A strange but true way to increase your success at crossbreeding.

[Celsus]

I wasn't going to mention this because it seems ridiculous. But after now four wipes, I've confirmed it's true.

If you're familiar with crossbreeding plants, you know that there is a center, sacrificial clone that is overwritten by the others, a near-perfect clone (all green) in which two are planted in the corners, and the two donor clones in the remaining corners that are intended to push unwanted genes from the near perfects when they all imprint onto the sacrificial.

Here's the strange part that I have now confirmed: If you place your near perfect pair of clones in the corners along the SOUTH side of the planter, you drastically increase the chance that your cloning will succeed and not merely result in the sacrificial taking on the same genome as the near perfect ones. It has been said that there is a 50% chance of any crossbreeding to be successful. That turns out to be gameable.

So when you plant your clones, put the sacrifice in the middle, and when it is about to enter crossbreed stage, place your near perfect clones in the two corners that are on the Southern side of the planter, and your two donor clones in the remaining corners along the Northern side. This will results in about 90% of the planters you use taking the desired genome.

Incidentally, it is also a good practice to put your grow lights on a switch. This gives a few advantages. One is that if you begin your crossbreeding from seeds in the morning (or have Industrial Lights which do not provide growing light) and your plant lights switched off, you can take your time looking for the near perfect and donors, and then one-hit the plants that are not needed to get rid of them. More importantly, you can pause the growth cycle at any point* just by turning your grow lights off. I mention this because once your sacrificial clones are nearing crossbreed stage, you can turn off the grow lights and take your time arranging the near perfect and donor clones in the planters, then simply switch on the grow lights again to complete the crossbreeding process.

*It's also worth mentioning that there is an exception to growth being halted with lights off. Once the plants have entered crossbreeding stage, they will quickly move on to mature stage even with the lights off. So once your sacrificials have all entered crossbreed stage, you can turn off the lights again and hatchet out the near perfects and donors when they are still young and while the center ones enter mature stage. Then harvest the few center ones that didn't take and clone all the winners.

If you want to learn more about crossbreeding, I have written a Steam guide a few years ago that is still relevant. Although the process described is the slow method, there is a quicker method described at the end of the document which is the one I use now.

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2376541302

Happy farming!