// Unofficial neighborhood guide
Welcome to Elderfield
The suburb is not normal and neither is the farming. This guide covers what actually blocks players in the 1.0 release: getting the game to launch, keeping your save, finding where things are, and working out why the enemy just acted three times.
Official launch trailer — Kwalee Gaming
Every page here is checked against the live 1.0 release rather than demo footage. Where something still is not confirmed by the game or the developers, the page says so instead of guessing.
Where Your Save File Lives
Find the save folder, back it up before you experiment, and recover a save after a crash.
Read Report →
Beginner Guide
What to do in your first days, which systems matter early, and what you can safely ignore.
Read Report →Popular Welcome to Elderfield Guides
These are the pages that resolve the most common dead ends people hit in the first week.
Map & NPCs
Town, Mall, Old Woods and Catacombs layouts.
Combat & AP
Turn order, action points and enemy turns.
Keys & Passcodes
Every key, what it opens, whether it is used up.
Achievements
All 51 with real unlock conditions.
Bosses
Weaknesses, preparation and tactics.
Mysteries
Dice rolls, locations and hidden results.
Troubleshooting
When the game refuses to cooperate.
Save Files
Back up and restore your progress.
What Kind of Game Is This
Welcome to Elderfield is a cozy horror farming RPG developed by Chris Cote and published by Kwalee. It released on 10 September 2026 for Windows. Steam lists it under Adventure, Casual, Indie, RPG, Simulation and Strategy, it is single-player, and it has full controller support. The game ships with 51 Steam achievements and Steam Cloud.
The loop is familiar on purpose: farm, fish, mine, cook, befriend the neighbours, and open up new parts of town. What is not familiar is the pressure on top of it. Crops grow while something watches, the tax man comes around, curses stack on your character, and the town keeps reporting anomalous activity on the evening news.
For a new player, the practical consequence is that Elderfield rewards planning more than most games in the genre. You get roughly twenty minutes of real time per in-game day, the day rolls over at midnight whether you sleep or not, and a lot of what you own is finite. That is why this guide leads with the save file, the map and the combat rules rather than with a list of crops.
Common Questions
Why won't Welcome to Elderfield launch?
The most common causes reported on the Steam forums are a missing or blocked runtime, the game picking the integrated GPU on a laptop with two graphics chips, and controller or overlay software interfering at startup. Our troubleshooting page walks through them in order of how often they resolve the problem.
Where is the save file stored?
It is not inside the Steam install folder, which is why people lose progress when reinstalling. See save file location for the exact path on Windows and a backup routine you can run before every long session.
Why do enemies act more than once per turn?
Some enemies get more than one action per round, and multi-hit skills resolve as several separate hits rather than one bigger number. Both show up constantly in forum questions and both are explained in the combat and AP guide.
Is there a demo save migration?
The pre-release demo and the 1.0 release are separate builds, so treat demo saves as disposable. If you are still carrying one, back up your current 1.0 save first using the save file guide before you touch anything.
How long is the game?
Long enough that losing a save is painful, which is why we lead with backups. We do not publish hour counts we have not verified ourselves, and the official store page does not commit to one.
Latest Guides
All 51 Achievements
Full list with the real unlock condition for each one, including the difficulty-locked Stone Tower set.
View →