Hybrid flower breeding chart – how to crossbreed in Animal Crossing: New Horizons
Green fingers but pink flowers.
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Some bugs only appear when you’ve put a bit of effort into cross breeding flowers and making them special hybrid colours. Here’s how to make your flowers special.
The flowers you can buy from Nook’s Cranny are beautiful, but what if you want something a little more special? Blue, black, pink, and purple variations of flowers are available to breed, and you’ll want to follow these easy steps to make your flower garden the best it can be.
It’ll also let you catch special super-cool bugs like the Peacock Butterfly, so you don’t want to miss out on that.
How to crossbreed flowers in Animal Crossing: New Horizons
Here’s how to cross breed two types of flower in Animal Crossing: New Horizons:
Step 1: Plant flowers adjacent to each other. It’s important that your parent flowers are next to each other, otherwise they won’t crossbreed. They also have to be the same type of flower as each other.
Step 2: Water flowers daily.. You’ll be able to tell a flower is watered by a subtle glistening effect. Rain also works for this. Remember – digging up and moving a flower removes its ‘watered’ effect, so you’ll need to do it again.
Step 3: Make sure there’s space next to the flowers. One ‘tile’ must be open beside each parent flower. This means you won’t want to be planting them in huge patches.
Step 4: Wait. This is the hardest bit. Only a handful of flowers spawn each morning, and you’re not guaranteed to get a hybrid at any given point in time. To maximise your chances, set up gardens of flowers, planting them as outlined above.
You can see below the beginnings of our blue pansy growing spree, spacing out white pansies so the blue ones may spawn. Of course, more flowers and larger gardens increase your chances, so feel free to make vast mountains of flowers, as long as you keep our tips in mind!
More essential Animal Crossing: New Horizons guides
- 1. Tree Branches – Animal Crossing New Horizons: How to get tree branches fast
- 2. Tarantula Island – Animal Crossing New Horizons: How to get to tarantula island
- 3. Bells – Animal Crossing New Horizons: How to get Bells quickly
- 4. Iron Nuggets – Animal Crossing New Horizons: How to farm Iron Nuggets
- 5. Turnips – Animal Crossing New Horizons – Turnips and Stalk market guide
Which bugs are caught with certain flower hybrids?
Here’s what we know so far about the bugs that can be caught near rare flowers:
- Peacock Butterfly – flying near purple, black or blue flowers, 4am-7pm, March-June
- Orchid Mantis – on white flowers, 8am-5pm, March-November
How do I make certain flower colours?
A helpful chart has been put together by Twitter user @_NAMHT and translated on Reddit by u/RealThanathors. We’ve put the translated version below for your convenience.
Some colours are harder to get than others, but persevere and keep watering them and you’ll get there eventually!
A good tip to keep in mind is once you have more than one of the colour you’re looking for, place them next to each other and water them. This is because they’ll produce more copies of themselves rather than the parent flowers producing more of the less rare colours.
Visitor watering
Thanks to original research by the Animal Crossing community available here, it’s been worked out that you can increase the chances of breeding flowers by having multiple friends over to water your flowers.
If you and 5 or more friends come over and water the flowers you want, you get a higher chance of rare flower production. Below is what you’re looking for.
- Self-watered – 5% chance
- 1 visitor watered – 25% chance
- 2 visitors watered – 35% chance
- 3 visitors watered – 50% chance
- 4 visitors watered – 65% chance
- 5+ visitors watered – 80% chance
When the maximum number of visitors have watered your flowers, they’ll glow a bright golden colour. Time travelling resets all watering too, so don’t do that.
That’s all you need to know about crossbreeding flowers for now! Go catch those rare bugs and make a super fancy garden all your friends will be jealous of.
While you’re waiting for them to spawn, why not check out more of our Animal Crossing guides? We’ve got all sorts, from advice on getting rare fish like the coelacanth to tips on things you should be looking to do on your daily routine.
