How to Work Out What a Farm Is Worth Per Hour

Chance times value, added up

A 2% drop worth 5,000 contributes 100 to every run — not because you get 100 each time, but because that's what it averages to over enough runs.

Add every drop's contribution and you have the value of one run. Multiply by runs per hour and you have the rate to compare farms on.

At the defaults the contributions are 50, 80, 100 and 100 — an expected 330 a run, or 2,475 an hour at 7.5 runs.

The average is not your evening

Notice that the two rarest drops contribute as much as the two common ones combined.

Share of the value in the rarest drop reads 30% — nearly a third of what this farm is "worth" sits in an item appearing once in 200 runs, which is 26.7 hours of farming.

So a typical session earns well below the average, and the average is only recovered by the occasional session that goes far above it. That's not a flaw in the arithmetic. It's what a skewed distribution does.

Two farms, same number, different lives

Here's the case worth seeing. Take that rarest drop and make it five times rarer and five times more valuable — 0.1% at 100,000 instead of 0.5% at 20,000.

	Before	After
Expected value per hour	2,475	2,475
Concentration	30%	30%
Hours to see it	26.7	133.3

Identical on every headline figure. Five times the grind before the item that carries a third of the value shows up even once.

Expected value alone cannot tell those apart, which is why Hours to expect one rarest drop sits next to it.

Reading the concentration

• Low — value spread across common drops. Pays steadily, a short session earns roughly its share. Good if you play in small blocks.
• High — you're buying lottery tickets at a reasonable price. Fine if you can farm long enough for the average to assert itself; frustrating if you can't.

Two farms with the same expected value per hour can be completely different experiences, and this is the number that separates them.

Values are the soft part

Market prices move. An item you actually need is worth more than its sale price. An item you already have is worth its market value at best — less if selling is slow.

There's no objective figure, which is why the tool asks rather than assuming.

The practical consequence: comparing two farms is far more reliable than trusting one farm's absolute number, because your valuation errors largely cancel between them. That's what the printable has room for two.

Where the arithmetic stops holding

Expected value survives almost anything. Each item contributes chance × value regardless of how the rolls interact, so a weighted table that picks one item still adds up correctly.

The other figures don't. If a table rolls a single item from a list, the chances are mutually exclusive rather than independent — so Chance a run drops something understates a table that always drops something. And pity systems or bad-luck protection break the runs-to-see figure entirely, since they're designed to.

Time the whole cycle

Run time means travel, setup, the fight, repairs, restocking and the walk back.

A farm with a fast kill and a slow reset is considerably worse than its combat time suggests — and the forgotten parts, loading and banking and the run back, are exactly the parts that differ most between farms.

Time a few complete cycles with a stopwatch. It usually changes which farm wins.

One thing this deliberately won't weigh

Whether the rate is worth your time.

Working out that a farm pays 2,475 an hour is useful precisely because it lets you decide whether that's worth an evening. Sometimes the honest answer is no, and that's a judgement rather than a calculation.