Cultivating a desired crop

[Weylin]

When you finally get a plant you've been after, what is the best way to expand the crop so you can get a whole farm of it going?

Can it spread to single crops, or do I need to place cross crops on all 4 sides?

Can it spread to a cross crop on its own or do I need to have some other plant for it to cross with?

If it's growing to another crop stick, does it need to be fully grown or in the process of growing?

[HalibutBarn]

It can spread to a single other spot, but you'll obviously have better luck the more you try to spread it to. You still need another plant two spots away and crossed sticks in between. And both plants need to be grown to a certain point (close to fully grown) before anything but weeds will appear in the crossing spot.

[warpspeed10]

When crossbreeding, you have an 80% chance of the child being of the same species as one of the two parents, and a 20% chance of obtaining a completely different species. It's not the best system, but it's what is in place in the current version of IC2.

[Weylin]

The cross breeding system might actually be useful and worthwhile if you could convert or use a seed bag to generate a stack of seeds compatible with standard tilled soil so you can mass produce and automate it.

I understand the cross-breeding process being something to do manually, but once you have a desired result, there's really no way to start producing it on an industrial scale, which is funny for a mod called Industrial craft.

[warpspeed10]

The cross breeding system might actually be useful and worthwhile if you could convert or use a seed bag to generate a stack of seeds compatible with standard tilled soil so you can mass produce and automate it.

I understand the cross-breeding process being something to do manually, but once you have a desired result, there's really no way to start producing it on an industrial scale, which is funny for a mod called Industrial craft.

Have you not heard of exponential growth? Just keep duplicating plants.

[Weylin]

Not sure if it's exponential when 80% of the plants fail to drop any seed bags.

Also very high maintenance, and you can't forget to remove all empty crop sticks before going off mining or anything.

[warpspeed10]

Once you have your farm expanded, simply right click to harvest the plant without destroying it.

[Weylin]

When you do get just one of a new plant, you just gotta keep cross breeding it with something of a nearly identical tier, and just keep resetting the cross crop until you get the one you're trying to duplicate?