Gaming How-To

How to Farm Flax in Valheim and Make Linen Thread

Where flax grows in the Plains, how to replant it with the Cultivator, and every recipe it feeds into.

Where flax grows in the Plains, how to replant it with the Cultivator, and every recipe it feeds into.

Flax is a Plains-tier crop and one of the harder resources to lock down early, because it grows in only one place in the wild: the cultivated plots inside Fuling Villages. Once you have a single stalk, you never have to fight for it again, since every plant you replant returns two Flax when it matures.

Quick answer: Raid a Fuling Village in the Plains, take the grown Flax, then replant it on tilled Plains soil with a Cultivator. Each plant yields 2 Flax after roughly 2–3 in-game days.

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Where to find Flax in the Plains

Flax only appears in Fuling Villages inside the Plains biome. When you reach one of these goblin settlements, check the small patches of cultivated land around the huts. A planted plot holds roughly 15–20 stalks, and each grown stalk gives 2 Flax when harvested.

These plots grow either Flax or Barley, and Barley is far more common. Flax is the rarer of the two, so you may need to clear several villages before you find a patch of it. Chests scattered around the villages can also hold Flax, so they are worth opening while you are there.

Fuling Villages are guarded by multiple Fulings and are very dangerous. Bring your best gear and eat strong food before you commit to a raid.

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How to start a Flax farm

Because Flax is scarce in the wild, set aside your first batch for planting instead of spending it. Unlike carrots or turnips, Flax needs no seeds — you plant whole stalks directly, and each one doubles into 2 Flax. Save at least half of every harvest for replanting so your supply keeps growing.

Flax will only grow in the Plains biome. You can till soil and plant it anywhere, but it will refuse to mature outside the Plains, so your farm has to sit in that biome.

Craft a Cultivator. It is made at a Level 1 Forge using Bronze and Corewood, and it is the only tool that can till ground and plant crops.
Use the Cultivator like a hoe on a flat piece of Plains dirt to turn it into tilled soil.
Use the secondary action button for the Cultivator menu, select Flax, then plant it in tilled soil. Space the stalks by at least 1 meter; planting them closer together prevents growth.
Wait for the plants to mature. Full growth takes about 4000–5000 seconds, which is roughly 2–3 in-game days. Grown Flax passes through a blue-flower stage before it is ready to pick.
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Fulings and other Plains monsters can smash your crops, so protect the plot. Enemies do not spawn inside the area of effect of a workbench or stonecutter, and keeping open ground to a minimum limits spawns, so build your base tight around the field rather than off to one side.


Harvesting Flax for the best yield

Fully grown Flax is harvested by damaging it, which opens up two approaches with a real trade-off. Area attacks such as the Stagbreaker, Iron sledge, or an Atgeir secondary swing clear a whole field fast and lose no Flax in the process.

The catch is that AoE harvesting grants no Farming skill experience and never triggers the chance for extra yield. Picking by hand or using a Scythe is slower but keeps both of those bonuses, so it can produce more Flax over time.

Image credit: Coffee Stain Publishing via YouTube/@Shift2Run: CO-OP Gamers

What Flax is used for

Flax is a crafting material, not food. Its main job is producing Linen Thread, which drives most Plains gear and stays useful for the lighter armor of later biomes. It also feeds a building recipe and can be used to tame Lox.

UseWhere / howInputs
Linen ThreadSpinning Wheel1 Flax per thread
Straw (decoration)Workbench1 Barley + 1 Flax
Tame LoxFeed to a LoxRaw Flax

Linen Thread and the Spinning Wheel

To turn Flax into Linen Thread, build a Spinning Wheel with your Hammer. It costs 20 Finewood, 10 Iron Nails, and 5 Leather Scraps. Drop a stack of Flax into the wheel and collect the finished thread once it has processed.

Linen Thread is the gate to the Padded Armor set, the top-tier armor for this stage of the game.

Padded pieceLinen ThreadIron
Padded Helmet1510
Padded Cuirass2010
Padded Greaves2010

Linen Thread is also needed for a Lox Saddle, which requires 10 Leather Scraps, 20 Linen Thread, and 15 Black Metal. The saddle turns a tamed Lox into a fast, high-health mount.

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Taming a Lox with Flax

Raw Flax works as food for taming Lox, but Cloudberries are generally the better choice because Flax has greater value as a crafting material. Sneak toward a herd and scatter food nearby. When a yellow marker appears, the Lox eats and taming begins.

Feed the animal about once every 10 minutes and stay within 64 meters without drawing its aggro. Full taming takes 30 minutes, cut to 15 with a Brew of Animal Whispers. If a red exclamation mark appears, back off and let the herd calm down.

Because natural Flax spawns are rare and Fulings will trample an exposed field, the simplest long-term routine is to keep a small, well-walled plot in the Plains and always replant part of each harvest. Do that and a single stalk from your first raid can supply every batch of Linen Thread you will ever need.