Item farming

Item Farming is a term in video games where players fight enemies over and over with intent to amass items that enemy may drop. Item farming is usually done to acquire particularly rare and powerful items that are difficult or impossible to acquire through other means. Item farming may also be done to acquire items and equipment not available for purchase until later in the game. In games where items can be found to raise stats, farming such items allows the player to slowly max out their party's stats with patience.

Final Fantasy III
This game was the first to introduce the Steal ability, which allows items to be acquired in new ways other than random drops.

Final Fantasy IV
This was the first game to introduce items that permanently raise stats. The Soma Drop increases max MP by 10, while the Silver Apple and Golden Apple raise max HP by 50 and 100, respectively. These items are very rare and are only rarely dropped by enemies.

Final Fantasy IV: The After Years
This game features the Challenge Dungeons, which rewards the party a random treasure at the end of the dungeon. Some of the treasures are not unique, such as X-Potions, which allows the player to repeat Challenge Dungeons as much as they wish to farm them.

In the Wii release of the game, the game's random number generator could be "fixed" to guarantee a 100% certainty of the enemy party dropping a particular item, as long as the player had their party at the right levels, equipped with the right equipment, and used the right actions in battle. Most documented instances of this no longer work on the PSP version of the game.

Final Fantasy VI
This game introduced several new ways to farm useful items. Dragon's Neck Coliseum allows the player to bet items and equipment as wagers to win superior items and equipment, allowing the exchange of otherwise unique equipment pieces for others and the upgrading of some purchasable items into better ones.

Ahe Auction House allows certain Relics to be bought, some of which cannot be purchased from shops.

The Ragnarok summon uses Metamorphose when summoned, randomly turning an enemy into one of four items, many of which are otherwise unique and some of which cannot be acquired even in the Coliseum, such as the Growth Egg.

Final Fantasy VIII
In addition to Mug to steal items and winning items from enemies, Triple Triad and Refine abilities allow items to be amassed in new ways. Refine allows the player to turn Triple Triad cards and items into other items or magic spells, which are then possible to be further converted. Thus in addition to farming items from enemies, the player can use Quetzalcoatl's Card and Card Mod abilities to turn enemies into useful Triple Triad cards and refine them into more items, as well as the player being able to play Triple Triad to win useful cards.

Final Fantasy IX
This game allows Zidane Tribal to use the Detect ability to sense what items an enemy has to be stolen. Because Zidane is almost always in the player's party as the party leader, many bosses have powerful equipment to Steal that will not be available until much later in the game.

Final Fantasy X
Unlike previous Final Fantasy titles, in Final Fantasy X an enemy can be stolen from multiple times, though the success rate of Steal decreases with each success. Items can also be stolen in multiples, making item farming quicker compared to past games. As a compromise, the purpose of most items - to be used to customize abilities onto equipment and teach Aeons abilities - often requires several dozen of an item to be done.

Final Fantasy XII
In this game, the player can chain enemies of the same type by killing them in sequence without killing a new enemy type in the process. As chain level increases the drop rates of enemies increases and they may drop more than one item at a time. Many areas allow the amassing of items quickly be rapidly chaining like-type enemies in the region.

Item farming in Final Fantasy XII is subject to a glitch that allows items to be farmed from unique enemies when normally they could only be Stolen from or Poached once. When the player kills an enemy near the exit of an area and leaves the area before the display showing the Exp and LP won from that enemy appears, they will earn credit for the kill but the enemy will respawn at full health when the player re-enters the previous area, allowing them to Stolen from and/or Poached again. This also has the effect of allowing otherwise unique enemies to be chained, increasing the odds of their dropping items as described above.