Flax

Flax is both a source of food as well as a source of flax fiber that can be used in various technologies.

Obtaining flax

Sources of flax seeds

Flax can be found growing in the wild in temperate to warm climates and can be harvested by breaking the flax plants with an empty hand, knife, or scythe. Fully mature plants will yield flax grain, flax fibers and at least one seed when harvested. Harvesting immature plants may yield no or little grain or fiber and may or may not provide a seed.

Flax seeds can be used in farming and can be harvested in the same way as wild flax. Flax crops take 2.67 months (24 days) to grow at default 9 day per month settings. It goes through nine growth stages, and use 50% K nutrients from their farm plot. They grow best in temperatures from -5 - 40°C.

Flax seeds can also be found in seed and farming loot vessels located in ruins. They may also be sold by the agricultural trader.

Sources of flax fibers

Flax fibers can be harvested by breaking mature wild or farmed flax plants with an empty hand, knife, or scythe. They may or may not drop from breaking immature flax plants.

They may also drop by butchering dead drifters by shift clicking with a knife in the active hand until the process is complete and the GUI opens to allow players to remove dropped items.

Flax fibers can also be found in forage and farming loot vessels located in ruins.

Uses

Food

Flax grain can be eaten without cooking with a satiety value of 30 but can also be ground into flour using a quern either manually or with automated milling. This flour, like flour from other grains, can be made into a dough with water which can then be baked into bread and pies. Flax bread has a satiety value of 160. Flax grain can also be used as an ingredient in the advanced cooking recipe for porridge.

See Cooking's main page for more details on food and satiety

Flax grain and bread have the lowest satiety values of the grains (see table below) and therefore flax grain is often used as feed for domesticated animals rather than in cooking.

Item	Grain	Bread
Flax	30	160
Spelt	60	300
Rye	60	300
Rice	60	330

Fiber

Flax fibers
Stackable	32
Items

Flax fibers can be used to make twine which in turn can be used to make linen, both of which unlock important technology.

You can fit twice as many flax fibers in the form of twine, and there is no downside to always crafting them into twine because they are not used for anything else.

See also

• Twine
• Linen
• Cloth