Hybrid growing woes

[Laurelinde]

Just need to vent, really! I've been playing every day since launch and I've had hybrid growing patches set up for months now. For the most part it's gone well; honestly, when it rains, I get so many flowers now it's ridiculous how many I end up selling. As far as pink, black, and orange go I've got heaps, and I've got a fair few of the others too. But there are a couple I've had dedicated patches for for awhile and I just can't even get one single one to grow! I know green mums are really rare, but I've had a good amount of purple, and the 'right' kind of yellow, and still none. And purple pansies and purple windflowers are still totally eluding me and I can't really understand why. I guess I'm just unlucky, but I feel like I should have had one by now, at least. The only one that isn't surprising really is the blue roses, because they're so complicated and I've only just gotten enough purples to set up what I hope will produce the reds I need.

Any tips for the other ones or is it just a matter of patience? I've got lots of reds with blue parents so I think I'm doing it right, and I water them every day, but no success.

How well are other people's hybrids doing? Any that you can't seem to grow yet? Any that you have way too many of? (I grew loads of orange lilies on purpose because I love them but I have...a lot!)

 

[tajikey]

Do you ever have people come by to water for you? When I was working on getting my hybrids, I planted patches all the way in the front of my island, gated it off, and invited folks via Turnip Exchange. It wasn't long before I had one of each variety. At that point, I started cloning as opposed to breeding, and as they say, the rest was history.

 

[Laurelinde]

No I haven't done that yet, but I am thinking I may have to start. I had a friend come over a few times but most of my friends have stopped playing regularly and I haven't joined any watering circles. (Downside is, the area near my airport is pretty heavily developed...but I can probably move stuff around for a bit if I need to!)

 

[tajikey]

No I haven't done that yet, but I am thinking I may have to start. I had a friend come over a few times but most of my friends have stopped playing regularly and I haven't joined any watering circles. (Downside is, the area near my airport is pretty heavily developed...but I can probably move stuff around for a bit if I need to!)

The goal is to make it as convenient as possible for others to help you. It'll likely take less than a week to get the rest of what you need, then you can put your map back to how it was.

 

[GEEBRASS]

I feel you! I had one friend regularly come water a few patches for me, which definitely helped speed up the process on my green mums and purple windflowers, which took quite a while to emerge. I've tried to go one of the longer routes for a blue rose that gives a much better chance of spawning at the final stage. It's been a few weeks now, and while my super-special red hybrids have been multiplying, no blue roses yet. Starting to worry that I may have messed something up along the way, which would be a real disappointment after working on it for months.

 

[Nami]

Hmm, weird. As soon as I got a bunch of blue windfalls, the purple ones were rolling in no problems. Not as fast as blue, but I still wound up with a bunch. I have what i need so i didnt bother trying to grow more recently.

 

[Red Cat]

The only ways to speed up the process are to have other people water your flowers, invest more space into breeding, or TT. The first and third options were not good for me, so I set aside about a quarter of my island for breeding hybrids. The odds of success of breeding rare hybrids like the purple pansy/windflower/hyacinth, green mum, or blue rose are so low that you have to breed at an "industrial" scale to get those flowers in any reasonable amount of time. For the blue rose, you'll want at least 20 of each seed bag even with friends watering and you'll need to seed aside a lot of space for all of those flowers and their offspring.

 

[Your Local Wild Child]

I feel bad for those who missed the hybrid islands that were available for the first month; those gave ya the trophy flowers (what I call the tough hybrids) really fast! I got really lucky cuz my brother had roses as his island’s native flower. Black cosmos still elude me, and it took like a month to get my purple windflower.

if you just want the flowers and not the achievement of growing it yourself, it’s probably really easy to just buy them either here or on Nookazon. If you want the achievement (like I do), just keep soldiering on. have you been making sure that your flowers are pure (as in, there aren’t any related flowers touching your breeding pair-for example, a second seed yellow mum flower touching a yellow breeding for hybrid yellows)? It could throw off your attempts entirely. If not, you will get them eventually. I wish you the best of luck!

Post automatically merged: Jul 12, 2020

One more huge thing to note: do NOT do a 2-1-2 patch! Not only does it take more space, if you get 2 new flowers from that patch both are suspect (one could be a clone that’s worthless for breeding). Either do a 1-1 patch or if you like pattern gardens use a 1-2-1 patch.

 

[Laurelinde]

Oh thanks for the tip! I did run some islands in the first month but I only ever got regular tulips and regular mums. For 2-1-2 v 1-2-1, do you mean to have 1 flower at either end and 2 in the center in a diamond pattern, vs an X? I've been doing patterns but I didn't pay much mind to which way they went as I hadn't grokked it mattered. I'll change them straight away.

 

[Your Local Wild Child]

Oh thanks for the tip! I did run some islands in the first month but I only ever got regular tulips and regular mums. For 2-1-2 v 1-2-1, do you mean to have 1 flower at either end and 2 in the center in a diamond pattern, vs an X? I've been doing patterns but I didn't pay much mind to which way they went as I hadn't grokked it mattered. I'll change them straight away.

For clarification: the X pattern is the bad one, the diamond pattern is the good one.

 

[sleepydreepy]

Maybe unrelated (since its no longs a thing) but I got a bunch of blue and orange hyacinths from hybrid island and that really helped me breed purple hyacinths which were eluding me. I can't even imagine trying to breed those or purple windflowers like you mentioned which are really complex! Good luck

 

[FraudulentDimetrodon]

Oh thanks for the tip! I did run some islands in the first month but I only ever got regular tulips and regular mums. For 2-1-2 v 1-2-1, do you mean to have 1 flower at either end and 2 in the center in a diamond pattern, vs an X? I've been doing patterns but I didn't pay much mind to which way they went as I hadn't grokked it mattered. I'll change them straight away.

Proper layout is very important when it comes to breeding flowers with very specific genes (Green Mums, Purple Windflowers/Pansies, Blue Roses). While it's possible to accidentally stumble into those hybrids even with an not optimal layout, it's also possible that you'll get unlucky and never get the flowers you want, or if you mess up early on, it's possible that none of the later generation flowers have the correct genes.

If you haven't already, I'd recommend reading some accurate hybrid guides, especially the ones on layouts and what the difference between cloning and breeding are and when you want to exclude one or the other.

It could just be bad luck, but since you're having trouble with all the flowers that require specific genes, I'm getting the feeling that your flowers don't actually have the necessary genes. At this point, if you're still want to breed them yourself, I'd probably recommend starting from scratch with seed flowers unless you're 100% certain of your flowers' genes. And having others water your flowers to speed up process if you're into that.

 

[Laurelinde]

Thanks, I've just been through and changed my layouts for everything and I'm going to start from scratch on a couple flowers. I know most of my red pansies have a blue parent but I'm not sure about all of them, so I think I can restart those. It shouldn't be too bad since I've got plenty of blue already (I guess they all work?) I'd been using guides since the beginning but with 'wrong' layouts in a lot of cases I suspect I've got some clones without realizing it. Wish I'd learned all this back when my island had loads more empty space but I can regrow my orchards easily enough!

 

[Red Cat]

Thanks, I've just been through and changed my layouts for everything and I'm going to start from scratch on a couple flowers. I know most of my red pansies have a blue parent but I'm not sure about all of them, so I think I can restart those. It shouldn't be too bad since I've got plenty of blue already (I guess they all work?) I'd been using guides since the beginning but with 'wrong' layouts in a lot of cases I suspect I've got some clones without realizing it. Wish I'd learned all this back when my island had loads more empty space but I can regrow my orchards easily enough!

If you're unsure about the origins of your red pansies, it's probably best to toss them and breed new hybrid reds. All of your blue pansies are safe. If a blue pansy has a yellow gene, then you may get orange offspring when you cross those blue pansies with seed red pansies, but those orange offspring are functionally equivalent to hybrid red pansies when it comes to breeding purple pansies.

 

[Marshmallows]

I haven't really bred any pansies except blue... but I have the rest. I was gifted a green mum, so that was easy.

As for purple windflowers, it's not very straightforward. If I remember correctly you need special pinks and reds.
I bred pink and blues together to get "special" pinks, reds, and blues and put those separated... eventually I got purple from those hybrids. I grouped them in a 2x3 box.

 

[Lanstar]

Seeing your breeding woes, I suggest going for brute force: Focus on one or two specific flowers, and dedicate a large number of pairs to water - 30 or more to begin - to try and get them. Either that, or have plenty of visitors to water those flowers each day.

Yes, some flowers can be a pain to get. For instance, I started to try getting purple pansies and purple windflowers at the same time. It took me 53 days to get the Pansy - but over 70 days to get the Windflower. That's despite them having the same odds: The 1 in 16 chance is just that low in the first place - And the only way to raise your chance is to increase the spawn rate each day to have more dice to roll.

 

[Laurelinde]

Oh thanks for the tip! I've started over with a few pairs of roses, pansies and mums in safe configurations now to be sure. Need to grab some windflower seeds from Leif next time he's around and then I'll work on those too. In the meantime I've rearranged my patches so they can't clone and I'll see what I get in the next few days.

Thanks for all the help all!

 

[lars708]

Been playing every day since launch and got the last hybrid I needed like a month ago. It was the blue rose, I have bred all flowers by myself! I have had a friend come over to water them sometimes but strangely enough the rare flowers I needed only seemed to appear if I didn't let them water. I'm sure that's just coincidental though.

 

[daffodilcrossing]

Ugh I totally understand this. I have my hybrids set up in the way to clone them not breed them, and I’ll water all of them and the next day get zero new hybrids. The hybrid rate in new horizons just seems to be so much lower than in new leaf unless you have friends to come over and water your flowers everyday. There just seems to be a lot of things in the game that require you to trade items/services and sometimes i just wanna play by myself but then my hybrids won’t grow lol!

 

[FraudulentDimetrodon]

Ugh I totally understand this. I have my hybrids set up in the way to clone them not breed them, and I’ll water all of them and the next day get zero new hybrids. The hybrid rate in new horizons just seems to be so much lower than in new leaf unless you have friends to come over and water your flowers everyday.

I'm not sure if we ever figured out the breeding mechanics in NL, but from what I remember, in NL, you only have a set number of flowers spawning per day (I think basic random flower spawns in your town also add to that? I don't remember). So watering your flowers makes it more likely that those set spawns are from bred/watered flowers. So you'll generally have at least one new hybrid a day, but the amount is capped (and I'm not sure what the rates are in the end). In NH, you don't have a max spawn rate; instead it's just an increasing rate that a flower will breed/clone, so the flowers you get per day tend to vary wildly. You can go a few days not getting any results, but then you'll have a day when you get an absurd amount. So it definitely feels discouraging the first few days of watering a new plot. You get a kind of exponential effect where it's slow to start, but it can snowball faster, whereas NL feels more consistent even if you don't get the same highs.

You might already know this, but make sure you're not digging up your cloning patches. Digging flowers up resets their "bad luck mitigation counter." It's best to set aside a plot of land permanently for breeding/cloning, then leaving them there for a long time. Also a weird thing, but make sure you're actually watering your flowers (bear with me here). I'm sure you've had moments where you accidentally dig up a flower by accident/dig a random hole in a tile you weren't aiming for/etc. because you're slightly misaligned on the grid. I realized that when I'm watering flowers, I sometimes think that I'm lined up perfectly, but the game is like, "Nope! You're not actually facing those flowers!" and waters the wrong tiles. I pretty much always water flowers while walking south, because when walking any other way, it's hard to tell if you're actually facing the flowers or not.

Oh thanks for the tip! I've started over with a few pairs of roses, pansies and mums in safe configurations now to be sure. Need to grab some windflower seeds from Leif next time he's around and then I'll work on those too. In the meantime I've rearranged my patches so they can't clone and I'll see what I get in the next few days.

Best of luck!

My Nook's Cranny always sells Windflowers, so feel free to PM me if you don't want to wait for Leif. : D