Home/Reference/Crops

Crops

Crops are the plant half of an aquaponics farm: plant seeds on grow beds, the fish feed them through the water, and harvest produce off ripe plants. This page covers planting, the growth math, reading a crop's state, and harvesting.

See Building a System for setup. Everything below assumes a commissioned farm with water, a biofilter, and at least one grow bed.

Planting a seed

Hold a seed (lettuce, wheat, tomato, etc.) and right-click a Grow Bed. One seed is consumed per click; a crop sprouts in the cell directly above the bed.

One crop per bed. A bed already holding a crop ignores the click.
The space above must be clear. The crop renders in the block above the bed, so that cell must be air (or an existing crop). If something sits on top, you get "Something's on top of this bed; clear it before planting" and no seed is spent.

Planting is atomic: the seed only leaves your inventory if a crop took. If two players race for the same bed, the loser keeps their seed.

New crops start at 0% growth and 100% vitality.

Where seeds come from

Lettuce (leafy) is buyable and ships in the Starter Kit. The fruiting seeds (Tomato and Grain, wheat) are not sold: they turn up only as rare "seed-vein" finds on planet surfaces (green emerald-like deposits: tomato on rocky planets, grain on frozen ones; see Planets). Harvest has a ~25% bonus-seed chance, so a planted crop line can self-propagate.

Liebig minimum

A crop's growth speed each tick is set by the single worst of its five inputs, not the average (Liebig's law of the minimum). The four good inputs don't compensate; the bottleneck wins.

The five factors, each 0 (starved) to 1 (satisfied):

Factor	What it means	Driven by
Nitrate	Plant food in the water	Fish waste → biofilter (the fish→crop gate)
Light	Grow-lamp brightness × fuel	Grow Lamps + Drive Cells in the GENERAL hold
Water	Enough reservoir water per bed	Reservoir volume vs number of beds
pH	Water acidity in the healthy band	pH drift / self-heal (see the cycle page)
Supplements	Dosed P/K/Fe pool	Fruiting crops only; leafy ignore it

Growth per minute is the base rate × the lowest of those five factors. Base rate is 0.06/min, so a crop with all five factors at 1.0 ripens in about 17 minutes. A factor at 0.5 gives half speed; a factor at 0 stops growth. The console names the limiting factor (see Reading a crop below).

Nitrate gating: the fish→crop link

Nitrate exists only because fish produce ammonia and the biofilter converts it to nitrate. No fish (or a young, uncycled biofilter) means no nitrate.

Crops hit full-speed nitrate once the water holds 0.3 nitrate; below that, the factor scales down in proportion. If the beds out-demand the fish, nitrate settles lower and every bed grows proportionally slower.

Over-planting lowers the shared nitrate level and slows every bed proportionally; it never starves them. (Over-stocking fish is the opposite a lethal spiral. See The Nitrogen Cycle.)

Vitality vs growth

Each crop tracks two independent meters:

Growth (0–100%): harvest progress. At 100% the crop is ripe.
Vitality (0–100%): plant health. At 0 the crop wilts and dies and yields nothing.

Vitality only changes while a crop is still growing. If the Liebig limit drops below 0.30 (the starvation threshold), vitality bleeds off at 0.02/min. If the crop is adequately fed, vitality recovers at the same 0.02/min. At full starvation it takes roughly 50 minutes of sustained neglect to wilt a healthy crop to death.

A ripe crop holds its vitality forever. At 100% growth, vitality freezes; a finished-but-unpicked crop never wilts.

Reading a crop

The render shows ready, and only that. A crop block's visible stage tracks growth percentage, but the fully-grown final stage is reserved for ready crops: a crop at 98% is held one stage short. If a crop block looks maxed out, it's ready. At 100% it plays a one-time chime and sparkle.
Right-click a crop to read the exact numbers. Right-clicking the crop block (with the crop, not a seed) prints <crop>: <growth>% grown, vitality <v>%, plus "(READY - break to harvest)" once ripe. Inspecting also cancels any vanilla bonemeal click.

To read live water chemistry, right-click the build blocks (biofilter, aerator, lamp) bare-handed; see Building a System.

Harvesting

Harvest a ripe crop by breaking its block (left-click / mine it). Only a crop at 100% growth harvests; the system owns the break, so no vanilla wheat drops.

Produce drops on the ground at the crop: 4 produce items per harvest.
Bonus seed. Each harvest has a ~25% chance to also drop 1 seed.
The bed auto-replants. Harvesting resets that crop to 0% growth in place: cut-and-come-again. No hand replanting.

A ripe crop instant-breaks, so a held left-click can fire twice. Each bed ignores a second break for about 0.8s.

Uprooting an unripe crop (seed refund)

Breaking a crop that isn't ripe counts as uprooting: the crop is removed, the block cleared, and 1 seed is refunded ("seed returned"; or "seed lost" if your inventory is full).

Leafy vs fruiting crops: the supplement split

The two classes differ in one of the five Liebig factors: supplements.

Leafy crops (e.g. lettuce) demand zero supplements: their supplement factor is always 1. They grow on fish nitrogen alone: water, light, pH, and nitrate. Lettuce ships in the Starter Kit.
Fruiting crops (e.g. tomato and wheat) demand a steady dose of P/K/Fe supplements. Fish waste is nitrogen-rich but phosphorus/potassium-poor. If the supplement pool is empty their supplement factor falls to 0, which stalls growth entirely.

Supplements are a hand-dosed pool; for per-crop demand numbers, dosing, and pool drain, see Power & Supplies.

Harvested produce is an ingredient, not edible on its own. Cook it into meals at a Galley for buffs; see Food & Demand.