How to Get Black and Gold Roses on 'Animal Crossing'

Cultivating hybrid flowers on Animal Crossing New Horizons can be a fun but frustrating process. While some hybrids seem to sprout with little to no effort on your part others definitely require a little more know-how. There are multiple varieties of rose in the game, for example, but some are easier to coax out of the ground than others. We'll walk you through how to get black roses, gold roses, and even blue roses.

You can't grow a gold rose without first having at least two black ones. The simplest way to cultivate black roses is to plant four red roses in an X and water them regularly. Hybrids will sprout in the empty spaces adjacent to the parent roses. And while there is no guarantee they will be black, there is a 25 percent chance. Other possible offspring from breeding two red roses are pink (25 percent) and red (50 percent).

Once you have at least two black roses and have acquired the DIY recipe for a gold watering can by achieving a 5-star rating on your island, you can get to work on cultivating gold roses.

While you can get them with a minimum of two black roses, we recommend planting four black roses in an "X" if you have them. Then, you'll need to water the black roses with your gold watering can. However, there's a bit of a trick here.

Although your gold watering can will water all nine squares around you, it only counts for the flower immediately in front of you, so you may need to "overwater" and stand directly in front of each black rose to up your chances of sprouting gold roses.

Blue roses are difficult to cultivate because they're bred from hybrids of hybrids or from Mystery Island flowers. While there are several combinations of hybrid parents that can spawn a blue rose, the most reliable is to breed two orange roses brought back from a Nook Miles tour to a mystery island with hybrid flowers. Yes, that is totally convoluted, but dataminers who hacked the game's code say you have a 6.26  percent shot of breeding a blue rose if you are lucky enough to have orange roses from a mystery island.

That said, you need a great deal of luck in your favor to obtain these specific orange roses in the first place. For one, you need to land on the mystery island where hybrid flowers grow. There's only one, and there's a 3 percent chance of landing on it any time you take a Nook Miles Tour. And that's not the only barrier.

Even if you do land on this rare island, you won't have rose hybrids unless roses are your native flower. If that's the case, your best bet for obtaining them is befriending someone who has harvested these rare orange roses and it feeling generous enough to let you come to their island and dig them up. 

And then, you have to breed red roses from those orange flowers and start a new grid with those second-generation roses. The offspring of those special red roses have a 50 percent chance of being blue. 

If that all seems like too much hassle, there are other ways to get a blue rose, they're just less reliable. The first involves breeding pink and yellow roses to produce hybrid red roses. They look exactly the same as a red rose grown from seeds, but breeding two of these red roses has a chance of about 2 percent of producing a blue rose.

So unless you were lucky enough to end up with roses as your native flower, getting blue roses may be more difficult than the coveted gold rose!