Agriculture

Aquaponics is a fish-and-plant farm run on a station or rented room. Fish, bacteria, and crops feed each other in one closed loop. Raw produce and protein are ingredients; meals are cooked at a Galley.

In this section

• Building a System: the eight build blocks, the water network and how it's scanned, commission requirements, and the Siphon.
• The Nitrogen Cycle: ammonia → nitrate → crops, bacteria maturity ("cycle %"), pH as the master health knob and its self-heal, over-planting vs over-stocking.
• Fish: stocking eggs, grow-out and maturity, the health-as-a-buffer stress model, breeding, slaughtering, species and genome traits.
• Crops: planting seeds, the Liebig-minimum growth model, ripen times, vitality vs growth, harvest yields and auto-replant, leafy vs fruiting.
• Power & Supplies: Grow Lamps burning Drive Cells from the GENERAL hold, and the P/K/Fe supplement pool.
• Food & Demand: the hunger system, the drain table, the debuff ladder, and the ration floor.
• Troubleshooting & FAQ: stalled crops, ammonia spikes, dying fish, dimming lamps, stuck pH, fish that won't harvest, and the one-system-per-host limit.

The Starter Kit

Buy one Aquaponics Starter Kit (aquaponics.starter_kit) and right-click to unpack. It drops a balanced first farm (console, water, biofilter, beds, lamps, an aerator, hardy cod eggs, and lettuce seed) into your inventory. Lettuce grows on fish nitrogen alone with no dosing. Build walkthrough is on Building a System. Farms run only on a station or a rented room, never on a ship.

The big loop

1. Build the tank. Place Water Reservoirs (they render as real water), wire a Console and Biofilter Media into the water network, add grow beds, a lamp, and an aerator. Right-click the Console to commission.
2. Stock fish + plant seeds. Right-click the water holding a fish egg to drop in a juvenile; right-click a grow bed holding a seed to plant a crop.
3. The nitrogen cycle feeds the crops. Fish produce ammonia (toxic). Bacteria in the biofilter convert it to nitrate. Crops draw the nitrate and grow. See The Nitrogen Cycle.
4. Harvest produce + protein. Break a ripe crop for produce (auto-replants); slaughter a fully grown fish for protein. Both are ingredients.
5. Cook at a Galley. Combine ingredients at a Galley into meals. Meals with a fruiting crop (tomato/wheat) grant buffs; leafy + protein meals fill hunger only. Recipes are on the crafting wiki.
6. Breed more fish to scale. Mature, healthy fish lay eggs, collected at the Console. Eggs are the same item you stock with.

Over-planting spreads nitrate thinner and slows every bed. Over-stocking fish can tip the tank into a lethal ammonia cascade.

The support systems

Two systems sit outside the nitrogen loop, both on Power & Supplies:

• Light & power. Grow Lamps burn Drive Cells from the host's GENERAL cargo hold. An empty hold dims the lamps and crops slow.
• Supplements (P/K/Fe). Fruiting crops (tomato, wheat) need P/K/Fe dosed at the Console; leafy crops (lettuce) need none.

The tank simulates only while a faction member is online; catch-up is capped at a short grace window.

See also

• Stations: rent a door to run a farm without owning a station
• Mining: where Drive Cells and other feedstock come from
• Fabrication: turning raw materials into gear
• Crafting wiki: full bootstrap tree for every item