FAQs

How Do I Farm?

To start farming, build the farm structure on any suitable planet like you would any other structure. 

In the crafting window, a section called "Factories & Farms" lists all farms in your faction. By clicking into a farm, you have the controls to start farming. Load 100 of your favourite botanical consumables into the farm via the cargo window using the store option and instruct it to use them to cultivate. Cultivation takes time and varies for each consumable. There is also a success rate attached to consumables you can cultivate, depending on how difficult they are to grow.

Once cultivation starts, you can track progress in the same place by viewing the active fields of the farm. Note that you can increase the number of available fields by upgrading the structure. There is also a stability metric, which for most crops will be at 100%. The lower the stability, the higher the chance the crop will fail before cultivation finishes.

Some consumables have "booster" effects, but finding these consumables will be up to you. Consumables with booster effects will note this in their description and can be used with a crop in an active field. Boosters can decrease cultivation time and improve success rates but will always decrease the stability of the crop.

When cultivation is complete, the crops harvested will be added to the abundant consumables of the planet the farm is on, so you can gather them if you wish. However, once a crop on a planet exceeds a remaining count of 10,000, the farm will automatically start selling the crops, adding the profits as structure profits against the farm. Any profits from crops are also stated in the same window when you are viewing a farm.

The most interesting part of farming, is the ability to crossbreed crops. Once an active field is cultivating crops, you can optionally choose to crossbreed the crop with a suitable consumable in your hold, specifically, a consumable found on the same native planet as the crop. If crossbreeding is successful, you will create an entirely new consumable that combines attributes of both crops, which will be added as an abundant consumable to the planet. If the breeding is successful, the new crop will be worth more credits and will have a higher rarity. Crossbreeding is an endless activity, allowing you to take the result of a previous successful breeding by gathering a sample and then crossbreeding it with another crop, and so on.

When a new consumable is created by a faction, it is permanently noted in the consumable's description. A new player leaderboard is also available for the most successful farmers.

Additionally, each month the Stellar Horticultural Innovation Tournament will select the best crossbred crop and reward that faction with research points relative to the crop's quality. You can track the standings of which faction is winning each month in the computer window under leaderboards, in a new section called "Leading Cultivations". A crop can only win the award once.