Welcome to Elderfield Walkthrough Part 1: Difficulty and Day One

The opening comes down to three decisions: difficulty, whether to keep the tutorial, and what your character looks like. LoiChainz’s first episode (20m43s, 11 September 2026) walks through all three, and along the way it confirms a rule most players miss: difficulty can be lowered later from your bed.

So do not overthink the first run. Pick what looks reasonable, and turn it down if it bites.

Pick anything, you can change it later

In the episode the streamer scrolls the settings and lands on “We’ll do normal for now”, keeping the tutorial on.

The more interesting find comes from another playthrough recording, where the game’s own text is read out: A difficulty setting can be decreased later from the player's bed.

That changes your opening strategy: start a notch higher than you think you want. Approach this as a farming game and the standard difficulty will surprise you. Start on the softest setting instead and the only way to get the tension back is a new save. Going down is always available; going up is not.

One more thing people miss. Difficulty is not just enemy damage. Another streamer read the screen out item by item: gold loss percentage, progress rolling back to the last manual save, autosave progress being erased, enemy stats, enemy experience. It also decides what dying costs you. That breakdown is on the first-days page.

Character creation is thinner than you expect

The streamer’s words: there's actually not a lot of customization, but it is cool that there's like a little portrait.

You get hair, hair colour, body and face, a couple of colours, and a small portrait that shows up in dialogue. Do not expect depth. For anyone who hates character creators, that is a good thing - two minutes and you are playing.

Day one, in order

Going through the episode, the first day runs roughly like this:

1. Watch the intro and keep the tutorial on. Work out which key handles the hoe, the watering can, planting and sleeping.
2. Break your first plot near the house and plant whatever you can afford. Early crops are your only steady income.
3. Cycle into town and meet people. The more residents you meet on day one, the faster later quests open up. Most of this episode is exactly that.
4. Get home before dark and sleep. Sleeping is how you advance the calendar, and the calendar decides when the Tax Man shows up.

If this is your first run, read it alongside the beginner guide. That page explains why the systems work the way they do; this one covers what the episode actually did.

Early combat: run when you should

What actually stops the streamer is how dense the combat is. This is not a minigame bolted onto farming. It is a full turn-based RPG.

After launch, a Steam player wrote up two full playthroughs and put it well: you start with “no allies, no magic, no armor, and no weapons except a stick”. On easy he died twice, but “had a lot of close calls”.

His second lesson is the one worth copying: do not force fights. Fleeing costs a die roll, and healing comes from herbs and cooking. On day one your money is better spent on tools and seeds than on healing items. His second run came down to one line - play it like an old JRPG and standard difficulty is “actually not that hard”.

What this episode does not cover

Twenty minutes covers the opening, not the whole early game.

For the long unedited version, see live part 1. Farming and mining hands-on impressions are in part 2. The full Tax Man mechanics are on the Tax Man page.

The video

Embedded above: Is this the scariest farming game ever? | Welcome to Elderfield Let’s Play by LoiChainz. The “scariest farming game” hook is channel packaging; the game bills itself as a cozy horror RPG.

Facts checked 2026-09-16. This video has only two comments (one viewer, one channel reply), so the player-side notes above come from a Steam discussion write-up on the same topic rather than from padding out this video’s comment section.