Sol One Farming Guide: Crops, Seeds and a Greenhouse That Pays
How farming works in Sol One: every crop is also a seed, so the real skill is deciding what to eat and what to replant. Plus greenhouse design.
Sol One's farming system has one rule that changes everything else: every crop you harvest is also a seed. The official game description says it plainly — each crop can be eaten or replanted. That single sentence turns agriculture from a background chore into a resource allocation problem, and it is the reason players who farm casually run out of food in the second week while players who plan never do.
This guide covers the farm as a system: what to plant, how much to keep back, how to build the room, and how the water budget constrains all of it.
The seed decision
The core loop is:
- Plant a seed.
- Harvest a crop.
- Decide: eat it or replant it.
If you eat everything, you have no next harvest. If you replant everything, you never eat. The sustainable answer is a ratio, and the ratio depends on how many plots you run and how fast you want the farm to grow.
A practical starting policy:
- Keep 30 to 50 percent of each harvest as seed stock until you have at least two plots of that crop.
- Never eat the last unit of a crop type. That is your genetic reserve, in game terms.
- Expand plots slowly. A small farm with a seed buffer beats a large farm with none.
Staggered planting gives you a continuous harvest. A single planting day gives you a feast followed by a famine, and a famine is when you eat the seed stock.
What to grow first
Without a published crop list, the sensible early priorities are:
- A fast, low-water crop for daily calories.
- A calorie-dense crop for expeditions and for the days when the farm is recovering.
- A crop with a useful by-product if the build has one — anything that feeds the recycler, the fabricator or the research bench.
Plant a small amount of each before you commit to a monoculture. You need to learn the growth times and water draw of each crop in your build, and the only way to learn them is to grow them.
Greenhouse design
A greenhouse is a sealed, lit, watered room. Those three adjectives each carry a design consequence.
Sealed. The room should hold pressure or at least hold atmosphere, so you can tend it without a suit. A greenhouse you have to visit in a suit is a greenhouse you visit less often.
Lit. Crops need light, and on Mars that means powered grow lights. This puts the greenhouse on the power budget, and it makes the greenhouse a candidate for load-shedding during a storm — which is exactly when you do not want to lose a harvest.
Watered. Every plot is a water demand. The water guide→ treats the greenhouse as one of the three main consumers for this reason. Size the farm to the tank, not the other way around.
Short pipe runs, short walks, less freezing risk. The best greenhouse location is adjacent to both the water reserve and the habitat, with a door between them.
Humidity is a real load
A sealed room full of wet soil and grow lights is a humid room. In a life-support model, that moisture either gets recovered by the recycler or condenses on the wrong surface. Design for it:
- Keep the greenhouse on the recycler's loop if the build allows it.
- Do not seal a greenhouse so tightly that condensation has nowhere to go.
- Watch the room's state during the first full growth cycle, not just at planting.
Farm size and the water budget
The most common farming mistake is building the farm to fill the room. The correct size is the largest farm the water supply can support through a bad week.
A method:
- Measure how much water one plot consumes per growth cycle (or estimate from the tank drop).
- Decide how many days of reserve you want to keep.
- Size the plot count so that the farm's draw leaves that reserve intact.
- Plant half of it for the first cycle and see what the tank does.
If the tank falls, you built too big. If it rises, you have room to add plots.
Food storage and spoilage
Food that spoils is food you grew twice. Storage rules:
- Keep food in a sealed, temperature-stable room. The habitat is usually fine; an unpressurized shed is not.
- Keep the expedition stock separate. Do not let a long trip eat the base reserve.
- Preserve by processing if the build offers it. Any recipe that extends shelf life is worth a research slot.
Farming and the rest of the base
The farm touches every other system:
- Power: grow lights and heating.
- Water: irrigation and humidity.
- Oxygen: if the greenhouse is sealed, it is another volume on the atmosphere loop.
- Research: crops may be sample sources or unlock targets.
- Rocket: food is the last thing you think about before a launch, and the first thing you regret forgetting.
That last point is not a joke. A rocket with no food is a very expensive coffin.
A first-farm plan
For the first two weeks:
- Two plots of a fast crop, two of a dense crop.
- A seed buffer of at least one full harvest of each.
- A greenhouse adjacent to the water tank and the habitat.
- Grow lights on the critical circuit, or a plan to shed other loads first.
- A food store in the habitat that is never touched for expeditions.
Expand only when the water budget and the power budget both have headroom.
FAQ
Can I eat raw crops or do I need to cook? The game's survival loop treats crops as food. Whether processing improves nutrition is a build-specific detail; plan for the simple case and check the crafting menu at launch.
Do crops die if the greenhouse loses power? Light loss slows or stops growth, and a cold greenhouse is worse. The safe assumption is that an outage costs you growth time, so keep the grow lights high on the priority list.
How many crops do I need per day? There is no published number. Start with two plots of a fast crop, measure consumption over a few days, and scale from the measurement.
Can I farm outside? Not in any practical sense. Mars is cold, dry and irradiated; the game's farming is an indoor, lit, watered system.
What happens if I run out of seeds? You are dependent on finding more in the world — POIs, trade or a reseeded crop if the build offers one. This is exactly the failure the seed buffer exists to prevent.