In fact, use this link to demystify all aspects of the effects you can have on crops in boundless. It really helps to understand the “why” people do what they do. https://boundless.mayumi.fi/farming/
Cant get my head round it this time of night so will look in the morning…
Thanks this is great 
Is it not better to use sponge for pigment looking at that link, or does it end up being more efficient getting some seed from the rock setup?
I’m sure there’s some math that can prove out what I’m about to say, but I’ve made a small program and plugged in data points of common scenarios with crop/seed yield, and run simulations several hundred times.
Almost uniformly the tradeoff is always an inverse of seed yield vs seed iterations.
As in, it might take ~2 iterations on sponge to get you 8 pigment, or ~12 iterations to get 20 pigment per seed. (those numbers are probably off by quite a bit, but you get the idea)
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If you have goo kernels that are rare (ie: shadow blue), you’ll want to get as many uses out of them as possible. If you plant them on sponge, you have pretty much zero chance to get the kernel back. You’ll only get a pigment from it.
If you plant it on rock, you have a decent (80%) chance to get the kernel back, and you will get pigments.
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I’m pretty sure @Sujimichi88 has a spreadsheet calculating the iterative results and he might be kind enough to share the numbers. I have one on my PC at home but I cant remember the numbers off the top of my head.
Makes sense to me, is this why you don’t put growth by your gleam so you also may get pigment?
Somehow missed this before, thanks for the link.
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Yeah, bottom line is that if you go for maximized pigment return, technically it is better to use a growth setup. The small increase on seed return outweighs the severely diminished pigment return per harvest.
HOWEVER, using growth you end up having to do MANY more harvests to get to this slightly increased pigment return. The immense amount of extra time you’d spend on harvesting is just not worth it for a small increase in pigments.
220/80 for goo of the right color and 215/75 for mutating to a color are the most time-efficient ways of doing it.
Edit: just realized you folks were talking about sponge, not growth, will tweak my numbers and get back, but pretty sure sponge is never worth it.
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Sponge is pretty garbo, ngl
Thanks that has cleared it up for me, going to go for gleam and rock with lava, Just have to get some more rock colours…
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Rock color is inconsequential. Only gleam color. Rock doesn’t mutate with the exception of like… 5ish% chance to mutate in a direction randomly. I don’t know what it is off the top of my head. Enough to be annoying but not enough to happen often.
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It’s exactly a 20% chance of random mutation on both rock and gleam.
And like everyone is saying @Samski the rock colour does not matter at all. You use gleam to mutate to the colour you want, then you plant it on the rock. If it randomly mutates to something else, then it goes back on the gleam, then back to the rock, etc etc
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You would only need the end of the spectrum colors to achieve this and farm them in mass. Colors like White,Black,Vivid Slate, Luminous green etc (idk them all). Then use pigment combination to achieve the spray color you want.
It would be the most efficient way to do it. but i doubt there is enough of the rare gleam to achieve this atm (talking about mass production).
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You actually dont need a lot of gleam to achieve this. I was able to pump out thousands of shadow cerulean back when goo farming was first released with only a dozen pieces of the shadow cerulean gleam and about 20 black lanterns.
With only 20% random mutation my gleam section remains empty most of the time but my rock section is constantly full when in mass production mode now that I have hundreds of each colour gleam.
The more gleam you have basically just means the quicker you can perform that initial mass mutation of a particular colour that you have collected from a world.
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For reference:
You can use this tool to calculate returns over many harvesting rounds.
A lot of farms figure out a set-up that includes areas for each type of yield - it will depend on what your ultimate goal is with your farm. Do you plan to do/have it all? If so, you’ll need a set-up that is geared towards each type of yield. Do you only plan to make/sell pigments? If so, the majority of your farm should be set up to maximize pigment drops. And so on.
One thing that pretty much all farms try to do is mitigate goo kernel loss.
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What are the seed return and crop return on this set up?