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Cultivation is how the walking vessel feeds itself. Seedlings are scattered through the zones as gatherable finds, and once they are planted in the Grow Chamber they turn into a renewable supply of the ingredients Cooking runs on. Obtaining every one of the eleven types unlocks the Green Thumb achievement.

Seedlings

Seedlings are one-off finds. Each type has to be picked up in the field before it can be grown, and several varieties appear only in specific zones, which makes the system a reason to sweep a region before the story moves the ship on. Koo helps: speaking to a Keeper Golem when entering a new zone marks nearby seedling locations on the map. That answer is not free. Each Keeper Golem takes exactly one question and then goes quiet for good, and there are only thirty of them in the whole game, so a golem spent on seedlings is a golem not spent on a manual, a blade or an elite enemy.

Three types can also be bought rather than found. A merchant in the Ancient Civilization Zone starts stocking seedlings in Chapter 2, and the same three appear in merchant inventories in later zones, which makes them the safety net for anything an early sweep missed. Everything else on the list is field-only.

The Grow Chamber

Planted seedlings grow in the Grow Chamber aboard the ship and are harvested automatically once they are ready, so the loop runs in the background while Emma is out on an expedition. Planting and tending crops also raises rapport with Kagura, which ties the farming loop back into the cooking one.

The Digital Deluxe upgrade seeds the chamber early by including a set of vegetable seedlings in its bonus contents, although they can only be planted once the Grow Chamber itself is unlocked.

The chamber opens with three plots and grows on Facility Modules, salvaged parts pulled out of the zones. The first expansion costs one module and every slot after that costs one more than the one before it, so the eleventh and final plot alone asks for eight.

Filling all eleven costs thirty-six modules, and only twenty-six of them sit in fixed places across the zones. The rest turn up in strongboxes at random, so a completely expanded chamber is usually a second-playthrough project rather than a first-run one. Unspent modules and every slot already paid for carry into New Game Plus, which is what makes the second attempt cheap. Emma can hand the planting decision to Kagura or pick each seed herself, and the habit worth building either way is leaving no plot idle, since a crop growing while she is in the field costs nothing and an empty plot is what leaves a recipe one ingredient short.

The Incubator

Poultry runs alongside the crops. Fertilized Eggs are found in the field as their own collectible category, and placing one in the Incubator hatches a chicken that then lays eggs on its own. Eggs feed the Fried Egg, Omelette, Meat Omelette, and Egg Onigiri recipes, and putting a fertilized egg in the incubator raises Kagura's rapport.

The Incubator itself unlocks in Chapter 2 and draws on the same Facility Modules, though it is much cheaper to fill. It starts with one slot, the next three cost a module each, the fifth costs two and the sixth costs three, which comes to eight modules for a full coop of six. That is well inside what a single playthrough supplies, so the sensible order is to finish the Incubator first and let the Grow Chamber take whatever is left over.

Grow Research

Kagura researches each crop separately. Every guide has a basic and an advanced tier, and finishing one raises the harvest from that seedling by one or two units. The poultry guide raises egg yield the same way and lifts the golden egg chance on top of it, listed as plus 25 percent for the basic tier and plus 35 percent for the advanced one. Collecting every cooking and crop book is what the Gourmand achievement asks for.

The Research Queue

Research runs itself, which is convenient and also the trap. Koo and Kagura both keep working through their queues while Emma is out in the field, and when an entry finishes the next one starts without anyone asking. Kagura's automatic pick is always a recipe. Grow Research, the branch that actually raises harvest yields, only advances when it has been set by hand, and it has to be set again every single time an entry completes. A run that never goes back to the Walker to reselect it will reach the end of the campaign with a full recipe book and crop guides that were never touched.

How long her list is in the first place depends on Electronic Brains, the yellow skulls scattered through the zones. They unlock further Cooking and Grow Research entries, so a chapter swept for skulls widens the research she has available at the same time as it feeds the collection counters and the Achievements attached to them. Sweeping a zone before the story closes it is therefore worth more to the farming loop than it looks: the seedlings, the fertilized eggs and the skulls that unlock research for both are all in the same pass.

Related Pages

Cooking uses everything grown here, Rapport explains Kagura's research speed, and Collectibles lists seedlings and fertilized eggs among the tracked discovery categories.