The Ultimate Rust Farming Guide

While you can plant seeds in natural soil, it is highly inefficient. When starting your farm, the Large Planter Box (9 seeds) is highly recommended, as its size is necessary for cross-breeding. Both the Large and the Triangle Planter Box (4 seeds) automatically snap to the center of your foundations for perfect, hassle-free placement. You can fit three Small Planter Boxes (3 seeds each) on a square foundation, but they lack the auto-align feature. This makes them difficult to center and can interfere with placing walls.

Note that the current farming "meta" is using the Single Plant Pot. You can fit up to 25 of these onto a single square foundation for maximum yield! Even better, they can be placed on top of storage containers, allowing you to fit four Large Wood Boxes on a foundation with 25 pots resting directly on top of them ([Link: How to place correctly]). However, this method is best used afteryou have secured the perfect genetics for your crops (which we'll cover in the next section).

To keep the light level at a perfect 100%, you need to craft a standard ceiling light. The light's coverage is a hemisphere extending downwards and about one square foundation to the sides. The most efficient placement depends on your setup. If you are using Large Planter Boxes, you can hang the light exactly on the intersection of four foundations. Because the light only needs to touch the planter box itself (not the outer seeds), this will perfectly illuminate four boxes at once. However, if you are using the Single Plant Pot "meta", the mechanics change—the light must physically reach every individual pot. In this case, you must place the light exactly halfway between two foundations to perfectly cover 50 pots with a single light source.

Plants constantly consume water, but you don't water the plant directly—you fill the planter itself. The optimal water level for 100% happiness is to keep the planter filled to about 60–65% of its total capacity.

• Place a water pump into a fresh water source.
• Connect it directly to a sprinkler using a hose.
• Strategic sprinkler placement is key, and it works very similarly to the lighting mechanics. If using Large Planter Boxes, a sprinkler's effective range is very forgiving—you only need 2 sprinklers to cover up to 16 planters! However, if using the Single Plant Pot meta, the sprinkler must physically hit every individual pot. In this case, just like with the ceiling light, place the sprinkler exactly halfway between two foundations to cover all 50 pots evenly.

Even with perfect water and light, soil needs fertilizer to achieve 100% plant happiness.

• Craft a Composter. (You can click on the word to see a complete table of all compostable items and their fertilizer yields).
• While you can put almost any organic material (like food or fish) into the composter, the absolute best source is horse dung. Keeping a horse and feeding it will provide massive amounts of dung (1 dung = 10 fertilizer).
• The soil consumes exactly one fertilizer per sapling per growth cycle.

Plants can experience discomfort from incorrect temperatures. To control this, use an electric heater. Heaters warm all seedlings within a radius of just over one square and heat perfectly through walls.

Genetics dictate your farm's true efficiency. Every plant has six gene slots that become visible in the UI at the sapling stage.

Your goal is to reach the crossbreed stage and mix neighboring plants to achieve the perfect ratio, such as 3G 3Y or 2G 4Y. Once you breed the perfect plant, you can clone it endlessly.

Once you have harvested berries, corn, and eggs, set up a Cooking Table. The table will automatically suggest recipes based on your ingredients. Here you can brew teas and bake pies that provide massive buffs for farming, resource gathering, and PVP combat.