Guides/Indonesian Beehives

How to Breed all Indonesian Beehives

This Guide is about creating all 208 available Citrus fruits.
To my knowledge nobody has ever achieved that, and probably nobody ever will. But this is how you can get close to that goal.
If instead your goal is just to get a decent selection of Citrus, then just follow these simple steps:

Plant like 50 Indonesian Beehives, all within a 38x38 square
Keep unique citruses, mulch duplicates
This can quickly get you to around 50 different ones, enough for like Test of Giving Fisherman
After around 50 Citrus this method becomes very inefficient in creating new unique citrusses. So read on, if you in fact want more!

General Information about Citrus: Read this first

https://atitd.wiki/tale11/Citrus

Be aware that my testing suggest a new Indonesian Beehive get its value from any two "parent" trees that it can see when it arrives (not when its created) and those parents can be within +/- 19 coordinates.
Example: a new tree in (20,20) will not be able to see another tree in (0,0). But a tree in (19,19) will be able to find the (0,0) tree.
This information is a key elements in this Guide! So double check, it's true for you as well.

How to get expand beyond the first 50 Citrus

Keep your original 50 Indonesian Beehives and even expand it to 100. Keep mulching duplicates. Dont worry about values. The purpose is to create all the "common" Citrus. With values in the mid section 300-700. This random mulching will be unlikely to produce any high or low values. But that's fine. You need the common ones anyway. And its fast.
Next you want to start over with another group of Indonesian Beehives. Plant them far away from your first group. And at least 60 coordinates away. They should never interact.
Now its time to create the extreme values: 0 and 1000 for every category. So plant like 16 Hives. And mulch them over and over for perhaps a week of real time. Always keep the highest and lowest values for each of the four categories (color, sweetness, size, length)
When you have 0 and 1000 in all categories, then it's time to begin actual production. Or you may -like me- be satisfied with whatever numbers you managed to get, to speed things up.
Next you want to create four new groups of Beehives, and each of those should focus on Citrus with 2 extreme values. They should placed in direction: NE, SE, SW, NW (so they will never interact). The first group going NW could for instance focus on Citrus with high values in Color and Sweetness etc.
The trick to create those four groups is the fact that even though new beehives are random, the most likely thing for them to do, is just to copy an exact value from a parent, so what you do is this: create 2-4 *temporary" Beehives to NW, that are within your mid group. Mulch them over and over, until you have Color:1000 and Sweetness:1000 in this temporary group. Now Create the actual Breeding group of 16-20 even further NW and *outside* range of the mid group. That way, the Breeding group will be fed and start out with only the two extreme values! Salvage the "temporary" group.
From here on, its just repetitive: mulch over and over, and keep uniques!
Similarly create the other three Breeding group, and feed each of them with two different extreme values.
Once you have mastered this method of "moving" Beehives, you can get even more benefits:
... for instance you can decide to feed the two starter trees (Tangy Shangjuan and Long Etrog) into your Breeding groups in order to get more variaty. You do that with the same method: create two starter trees 20+ coords away from your Breeding group (and obviously not in range of anything else), afterwards place 2-4 trees in the middle. And after a few round of multhing, the new values will be copy/pasted into your Breeding group. Once accomplished, salvage the temporary trees.
... and you can speed things up greatly by "removing" unique trees with unwanted values from your Breeding group: same method: place a temp group, mulch until you get the uniques trees. Create another group even further away, and get the values from temporary group. Salvage temp group. This way you can create a holding area for unique Citrus. And keep the Breeding group focussed on the desired values.

Assumptions about Indonesian Beehives

The above strategy worked for me in creating 70% of all Citrus over a period of under one month real time.
Here is what I learned about what is going on. If you know more or find anything inaccuate, I'd love to hear about it!
If we learn more about the math and/or if it changes in the future, you can adapt accordingly!

As said: a new tree get its values when it arrives (one hour after being planted/mulched)
So if you mulch *all* of your trees at the same time, then they'll all start over as starter trees
A new tree find two "parents" within +/- 19 coordinates
First the new tree randomly copy values from its parents. It can get all values from just one parent and usually its a mix.
Next there's a chance that one (and rarely more) values are changed. The chance is hard to figure out. I saw values of 33% chance (good) down to 15% (poor). Either way, there's not alot of randomness. And it takes dedicated effort to drives the values to 0 and 1000.
The randomness, in case it happens, is between 1 and 150. The range of 20-40 is more likely. So it's certainly *not* an even distribution. More like a normal distribution with an average of 30.
Furthermore some parents liked to produce the same "random" numbers very often. Which may, in fact, be another method that's applied on top of or instead of the randomness.
Different parents will have different chance of randomness! Like the two starter trees (Tangy Shangjuan and Long Etrog) are very likely to produce randomness (33% chance). Whereas other parents were very unlikely to produce randomness (down to 15% chance).
Also depending on the two parents, the categories of Color,Sweetness,Size and Lengh did *not* have the same chance of of randomness!
The whole theory about "ideal values" for each type of Citrus seem to work fine. And as I got more and more data to estimate those ideal values, I could predict the type of citrus with 90+% accuracy using this theory.
I also used this theory to fine tune the breeding in the end to find "missing" types of Citrus with good effect.