Which crop should I grow to make the most pixels?

Question

With the Terramart Shipment structure it is possible to sell crops and farm produce directly from your colony. This makes farming crops to make pixels a viable option. However, choosing the right crop to grow is surprisingly hard - there's a lot of variables to take into consideration -

• Crops that grow on vines (eg. rice, tomato) are preferred to to those that don't (eg. potato) since they don't need constant replanting
• Some crops grow faster or have fewer stages, which is a plus since (I believe) each individual stage requires watering
• Some crops can be cooked or processed to increase their value
• Some plants can only found on planets which are inaccessible until late in the game

With these in mind, what are the best crops to grow for the purpose of selling them to make pixels?

Answer 1

I'm going to assume that for the crops that don't need to be replanted, the initial growth period is negligible in the long run, and only the time between harvests needs to be taken into account.

I gathered information from here and here, then created a spreadsheet and put in recipes for everything that can be made with just crops:

If the "best crops" are the ones which have the highest pixel per minute per tile of width, ie: for a given space or number of sprinklers, you'll be making the most money, then the best crops are jointly Boltbulb and Eggshoot at 6 pixels, per minute, per tile of width:

I've usually found Boltbulb fairly early on, so I think it should be good enough for your last point.

As a sprinkler has radius 12, this means that, with a single sprinkler, you can be making (on average) 144 pixels a minute. With 20 sprinklers and an hour, you'd have 172,800 pixels.

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If you're limited not by space, but instead by harvesting time, ie: you want to make the most profit per minute per plant harvested, which means less pressing e/Middle Click and less running back and forth to store stuff, then the best recipe is Hot Bone:

These are created with 1 Chilli and 1 Boneboo. Every minute, you'll be making 11.625 pixels for each individual plant.

These ingredients are fairly late-game, so earlier on you could consider instead Ocean Salsa (8.3125) or Ape Grapes (7.5).

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Here's a link to the spreadsheet I created, if you want to try something or check if I've made a mistake.

Answer 2

Necro Answer, and a bit of a Frame Challenge: Don't Look At Raw Pixel Amounts

If you're looking for big profits, you're usually talking about lots of plants. At which point, the logistics become a lot more of a hassle than anything else.

Because of that, the real answer is: Rice and Cocoa.

The reason these are the best is because:

• Their harvest crop is stackable.
• Their harvest doesn't require replanting.
• Their harvest can be cooked to increase income further.

This means you can run through your field, spamming E to collect everything. Doesn't matter how big your field is, you never need multiple trips through it.

And if you place your kitchen right next to the Terramart shipper and Campfire, you can boil the rice and make chocolate all at once. Sure, you won't be able to hold all the results at once (rice is stackable, but boiled rice isn't)... but it'll automatically get picked back up as you load up the Terramart shipping container. Meaning you can load container after container and ship them rapidly.

Sure, you might technically get more pixels per crop with more exotic plants... but it'll require lots of travel back and forth, lots of coordinating at the kitchen. Want a Hot Bone plantation that'll earn you 40k pix per harvest? You're looking at running through the fields spamming E, cooking recipes, and loading 15-18 cooked products into the shipping container (your inventory is only 40, and it takes two different ingredients to get each cooked product). So you're looking at having to make that run 5-6 times. Want to double the size of your farm? You're going to be making 10-12 runs.

Double the size of a rice farm... and you're still only running along its length once.