Scrap Mechanic’s new survival mode has recently released and it tasks players with surviving a world overrun by angry farming robots. After you awake from a crash landing, you’ll find that you have nothing but a jack lift and a hammer to forge your path. Similar to other survival games, players will need to manage a food and thirst meter otherwise they’ll start taking damage. This can be done by growing crops, creating milk, and scavenging for food in ruined buildings. While it’s generally easy to start a farm, the issue is creating a sustainable food source so you won’t have to worry about hunting down new seeds.
To be clear, we will be focusing on the basics and starting up a beginner’s farm. Scrap Mechanic is a devilishly intricate game where you can craft elaborate irrigation systems. But to even get there, you will need to start a basic farm so you can collect food and go exploring.
How to Grow Food
To grow food you will need to plant seeds in soil. When you’re just starting out, soil can be found in green bags. Each soil plot makes up a 2×2 space and can hold a single seed of any food type. You will need water to grow these plants, which can be harvested by using a blue bucket. One of these buckets is by the small pond to the right of your ship, while another is on the ramp of the destroyed building directly across from the crash site. Eventually you will be able to craft a water pump and siphon water directly from a source, but for now these buckets will be your best friend.
Once you have water, toss it on the seed of choice. You only need to water a seed once for it to grow and you can tell which soil section you’ve watered if the dirt is a darker shade of brown. After this, you can decide to use fertilizer to speed up the process by a couple of days. This isn’t necessary and you shouldn’t rely on always having fertilizer for your crops.
How to Start Your First Farm
When the game starts, I recommend gathering all of the food supplies from the pond to the right of the ship. Once you have enough supplies, follow the main road until you reach the gas station. This structure will have a giant glowing wrench sign so it’s nearly impossible to miss. Now look for a body of water somewhere around this structure to start your farm. You’ll want to be somewhere generally near the gas station since it’s where you can create advanced robots.
After you pick out some land, harvest some wood and build a nice fence around it. Layout the soil, plant your seeds, and water them via the buckets you collected early on. You’ll want to reinforce your farm with a few walls that at least four blocks high. This is because you will eventually attract a lot of attention from the farming robots who are wandering around. If your farm is too big you’ll get a warning and a red timer that begins to countdown. Keep in mind hours in-game are minutes in the real world, so if the timer states you have 13 hours left before the robots attack your crops, you’ll actually have 13 minutes.
This is why you will want to construct walls around your crops, perhaps even a second or third layer to ensure that the robots cannot breach your defenses. Farm bots will only attack if you have a lot of crops growing, so consider creating a bunch of food and then holding off on planting until you’re ready to defend them again.
As for satisfying your thirst meter, you will want to look for a cow that’s wandering the area. You can actually trap this animal in a pen and feed it corn to produce milk. When you find a cow, stand behind it and just walk into the animal. This will push the beast, letting you move it to a specific area. It’s not eloquent, but it’s much better than leading it along with a bit of corn. Once you put the cow where you want, build a fence around it that’s between 3-4 blocks high.
Congratulations, you have a renewable source for your thirst meter. In my world, I placed the pen right next to some stalks of corn since these will typically refill every three days. Now just drop the pieces around the cow so it will eat the food and produce a jar of milk.
Obviously, Scrap Mechanic’s farming will only get more complicated as you progress through the game. However, this should get you started so you can survive the initial days and freely explore the world without too much fear.
