The Planter Box (Tier 3 research, 2000 Gold) is the third and final gold producer, and the only machine whose real product is not gold at all. Officially: a Wet Seed touching a Planter Box grows into a Flower, and each flower is a Vine stem topped with a head of 4 Amethelis + 1 Gold. Harvest by burning or shooting the head; the vine itself yields nothing.
The gold is nice. The Amethelis is the point — it is the sole input that (with Redsand) becomes Voidbloom and then Fluxite, and separately the feedstock of the entire Energy chain. Every upgrade you will ever buy traces back to a planter box.
The seed supply
Seeds arrive from the Kinetic Press (1 per Burnt Residue, alongside the gold) and must be hydrated one-for-one: 1 Seed + 1 Water = 1 Wet Seed. Two densities govern the plumbing:
- Dry Seed: 150 — sinks through water.
- Wet Seed: 100 — exactly water's density, so it floats at the waterline.
That pair is self-sorting: dump mixed seeds into a pool and the unhydrated ones sink to the bottom while the finished ones ride the surface. The research tree acknowledges the resulting extraction problem directly — the Clearing Frame exists to push floating Wet Seeds out of the water toward your planters. (Demo veterans: this whole loop used to have an extra spore step — see what happened to spores.)
What passes through the box
Like the Shaker, the Planter Box is selectively permeable, and the selection is elegant: only Gold and Amethelis pass through it. The flower's payload falls through the box on harvest; the vine and any stray material stay above. A Collector shaft under the planter row catches the gold, and a Filter below that (Amethelis, density 40, is far lighter than gold's 300) splits the amethelis off toward the voidbloom mixer.
A layout from first principles
The wiki offers no official "best planter setup", so this is ours, built purely from the documented mechanics and marked accordingly:
- A shallow hydration pool fed by a drip — seeds enter dry, sink, absorb, surface.
- A Clearing Frame at the waterline pushing wet seeds onto a short belt.
- A row of Planter Boxes at the belt's end, harvested by a Pyro Dispenser on a timer (flame both harvests the heads and clears the vines — fire is the harvest tool the wiki names first).
- Below the boxes: straight drop to a Filter — gold continues to the Collector, amethelis diverts to the redsand drop-shaft.
Sizing rule: the press produces seeds and the planters consume them at 1:1 with your burnt-residue line, so a farm that keeps up with 4 Shakers needs the seed output of exactly those Shakers' residue — the whole factory stays in ratio automatically as long as nothing overflows.
If you searched "plant pot" or "planter boxes"
Same machine. The community says planter, plant pot, planter box interchangeably; the research entry is Planter Box, singular, 2000 Gold, Tier 3.