Plan your rose god clone

Roses go into no recipe on this site: they are grown for the flowers. Like sunflowers they spend an hour in Mature and stay Ripe for about 28 hours, the longest of any crop.

Rose growth stages and times

Base times from the game files (minutes at default server settings). A rose seed is a Seed for 1 min and already counts as a neighbour, a Seedling for 10 min, then a Sapling for 10 min: from about 11 to 21 minutes after planting its cuttings copy its genes exactly, before any crossing. At 21 min the rose enters Crossbreed for 1 min; its new genes are worked out once, as it enters, from the plants touching it in the same planter. Rose's Mature stage lasts 1 h, tied for the longest of any crop: the time to read the genes and take cuttings. Fruiting takes 30 min, so a rose plant is ripe about 1 h 52 min after planting, stays Ripe for up to 28 h, and then turns Dying: the harvest and cuttings are gone, and 1 h 40 min later the plant dies. Poor light, water, temperature or soil stretch all of that for rose; each G gene speeds its growth by 25%.

When Hardiness matters for rose

H Hardiness copes with cold, heat and poor soil, so it earns its place in a snow or desert base, where GGGYYH rose beats a plant that dies before it fruits. Anywhere else it is the weakest green for rose too: the calculator scores H at 0.5 against 1 for G and Y, and you can raise it in Options when you farm in the cold. A rose plant's water intake is 5 in the game files; each W Water gene adds 10% to it, which is why W counts as a bad gene.

How to breed a rose god clone

1. Plant rose seeds in one planter and wait about 11 minutes for the Sapling stage, then take a cutting from each and read the genes in its name.
2. Add the clones above (the calculator on this page is already set to rose) and press Calculate. It tries every way of putting your rose clones around a centre plant and shows the layouts that give GGGYYY or GGYYYY, the planting order when a tie needs it, and the chance of each.
3. Plant the layout in a planter with nothing but rose in it. The centre crosses once, about 21 minutes after it went in (12 if it has 3 G); from Mature (1 h long for rose) read its genes and clone it.
4. Clone the rose while it is Mature or Ripe. A rose plant gives 2 cuttings a cut with no Yield genes, 3 with GGGYYY and 4 with GGYYYY (one more per two Y, game code), so the god clone multiplies itself.

Which of the two to aim for with rose depends on what you want from it: more Y means bigger harvests and more cuttings, more G means a faster bed. When to plant and the triangle planter cover the timing for rose and the small planters.