Rust: All info on the big farming update - tips

Cultivating your own crops has been included in Rust for a long time, but was treated quite stepmotherly. This has now changed and our guide explains what "Farming 2.0" means.

Good genes, bad genes: your crops in Rust are now truly individual.

In Rust, you can now follow in the footsteps of the legendary Gregor Mendel. Our tips will help.

Farming in Rust: Genetics provides strong innovation

The biggest and innovative change concerns the character of your plants. Namely, they now have individual genetics:

• Each plant has a total of six places (slots) for genes.
• The genes are distributed purely randomly. There are three good genes (marked green) and two bad (red).
• The good genes: G (faster growth), H (better resistance to environmental conditions) and Y (more yield when harvesting).
• The bad genes: X (not occupied) and W (requires more water).

The plants go through several growth phases, which now include a crossing phase. You can take advantage of this to breed a better variant from different plants. There are rules for this as well:

• First things first: genes are transferred from slot to slot.
• Plants can only be crossed with directly adjacent plants in a bed. This also applies to diagonal connections.
• A plant will adopt the genes of other plants in a genetics slot if the other genes are numerically superior.
• An example of this: One plant has "X" in slot 1, two neighboring plants have a "G" in slot 1. As a result, the "X" is replaced by the "G" via crossover, which is good.
• However, you have to consider all six slots - and this makes it tricky.
• Even more importantly, red genes weigh more heavily, so are transferred faster and require more genetic counterbalance in the neighborhood to be balanced or neutralized.

Thanks to these new mechanics, Farming in Rust keeps you busy if you enjoy growing the perfect potato (or squash, hemp or corn on the cob).