IC2 Crops Guide

This page contains a guide to progress through IC2 crops and take advantage of the many kinds of renewable resources they provide. For a list of crops, see IC2 Crops List, and to read about crop mechanics in more detail, see IC2 Crops.

Crop breeding can be started in the Steam age, but it becomes much faster and easier with the Portable Scanner, which requires HV circuits.

TL:DR

• Begin by crafting IC2 Cropsticks and searching for Sugar Canes in the world. When you have some, right-click wet, tilled soil with the sticks to put them down (wet soil makes the crops grow faster).
• Right-click the cropsticks with the canes to plant them. This creates Reeds, the name of the plant that ended up in the cropstick.
• Wait for the crop to grow fully and right-click it to get some more Sugar Canes.
• Place down some more Cropsticks. Put two of them on the same dirt block to make double cropsticks, surround it with Reeds and put more double cropsticks on the corners to make a 3x3 field. The double cropsticks allow for the crossbreeding of the Reeds, originating more of themselves or a different kind of plant at random.
• Watch out for weeds! They can show up in cropsticks without a crop inside (double cropsticks too), and if they are allowed to grow, they take over adjacent cropsticks and replace the plants inside. Destroy the cropstick if a weed appears, right click with a Spade or use Weed-Ex to prevent the weeds from appearing for a good while.
• Make more of these 3x3 fields, or expand the first one, alternating between Reed and double cropstick. Keep doing this until you get Stickreed. Be careful that Stickreed is different from Reed, but looks the same in the first three growth stages! Use a Plant Lens to see what crop it is, or a Portable Scanner if you have it.
• Keep crossbreeding until you have a lot of Stickreeds, and replace the Reeds you had with those. The objective now is to crossbreed them to get better crop stats.
• To see crop stats, the early option is an LV scanner, but it needs harvested seeds to scan, which needs the crop to be fully harvested as well. To avoid this, make a Portable Scanner and right click planted crops to see their stats right away.
• Crop stats start at 1/1/1 for Growth/Gain/Resistance and change slightly from the existing crops to the new one, at random. Since Stickreeds grow very fast and are Tier 4, unlike most of the other fast-growing crops at Tier 1, keep crossbreeding and replanting the new crops that have better stats than the ones you have. The objective is to get 21/31/0 for Stickreeds used to spread high stats to other crops, and 23/31/0 for crops meant to be harvested in an automated farm.
• While crossbreeding for stats, pick all the different crops that show up over time and store their seeds. To reach most of the useful high-tier crops, start with the ore crops obtained from crossbreeding Stickreeds and cross those, aiming for higher and higher tier crops until you reach Platina. These need Platinum Blocks to grow fully, which might be unavailable, but they can still crossbreed without the block at growth stage 3.
• When both steps are done, crossbreed the max-statted Stickreeds with other crops to transfer over the high stats. To obtain other kinds of crops that haven't showed up yet, the NEI tab on the seeds is useful and a good path to follow.