Rune Factory: Guardians of Azuma Village Guide

Our Rune Factory: Guardians of Azuma Village Guide will go over how to improve each of the four villages, including what you get for levelling each.

Quicklinks: Basics | Farming | Villagers

Village Building Basics

As you progress through the early story in Rune Factory: Guardians of Azuma, you'll unlock the ability to run four different villages. Each has its own level and stats, which much be increased separately alongside your usual adventuring.

Your ability to house more villagers and increase building space is capped by your Village Level, which increases as you complete Village Missions. These are small goals, ranging from harvesting specific crops to increasing a village's Scenic Score.

Village Dev Zones

Building in each village is limited to Dev Zones. These are shown by green squares on the map, and are the only places you can actually place new buildings and other items. The amount of zones goes up as the village level increases, with Autumn Village containing the larges areas for building.

To actually build inside Dev Zones, you must equip the Terra Tiller, the Sacred Treasure you receive during the quest The State of the Village. This also lets you see the current Village Bonuses, like extra stats and the limits for buildings and decorations.

For farmland and other natural building spots, you must speak to Woolby with the Terra Tiller equipped while in a Dev Zone. Otherwise, buildings and decorations require a carpenter to make. While you can add these to all villages, Takumi in Spring Village is available from the start.

More recipes for buildings and decorations unlock from increasing Village Levels, finding Frog Statues out in the wild, and completing certain Ema Requests.

Stat Bonuses

Most buildings and decorations come with various stat bonuses, either to villages or the player directly. However, you can only gain this bonus for the first time it's placed in a village. This means you'll want to place the same building or decoration across multiple villages.

However, some only give this bonus when placed in a specific village. You can see which villages can make use of the building by looking at the icons shown in its info page. There are four possible icons, one for each village, and these show which village to place buildings in.

These icons start grayed out, but will light up once the building or decoration is placed in that village. 

Scenic Score

Scenic Score is a general value assigned to each village based on the buildings and decorations placed in it. Unlike stat bonuses, you can keep increasing Scenic Score by placing multiple of the same item in a village.

However, you can gain even more Scenic Score by paying attention to the categories given to buildings and decorations. Shown in the info screen for each item, placing multiple different items of the same category in one Dev Zone will give your Scenic Score an extra boost. 

Increasing Village Level

Village Missions are the only way to increase a village's level. These are made up of simple tasks like "Kill X monsters" or "Harvest X crop", with more unlocking at higher Village Levels. Village Missions are retroactive, meaning that you'll likely automatically complete a bunch of new missions that unlock after increasing the village level.

Once you reach enough XP to hit the next level, talk to that village's god to receive the rewards. If you don't want to search for a god, you can interact with the sign that's places outside their shrine to summon them.

Higher Village Levels increase the cap on villagers, buildings and decorations. They also unlock new building crafting recipes, plus the occasional tool upgrade recipe. 

Farming

Normally a fairly important part of your daily routine in Rune Factory games, farming in Guardians of Azuma is generally passive thanks to villagers. You'll still want to grow crops to increase Village Levels, and many are used in different cooking recipes.

Most crops and flowers require Field tiles, which can be crafted by Woolby. The exceptions are Rice and Sticky Rice which need Rice Paddies, the recipe for which unlocks as you progress through the Autumn Village story.

After placing Fields using the Terra Tiller, you can plant seeds from the build menu. Interacting with a planted crop will also water, though this only works one square at a time.

However, you have a number of ways to speed up farming. As mentioned earlier, you can assign villagers to farming. This means they'll not only water and harvest crops, but also replant them again (you always get seeds back when harvesting crops).

In addition, some of the Sacred Treasures you unlock in the story also have uses for farming:

• Sacred Drum - Speeds up crop growth by 1 day
• Sacred Sword - Can be used to destroy a crop and gain lots of seeds. The seeds have a chance at being 1 level higher
• Sacred Fan - Harvests multiple crops at once
• Sacred Parasol - Waters multiple crops at once

Villagers

Villagers are the key to village autonomy. You can only give them a few roles to start with, with more unlocking as the story progresses.

Each villager has different stats, determining how efficient they are at jobs. However, their most important aspect is Qualities. Certain villagers require specific Qualities to run certain facilities (e.g. Journeyman Smith to run a Smithy), while others give big boosts to specific jobs.

As you reach the current villager cap for a village, you can evict the low output ones via the villager menu. This lets you wait for more, potentially better villagers to move in — this isn't actually necessary in the grand scheme of things, and is something you only need to worry about if you want max efficiency.

Villager Jobs

• Farming - Will work the fields, harvesting and replanting crops when needed. Farmers prioritise replanting crops with the same type.
• Logging - Collect wood. Very useful as building and decorations generally use more wood than stone.
• Fishing - Collect that season's specific fish.
• Mining - Collect stone and ore.
• Herding - Can be assigned to barns to collect monster drops.
• Trading - Can run facilities. Some facilities can only be run by villagers with the right Quality.

The items farmers, fishers, and herders obtain each day will automatically be placed in the shipping bin. You can take these out of the shipping bin before the end of the day if you want to keep them.

Villagers assigned to trading will automatically generate money each day, on top of the profits made from selling items.

That's all for the basics on improving villages in Rune Factory: Guardians of Azuma. Make sure to check out more of our guides for the game below.