Resources are the key to almost everything in Clash of Clans. If you want to upgrade any of your defenses, you need a serious amount of gold, and if you want to improve your army with better barracks and unit upgrades, those elixir storages will need some love.
While you can simply let your resource collectors do their thing, they don’t collect nearly quickly enough to make it sustainable in the long term. Early levels are not such a problem as collectors and lower-level multiplayer battles get you enough loot for lower-level building upgrades without too much trouble. But you’re going to run into problems with resources as you progress with this strategy.
This is especially prominent as you begin to acquire more builders. The more builders that you can have, the more buildings you can upgrade at once, but also the more resources you will need to perform these upgrades simultaneously. If you want to be able to utilize all five builders once they have been unlocked, you’re going to need to do more than pick up your daily loot for getting five stars in multiplayer battles or waiting on the collectors.
This is where farming comes in.
What is farming?
In Clash of Clans, farming is the term for looking at bases with the intention of collecting as much loot as possible, often while using as few resources to do so as possible. Depending on where you are with your league, this can be with or without the intention of also taking a star from a multiplayer battle by reaching 50 percent destruction.
Typically, farming is used as a way of gaining resources very quickly, targeting bases that have a high number of resources available, often with the intention of using them fairly soon after acquiring them. This means that not only can you continue to push through upgrades to all of your buildings at a faster pace, but you can keep a minimal number of resources from being lost when you are attacked.
When you have a smaller number of resources left in your storage in your village, it means that when it comes to enemies looking for multiplayer bases to raid, there are fewer resources available for them to take. When there are fewer resources to take, there is usually less incentive for an enemy to attack you, as they’d only typically gain trophies from a successful raid. This means, for example, that you can sleep with the potential that you won’t be attacked overnight.
The numbers to farming
In a raid, there is only a certain amount of resources per storage or collector that is available to an attacker to be able to loot. The collectors (Gold Mine, Elixir Collector, Dark Elixir Drill) offer up more resources to attackers than the storage containers do, but since the containers can hold a much higher capacity, there is potential to take more by targeting the storage containers over the collectors. However, as storage containers are often behind defenses and closer to the center of a village, they carry a higher risk of leaving with less because they often require more advanced troops and tactics to raid effectively.
Town Halls also act as storage to each of the three types of resources, though to a lesser extent than the storage containers. The Clan Castle treasury can also be raided, though the amount available from here is significantly less than the other types of resource holders.
For all Town Halls up to level six, the amount of loot that can be taken from a storage container for Gold and Elixir is 20 percent, which decreases as you gain further Town Hall levels. This is less for Dark Elixir storage, which starts at 6 percent for Town Hall level seven and decreases to 4 percent at max.
Collectors, though, are much more susceptible to being emptied in raids. Fifty percent of the loot from Gold and Elixir collectors can be snatched, while Dark Elixir drills can have a whopping 75 percent of their intake looted. There is a cap to the number of resources that a base can offer up to raids based on the level of storage though, so even if you have an excessive amount of resources, you won’t lose all of them. This means that if 20 percent can be raided from a Gold Storage’s capacity and the cap is at 100,000, this would be the maximum available from that storage if it is holding more than 500,000 in gold.
If you’re unsure of how many resources a particular storage building is holding, you can tap on it and then hit the ‘Info’ button. This should give the amount being held in it.
For Gold and Elixir Storages, the cap looks like this:
For Gold and Elixir held in Mines/Collectors:
For Gold, Elixir and Dark Elixir held in Clan Castles
For Dark Elixir Storages:
Finally, for Dark Elixir Drills:
The numbers above also serve to highlight why rushing to upgrade your town hall, a common occurrence amongst less experienced players looking to get access to more buildings more quickly, can be devastating for your progress. The further behind you are, the easier it is for other players to take any resources that you have been building in order to catch up.
How to know where to raid
Farming resources is one of the easiest ways to grab resources, but knowing what to look for is not as easy as it sounds. Seeing lots of exposed Mines, Collectors and Drills on the outside of the walls is not always a guarantee that you’ll get a good amount of resources from it.
The collectors all fill up over time, and you can see an indication of how full they are by looking into your own town’s collector. If you’ve just collected from it, the collector will look empty, and checking out the info for it will also confirm that it’s empty. This indicator of how full the storage or collectors are works the same for every player’s collectors, even in raids.
An empty collector, where the player has collected the resources very recently, will look like these, where the fill lines for the Elixir and Dark Elixir, and the mine crate is empty:
Conversely, full collectors will like something like these, where it is either full, or the crate of gold is overflowing:
There are levels in between, but the full collectors will show the maximum stored when zooming in close. Storage will be similar, where the storage will have nothing in it if the player doesn’t have any of a particular resource, while if at max capacity, it will look full, or in the case of the Gold storage, almost overflowing.
The collectors are more likely to be targeted as they are usually not behind enemy walls, whilst also offering a much higher percentage of lootable resources, so these will often be the best targets requiring the least number of resources to loot in a raid. Players who either stop playing or don’t collect their resources regularly will be more likely to have their resources collectors full on the outside of their walls. The higher level that their collectors were when they left them, the more loot for you to raid.
You also need to decide whether you want to maintain your level of trophies too. At higher Town Hall levels, players will have more buildings contained in their village. In order to achieve one star in a multiplayer battle, you need to either destroy 50% of a village’s total buildings (the more common target as Town Halls are usually in the middle of a map, heavily protected) or destroy a player’s Town Hall. If you are farming resources, specifically Gold and Elixir, it’s sometimes smarter to sacrifice the trophies in order to be able to maximize your investment of Elixir into troops for your farm, especially at lower level Town Halls.
This means that you can use lower-priced troops to raid the collectors that are full on the outside of a village wall, such as Barbarians and Archers to draw fire from the defenses, while Goblins are used to scoop up all of the town’s collectors quickly. This means that you will lack firepower to take out the town to reach 50%, but maximizes your ability to loot as many resources as you can.
How to engage villages to farm
The village below is an example of a good village to attack as almost all of the collectors are full and of a high level, meaning that you have an excellent opportunity to farm plenty of resources. This can be seen in the available loot section under the defending player’s name, with this particular example being incredibly high for a Town Hall level eight.
Some of the collectors are behind walls but within reach of a set of archers. The Town Hall level is eight, but this idea of finding collectors that are full in and around the outer walls will be the same for any Town Hall level, with the case being that the higher the Town Hall level, the harder it will be to find inactive players.
Using barbarians, archers, and goblins for a farming raid is one of the more simple farming techniques. If you want to make sure you don’t lose any stars, you may need to invest in more powerful units to take out more of the town in order to get to 50 percent destruction or get to the Town Center.
In more protected villages, or if you want to target Dark Elixir storages, which are often placed near the center of villages due to how scarce it can be to loot, you will need to consider more powerful troops or more advanced techniques. One such way would be to “funnel” in a team to go straight to the required resources.
The idea of this is to send in part of your army to take out all of the buildings, defenses included, that lead towards the Dark Elixir storage or Town Hall, and then send in more troops. After your army has taken out all of the builders around the one that you’re aiming for, your troops should avoid getting distracted by closer buildings and attacking them instead, essentially “funneling” your army to the resources. The below picture gives a visual idea of this technique.
By sending in troops to take out as many of the buildings between the cone as possible, you would leave yourself with a much easier path to the Dark Elixir Storage and the Town Hall to loot as much of the more valuable resources as you can whilst maintaining your trophy level. Wall breakers will be incredibly valuable for getting into those harder to reach buildings, so bringing plenty of them (10+) while keeping them upgraded will aid you significantly.
Your biggest hurdle in these types of attacks are the defenses that do splash damage, such as the Wizard Tower and Inferno Towers set to multiple target mode, and Heroes that can decimate your troops if you don’t take them out quickly, so be wary of the placement of these when picking a village to attack. Big bomb traps will also take out almost all lower health troops, the ones which are the best for sending through the funnel, so be wary of any areas that look like a could be a trap set up, such as next to the Dark Elixir storage in the above picture.
This type of technique will be required more often as you get higher in both trophy leagues and Town Hall levels due to the significant upgrades to defensive building options later on.
Other details to look out for include a player’s league, which will be shown in the top left corner of the screen when attacking a player.
If they have no medal in place to tell you their league, it means that they have not made an attack since the beginning of the season (the beginning of the calendar month). While there will be some players that don’t engage in attacks, you will be more likely to find that these players simply haven’t played the game since the start of this month. If they have high-level collectors, they will be ripe for the looting. It may take you a while to find these types of players to loot, but with the number of players that you can be matched with on Clash of Clans, it will come, so patience is required.
If you take all of this into consideration, you can ensure that your haul of resources from a raid is maximized and you can continue to grow and maintain trophies as you climb the ranks. Before you know it, you’ll be farming like the best of them.
