In Once Human, as any other survival game, there are a lot of food items for you to discover and cook yourself. These can have varying buffs ranging from simply movement speed boosts to further pushing your damage output beyond what your gear can allow. These types of food items typically require deviated crops, and in this guide, let me show you how to improve your chances of getting them!
How to Grow More Deviated Crops
So, if you are reading this article, I’m going to assume that you at least know the bare basics of planting crops, since you wouldn’t be looking this up otherwise. Because of that, let me skip past the whole “put down some planter boxes” schtick.
There are really only a few ways to improve your chances of getting deviated crops, and if you have been reading the list of memetics, I’m sure you know at least one of them by now, so let’s get to that one first as a refresher.
Method #1. Making Your Own Specialized Fertilizer
Like I just said, if you have been paying attention to all the memetics in the game, then you know about the entire branch of fertilizer-related nodes under the Logistics tab, right after the planter boxes one.
Basically, you need to unlock everything under this branch all the way up until the Fertilizers III node. This will give you the ability to create your own Mutation Boost fertilizer at any supplies workbench.
Needless to say, using this will increase your chance of getting a deviated crop once a seed has fully grown. The downside to this method is that it is somewhat expensive due to the fact that it costs 30 stardust source each.
Unless you are drowning in this resource and are already done maxing out your gear and clearing prime wars, I’d recommend that you steer clear of this for now.
On top of that, you will also need 5 mushrooms each, which is significantly easier to gather but might not be something that you have been stocking up on beforehand.
If you need some help finding mushrooms, there are a few spots in the map where you can get a lot of them easily. One of the most common spots is the “Mushroom Cave”, as players have so lovingly called it.
It is basically a chasm that can be found right beside the teleportation tower at Sunbury. You can’t miss this large gaping hole, especially since there are a ton of whispers left behind by people who keep saying that there are mushrooms down there. They’re right, though, there are a lot of spawns here.
If you have the Harvesting Sickle specialization or somebody else in your server is selling one, I highly recommend getting it to potentially get double yield while gathering some shrooms. A single run through with a sickle got me almost 40 mushrooms and some seeds to passively grow them.
NOTE: There is also the improved compound fertilizer that will give you the buffs that every other fertilizer type will give you, but it requires deviated mushrooms. It is also a random specialization, which means that some of you will probably never even see it throughout the whole season.
Method #2. Stocking Up On Bees
Another way you can improve your chances of getting deviated crops is by capturing and fielding some Buzzy Bee deviations. Their entire purpose is to increase the mutation chance of crops, and this goes up even further if they have a high skill level.
If your focus is going to be on farming, then I recommend getting a bunch of them active and set up in a room where you can fully max out their recovery.
They only need music, crops, and flowers, so just put their securement units somewhere near your farm and dedicate at least a single planter box for a flower that you can just choose to never harvest.
There are many places where you can catch Buzzy Bees, but these are not guaranteed spawns. To save you some time, below will be a screenshot of the interactive map with all known spawn locations of the Buzzy Bee. Just keep checking them whenever you can.
Though I haven’t done extensive testing on it, especially since I run a big rooftop and basement farm where I mostly just plant and ignore, the Growshroom deviation seem to work well with these bees.
Growshrooms can be acquired randomly by picking mushrooms, and while they do not use fertilizers, they can pick deviated crops and then replant the seed. Combined with Buzzy Bees, you can run a pretty passive farm with some okay yield and fast growth.
NOTE: The Growshroom will not replant automatically on initial use. Make sure to set up the replant feature after it has harvested everything for the first time.
Method #3. Just Finding Them, Really
Most crops in the game have static spawns all around the map, and there is a chance for them to become deviated every time they respawn. This is the least reliable and most tedious way of getting them, but you may as well try your luck if you want to actively farm some.
As with any deviated crop, the ones that spawn in the wild will have a very distinct and easy to spot red and purple aura. Since these do not expire, you may as well grab any that you find while roaming the map.
I am not going to waste my time searching for one as I write this, so here is a planter box that shows you the exact same aura that they have. The plant (corn) is invisible, for some odd reason, but the aura is right there!
Unfortunately, as far as I know, there isn’t really any other methods whether active or passive for this. I guess you could count buying from other players as another way to get them? They basically do some or all of the methods above, though, so you may as well make your own.
Those are pretty much all of the ways you can potentially increase your deviated crop yield. If you plan on buying from other players instead, check out this guide I made on how to get rich quick in Once Human so you can start racking up a lot of energy links to spend on people’s vending machines. I highly recommend doing that as your crops are growing!
