Flowers

[Croconaw]

I’ve got a confession to make. I never took flowers seriously in Animal Crossing. I don’t know the first thing about hybrids or breeding. There are some flowers I think look cool, but I could never breed them myself. I’ve had hybrids given to me by other players, but they’re just regular flowers to me I’ve placed around my island.

I’ve noticed a lot of players take flower breeding quite seriously, and I’ve not seen one person (I’m being serious) that isn’t familiar with how flowers work. I’m curious how members of the forum feel about flowers in general. How did you learn about breeding flowers and getting hybrids? I’m definitely not familiar with anything about hybrids.

 

[Ganucci]

I think flowers and their ability to breed is really cool but also can get very complicated. I feel like I learned most of the hybrid “recipes” just from playing New Leaf and then New Horizons. Some things changed but things like white flower + red flower = pink flower and red flower + yellow flower = orange flower is usually pretty consistent.

Overall I don’t spend a ton of time breeding, it’s just never been a focus of mine, so any hybrids I have are mostly by accident. The ones that aren’t would be any black or blue flowers probably and then of course the gold roses. After over a year of the game I’ve gotten almost every flower color with only one traded to me (purple tulips) and I now just need the elusive blue rose.

 

[Goldenapple]

I love breeding flowers! It's really fun to breed hybrids and create things such as this!

The process is a bit complicated to learn at first, but it's definitely worth it to get all of the variations! It also takes some patience and experience, especially with the hybrids that are harder to obtain. There are a bunch of guides that shows the combinations of flowers and what the resulting hybrid will be. Here's one guide that may help! It can get more complicated when you look at guides like these, but I've personally never used them. The breeding process is a lot easier in ACNH compared to ACNL, considering how many hybrids you can get from one thunderstorm!

 

[LittleMissPanda]

Animal Crossing just wouldn't be Animal Crossing without flowers, if you ask me. It's nice that the way flowers are handled and work have changed drastically since Animal Crossing: Population Growing, wherein that game hybridizing was not a thing, and the watering can did not even exist, believe it or not. Flowers never withered (but they could still be dug up with a shovel in order to be destroyed) and not only that but flowers could not multiply in the rain/snow. Gardening is something I really like, but cannot do IRL because I live in an apartment, I'm afraid of attracting bees lol but I'm fine with most other bugs, but I love flowers. The look of them, their fragrance, and of course, their language. Different flowers convey different emotions and messages, and I think that's so wonderful and interesting. I love learning about stuff like that. In some instances during my writing, I use that concept as symbolism for the reader to understand even further things like imagery or the feelings of the characters.

I've paid more attention to flowers ever since hybridizing became a thing in WW. I cared a lot about it and would water my flowerbeds every day in the hopes they would breed. My favorite kind of flower is the cosmos, with pink and orange cosmos being the ones I use the most. All flowers and their hybrid variations can add beauty to any area. I miss the carnations and four-leaf clovers...

With NH, we got mums and I love them so much, but most of all green mums they look especially beautiful in a bamboo grove. I remember going crazy with breeding them, though, and that garden got out of control pretty quickly. Pair them up with white mums and you'll have a whimsical aesthetic. That's another one of my favorite things about flowers: mix and match types and colors and you can create some very pleasing environments.

 

[Moritz]

I really liked getting my hybrids.
I dont remember where I learned about them all because it was so long ago.

I do wish for such things like blue roses, that it wasnt so vague about how to get them.
I mean the game doesn't even tell you they exist and yet you have to do so much cross breeding with such low odds, it would be a miracle if anyone ever found them without an official guide book or the Internet

 

[WaileaNoRei]

I love hybrids and all the flowers in the game, especially since I like my island to be full of color! However, I am a really unserious breeder. 90% of the time I need my flowers by just having a bunch growing all over. The only ones where I made something of a concerted effort were purple pansies and blue roses (and the purple pansies ‘method’ was to just make an area of only pansies). Even then, I chose the laziest methods possible, because I just did not want to work hard at it.

the guides are helpful, but keep in mind most of them show only the easiest/ highest probability way to get the hybrids. My first purple tulips all grew from my black tulips, for instance, though I expected them to more likely come from orange. Blue roses I chose the lower probability method, but it was also the one that involved the least work and attention! And it did work fine, with very minimal work from me (which is all I can actually bring myself to do)

I found the guides on here or by googling/ having a friend send their own search results to me, I think. And basically read through them to get an idea of how the flowers work, but to be honest my knowledge of them is not super deep, and I mostly just winged it. I do think it is a cool and interesting mechanic in the game, but it is not my primary focus or passion. Still it was always an exciting day when I got a new hybrid flower for the first time, and having the hybrids adds a great range of colors to the game.

 

[Tiffany]

NH is the first ac game where I have actually tried to breed flowers. I have gotten some info here but most from youtube videos or google searches(there are tons of hybrid guides out there). I find the videos to be most helpful. Regular flowers are easy just plant and water. Hybrids require a bit more work and knowing which colors to plant together. Some require multiple steps with different color flowers and some you need to make hybrids to get other hybrids. Blue roses are the most difficult/time consuming. You could also buy hybrids here on the forum which is of course the easiest way to get them.

 

[corncob]

i wish more of the purple flowers were brighter in this edition : ( i loved my bright purple roses in NL lmao. i just got my first few purple roses on my island and they're pretty and all but htey're so dark and dull by comparison!

some of the new breeding rules kinda threw me for a loop. when i found out that for hyacinths, purples came from orange, i was absolutely flabberghasted XD

i only care about certain colors of certain flowers really. all the blues, pinks, and purples bc i just love cool colors lol, and the green mums. the regular color special hybrids i don't really care about unless they're like absolutely necessary for acheiving a new color.

 

[Red Cat]

For nerdy people like me, breeding hybrids in Animal Crossing is interesting because it involves a combination of geometry, probability, and genetics. It's one of the few things in Animal Crossing that requires careful planning and strategy to do successfully. Of course you can easily get hybrids from other people, but like the TC said, they're just other flowers if you get them that way. The datamining of flower mechanics in NH is a game changer. Before NH, breeding complex hybrids like purple pansies and blue roses was hit or miss because no one really knew what was going on beneath the surface, but now we know what is happening and can develop different methods for breeding hybrids. That being said, it takes a level of insanity to take several hours to learn about the hybrid mechanics in NH so that you can spend many more hours breeding those hybrids when you can buy or get hybrids for free from someone else in 10 minutes and clone them to get as many as you want.

 

[CylieDanny]

In all honesty were in the exact same place. As a new player I'm still learning, didn't even know about breeding flowers, just Tom telling us to water all of them

But I saw blue flowers, then after awhile asked a friend where the blue flowers grow, and that's where I learned about the whole breeding process. I dont really breed them, but some un-used areas have so many flowers bunched up, and I sometimes get a different flower from them.

I have a rose area, and I'm always finding black rose there.

But my island is mainly covered in a custom designed grass, so I dont have many flowers growing except for some areas.

Not that I'm too lazy to breed flowers, just not my thing. I admire those people who do though.

 

[Xara]

i personally don’t have the patience to breed flowers myself lol. i tried at first but now, about 90% of the flowers on my island came from somebody else. i have a basic understanding of how breeding flowers works thanks to a few guides i’ve seen + threads on here but i haven’t 100% grasped the concept yet . regardless of my impatience and mild confusion, i think breeding flowers is actually really neat and i’ve actually been trying to breed some orange lilies by myself. i started off with about 2-3 and while it’s been a slow process, i now have about 15 or so which i’m happy about! i don’t see myself trying to breed any others after this, though, since i have no need for anymore flowers and breeding them hasn’t ever interested me for longer than a few weeks at a time haha.

 

[0ni]

I think it's a really cool mechanic, but I also never got really into it in past games. In NH I did some cross-breeding because I really wanted green mums, and purple hyacinths for crafting hyacinth lamps. Other than that I didn't really do much else. I like white flowers the most and I just have to buy those ones lol. I also don't really like blue roses that much so I never felt the need to go through the trouble of growing them.

 

[Kg1595]

I also wish hybrid breeding was a little easier. For over six months, I have tried to get all of the windflower and pansy variations, and there are still one or two colors I simply cannot get, even after moving parent flowers around and adding non-natives to the mix. I do get there is an element of chance and probability, but still!

That said, I hope new floor breeds are on the way in a future update/expansion. I enjoy being a gardener.