Resource & farming guide
Every upgrade in Clash of Clans is paid for in gold, elixir and dark elixir. This guide lists all the resource buildings — collectors, mines, drills and storages — with their max levels and counts per Town Hall, then covers a farming strategy to keep your Builder Huts busy without ever running dry.
Watch your storages and collectors against these maxes in the ClashTrack buildings tracker.
Resource buildings
Pulled live from the ClashTrack catalog. “Unlocks” is the first Town Hall the building appears at; count and max level are shown at Town Hall 18.
Storages come before collectors
Collectors and mines trickle resources in slowly; the bulk of your loot comes from raiding. That makes storage capacity the real bottleneck — if a big upgrade costs more than your storages can hold, you physically cannot bank enough to buy it.
- Upgrade Gold and Elixir Storages early at each Town Hall so you can hold the price of your most expensive defense or lab upgrade.
- Dark Elixir Storage & Drills (TH7+) fund heroes — the slowest and most impactful upgrades in the game. Keep drills collected and the storage large enough for a hero level.
- Collectors and mines are a low priority for war players but great for passive farmers; max them last unless you rarely log in.
Farming strategy
Best farming Town Halls: most players pile up loot fastest at TH9–TH12, where cheap, fast armies (Barch, Sneaky Goblins, mass Dragons) can hit the dead bases that flood the lower legends and gold/crystal leagues.
- Use a cheap army. Barbarians + Archers (“Barch”) and Sneaky Goblins train in seconds and cost little elixir, so you net far more loot than you spend. Goblins do double damage to resource buildings and storages.
- Snipe collectors and storages, not the whole base. When farming, a 40–50% raid that grabs full storages is more efficient than a slow three-star. Next-search until you find a base with fat, uncovered storages.
- Farm dark elixir deliberately. Dark is the rarest resource and gates your heroes. Target bases with exposed Dark Elixir Storage and drills, and consider a dedicated dark-farming army.
- Drop trophies if loot dries up. Higher leagues give more loot bonus per win, but lower leagues have more abandoned, loot-rich bases. Sitting in a comfortable league with easy targets often out-earns a hard push.
An efficient upgrade economy means you spend loot the moment you bank it. Use the upgrade priority guide to always have something worth buying so gold and elixir never sit capped.
Which resource is actually blocking you
Most players farm whatever they are short of today, which sounds obviously correct and usually is not. The resource worth farming is the one blocking your longest-running track, and that is almost always Dark Elixir from Town Hall 9 upward, because heroes are the upgrades that gate everything else and heroes drink nothing else.
Gold and Elixir have a self-correcting quality: they buy buildings and troops, which are numerous and cheap relative to income, so a shortfall resolves itself in a few days of ordinary play. A Dark Elixir shortfall does not resolve itself — it stalls a hero, the hero stays weak, your attacks stay worse, and your Dark Elixir income drops further. It is the only resource in the game with a genuine downward spiral attached.
Collectors, raids and the honest maths
Collectors and mines are frequently dismissed as irrelevant at high Town Halls. That is true per-collection and false per-day. A fully upgraded set of collectors left running produces a meaningful fraction of a maxed player’s daily income for zero effort and zero army cost, and unlike raiding it continues while you are asleep or at work. The correct conclusion is not that collectors are a priority upgrade — they are not — but that ignoring them entirely is leaving free income on the table.
Raiding is where the real income is, and the variable that matters most is not your trophy count but the time you spend per raid. An army that takes twenty minutes to train and wins 400k gold is worse than one that takes eight minutes and wins 250k, if you are actually playing in sessions rather than logging in twice a day. Match your army to your available attention, not to the theoretical maximum loot.
Where the loot goes
Walls will absorb more resources than any other category across the life of the account, and they are the correct place to dump surplus rather than a project to schedule. Keep them as the thing you spend on when your builders are all busy and your storages are near full, upgrade the compartments around your Town Hall and storages first, and they will progress steadily without ever feeling like a wall of their own.