Crossbreeding and Plant Genetics

This guide teaches the player how to achieve plant clones that grow fast and have extreme yields when compared with randomly planted seeds. It is intended for beginners and those who have become frustrated with other guides and videos that skip steps or are too difficult to follow. Players will gain a skill that will make them a valuable addition to any team and make solo play a lot more productive, even with limited growing space.

Why do this?

It is true that planting seeds in a planter will get you berries, cloth or other plant products. All you need is water, light and seeds to make it to work. However, refining your plants to maximize growth speed, crop yields and resistance to extremes of temperature comes with several benefits.

Predictability of your harvest is a big advantage: All plants have the same genome so they all reach the same stage at the same time. The player can spend less time monitoring plants and simply note what stage their crop is at with a glance. Once a time for the crop has been established, the player can show up, harvest, plant a new crop and go do something more interesting while it grows.

And most importantly, yields can be maximized even with only a few planter boxes. Because of the way the growth cycles work, the longer you wait, the higher the yield. Hemp, for example, can be harvested as soon as the plant is at Fruiting 0%, but the amount of cloth received will be limited. But if the player waits until the Ripe stage, yields can reach 70 cloth per plant. Knowing within a few minutes of when all of your plants will reach Ripe is extremely handy.

How hard is it?

It isn't that hard, but it can be pretty time consuming. The principles are simple and once understood will allow the player to make perfect clones in only a few hours. There is some luck involved because even when you get everything just right, there's still only a 50/50 chance of success. Because of this, I recommend using multiple planters at once to make sure you get at least a few winners.

But even failure at this stage isn't the end because you actually triple the materials you put into each cycle: One plant yields three clones, so you can try again immediately with three chances to succeed this time. And as the plants get closer to ideal, you may also get more than three clones from a single plant. When you finally clone your perfect plant, you won't need to do anything else but plant, harvest and reserve enough clones to re-seed and you're good for the wipe.

The Genes

There are three green (positive) genes:
G - Growth (Reduces the time per harvest)
H - Hardiness (Plants grow well even in cold and heat)
Y - Yield (Multiplier that increases your harvest)

There are two red (negative) genes:
W - Water (Thirstier plant for no benefit)
X - Dummy gene (no effect, wastes a slot)

All genes stack, which means the number of copies of a given gene add up to change how strong the effect is. Pretty straightforward: More Y's = more yield. Many G's will speed up the growth considerably.

No more than four of any one gene is used by the game. You can plant a clone with six G's, but it will grow at the same rate as one planted with only four (which would still be really fast). Therefore it is better to choose one trait to maximize (four copies of a gene) and another to assist the first, or to evenly split the clone with three of each type.

When it comes to Hemp, I usually make 4 Y's and 2 G's to get the maximum potential of 70 cloth per plant. But when making Berry clones, I make them 3 Y's and 3 G's because 4 Y's don't yield any more than 3 (5 berries per plant) and the extra Y makes the growing cycle a bit longer when compared with an even split of 3Y3G.

Stage 1: Shotgun phase.

Near-Perfect Clone

• Place several planters and fill them with water. (Don't worry about over-watering the plants at this stage. It does not matter.)
  
• Put a seed in each corner of each planter. (No seed next to another in the same planter box is the important part. We want distinct genomes that don't interfere with one another)
  
• Look for genomes that are all green, ideally with lots of Y's and G's and few H's. Take a clone or note the location if the plant is not yet in sapling stage and therefore cannot be cloned yet.
  
• If you don't find a clone with all green genes, try again. Wait to harvest everything or hatchet out the losers and plant a new set of seeds in the corners again.

A near perfect clone would be YHGYYG. Ideally we would substitute that H in slot 2 for a G or (even better) a Y.

Donor Clones
Selecting from all the other plants we didn't choose (or hatchet out) we can find ones that match our criteria to take for our donor genes (clones that have the desired letter in the correct slot).
For this example, we will need two different clones that have a Y in the 2nd slot, and that differ from one another in every other slot. In other words, of the six slots in the genome, the two different clones you select should both have a Y in slot 2, but should not share the same letter in any of their other five slots.
Note: As long as we aren't choosing our near-perfect clone, and are instead choosing our donor clones, we can even select clones that have one or more red genes in them. They must not match up with another red gene of the same type in the other clone, though if one is a W and one is an X in the same slot, it's fine.

Again, our near perfect genome is YHGYYG. We want clones with a Y in slot 2 to replace the H.

Good choice: YYWGGH and GYYHYX <- Only the Y in slot 2 is the same for both.
Bad choice: YYWGGH and GYWHYX <- The W in slot 3 is present in both clones.

Stage 2: Crossbreeding phase.

The Math

• Red letters = 1
  
• Green letters = 0.6
  
• It takes two greens (0.6 x 2 = 1.2) to overpower a red (1.2 > 1)
  
• It also takes two greens to overpower another green (1.2 > 0.6)
  
• But only one red will overpower one green (1 > 0.6)
  
• And because of this, no red genes can be present in our near-perfect clone. (1 + 1 = 2, and no arrangement of green donor clones in one planter box can add up to beat a 2)

Crossbreeding

• In one large planter box, put two copies of the near perfect clone, one in each of the corners on the same side.
  
  
• In each of the other two corners, put one of your donor clones.
  
  
  We should now have four plants and three different genomes in one planter box, and our near perfect one should be the one with two plants.
  
  
• When all four plants leave the crossbreed stage and enter mature stage, plant a seed in the center of the planter. It doesn't matter at all what the genes are in this seed, it will be overwritten by the near perfect and donor clones.
  
  
• When the seed reaches crossbreeding stage, verify that the gene transplant was successful.
  
• If it was successful, you have your perfect clone! Go to the next stage.
  
• If the seed grew into another copy of your near-perfect clone, take clones of all the plants you started with from the four corners so we have the makings to try again with three chances instead of one this time. The plant in the center can be harvested or cloned/added to the stack of near perfect ones.

In this image, the transfer is successful, and only one more run through the process is needed to turn that H in slot 2 into something more useful.

Stage 3: Replication phase.

Now that you have your perfect clone, it must be replicated many times over. Plants that are planted by the player do not give seeds when they are harvested, so it is important to keep a supply of your perfect clone that can be used to restart the cycle after harvest.

Replication
Plant your perfect clones in a planter box. You no longer need to separate them. In fact, the ability to densely pack your plants is one of the reasons for going through all this effort. Uniform growing cycles (all plants grow at the same rate) is another major one.

Once your plants reach sapling stage, take clones of them (you'll get four instead of three because of the extra Y genes) and plant them all again. Holding Right-Mouse will let you take a clone instead of bringing up the menu for each plant. And Facepunch have also allowed us to clone all the plants in the planter at once, which is very nice.

Repeat until you have enough clones to fill all your planters a few times over. Save enough aside to fill the planters once and then plant the rest of your clones, harvesting the crop directly this time. Once you run out of clones, plant your reserve and take those as new clones, once again reserving enough for one full set of planters. In this way you will have a constant supply.

Some final thoughts.

With patience comes great rewards.

The final stages of growth are Fruiting and Ripe, and the yield increases the longer you wait. The best time to harvest is Ripe, and yield doesn't increase any more during this phase. Which means the yield shown when you hover over the plant at the beginning of Ripe is the final yield.

The increased yield of a well-bred clone over a random seed cannot be overstated. If you're used to getting 10 cloth from a single wild hemp plant, you should plan on having an empty inventory before your harvest begins.

In addition to being a valuable skill for someone in a group or clan to possess, a solo player can also gain a significant advantage from growing certain cash crops and also berries for use in teas which make the grind a lot less grindy.

If you find that even when you have a 4Y2G Hemp clone, your yield doesn't reach 70, you may wish to install heaters next to your planters. Overwatering doesn't compromise yield, so you can leave sprinklers on all through the growing cycle, but temperature, especially in colder areas of the game world, can reduce your yield to low-mid 60's.

User Morphine in the comments below suggests planting the center seed first, and just before it has reached crossbreed phase, plant the near perfect and donor clones in the corners. This would speed up the cloning process significantly, so I thank him for that excellent suggestion! :)

[LootDeliveryGuy]

❤️

[[FRFR] JuJu]

When i have god clone for cloth i can use it for crossbreed other berries and get blue Red and yellow berries perfects?

[Celsus]

For what it's worth, I have confirmed something after several wipes. When you plant your near perfects at each stage, you will have much more success if they are placed along the South side of the planter. So sacrificial in the center, when it is at sapling, plant two near perfects in the corners on the South side, and the two donor clones in each of the North corners. This results in about 90% of the sacrificials taking the desired genes.

[clop1000]

What does overwatering do exactly?

[Wolfito]

plant the clone u want to take the genes in the middle. When it reaches Sapling stage plant the clones that give the genes in the corners

[Cucumber]

@Celus, thanks man! Love farming! At my age there is nothing else for me than just an good role play chill xD

[Celsus]

Cultist, the speed of the plant's growth depends on the number of G's in their genome. I make my berries 3Y3G because 4Y doesn't add anything (maximum of 5 berries per plant either way) So yes, berries will grow faster, but only if they have 3 G's.

[Celsus]

Morphine, those are all really good points. I'll be adjusting the guide later today to reflect them. Thanks.

[Cucumber]

Does Berries grow faster than Hemp?

[Morphine]

Finally the center seed for the 50/50 method should be one with lot of Gs. It speeds up the global thing.