How To Grow Every Crop In Aloft

While combat is far from the central focus in Aloft, you’ll still butt heads with some gnarly corrupted creatures from time to time as you cure the corruption on plenty of sky islands. You’ve got access to bandages early on, but eating is one of the best ways to earn some extra HP.

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And while you’ll find plenty of crops around islands in Aloft, you can also opt into growing your own garden on your home island to save some time and have a steady source of them! Simply craft a Farming Plot, place it, plant a seed, and harvest.

How To Grow Crops On Your Home Island

Step One: Collect Seeds And Crops As You Explore

As you explore the skies in Aloft, you’ll stumble upon plenty of foraging goods while checking out different islands and unlocking new sectors of the map table by venturing past what appears to be the borders between sections of the sky, with plenty of new crops growing in each subsequent biome you unlock as you progress. In addition to more standard resources, this will include a wealth of crops and crop seeds, so be sure to interact with plants to grab them before you go.

How you actually go about obtaining these crops is different depending on which crop it is. Bush plants are picked from the plant themselves, like blueberry bushes or tomato plants. Ground crops are plucked straight from the earth, which is how you’ll find things like coffee beans and sugar beets. Additionally, you can use the scythe to cut down taller crops, things like fully-grown wheat. Finally, things like mushrooms are pulled from the base of trees when you see them growing.

Be careful not to take too many Reishi Mushrooms from an island, though, since they’re one of the decomposers that contribute to an island’s ecological balance. Be sure to consult your Field Guide to see that you’re not taking too many mushrooms and off-setting the ecological harmony!

Step Two: Obtain Soil From Animal Manure

Have you seen those cute animals all around the sky islands in Aloft? Whether or not you’ve taken any back home with you, you’ll likely have noticed that livestock in this game can be realistically messy, leaving piles of manure on any island with animals.

Try not to think about how exactly you’re grabbing them, but you can collect piles of manure by interacting with them on the ground. It’s a bit gross, but keep a good stack of it someplace on your home island, since you’ll need it to begin farming, as manure is one of the best sources of soil for growing crops.

To transform the manure into usable soil, you’ll need to first build and place a Compost Bin someplace on your home island for repeated use. You’ll find this recipe from a Knowledge Stone as you explore the skies, so it’s likely that farming may not be one of the first things you do in Aloft.

With the Compost Bin placed, put your pile of manure into the Bin and press the button when the arrow on the meter is in the white bar to generate soil at an exchange rate of one manure for one soil. You can also wait for the meter just below the manure itself at the bottom of the screen fills up, but interacting with the machine makes the soil production that much faster.

Step Three: Place Farm Plots, And Plant Seeds In Them

With seeds and soil in hand, you’re finally ready to get down to farming in Aloft! To begin, you’ll need to first find the recipe for a Farm Plot as you explore the skies. The first one we found was the Rustic Farm Plot, but since each world spawns islands randomly and no two maps are completely the same, you may find a different style instead, especially if you’ve been using your sketchbook.

Once you’ve gathered the materials, simply craft a Farm Plot from the Construction menu, which you’ll find in the Home Garden tab. With the plot placed, you’ll need to till the soil with a Dorkip before you can plant anything.

A tilled plot is ready for planting! With seeds in your inventory, you’ll need to simply interact with the farm plot to plant your crops. You’ll be able to choose one seed per plot, but the number of plants that grow from one seed varies by which crop it is, which we’ll detail a bit more below. If it regenerates elsewhere on other islands, it’ll regenerate on your island, too, but crops you pick once are also one-off crops in your garden in kind.

Crops typically regrow every day or so if they do, so be sure to harvest your garden in Aloft and store your ingredients – sure, you’ll get plenty of extra health from eating fruits and vegetables, but once you’ve begun cooking those things into more elaborate meals is when the real perks begin!

One of the most critical things to remember is that planted seeds need to be watered or they won’t grow. They don’t seem to die off, but their growth stagnates. You can tell when plants need to be watered if the soil in the Farming Plot is dry and cracked. Plants are watered when you go through a rainstorm, or you can water them manually with a bucket when you have Dirty Water in your inventory as well.

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All Crops In Aloft

In the table below, we’ve kept track of all sorts of information on every crop in Aloft, including how to harvest them, how many grow in a garden plot from one seed, growth time, and potential recipes you’ll use said crops to make. We’ve also included Reishi Mushrooms in this list of crops in Aloft, but you’ll plant these on trees instead of in Farming Plots as with other crops. The crops currently all seem to have the same stat when eaten raw – eight additional health points that last for three minutes in real time.

Every Crop You Can Grow In Aloft

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