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Species and genetics

Eighteen plants, nine of them with real genetics. What each species is, how crossing works, and where every seed can be found.

Eighteen species, in two registers

The Garden ships eighteen species. Seven are new flowers, two are the hemp and cannabis plants that existed before the Garden and were retrofitted into the same system, and nine are crops. They all end up in one registry, but they reach it from two places: the genetics species are declared in the garden's species file, and the crops come from the crop table. Both halves answer the same questions about identity, planting and harvesting.

The real division is whether a plant carries genetics. The nine genetics species have loci, phenotypes and a crossing table. The nine crops are planted, graded and cooked, and they carry no genome at all.

Several species share a host. The torchflower crop carries Emberbloom, Goldcrown and hemp; the sweet berry bush carries coffee, tea and Saltmarsh Aster; wheat carries Frostlace, rye and barley. Because of that, the block never tells you what the plant is. Identity is a position: the plot record written at planting is asked first, and the block material is the last resort rather than the first. That is also why rye, barley and Frostlace stopped rendering as wheat, since each look is given a reserved block state of its own. You need the server resource pack to see it.

Genetics: four loci packed into one byte

A genetics species carries between two and four loci, and every locus holds two alleles, one dominant and one recessive. Four is the ceiling. The whole genome fits in a single byte, and unused loci are masked off so a two locus plant cannot accidentally read a value out of a slot it does not have.

Canonicalising the heterozygote is not cosmetic. The packed byte is the value stored on the item, so two spellings of one organism would be two genetically identical seeds that refuse to stack in your inventory. One spelling means one stack.

Seed stacks for the seven flowers are built by the garden's own item table and carry their genotype written into the stack. For the other eleven, hemp, cannabis and the nine crops, the key is simply absent, and an absent key reads as the species default. That is a real answer and not a gap: a plot planted from such a seed records the species default, which is what the plant is.

Two settings were cut from the first draft of this system rather than left sitting in the file, because at that point they would have gated behaviour that did not exist, and an inert setting is worse than a missing one since it reads like a lever. Both came back once the crossing path they describe was actually built, and both ship live and are read: crossing is on by default, and the mutation multiplier sits at 1.00 and scales the mutation roll alone.

From genotype to phenotype

A phenotype is the form you can actually see and name. Each species declares two to four of them, and each one carries a colour from the same list of sixteen the resource pack draws from, so a colour change moves the seed, the bud and the leaf together.

The lookup that turns a genotype into a phenotype is generated from one stated rule rather than hand typed, because a few hundred hand written rows are a table nobody reviews, and an unreviewed table is where a phenotype quietly becomes unreachable. The index is the plant's total count of dominant alleles, which means the distribution is centred rather than rising steadily. Extremes are rare and the middle is common.

Emberbloom is the clearest example. It uses three loci, so 27 canonical genotypes, spread across four phenotypes like this.

Note what that says about the order in the file. The first phenotype declared for Emberbloom is the second rarest of its four, so the declaration order is not a frequency ranking. Only the three species with two loci and two phenotypes, cannabis, hemp and Cinderpetal, happen to have their first entry also be their most common one. The first entry is still the name a seed refers to, because it is a stable declared choice, but it is not a claim about how often you will see it.

The artwork for every phenotype exists: 64 phenotype textures are drawn, each in its own colour. Turning them on in game is switched off by default, and for a good reason. A seed's identity includes its model string, so making the model vary by phenotype would mean two seeds of one species and one genotype minted either side of the change would stop stacking with each other. Today every seed of a species shows one sprite, and the art is waiting behind a restart rather than a pack rebuild.

Crossing: what two plants beside each other can produce

Crossing is rolled at the moment you harvest. The plant you harvested looks at its four orthogonal neighbours, the ones directly north, east, south and west on the same level. Diagonals do not count and neither does a plot one block higher. There is no radius scan: the four cells beside the plant are the entire neighbourhood.

Not every roll that fires hands you a seed. One of the six outcomes exists specifically for the case where a catalyst was required and could not be taken: no seed is minted, nothing is spent, and you are told. Refusing before charging, and voiding the credit when the charge fails, are the same rule read from two sides.

If an operator has switched breeding off entirely, the neighbour plots are not even read, and the crossing pages say so instead of describing a path you cannot walk. The same is true of a catalyst that does not resolve on a given server: the pair is named undiscoverable rather than quietly listed as available.

Where to read the live numbers. /farm help crossing renders the crossing guide, and every number on it is read from the code that implements it rather than typed into prose. Asked without a player, for example from the console, it prints the server wide chance and says plainly that Hybrid Vigour is added per player, instead of quoting some absent player's figure. /gardencodex carries the same content as screens, and /botany opens the Herbarium.

Punnett's Eye is the information perk that opens a species' Crosses screen. It is granted by a Herbarium milestone with a crossing target, and the perk is a pure function of your record: nothing is handed out in a transaction, so a lost write can delay it but can never duplicate, invent or destroy it. Until you have earned it, clicking the Crosses card still lands on a page about that species, explaining how the perk is unlocked.

Seed Sight, and what it shows you

Seed Sight is a tier 3 node in the Farming skill tree, bought with /skill unlock farming.seedsight and readable as a card with /skill node farming.seedsight. It grants the genotype sight capability, and the reader sits on the interaction the server already receives, so it is live the day you buy it.

Waving a seed at the sky works. The handler deliberately does not skip an already cancelled event, because every click on air arrives cancelled, and holding a seed up is the natural gesture for this. It resolves the species before it starts the five second clock, so a click that identifies nothing cannot eat the window you wanted for the next one.

It never writes to the stack, and that is the point. A lore line describing the genotype would bake one answer into the item for every viewer for ever, and lore is part of an item's identity for stacking, so a viewer dependent line would split every seed stack in the world the moment one player bought the node. An observation sent to you in chat has neither problem, and it reads identically on Bedrock.

The handler cancels nothing, denies nothing and writes nothing. Planting the seed still plants the seed. On a seed with no written genome, the readout reports the species default, which is exactly what such a seed is: the absence of the key is the default genotype, not a missing value.

Tier 3 of the Farming tree also holds Barehand harvesting, Full Ear, Glasswise and the three Seedwright ranks. Glasswise is the sibling capability: it reads a greenhouse without touching it, using only plain reads, because asking a greenhouse how it is doing through the detection path would change how it is doing.

Where every seed comes from

Six doors hand out species seeds. Which of them are open on a given server is an operator's choice, and the boot log names any species no door can reach, so a gap is reported rather than discovered by a player who gave up looking.

Climate gates the wild band and nothing else. The wild forage table derives from each species' climate rule, so every species a climate admits is offered in that climate's biomes. There are six bands, read as an ordered ladder: Nether, Dark, Cold, Arid, Wet and Any. The shipped table is 72 rows across those six sections. Duskbell, for instance, is a Dark species and must not appear in a plains biome. A rift is not a biome event and a catch is not a forage, so those two doors deliberately ask only whether a species can be planted at all.

There is a daily budget on foraged seeds. Eight species seeds per player per day. Past it the wild band still fires and still drops something: it hands you a bloom instead of a seed, so the reward for breaking grass never silently becomes nothing.

Hemp and cannabis are kept out of all six doors on purpose, because they already have prices and their own route. Their seeds come from breaking grass and ferns: hemp at 5 percent per break, cannabis at 0.5 percent and biome weighted, warm biomes more and everywhere else less. One roll per break, never both bands.

Species seeds carry no sell price at all. They are a planting input, not a money faucet, so no seed door closes a round trip back into coins.

Relic Coins are the grove's own currency, and the grove is where they are earned. The flower harvest inside a grove yields about one coin per fifty flowers, and a purchase at the Grove Exchange burns the coins rather than paying them to anyone.

The Grove Seedling has three routes. Craft it from four grove essence and a sapling, buy it at the Grove Exchange for twelve Relic Coins, or find one on the flower harvest inside a grove, at a weight of one in a thousand flowers. At roughly ten seconds per flower that is one seedling per 2.8 hours of harvesting for a solo player, comfortably below the Exchange price, so the find is the patient route and not a way around the coin sink.

The nine crop seeds that had no shop row

Until 2.0.5 there was a real and specific hole: coffee and eight other crop seeds could not be bought anywhere, and the Event Shop is the only seed surface most players ever look at. Since it is also the surface people reach for first, the whole crop half of the roster read as missing.

The cause was not the one it looked like. The filter that decides which species a seed door may hand over had already been widened to sixteen species in an earlier release. What was never widened with it were two of the five places that build the stack. Both were still using a builder that covers seven species and returns nothing for the rest. In the Event Shop that nothing was dropped silently, so nine rows simply did not exist. At the Grove Exchange it became an apology message, on roughly nine of every sixteen clicks on a four coin row, permanently.

What shipped is one funnel. Every seed door now builds through the same single entry point, which tries the garden's own item table first, so the seven species that carry a genotype keep it and their stacks stay byte identical, and falls back to the custom item registry for the other nine. Sixteen species pass the filter rather than all eighteen, because hemp and cannabis are kept out of the seed doors entirely. Alongside it sits an audit that asks three questions the old single yes or no could not:

• Can each consumer's own builder actually produce every species the filter admits, and if not, which ones by name?
• Is there any way at all to obtain this seed?
• Is the shop the only door? That last one is the original report turned into a standing assertion, because a roster where nine species are shop only reads perfectly clean to a check that only asks whether a species is reachable at all.

Two further faults turned up while reviewing that work, both found by asking whether a check could actually fire. The wild forage band described itself as always consulted when a server can switch it off, so the shop only check could not fire on the one server state it exists to catch. And the grove forage door had no state branch at all, printing that its state was unknown on every start with a configuration sitting right there.

The Species tab in the Herbarium

/botany opens the Herbarium, your own record of what you have found. The Species tab lists the roster, and every card opens: a species you have never recorded still has a detail page, so opening it is browsing rather than a locked door. Phenotypes you have not seen read as not yet recorded instead of being hidden.

Your record is stored as a bitset indexed by the packed genotype byte, four longs per species, thirty two bytes whatever the locus count. Indexing by the raw byte is deliberate: a dense ordinal would need an index function, and an index function is a second spelling of the genome layout, which is exactly the kind of duplicate that drifts.

Milestones latch once earned. The count they measure against is the reachable set rather than the declared one, because a phenotype declared with no genotype pointing at it can never be found, and measuring against the declared list would have made a milestone impossible for everyone, for ever, without saying so. When the live roster cannot satisfy a milestone, that is reported by name.

The 2.0.5 fix: the tab was showing the base material. The icon resolver did ask the item registry which custom item a species uses, then kept only the vanilla material underneath it and threw the factory away. The card then built a plain stack from that material, which carries no model data and no identity, so a client with the resource pack drew the vanilla item. The registry was being asked the wrong question, not left unasked.

The fix is a second question beside the first: the candidate item ids for a species, in a fixed order, seed first and then bloom, and then the first of those this server can actually build. The material chain survives untouched underneath as the fallback that must never fail. Four screens changed together, the species list card, the species detail header, the crosses focus header and the crosses roster rows, so no two screens disagree about the same plant.

The card's icon is resolved at the moment it is painted, never held between openings, and a species whose item throws while building is caught and drops back to the material chain rather than taking the whole page down.