Crossbreeding

The rule

A plant crossbreeds once, on entering its crossbreed stage. For each of the six slots, every other plant of the same crop in the same planter within 1.5 m contributes the weight of whatever gene it holds in that slot. Those weights are added up per gene. The heaviest gene replaces yours only when its total is strictly greater than the weight of the gene you already have.

There is no random roll anywhere in that. Given the same planter, the outcome is the same every time.

The weights, and why they matter

X and W weigh 1. G, Y and H weigh 0.6. Two consequences follow, and between them they explain almost every breeding frustration.

• One neighbour can never overwrite an X or a W, because 0.6 does not beat 1. You need two carrying the same gene, for 1.2.
• A single X or W will overwrite a G, a Y or an H, because 1 does beat 0.6. One bad plant in the planter drags your good ones backwards. That is why breeders pull the empties out rather than leaving them in to fill space.

Crossbreeding

The simulator below is the rule above, applied exactly. It is not a route finder: measured against realistic random seed hands, a search for a full six gene target succeeds for roughly one hand in three hundred, because most hands simply do not contain the genes needed. Asking what a planting produces, and whether a target is reachable at all, are the two questions that always have a real answer.

Timing, which is per crop

A plant reaches its crossbreed stage after its first three stages. That is 21 minutes for hemp, and the crossbreed stage itself lasts one minute for most crops but five for every berry. Any single number quoted for all crops is wrong for most of them.

Bank a good roll before it breeds

You cannot clone a plant during its crossbreed stage: that stage carries no resources, so the game refuses. The sapling stage before it does, which is where you take clones of a plant you want to keep exactly as it is. Clones inherit genes precisely; seeds from a harvest roll fresh.

Planters

Only plants in the same planter can breed with each other, and only within 1.5 m, so in a large planter opposite corners never interact. Soil capacity differs.

What we could not source

Two of these are honest limits rather than missing homework: one is genuinely random in the game, and no tool can remove it.

• lifeLength

  Exactly how many minutes a plant takes to reach the crossbreed. The stage lengths are exact, but the game advances them on a 60 second tick, so the true figure sits a tick or two above the sum rather than on it.

  To settle it: Time one plant on a server with default planttick and compare against the stage sum.

• InvokeRandomized

  Which plant in a planter crossbreeds first. Each plant's tick carries a small random offset and every crossbreed rewrites its own genes immediately, so plants that reach the stage together resolve in an order the game picks.

  To settle it: Nothing to resolve. It is genuinely non deterministic, which is why no plan here is ever called certain.

• none

  How many seeds a harvest returns. The dispenser tables are not in the bundles this reads.

  To settle it: Locate the growable dispenser tables and extract their yields.