the ground, or you'll have to harvest them again.

• You can use spells/rods of teleportation to quickly reach the edges of the map or repeatedly use the spells/rod to try to get closer to the bin.

• Speed is very helpful to complete this quest, as it reduces the time passed in the game whenever you harvest or walk. Speed boosting equipment or riding a fast pet are recommended.
• If you drop any of the vegetables you've harvested, you'll have to harvest them a second time to pick them up again: this can be useful if you have already reached the quota and feel like trading a potential bonus to the reward for some extra Gardening training. The heavier the vegetable you use for this purpose, the better.
• If you're hungry, you can eat the vegetables on the ground with no penalty for doing so. The size of the vegetable has nothing to do with how filling it is - that is, not very. Be warned: some are cursed and will cause you to drop into hungry, or worse, starving. Also note that in vanilla Elona, you can't eat the traveler's cargo food, even though you appear to be on the surface.

Other Benefits

Yowyn has a lot of Harvest Time quests, which are a great choice as first-time jobs, especially when you're struggling to find other easy jobs such as Ecologist, Book delivery, etc. You may fail some harvest time jobs if you have low strength, but keep harvesting and you'll eventually be able to clear them.

Harvesting crops greatly boosts your strength. It also increases constitution, willpower, perception, learning, and gardening. It's a good idea to do harvesting missions early on to boost your stats into the high 20s or 30s.

One common enemy found during Harvest Time quests is the hermit crab, which may drop the <Unknown Shell>, a precious equipment that raises defense and increases your Faith skill without the need to train it, which will instantly grant you enough max favor to get a God's pet.

Additionally, there are pots scattered randomly throughout the fields which can be looted during the quest. These pots typically have potions and scrolls, including sometimes rare or valuable items like scrolls of faith, oracle, flying, or potions of mutation. They also occasionally have ammo or even furniture.

Further, they can have fruit trees with harvestable fruit (or whose trees can be pickpocketed), and very weak enemies for the "challenge rating" of the quests, with few enemies that would challenge even a level 1 little girl pet.

In short, new players can benefit greatly from doing as many of these as possible. If the player is unable or unwilling to harvest, they can instead aim to loot the pots scattered throughout the quest to make a potentially large sum of money early on, provided they can deal with the wildlife, as a multitude of scrolls can spawn, including oracle and flying.

Elona+

In Elona+, in addition to the other items you get as a quest reward, you'll get plant seeds, which lets any character run a farm, not just those who worship Kumiromi. The type of seed rewarded is random but slightly influenced by your gardening level.

A random number is generated between 0 and (79 + gardening/2). The addition from gardening is capped at level 60, where the number will be between 0 and 109. In some cases a second number is generated between 0 and 1 which is used to add a little more variety to the reward

Random Number	Second roll	Seed Type	Amount
X >= 90	0	Herb	3
	1		2
90 > X >= 70	0	Unknown	3
	1	Magic	4
70 > X >= 50	N/A	Gem	4
50 > X	0	Fruit	5
	1	Vegetable	5

Gathering more than 1.25x the required amount of weight will add a bronze coin to the reward.

You can now leave the map after meeting the quota, to quickly finish your task.