Tomato
Food · FoodVegetable0★Lifts whatever it goes into, and the lycopene makes it a healthy addition besides.
Tomato is 10th of 20 foods by hunger restored, at 15 against the 100 of Corn Soup.
Tomato feeds 12 different recipes, which is why it is worth farming past the point you think you need it.
Details
It weighs almost nothing and stacks to 9,999, so there is no reason not to carry a full stack.
Where to Find Tomato
If you would rather just buy it, the cheapest seller is Caravan Shop at 80 Gold, and 2 other shops stock it too.
You can also grow it yourself at a Plantation — roughly 5 minutes per harvest for 10 at a time, which quickly beats foraging once the farm is running.
For seeds without shopping, station a Vaelet on a Ranch. It rolls a six-crop seed pool, and tomato carries the single heaviest weight in it at 22.2% — a base-rank Vaelet hands over 1-2 per drop and the top of the ladder pays 4-11 on the same roll. Killing works too: Bristla, Dinossom and Dinossom Lux each drop 1-2 seeds every time, Cinnamoth three fights in four, and Vaelet or Braloha about half the time. Since a plot only ever needs three, one Bristla is usually the entire supply chain.
If you would rather just buy, the desert settlement of Duneshelter is the fastest counter to reach — its merchant carries both the vegetable and the seeds, and it is a fast-travel point, so the round trip is short enough to be worth it while you are still working toward level 21.
| How | Where | Details |
|---|---|---|
| Merchant | Caravan Shop | 80 Gold |
| Merchant | Desert Shop | 80 Gold |
| Merchant | Volcano Shop | 80 Gold |
| Plantation | Grown at your base | 5 min per harvest · 10 per crop |
Using Tomato Well
The plot is the whole answer, and it is gated later than most people expect. Tomato Plantation sits at technology level 21, and raising one costs 70 Wood, 50 Stone, 5 Aquatic Pal Fluids and 3 Tomato Seeds. That fluid line is the real gate rather than the seeds: berry and wheat plots ask for nothing but wood and stone, so tomato is the first crop that makes you go catch or kill something aquatic before you can farm at all. Everything is paid once at construction — the plot never consumes a seed again, so three is all you ever need.
A built plot still stalls unless the Pals working your base cover Planting, Watering and Gathering between them. Those are three separate stages, and a base missing any one of them leaves the plot parked at that step instead of falling back to another worker. Watering is the one most bases are short of, so check that before assuming the plot is bugged.
Never buy the vegetable itself. At 80 Gold apiece it is one of the more expensive raw ingredients a merchant stocks, while the seeds run 30 Gold at the same counters — so 90 Gold of seed buys a plot that returns ten tomatoes every five minutes, forever. One harvest is already worth roughly nine times the seed outlay. That matters most for the bulk recipes: Vegetable Cake wants 8 at a time and High Quality Bait wants 4 per batch, quantities that turn a shopping habit into thousands of Gold and a farm into a rounding error.
Alternatives and Upgrades
Red Berries matches it exactly at 15 hunger restored — those two differ in what they resist and what they weigh, not in raw hunger restored, so picking between them is a swap rather than an upgrade. The next real step is Red Berries at 20; below it is Mushroom at 13.
Other foods at a similar tier, for when you want to weigh this against the rest of its class:
