Becoming self-sustainable in The Planet Crafter is extremely important for survival so it helps to know how to make food. Chances are if you’re still new to the game, you’ll have a decent source of oxygen and water due to readily available resources.
The main struggle with how to get food in The Planet Crafter is that you can’t produce it early on. Instead, you’re stuck with a limited supply of Space Food in your escape pod. And once you’ve finished eating that, you’ll need to search abandoned ships for whatever you can get.
How to Make Food in The Planet Crafter
Unlocking the Right Blueprint
The tier 1 Food Grower requires 1 Aluminum, 1 Iron, and 1 Water Bottle. Keep an eye out for Aluminum when asteroids hit. There are also a couple of popular areas to find it.
The trick to making food is growing your own, but it can be a little more complicated than that if you don’t know where to start. This is because it takes more than just looting Cobalt or Ice off the floor for Oxygen Capsules and Water Bottles. You’ll need to instead work on your oxygen production so you can unlock an important blueprint.
If you’ve built a Blueprints Screen using your construction tool, you can check along the oxygen tree for the Food Grower. This unlocks at 12.00 ppt oxygen and you’ll definitely need it to start making food. Until you get this blueprint, you won’t have a reliable supply of food in The Planet Crafter. And nobody wants to get stuck running out of Space Food to keep your health bar full.
Finding the Best Seeds For Farming
Try to have at least one of every seed type so you have them for certain crafting recipes.
The complicated part beyond unlocking this blueprint is finding the right seeds to produce food. Unlike many machines in The Planet Crafter that operate on their own, this one won’t immediately. You’ll need to search your world for storage crates and abandoned ships that may have seeds lurking inside.
While searching for seeds to make your own food, it’s important to search for a specific type of seed. These all come in a small yellow packet that you can also loot outside of containers. Abandoned ships often have them laying in cabinets along the walls that you can freely grab. So be careful to not accidentally miss items like these and even more valuable ones.
Vegetubes are a slow way to get your oxygen production up with certain seeds that you won’t use for food.
Even though you only need the yellow packet seeds for growing food, there are plenty of other types worth collecting too. So try not to leave behind tree seeds or the ones that provide high oxygen multipliers like 300%, 400%, or even 600%.
Regardless, there are several types of plants that you can grow in The Planet Crafter. And it’s likely that the developer will add more over time with content updates. Here are the ones you can currently make and how much food each gives you from eating them. I also added Space Food to the list so you can compare.
- Beans – 60
- Squash – 40
- Space Food – 40
- Mushroom – 35
- Eggplant – 25
Make sure you grab your plant from outside the Food Grower inventory. You can only take seeds from the Food Grower when the plant isn’t completely grown. This will also prevent the plant from growing.
Chances are likely that you’ll find a lot of Eggplant Seeds since they seem to be the most common type. Even though they give the lowest amount of food, they’re still useful for late-game recipes. So it doesn’t hurt to collect them even when you eventually find Beans Seeds.
Assuming you’ve made your first Food Grower, all you need to do now is interact with it and place a seed type inside. This will grow a plant over time that you can watch get bigger over time. However, it will take a while until you unlock the tier 2 Food Grower at 33 t. This version requires building a Biolab to see the biomass set of blueprints.
While you won’t need water to grow food, it’s still good to have a renewable source. This is where the Atmospheric Water collector comes in.
Make sure you don’t run out of power because this will prevent your plants from growing. As long as you have a consistent power source and a few Food Growers, you should be able to survive. My next recommendation for improving your survivability is getting an Atmospheric Water Collector. While it doesn’t play a role in your hunger, it will help you constantly have a source of water.
The Atmospheric Water Collector along the Terraformation set of blueprints easily produces enough water for you to survive. You’ll likely have extra if you check it every now and then. At which point, you may struggle with Oxygen Capsules a little if you run out of Cobalt. This is where the Ore Extractor can help.
The Ore Extractor is a great way to farm minerals if you’re starting to run out of nearby resources.
That’s all there is to this guide for The Planet Crafter on how to make food. If you haven’t quite made it to this phase yet, you can still gather Space Food from abandoned shuttles. It’s always important to explore these shipwrecks for useful loot like blueprint chips as well.
Jeff is a journalist with over 10 years of experience writing, streaming, and making content about video games. With an associate degree in journalism, he’s a sucker for RPGs, survival games, roguelikes, and more.