Part of the Base Building series:

Base Building Guide Hub: Start here.

Cooking & Nutrient Processor: What to do with the harvest.

Quick Answer

Farming means planting crops in your own base so plant materials regrow on a timer instead of being gathered from the wild.
Hydroponic Trays are the compact option. They mount on floors and walls, stack neatly into rows, and draw base power.
Bio-Domes are large glass domes that hold many plants at once and look like a greenhouse, which makes them the display piece of most crop bases.
Standard planters sit outdoors and suit small, casual setups on the crop's home planet.
To plant a crop you first need to harvest that plant in the wild, so a short trip to the right biome unlocks permanent supply.
Crops map to biomes: Star Bulb on lush worlds, Frost Crystal on frozen, Cactus Flesh on desert, Solanium on scorched, Gamma Root on radioactive, Fungal Mould on toxic, Marrow Bulb in caves.
A farm is the input side of two economies at once: the Nutrient Processor and the high-value crafted products like Stasis Devices and Fusion Igniters.

Overview

Most players meet No Man's Sky's plant resources the hard way. You need Frost Crystal, so you warp to a frozen planet, freeze for ten minutes, fill half a stack, and fly home. Two days later you need Gamma Root, so you do the same thing somewhere irradiated. Farming replaces that loop with a room in your base.

Planted crops behave like renewable deposits. They mature, you harvest them, and they start regrowing immediately. Nothing depletes, nothing runs out, and a base full of trays produces the same materials whether you built it on a paradise world or a dead moon. Once the farm exists, the cost of any recipe that uses plant matter drops to the walk between your landing pad and the growing room.

The structures themselves are cheap. What takes planning is deciding which crops you actually need, and how many of each, and that depends entirely on what you intend to build with them.

Why Farm Instead of Gather

Wild harvesting has four problems that a farm solves at once.

It is not renewable on your schedule. Wild plants respawn, but you have to travel back to them. A farm regrows where you already are.

It is biome-locked. Every plant material lives on a specific planet type, so gathering four different crops means four different worlds and four sets of hazard protection. Crops planted indoors ignore where you built.

It is hazardous. Toxic rain, radiation, and superheated storms all drain protection while you are standing in a field picking mould. A Bio-Dome or an interior tray room removes the hazard from the job entirely.

It does not scale. Hand-gathering 400 Gamma Root is a chore. Harvesting 400 Gamma Root from planted rows is one lap of a room.

There is one more benefit that surprises people. Valuable oddities like Gravitino Balls and Vortex Cubes can be cultivated in your own growing structures, and collecting them from your own plants does not trigger the Sentinel response that picking them up in the wild does.

The Growing Structures

Hydroponic Trays

Trays are the workhorse. They are small, they mount on floor panels or wall sections, and they tile into dense grids inside a single room. Because they are compact you can put a genuinely large number of growing slots into a modest structure, which is why high-volume production bases lean on them.

Two things to plan for. Trays draw base power, so a big tray farm needs a real grid behind it rather than a lone solar panel. They also want periodic Carbon to keep growth running at full speed. The tradeoff is flexibility: Large Hydroponic Trays grow any species on any planet, so a single interior room can produce every crop in the game regardless of what world you landed on.

Bio-Domes

A Bio-Dome is a large glass structure that holds many plants under one roof. It has the biggest footprint of the three options and the best visual payoff, since a lit dome full of alien crops reads as a greenhouse rather than a warehouse.

Bio-Domes are also the low-maintenance choice. They do not need the Carbon top-ups that trays want between harvests, which matters when your farm is large enough that upkeep becomes its own chore. Many long-running crop bases use domes as the bulk producer and keep a handful of trays nearby for whatever the domes are not covering.

Planters

Standard planters are the entry-level option: individual outdoor pots, cheap to place, no dome or interior room required. They suit a starter base or a decorative garden more than a production line. If you are farming a crop on its native planet and only need a trickle of it, planters do the job without any of the setup.

Freighter Agricultural Rooms

Your freighter has dedicated agricultural rooms, and they change the calculus completely. A freighter farm travels with you, sits behind a single teleport, and never asks which planet you are standing on. For players who move around constantly, growing crops aboard the capital ship beats maintaining planet-side bases you have to fly back to. See the freighter base building guide for how those rooms slot into the interior layout.

Seeds: Where Crops Come From

There is no seed shop. To plant a species, you first have to harvest that plant in the wild, which gives you what the growing structure needs to start a crop of the same type. That single requirement is what makes biome knowledge matter: every farm begins with one trip to the right planet.

Plan the trip properly and you only make it once. Land on a lush world, strip enough Star Bulb, and every Star Bulb you will ever need afterwards comes from your own base. The planet types and biomes guide covers which hazards you should prepare for on each of these worlds before you go.

Crop	Source biome	Feeds into
Star Bulb	Lush / paradise	Poly Fibre for Circuit Boards, cooking
Frost Crystal	Frozen	Refines into Glass, Heat Capacitor, Living Glass, cooking
Cactus Flesh	Desert / barren	Poly Fibre for Circuit Boards, cooking
Solanium	Scorched	Heat Capacitor for Circuit Boards, cooking
Gamma Root	Radioactive	Lubricant for Living Glass, cooking
Fungal Mould	Toxic	Acid for Liquid Explosive, cooking
Marrow Bulb	Caves on any planet type	Cooking, Carbon refining

Full material references for each of these sit in the resources and items index.

Growth Timers and Harvesting

Planted crops mature on a real-time timer. The clock runs whether or not you are standing there, so the natural rhythm is to harvest, go do something else for a while, and come back to a full farm. Different species take different amounts of time to mature, and a plant that has not finished growing simply cannot be picked yet.

Harvesting does not destroy the plant. You take the yield, the growth cycle restarts, and the same slot produces again. This is the part that makes farming compound: a slot planted once keeps paying out for the rest of your save.

That timer is also the real constraint on production. You cannot rush a harvest, so the only lever you have on output is the number of planted slots. If you want more material per cycle, you plant more rows, not better rows.

What a Farm Actually Feeds

Cooking. The Nutrient Processor turns raw produce into meals, and meals convert into Nanites and Quicksilver through Cronus on the Anomaly. Roasted and grilled produce are single-ingredient recipes, so crops go in raw and come out saleable. A steady tray of crops removes the "go find ingredients" step that stops most players from cooking seriously.

High-value crafted products. This is where farms pay for themselves. The Stasis Device and Fusion Igniter chains are built on plant matter in bulk. A single Stasis Device wants 400 Gamma Root, 300 Frost Crystal across two intermediates, plus Star Bulb, Cactus Flesh, and Solanium for the Circuit Board. A Fusion Igniter wants roughly 600 Fungal Mould. Those numbers are unpleasant to gather by hand and trivial to harvest from a room you already built.

Everything in between. Glass for windows and domes comes from refined Frost Crystal. Carbon for fuel comes off almost any plant. A crop base quietly covers a lot of ordinary construction upkeep too.

Scaling Up

Work backwards from the product. If you want one Stasis Device per harvest cycle, you need enough Gamma Root slots to produce 400 units in that cycle, and enough Frost Crystal slots for 300. Multiply by the number of devices you want per cycle and you have your slot count. Most players discover the answer is dozens of plants per crop, not a handful, and that a first attempt at a farm is usually about a third of the size it needs to be.

Two structural decisions follow from that.

Dedicated crop bases. Rather than cramming everything into your main base, build satellite farms on each crop's native planet and use outdoor planting or Bio-Domes there. Native-planet growing avoids the power and Carbon overhead of a big tray room, at the cost of teleporting between sites at harvest time.

One central farm. The alternative is a single large interior farm using Large Hydroponic Trays, which grow anything anywhere. Everything is in one place, harvesting is one lap, and the price is a serious power grid. Budget generator capacity for the full tray count before you start planting, because a farm that browns out stops growing.

Freighter agricultural rooms sit between the two. They are centralized like a main base and portable like nothing else, which is why players who warp constantly tend to end up farming in orbit.

FAQ

Do I need to find seeds to start farming?

No, and there is no vendor for them. Harvest the plant in the wild once and you will have what the tray, planter, or Bio-Dome needs to grow that species yourself. After that first trip the crop is permanently available in your base.

Can I grow any crop on any planet?

Large Hydroponic Trays can, which is what makes them the standard for centralized farms. Outdoor planters and native-planet setups are tied to what suits the local environment, so a fully mixed farm generally means indoor trays or a Bio-Dome rather than pots in the open.

Are Bio-Domes better than Hydroponic Trays?

They solve different problems. Bio-Domes hold many plants with less upkeep and look far better. Trays pack more growing slots into less space and mount anywhere, including walls. Large operations usually run both.

Do plants keep growing while I am offline?

Growth runs on a real-time clock, so the practical pattern is to harvest everything, leave, and return later to a matured farm. There is no way to speed up a cycle, which is why total slot count is the only real lever on output.

How many plants do I need for Stasis Devices?

Enough to cover 400 Gamma Root and 300 Frost Crystal per device, plus the Star Bulb, Cactus Flesh, and Solanium going into the Circuit Board. In practice that means dedicated rows for each crop, and it is the single biggest reason serious crafters build farms at all.

Key Takeaways

Farming converts biome-locked, hazard-exposed gathering trips into a renewable supply that sits inside your base.
Hydroponic Trays pack the most growing slots into a room and take power plus Carbon upkeep; Bio-Domes hold many plants with less maintenance and better looks; planters cover small outdoor setups.
Freighter agricultural rooms give you a farm that follows you across the galaxy.
Every crop starts with one wild harvest on its home biome, so a single planned trip per species unlocks permanent production.
Growth runs on a real-time timer and plants are harvested repeatedly, so output scales with slot count and nothing else.
Cooking and the Stasis Device and Fusion Igniter chains both run on farmed plant matter, which is what turns a growing room into an income source rather than a decoration.

No Man's Sky Farming Guide: Hydroponics, Bio-Domes & Crop Growing