Welcome to my little guide about the Island Sanctuary Farm in FFXIV. It’s a simple system, but hey, it’s easy to miss a few bits of knowledge here and there. Here we discuss the:
Updated Jan 17 ’23: Patch 6.3 Adds 2 more types of seeds, which will ultimately affect the “best” setup suggestions. I had to restructure completely how this data is delivered to you… Hopefully it makes sense.
FFXIV Island Sanctuary Farm – Basics & FAQ
In a nutshell, you plant seeds, you water your plants (”once a day”), and after a few days you will get the corresponding island sanctuary produce – 5 pieces per full grown plant. Plants will not grow if dry. Rain waters all your plots automatically. Eventually, you can leave them to mammet caretakers for a daily fee.
That’s basically it! Now, for the usual questions…
How many max plots will my Island Sanctuary farm have, eventually? You get 5/10/20 plots at rank 3/4/9.
How many types of seeds / produce are there? See: Seeds, produce and locations. Used to talk about this here and in other guides, but just decided to make a small place to consolidate the info.
How often should I water plants? Once a day is fine – you can get caretakers later on at Rank 9 to do that for you. Plants only grow if they’re watered. Raining weather also waters your plots as a bonus.
How often can I harvest? Every few human days. Caretakers do this for you too – and can store a maximum of 50 produce units before stopping care.
Do plants die out? From what I hear, yes. A fully grown plant that’s not harvested will die off in a few days. This should happen very rarely if ever at all, especially with caretaking.
Best Island Sanctuary Farming Setups
There are many different phases your farm will pass – changes will be on the number of plots and number of seeds available to you. One concept we will be using forward, no matter your level (if you’re past the 10 plot stage) – is the Mahiko Special.
Best farm setups? Enter: the Mahiko Special!
The Mahiko Special aims to do 3 things:
- Go out and gather seeds as little as possible.
- Have as little brainpower used when choosing which produce to make feed.
- Get as balanced an output as possible
Using these “Mahiko Special” rules, we can logically find a good baseline “best” setup for each 10+ plot farm setup!
20 Plot 12 Seed Farm Setup (Rank 11+)
At Rank 11+, you need to shift it up a bit. Here’s 2 variants for 20 plot, 12 seed type farms.
| Seed | Type | New Rank 11 | Balanced |
| Parsnip | G | 1 | 1 |
| Cabbage | G | 1 | 1 |
| Popoto | G | 1 | 1 |
| Pumpkin | G | 1 | 1 |
| Isleberry | V | 1 | 2 |
| Onion | V | 1 | 2 |
| Corn | V | 1 | 2 |
| Wheat | V | 1 | 2 |
| Paprika | V | 2 | 2 |
| Leek | V | 2 | 2 |
| Radish | V | 4 | 2 |
| Tomato | V | 4 | 2 |
New rank 11 variant: In this case you plant a little extra Paprika and Leek since they’re “new”. Radish and Tomato (just an example, use any buyable seed) are your feed-making pairs. Once you have enough Paprika and Leek, I suppose you then have “2 extra free slots”. Plant any other 2 extras, or further beef up your feed-making pair. This TRIES to get as close as possible to the tenets of the Mahiko Special. It technically does.
Balanced: Having a little bias AGAINST the gatherable seed, you can have a pretty balanced output for the remaining buyable seeds. You don’t have a “feed-making pair” here, but some people don’t really care about that.
20 Plot 10 Seed Farm Setup (Rank 9 to 11)
At Rank 9 to 11, you’ll have 20 plots, and 10 seed types. Here’s 2 variants for you to start out from.
| Seed | Type | Mahiko Special | Balanced |
| Parsnip | G | 1 | 2 |
| Cabbage | G | 1 | 2 |
| Popoto | G | 1 | 2 |
| Pumpkin | G | 1 | 2 |
| Isleberry | V | 2 | 2 |
| Onion | V | 2 | 2 |
| Corn | V | 2 | 2 |
| Wheat | V | 2 | 2 |
| Radish | V | 4 | 2 |
| Tomato | V | 4 | 2 |
The mahiko special is completely fulfilled with this setup. In this example, Radish and Tomato are used as your feed-making pair, and using only a minimum of 1 of each gatherable seed. Neat!
Balanced is, well, balanced. Straight up 2 of each produce type. Weirdly, I didn’t like this at all. It might be alright for you though!
Best 5 or 10 plot farm setups?
Best farm setup for 10 plots? Since you can gather up Island Parsnip and Popoto seeds at this point, you probably want to do a 2/2/2/3 split between the three types of plants you can grow. Sadly, you’ll be at this point for a long while until the next upgrade.
Best farm setup for 5 plots? Since you can only plant 2 types of produce during this phase, you’re forced into a 3/2 split of Pumpkin and Cabbage. You won’t have 5 slots for long so don’t sweat it.
Any nuances to these farming setups?
Well, this even split will work for a vast majority of people. I can see only two “options”, and they’re not even that big of a deal.
Note that this knowledge is pretty irrelevant to most people
if you’ve read all of the above.
The mahiko special can of course be edited for the “feed creating pair” to be any number you want. 3/3 is the minimum I’d say…
You have some special “workshop rotation” that completely ignores some produce types (or you want to fulfill the above requirement also, while doing this). In which case simply plant more of the produce you want and go to 1 or 0 on the rest. I can’t really recommend a setup for this for obvious reasons as it changes from person to person.
Island Sanctuary Farm Caretakers – how does it work?
At Rank 9 you can enlist the service of farm caretaker mammets (Just like your pasture). These guys do a couple things
- They water and harvest the crops for you.
- They keep up to 50 units of harvested produce for you for each plot (then they forcibly stop caretaking if you don’t offload ‘em)
- They automatically replant the seed IF YOU HAVE IT IN STOCK.
You can only tell them which seed to plant on which plot at the start of caretaking services. SImply end and restart the caretaking if you want to change it up.
You cannot “kill” a plant that’s currently under care.
These mammets take a load of your mind, for the low cost of a few cowries everyday per plot.
Island Sanctuary Farming Basics and Setups – Navigation:
Farming Basics & FAQ | Best Setups 5/10/20 plots | Farm Caretaking FAQ
Summary and Outro
Well that’s about it. The farming system in your FFXIV Island Sanctuary isn’t all that complex but it wont harm anyone for me to put all I know about it here. The biggest nugget of knowledge I can share here IMO is the “Mahiko Special” up there – unbiased of course.
Check out these closely related links: Animal Feed , Seeds and Produce , Rank by rank Walkthrough
Learn moreabout FFXIV Island Sanctuary!