Beginner’s guide to farming in Clash of Clans

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. 

Related: Tips and tricks for new players in Clash of Clans

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.