Roses
Okay, let's be honest. You probably only care about two kinds of roses: gold and blue. They've been the coveted flower in Animal Crossing for a long time, and that's unlikely to change.
Gold roses are special in New Horizons, as they aren't technically hybrids. They have a chance to appear off any Black rose that is watered with a Golden Watering Can (DIY recipe given once a 5 Star town is achieved).
Blue roses are especially difficult to breed because roses are the only flower to use 4 different "genes" to make hybrids, which means there's actually 81 distinct roses (even though many of them look the same), as compared to 27 for other flower species. To make things more difficult, Blue roses have only 1 distinct combination that will work. There's a few different methods that have been proposed, and I thought I would try to mention them all here.
- The simple method
- The mass production method (based on Paleh's guide)
- The efficient method (discovered by Backwardsn)
Which method should you use? If you want to build a blue rose flower factory and are willing to put in the time, the mass production method is your best bet. If you want an efficient and easy way to make a few blue roses, then the efficient method is right for you. For the classic, tried and true method, see the simple method.
Simple method for Blue Roses
The simple method for Blue roses can be broken down in the following table, which shows some of the basic breeding patterns for roses starting from the seed bag flowers:
| Hybrid Color | Parent 1 | Parent 2 | Chance | Other possible colors |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Orange | Red (seed) | Yellow (seed) | 50% | Yellow |
| Black | Red (seed) | Red (seed) | 25% | Red (seed), Pink |
| Pink | Red (seed) | Red (seed) | 25% | Red (seed), Black |
| Pink | Red (seed) | White (seed) | 50% | Red |
| Purple | White (seed) | White (seed) | 25% | White (seed), White |
| Orange (2) | Black | Yellow (seed) | 100% | - |
| Red (special) | Orange | Purple | 25% | Red (not special), White |
| Blue | Red (special) | Red (special) | 1.5% | Anything |
There's a few rows of this table that aren't needed, but may be useful in breeding other colors. Here's a step-by-step guide for breeding Blue roses by this simple method.
- Plant a plot of White (seed) roses.
- These White roses will mostly produce other white roses, but 25% of the hybrids will be Purple roses.
- Throw out the new White roses that appear, as they may have different genes than the ones you planted from seed bags.
- Move the purple roses into a separate area for the moment.
- Plant a plot of Red (seed) and Yellow (seed) roses in a large diagonal pattern so that only Reds are touching Yellows.
- 50% of the hybrids here will be Orange; move them to a separate area.
- The other 50% will be Yellow, but different than the Yellow seed flowers. Plant these flowers elsewhere to prevent contamination.
- Take the Purple hybrids from Step 1 and the Orange hybrids from Step 2 and plant them in a large diagonal pattern so that only Purple roses are touching Orange roses.
- 25% of the hybrids that appear from this plot will be Red (special) hybrids that are different from the Red roses in seed bags. These are the Red roses that are capable of making Blue hybrids.
- Another 25% of the hybrids will be Red (not special) hybrids. These are also different from the Red roses in seed bags, but they have no ability to make Blue hybrids. It's impossible to tell the difference from this method.
- The other 50% of hybrids will be White. Throw these away or plant elsewhere.
- Take all of the Red hybrids (special and not special) into one large plot. Having a dense block patterns helps here to allow for the most combinations of flowers. Continue to grow this plot with flowers from Step 3 as you will want as many flowers as possible.
- About 1.56% of the hybrids from two Red (special) parents will make the coveted Blue rose. Unfortunately, your chances of getting one are small because you will have many red roses in this plot that will never make Blue. If you can build this plot to be quite large, the odds will increase and you will eventually have yourself a blue rose. Keep at it!
The Mass Production Method
The best way to actually make a lot of blue roses is more complicated, but strategically makes roses that have high chances of blue roses. At the end, you will have a Red (very special) rose that makes Blue roses 25% of the time (16x more likely than from the simple method). These Red (very special) roses can be bred with any Blue roses, and will only give you more Red (very special) roses or more Blue roses (50/50 split).
There first major step is to follow the 9 steps in Paleh's guide under the section Guaranteed blue rose path. I hope to re-write that guide here soon with mass production in mind. Take the red roses from the last step, which I call Red (very special) roses.
- As you breed Red (very special) roses, put these into a separate plot (can be dense or diagonal).
- 50% of the hybrids here will be more Red (very special), 25% will be White (the same White roses as Step 4 of Paleh's guide), and 25% will be Blue.
- Take any Red (very special) and Blue hybrids from Step 1 and add them to your plot of Red (very special) flowers. You want the Blue hybrids to be close to the center.
- Each combination of the Red (very special) and Blue hybrids will have 50% of it's hybrids be more Blue, and the other 50% be the Red (very special). Both of these can be again added to the plot.
- If you run out of space in this plot, it's best to replace the Red (very special) flowers with Blue roses, since two Blue roses will only make more Blue roses.
This process takes a long time to get set up, but quickly builds momentum when you have a few of the Red (very special) and Blue roses. For mass production and a long term goal of tons of Blue roses, I highly recommend this method.
Backwardsn’s Efficient Method
I came across an efficient method for making a blue rose from Backwardsn’s Optimized ACNH Hybrid Recipes. He used an optimization procedure to figure this method out, and its quite different from the other methods. I believe this to be the fastest way to get a single blue rose, but if you want many blue roses I still recommend the above mass production method. I've summarized his method below:
- Plant Red (seed) and White (seed) flowers in a large blocked off pattern where the Red (seed) flowers are blocked off.
- 50% of the hybrids here will be a Red hybrids, which could be of two genetics (call them H1 and H2).
- Plant Red (H1/H2) from Step 2 and Yellow (seed) flowers in a large blocked off pattern where the Red (H1) flowers are blocked off.
- about 12% of the hybrids produced will be Red (H3) hybrids.
- You will also get some Yellow, Orange, and White hybrids here, discard them.
- Take all of the Red (H3) hybrids from Step 2 and plant into a dense or diagonal plot.
- 75% of hybrids produced will be Red, Orange, and Black roses.
- About 1.5% of the hybrids here will be Blue roses!
- You will also get Purple, White, and Yellow roses from this, discard them.
- Take all of the Red, Orange, and Black roses from Step 3 and plant them into a big dense block.
- The hybrids from this dense block will be all sorts of colors, but about 1/45 (2%) will be Blue roses
- Discard other hybrids from this block, but continue to add Red, Orange, and Black roses from Step 3 to increase the number of flowers and thus the chances of getting a Blue rose.
The one downside to this method is that your odds of getting a Blue rose don't increase. Backwardsn has tried this with time-traveling and got a blue rose after 66 days.