The seed is a resource multiplier with a six-cycle delay
The Mineral Tree is the only wild discoverable in Dome Keeper that keeps paying after you walk away. You find a seed, plant it, and six cycles later it starts handing you resources every cycle for the rest of the run. Nothing else in the game compounds like that — the cost is the delay, and the risk is planting it badly.
The seed lives in its own cave in the green biome: a 2x3 room with the seed sitting in the middle of a nest. The green biome spawns that cave or Squidley, not both. If your green biome gave you Squidley, there is no wild seed in that run at all.
Planting: the two rules that decide everything
Drop the seed on a mineable tile. It wobbles toward the tile centre and grows small roots — while it is in that state you can still pick it up and move it, so nothing is committed yet.
Two things decide whether the tree is worth the six cycles:
Plant it on a resource tile. Every rooted resource tile becomes one branch producing that resource, up to three branches. A tree rooted entirely into plain rock still grows exactly one iron branch — useful, but a fraction of what a well-placed tree returns.
Leave a clear 3x3 above it. The tree destroys every tile inside its final footprint as it grows, and that footprint depends on branch count:
| Branches | Footprint |
|---|---|
| 1 branch | 2 tall, 1 wide |
| 2 branches | 2 tall, 3 wide |
| 3 branches | 3 tall, 3 wide |
Since destruction includes resource tiles, a tree that grows into the cobalt you were mining deletes it. The wiki’s own advice is to always leave a clear 3x3 area above the seed, which is the size a three-branch tree needs.
Roots: one tile per cycle, no distance limit
The seed roots into its original tile at the end of the next cycle. From then on it roots one additional tile at the end of every cycle — wave end — with no limit on how far the roots travel. The one thing they will not root is indestructible Bedrock.
Rooted tiles become significantly harder to destroy, which is protection rather than a problem. The exception: destroying the tile the seed originally rooted into refunds the seed, so a bad placement is recoverable — at the cost of losing every tile it rooted since. Those keep their rooted appearance and bonus hardness either way.
What it produces, and how fast it comes back
Once six cycles have passed, the tree grows one branch per rooted resource tile, up to three:
| Resource | Regrows every |
|---|---|
| Iron | 1 cycle |
| Water | 2 cycles |
| Cobalt | 3 cycles |
Two version-specific caps matter here. From version 2.5 a tree will not grow more than one cobalt branch no matter how many cobalt tiles it roots. And when four or more resource tiles are rooted, priority runs Cobalt > Water > Iron — so a tree with cobalt, water and iron roots gives you cobalt, water and iron in that order of preference.
Grown resources sit on the branch for one cycle and then fall off automatically, which is what makes drone collection work: the fruit drops whether or not you are standing there.
Multiple trees during Tree Farm
The Tree Farm guild assignment spawns a large number of seed caves, which turns the single-seed decision into a layout problem:
- Only one tree can be planted on any given tile
- Several trees can root into the same tile
- Roots are not shared — planting a new tree on an existing root network does not let it reach far-away resources until it roots there itself
- Multiple trees can root into the same resource tile, and all of them then produce that resource
That last rule is the payoff: find a cluster of cobalt, plant several trees into it, and every tree produces cobalt. There is no visual way to tell which roots belong to which tree, so the wiki’s recommendation is to identify resource clusters first and plant around them.
One trap: a tree can grow behind indestructible tiles, but the resources it grows may end up unreachable.