I'm wondering how difficult it would be to create every combination of plants without relying on/using a virtual seed tray, or is it possible at all? I've read one of the posts that told how many kinds of flowers and foliages there are and with that info, the number of combination would be indeed just over 500 by simple/basic calculation. BUT what I mean by "every" combination means every combination - there are well over 200000 combination we can do, or am I wrong? RSVP, thank you.

people have done it. I know Charley has, I don't know who else. There are less than 600 combos in total

There is a difference between species (such as Spotted Astera) and breeding combinations (the "parents" used to produce each species). The game tracks only the species, of which there over 500 (to keep this from becoming a spoiler thread). There are far more breeding combinations than that, but the game doesn't track them and neither does the Virtual Seed Tray. You'd have to do that yourself.

a breeding combo would be plant A + plant B

Yes, those would be the parent plants, and there are a lot more than 500 possible breeding combinations! For some species, there could be dozens of possible parent combinations.

My math may be wrong, but I calculate the number to be 139,656.

Even if a person could do 100 a day, it would take years to complete.

I get 279,841

Several different combos of parent plants can equal the same species though right? So if you set up a chart to cross breed just the plants going along at the pace of when you discover a new one and setting it up in the chart, and cross breeding the new one with all the ones you have previously, each combo in the grid counts as two ... astera (AST) + ball cactus (BAL) = lemonbush (LMB) and conversely, BAL + AST = LMB on the chart as well, so are there as many combos as you would think?

I crossbred every of the ## plants with the others of the ##. I know this is just for PLANTS ... I am not even talking about flower combos ... I made a separate chart for them and crossbred all of them as well ... ## flowers ...filling in the info on both charts as I went along.

Yeah, I know I had quite a few repeats while I experimented to fill in the charts, but that was half the fun of discovery.

Making a check list for plant and flower species, even before using the VT, isn't species ##plant X ##flower = "OVER 500 species"? Granted, some had to be mutated in order to GET in actuality that particular plant/flower combo, but the crossbreeding charts helped. And in order to get that particular species combo, you only need to use ONE of the possible combinations to get it, not all of them. Am I on the right track here or is there more?

(numbers edited out so not to make spoiler)

I do have to say that the VT was very helpful at the end for tracking purposes (you have the option to hide the spoiler information) to confirm/track what I had made and alert me to what I needed to make.

279841 is the number I got as well. But anyway, thank you very much for your responses. Now, my stubbornness of attempting to accomplish 279841 combination with or without VT is out of question. :-) I just keep at it until I get the specific number of species that exist. Thanks again.

Dr. Borg's math lesson du jour, on combinations, is for the benefit of Jazzo and MHR.

What we know:
1. There are 23x23=529 different plants.
2. Breeding a nox fern with a mela grass, and then later breeding a mela grass with a nox fern .. those are the same thing and count only once, not twice (twice would be permutations).
3. Cross breeding means breeding things with other things. Breeding a plant with itself does not count.

So what we want to do is calculate the number of combinations (not permutations) of 529 things taken 2 at a time. The formula for the number of combinations is n!/r!(n-r!) where !=factorial. In our case it would be 529!/2!(529-2)! = 529x528/2 = 139,656.

279,841 would not only include breeding a plant with itself, but would include breeding AxB twice (once as AxB, once as BxA).

(highlight the blank appearing areas above to reveal the hidden spoiler text.)