Complete Farming Guide in Once Human
Have you ever wanted to craft all the incredible recipes in your stove but did not want to go out farming the resources constantly? Well, we have created a complete farming guide in Once Human, which will allow you to have time to do other things with your friends.
The Basics to Farming
Farming is super easy and straight forward if you wish to plant one or two different crops. This is good if you wish to make your house pretty. But later on it will get alot more complex as you will want to create an automated system.
To start the very basics of farming, head to your Memetics screen and in the Logistics tab, you will see the Planting Memetic. Unlocking this will allow you to create and plant Loamy Soil.
Go ahead and place one of them anywhere outside. Later on, you will be able to plant crops inside, but for now, you must place them outside. This will cost you 8 Boiled Water and 3 Spoiled Food per Loamy Soil.
Once placed, select a seed that you wish to try. We have chosen the Blueberry Seed. You will notice “Choose Fertilizer”, which we dive into later. But click no fertilizer. Then it will plant the crop.
Interact with the crop and you will notice two bars on the screen. One of them is for irrigation and the other is for lightning.
Irrigation can be done in two different ways. The first way is simply clicking on the crop and manually adding water to it. Depending on the water you add, it will determine how much of the irrigation level goes up. Your task will be to add enough water, so the marker is in the green. (In this case, between 50-100). The second way is to use a water sprinkler. Which will keep your crops at a consistent water level of your choice.
The next thing you will need is lighting. There are also two possible ways for this. The first option is natural light. So, naturally, the sun will shine and fill this meter up for you. However, this is very inconsistent as the sun does not shine 24/7. So, another alternative for this, is to use grow lights. These will give the plants constant light. So they will grow faster.
Now it is a waiting game. Give your crop time, and it will fully grow to 100%, which will allow you to harvest it. This will give you 1 of the resources and 1 seed back every time. This also gives you a chance to get a deviated type of the crop too.
This will cover the very basics of farming. But to really benefit from farming, you will want to create a larger and automated farming system.
Automated Farming System
In order to get an automated system. Open your Memetics screen again and unlock all of these memetics below:
- Water Pump
- Water Purifier / Compact Water Filter
- Planter Box
- Grow Light
- Automatic Irrigation Facility
Once you have unlocked these, it’s time to start creating a greenhouse. We recommend building something that is 2 walls high. This will allow you to use fewer Grow Lights with a wider spread of light.
Planting Boxes
So in our case, we have built a box room that is 2 walls high. Then we are going to place 24 Planter Boxes. Thanks to the new snapping system, it allows you to neatly place 25 then remove the middle one.
Now, in the middle, add the Automatic Irrigation Facility (Sprinkler) and connect it to power. We have set it up like this, as this one sprinkler will cover all the planter boxes here, which will save you water and electricity.
Next, you will want to create a water system. It will automatically pump water out of the ground, then feed into the sprinkler.
Water system
Depending on where you are located, it will determine what resources your water pump will pump out of the ground.
- Polluted Zone will give you Polluted Water, which filters into Impure Acid.
- Normal Areas will give you Dirty Water.
- Oil Marked Areas will give you Barreled Crude Oil.
You will want a location that gives Dirty water, to test this. Place a water pump in the ground and connect it to power. Overtime you will now notice it starts to extract the resource every 5 minutes.
As seen in the images, below our water pump is giving us some oil but also dirty water.
Now it is time to filter the dirty water into purified water. In order to do this, you will need to place a small blue water pump above the main water pump. Connect this to the power, and then you can connect the water pipe to it.
To know this has been done correctly. You will notice the direction of the pump feeding into the little blue pump. If it does not look like the image below, then you have either not connected power to the little blue pump or you have not placed it high enough.
The next part is to connect the little blue pump to the water filter. Which means you will need to place the water filter above the blue pump. Then connect power to it. You will notice the water pushing upwards into the filter.
If done correctly, you will notice dirty water is automatically purifying. Which is amazing!
Now you can just go ahead and connect it to the barrel and be done. But we strongly advise adding a tank below it. This will store any excess water in the tank, which can help you out if you need some for cooking or perhaps just to take some on your journey in the world.
Go ahead and place it below the filtration system and add the water pipe to it. If you have done this correctly, you will see the blue water pipe going downwards to the tank, and you can check the tank’s inventory and will see the purified water in there.
Let the water build up a little bit first in the storage tank, then connect this storage tank to your sprinkler. As seen in the image below. The Sprinkler will now start working and be pumping water to all your plots.
You can also test a few things to make sure this is working correctly. One, access the inventory of the sprinkler and see the water inside it. Two, check all your planter boxes, they will slowly rise to 10 irrigation.
Lighting For Your Crops
Once the water has been set up, and you have done your planting boxes, the final step is to get your lighting sorted.
To do this, simply go into the build menu and craft the grow light and connect it to power. Then place it above the sprinkler(in the middle of all the crops). If done correctly, this one grow light can cover all the planter boxes.
If you are having issues with placing 1 grow light to cover all planting boxes, you can just add more lights. These only use 1 watt of power, so thankfully it will not impact you that much.
What Fertilizer do i need?
Now that you have everything in place, it’s time to work out what fertilizer you need for your crops and if you wish to use it. Fertilizers can give your crops additional bonuses from yielding more seeds to having an increased chance of getting deviated crops. So fertilizer can be extremely useful.
In order to make normal fertilizer, we simply unlock the Memetic for the Compost Bin. This will allow you to deposit items and turn them into normal fertilizer. So place this down, and you will see a list of items from your inventory that you can use. It does not matter what you put inside, they will all give you the same output of just fertilizer.
We highly recommend spoiled food as it can be easily obtained while playing casually. Add this to the compost bin. Every 3 minutes will give you 1 output.
If you wish to create the different types of fertilizer, you will need to go a little deeper in your Memetics and unlock Fertilizers I, II and III. You can also unlock a unique and special one from the mastery Memetic bench called “Mutation Boost”. From our experience, we do not think it is worth it to use this. As it costs so much and the difference from getting deviated crops wasn’t that much.
Here is a table below of all the Fertilizers you can now craft from the Supplies Workbench.
| Fertilizer | Effect | Ingredients |
|---|---|---|
| Fertilizer – Breeding Boost | Increases the crop’s fertility, causing it to drop more seeds when the plant fully matures. | 3x Fertilizers 5x Scarlet Calamus |
| Fertilizer – Growth Boost | Speeds up the growth of your crop. | 3x Fertilizers 1x Apple |
| Fertilizer – Mutation Boost | Increases the chances that a plant will become Deviated. | 3x Fertilizers 30x Stardust Source 5x Mushrooms |
| Fertilizer – Yield Boost | Boosts nutrition and increases the yield of a crop when it matures. | 3x Fertilizers 3x Mushrooms |
Planting your crops
After you have worked out what you are going to plant, it’s now time to get them in the soil and get them growing. We highly recommend using Breeding boost first on your crops so you can get more seeds back, especially with harder seeds that can be found, such as morels.
Go ahead and plant the first seed in the planting box. If you are going to plant multiple of the same seed, you can now use the “Continuous Planting” feature, which allows you to look at an empty plot and instantly add the same seed and fertilizer as you added in the last plot.
Once you have added all the seeds, you may have noticed the irrigation and lighting is stuck on 10 each.
You will now need to look at the crops information and work out what levels are needed. For Wheat, there must be around 50-90 irrigation and 70-100 lighting. A very good spot for the majority of crops is around 70-80 on lighting and irrigation.
In order to change this, simply bring the grow light back down from the ceiling and change the target lighting to the number required.
Then interact with the Sprinkler and change the Target Irrigation too.
Well done, now it’s a simple case of waiting for the crops to grow in time, and you will be able to harvest all your yield!
Making Farming Even Easier
Now the basics of automation are covered, you can now even go that step further if you wish by using deviants to help you or getting some extra tools.
Growshroom
Growshroom is a MUST get deviant. This will go that extra step further by letting you interact with its securement unit and will automatically plant your seeds and harvest them for you. So you do not need to even interact with your crops ever!
In order to get this deviant, you can grow mushrooms for a chance to get it, or you can gather mushrooms in the wild and get the chance to obtain it.
Below is an image of a cave that has lots of mushrooms, so you will have a very high chance of getting it from that.
Buzzy Bee
Another deviant that is a MUST is the Buzzy Bee. Sadly, this is for PVE players only, but this deviant will increase the chances of mutation of planted crops.
To get this deviant, you will need to check different farms in the world. You can use our interactive map to find all the spawn locations.
Gardening Gloves
A huge recommendation is to get a pair of Gardening Gloves. They come in 3 different bonus effects; 6%, 9% and 12%. These are very good if you wish to plant seeds and harvest without the Growshroom. As you can get double seeds back. These are available from the Mastery Memetic or purchasing them from a player.
This should lead you to having a full understanding of farming in Once Human. We would love to see your homes and farms in our Discord! Of course, if you have any inquiries, the MMO-Wiki Team will be more than happy to help you!
