Crossbreeding flowers in Animal Crossing: New Horizons is simple on its surface, but some flowers can be deceptively difficult to produce. There are numerous ways players can get flowers onto their islands, including finding special flower-filled Nook Miles islands and planting seeds they can buy from Nook’s Cranny or Leif’s store. When players can’t find hybrid flower islands, however, they’ll have to crossbreed flowers themselves to get rare colorations.
For new flowers to spawn, players must water the fully-grown flowers that are already on their island. By placing different color combinations of the same flower diagonally touching each other, players can efficiently grow hybrid flowers in Animal Crossing: New Horizons. The flowers have a greater chance of spawning offspring when in this formation.
In Animal Crossing: New Horizons, flowers have numerous genes, similar to those found in real flowers. These genes, confirmed by data miners and compiled into a Google Doc by Paleh, determine the colors of the resulting crossbreeds, making the hybrid flower system in New Horizons very in-depth. This offers room for alternative methods of obtaining certain flowers since flowers that come from different “parents” will have their own genetic makeup compared to other flowers of the same color and species. Even with all these options, the Blue Rose remains the hardest hybrid flower to crossbreed because it has only one possible genetic makeup, and it uses the genes from all three of the store-bought Animal Crossing flower colors: Red, Yellow, and White Roses.
Why The Blue Rose Is The Hardest Hybrid Flower To Crossbreed In ACNH
When working toward a Blue Rose in Animal Crossing, it’s best to work with only the two-parent flowers at a time rather than an entire array like with other hybrid flowers, although players can plant multiple of the same “pairings” across their island to increase their chances of the right flower spawns. The simplest way to guarantee to breed Blue Roses that doesn’t involve finding hybrid Roses on a Nook Miles island requires the following steps:
- Breed two White Roses, grown from seeds, to obtain a Purple Rose.
- Breed one Red Rose, grown from seeds, and the Purple Rose from the previous step, to obtain a hybrid Red Rose.
- Breed one Yellow Rose, grown from seeds, with the hybrid Red Rose from the previous step, to obtain a new, “second generation” hybrid Red Rose.
- Repeat the previous step to obtain another “second generation” hybrid Red Rose.
- Breed the two “second generation” hybrid Red Roses together for a chance of finding a Blue Rose.
A commonly used method to breed Blue Roses in ACNH involves breeding a Purple and Orange Rose - both already hybrid colors - and using two of their hybrid Red offsprings to breed for Blue, but only half of the hybrid Reds from a Purple and Orange will have the necessary genes to produce a Blue. Although this is all incredibly complicated, the good news is that once players have their first Blue Rose, they can grow more by keeping the hybrid Red Roses close to each other, and by moving the Blue Rose to a square where it isn’t touching any other flowers. Because Blue Roses in Animal Crossing: New Horizons have only one genetic makeup, they will always produce other Blue Roses when watered, unlike other flowers that may produce different colors when by themselves due to their variable genetic makeups.