How To Grow Plants In No Man’s Sky

No Man’s Sky has grown in intricacy over the years, from a fairly simple game of space exploration and a light story, to a game full of various systems, almost all of which are fully-fleshed out and growing in complexity every single year.

Base building is one of the key mechanics in No Man’s Sky, allowing you to build whatever you can imagine on a planet that you likely have all to yourself. One of the things you can do in your base, and that can have a lot of impact on how you play the game, is farming and cultivating plants.

How To Construct Hydroponic Trays

The first thing you’re going to need to grow plants at your base in No Man’s Sky is the bed in which your plants will be grown: the Hydroponic Bay. You can have as many of these as you’d like (up to the build limit), and there are two different sizes of Hydroponic Bay available.

For the most part, there’s no reason other than an aesthetic one to build a normal Hydroponic Bay instead of a large one. You get more slots for your resources by building a large one, and most of the time, if you’re planting things for a reason, the higher the quantity of your yield, the better.

The Hydroponic Tray blueprint is either obtained as a reward from completing a quest for the Farmer at your Agricultural Station, or purchased from the Construction Research Terminal in the Anomaly.

You can also place Hydroponic Trays in your Freighter, allowing you to grow plants on the go.

How To Construct A Bio-Dome

As an alternative to growing your plants in a Hydroponic Tray, you can also choose to build a Bio-Dome. The blueprint for this is obtained the same way, and is a different way to achieve the same purpose.

In the Bio-Dome, you can grow 13 different plants at the same time. Much like the Hydroponic Trays, you can grow any kind of plant in the Bio-Dome, regardless of the type of climate the plant prefers.

Mostly, whether you use a Bio-Dome, Hydroponic Trays, or a combination of both depends on preference and visual style.

You cannot construct a Bio-Dome in a Freighter.

How To Gather Plants To Grow At Your Base

Finding plants to grow at your base is not going to be a quick process; likely, you’re going to slowly build up a collection of plants over time. It’s difficult to tell when traveling to a new system what plants are going to be growing on what planet, and oftentimes you’re down to simply exploring and finding plants at your own pace.

Apart from finding plants to grow out in the wild, you can grow certain things that don’t require gathering a plant in the first place, like Albumen Pearls.

How To Get Blueprints To Grow Plants

Before you can actually grow plants in your base, you’ll need to obtain the blueprint first. This can be done in two different ways.

How To Buy Blueprints In The Anomaly

One way to get blueprints is in the Anomaly, at the Construction Research Terminal. This station has a lot of different tabs of blueprints to navigate to, and for the plant blueprints, you’ll need to get to the Agricultural Modules tab. Here, you’ll find the blueprints for the Hydroponic Trays, and for all the plant blueprints.

How To Get Plant Blueprints From Your Agricultural Station

You can also accomplish all of these same things at your base’s Agricultural Station. Once you’ve got a Farmer stationed there, they’ll send you on various quests; the rewards for these quests will be the same blueprints that you can buy on the Anomaly.

How To Plant In Your Hydroponic Trays

While you are going to (usually) need to obtain the plant that you’d like to grow itself, once you’ve acquired the blueprint, you’ll need another resource for most plants, too. This is going to vary depending on the plant, and is usually going to be a resource found specifically in the kind of environment that plant thrives in.

What Do You Do With Plants Once Harvested?

There are a lot of things you can do with plants once you’ve harvested them, the options differing depending on what plants you’ve grown.

How To Cook With Plants

A few different plants are included in different cooking recipes, of which there are hundreds. In order to cook, you’ll need a Nutrient Processor, which can be purchased from the Construction Blueprint Terminal in the Anomaly, and allows you to combine multiple ingredients into a fully-cooked dish.

Alongside plants, you’ll want to consider adding a few other things to your base to broaden the scope of what you can cook. Adding a Livestock Unit and Automated Feeder is going to help you gather animal byproducts for more ingredients, and greatly increase the amount of recipes you’re able to cook.

Different dishes have different effects. Some of them give you a certain bonus, while others are more lucrative to sell. Whatever your purpose is for cooking, plants are usually going to be involved in one way or another.

How To Make Money By Growing Plants

A few plants have a fairly high value in their raw form, while others are used as crafting ingredients used to create higher-level materials. Between those two, growing plants, especially in large quantities, can be a good way to make a consistent profit.

Make A Plan For Your Farm

Before setting up a big farm, it’s a good idea to figure out exactly what your goal is with the plants you’re growing. These plants take varying times to grow, but even at their quickest, they take longer than an hour to obtain. Aside from that, it can be difficult to find the materials needed to plant new growth, depending quite a bit on how lucky you are at finding the particular resource you need.

If your plan is to cook a certain selection of dishes or crafting components, plan out exactly how much of each plant you’re going to need for each batch, also keeping in mind how long it’s going to take for each plant to grow, because it might not be the same.

It’s also worth finding a system that values what it is you’re looking to sell higher than its standard price.

It can all be a time-intensive process, but once you’ve got every angle figured out, it can be a fun and very consistent way to make money in No Man’s Sky.