One-planet challenge

One-planet challenge is a popular challenge for experienced FU players who like engineering/automation.

Note: This challenge is not recommended for first-time players, and as it is not officially supported some content is inaccessible or very hard to access.

The goal is to progress (obtain higher-tier resources and reach higher-tier techs) without visiting any planets except your starting Garden planet.

• Visiting missions (such as Verdant Ruins) and trading at Outpost or Science Outpost is usually allowed.
• Buying ores (e.g. from Geologist, station terminals etc.) is usually not allowed, because it's too easy and cheapens the challenge, but, depending upon how hard the challenge is set, there may be exceptions, such as
  • Buying ores from the tenants you spawned via Colony Deeds might be allowed (notably the tiny variant of deeds requires no outpost interaction),
  • Buying Zerchesium Ore, which is unobtainable otherwise, might be allowed.

Under these conditions, most things in the game are obtainable.

The Garden planet is tier 1, so it doesn't have tier 2+ ores in the ground. They need to be obtained by other means.

This can be accomplished by using chemistry, plants, liquid interactions, machinery (sifters, crushers, centrifuges, extractors), bees, tenants (including merchant NPCs), etc.

The early Power Progression naturally offers a relatively fast path to automate extraction of Tungsten and Titanium:

1. keep digging underground via the help of a Quarry and when in the Garden Core Layer keep digging around and down but without digging the Unrefined Conglomerate background blocks,
2. This act of digging alone should yield enough materials to make 2 Hydraulic Dynamo, a Colony Core (in particular enough Diamonds), pumps and centrifuges
3. Make a room near the lava ocean at the bottom with the dynamos, a bed and a light, outside the room wire to them centrifuges to centrifuge lava pumped from the lava ocean,
4. Keep spawning a tenant in such room until a Foundry Merchant selling Tungsten and Titanium cheap enough appears, add more hydraulic Dynamos or remove other items from the room until it happens,
5. Pump and centrifuge the lava to obtain iron and tungsten ore in unlimited quantities,
6. Liquify the iron, either via extraction or at a Chemistry Lab,
7. All the background blocks that are left in the core are on average Unrefined Conglomerate, if you pour the previously made Liquid Iron on them, they will turn to Volcanic Ash in great quantities with a little amount of liquid (unlike in the mixer), which can be mined by the same quarries that mined the foreground. Volcanic Ash can then be sifted to obtain Diamonds in much larger numbers or mixed with Dark Water and crushed for Titanium Ore,
8. Such initial supply should allow you to purchase enough Teleporter Cores from the outpost and craft enough Liquid Mixers to keep advancing in the tech tree and automate resource transformation effectively.

Once access to liquid mixing and ITDs is secured, the tier progression is more dependent on what is available and is not necessarily linked to the power progression. For example,

• Titanium production can be automated by growing some Blade Trees, or by mixing some Steel Sand Block blocks, etc.
• Blue Grav-Liquid can be obtained early by extracting Neonmelon seeds for Prism Shards, which have a chance to produce blue-grav liquid when processed in a blast furnace.
• Blue Grav-liquid opens up a number of new production chains by allowing direct conversion of water into both Black Tar and Liquid Protocite
• Durasteel production can be automated chaining several ITDs for Alien Rock production, or delving into madness for Plasmango Seed extraction etc
• A large colony near you offers many advantages:
  • With a Recycling Center and a Sewage Storage there might be enough waste that farming there radioactive materials to power production might become reasonable,
  • a Community Garden will greatly speed up your agriculture research due to the large yield multiplers it carries,
  • more tenants there are, more missions more regularly are offered, some of which have loot otherwise difficult to obtain. For instance, a Solstew delivery mission will gift the player Solusberry Seeds to unlock Solarium Stars otherwise unobtainable, while a mission to kill Wretched Rats might result in the rats dropping Essentia Obscura, even before a liquid mixer is secured!

Because the starting planet is tier 1, the passive gain of Research is very low on it. You would want to counter this: produce some pricey materials/crops and throw them into the Computers. Automate the computer interactions!

At tier 4, it becomes possible to craft Microformers. Microforming a small area creates a subbiome, which will change spawning monsters (including bees), blocks, plants, trees, etc. Some biomes will have Geodes. There are 34 bee types (of which only Xenodaemonae and Reaper can't survive on Garden planets), and these bees produce all sorts of things.

At tier 6, it becomes possible to craft Terraformers. This can change the planet type (if 50% of the planet is terraformed), which will change the outputs of Atmospheric Condenser. For example, you can obtain Trianglium Ore by terraforming the planet to Lightless. It will also change the weather (allowing access to Blue Grav-Liquid, etc.).

Note that microformers/terraformers don't create new ores in the ground.

Tenant quests "deal with bandits" can have Precursor drones as enemies (questgiver will call them "mysterious and deadly aliens"). They drop Precursor loot, including machines like Erchius Converter.