Crop breeding strategies for better stats - portable scanner vs. large batches?

After noticing in the configs that Geologica lapis ore doesn't generate when GregTech is installed, and the COG version of lazurite veins wouldn't generate since I had disabled GregTech ores in the COG tabs, I went ahead and installed Mystcraft and explored a random age for a few kilometers, but then it lagged so bad that I tried to quit the game and it got stuck on "Shutting down internal server" for 10 minutes and I had to use MultiMC's "Kill Minecraft" button. In the morning, I'll see if the game will load.

Edit: the world loaded, but then quickly lagged completely again (after killing two cows, the third showed no reaction to being attacked, though I was able to travel further north to the edge of the generated chunks, and I even tried to use my linking book, but the GUI for it wouldn't open)

I went back to an older world yesterday, and did some breeding of my Aurelia crop to fill a 9x9 field (with water in the middle), which I thought was all growth 19-21, but after breeding some coppon, I went back and half the aurelia field was weeds. I think next time I'll go for quantity instead of trying to get the best stats. (and also use smaller separated fields to limit weed spreading - it can't spread to stone-type blocks, right?)

I knew about the growth 24 part, and I thought all my crops were 19-21/29-31/any (I had already determined that going for exactly 21/31 would take too long), though the weeds proved me wrong (I used the portable scanner on a few of them, and saw growth values from 20 to 31, which makes it unlikely that it started from a weed from empty cropsticks, since those appear at 0/0/0). I also just realized that I might have left the high-growth crop in place when I only got rid of the weeds, but I checked the remaining aurelia crops, and none of them had growth higher than 21, so now I'm a little confused - I thought high-growth crops would only act like weeds, but not change to the "weed" texture.

Quote from SpwnX

weeds only spread to other cropsticks.

Don't they also convert adjacent cropstick-less farmland to grass?

SpwnX, I don't think I really understood until just now what you meant about nursery plots. I had been breeding my crops in-place to fill each field (once I had enough with high stats to make an "X" shape in the field), but that has an additional risk of producing growth 24 or higher crops if I fail to destroy some growth 22 or higher crops (e.g. by accidentally skipping them when scanning new crops) and crossbreed them, or if I end up with a crossbreeding spot with three growth-21 crops around it. You were talking about having separate plots with breeding stock, and once those got to 21/31 (or so), using crops crossbred from those to populate larger fields (without further crossbreeding), right? I think that would be both safer and less frustrating than the way I had been doing it before.

Quote from SpwnX

Ideally you can have lots of 21/31 2x2 plots to just crossbreed new seedbags, which would be safer as they are guaranteed to not go over 23 growth (and your crops stats would always be near perfect).

I might try the 2x2 plots (with water at the center of each group of 4 such plots?) in my next game, but since I already had 9x9 fields (with water at the center of each), I split each of them into four 4x4 fields.

Quote from SpwnX

Although, I'm used to crossbreed and spread fields on the go (while always scanning them and destroying any growth >21 crop).

That gets frustrating when 40% of the crops produced by crossbreeding will be outside the target 19-21 growth range (and therefore need to be destroyed), and I think a mistake while doing that was what cost me half my aurelia crops yesterday, though I couldn't figure out what happened to the rogue crop.

Quote from SpwnX

This can be done at the very early stage too since the scanner doesnt need the crop to be mature as you probably know.

I think the IC2 Cropnalyzer has had some changes recently, so it might not need that either now.

P.S. I'm curious: do you use default textures or a resource pack for your crops? With default textures, it's hard for me to see the difference between the last two stages of coppon, and with Soartex textures, it's hard for me to see the difference between the last two stages of stickreed, so I've been using Sphax 64x textures for the IC2 crops and the 32x textures by IChrisI that I adapted to 1.7.10 for some of the GT crops.

Quote from SpwnX

IC2 crop biome environment bonus is not based on temperature and humidity forestry-like, but on biome types.

Quote from Nexey_

Seems like Moor is a swamp like biome, so that's a gg for me

Any tips on determining ahead of time which BoP biomes count as swampland for the purposes of IC2 crops? I would guess that lush swamp, bayou, and wetland count. I don't know if Nexey_'s results really prove that Moor counts, and I don't know whether quagmire or sludgepit would count.

Edit: I figured this out from decompiling sources, but since I'm not giving exact values, I hope this is okay: for the purposes of IC2 crops, lush swamp and bayou are about the same as vanilla swampland, wetland and bamboo forest are better, but fungi forest is the best. Moor isn't quite as good as vanilla swampland, quagmire and sludgepit are bad, and the worst is crag (even worse than the nether biomes, which are technically farmable iirc by using the BoP blood fluid in place of water)

Nice, but that doesn't really prove that Moor is as good as swampland, because those are low-tier crops (pumpkin is tier 1, and reed is tier 2), so having a good biome is less critical for them (especially if you have a crop-matron going as you mentioned before).

With a different world, I trimmed my stickreed supply down to two 4/5/0 crops, and timed how long it would take for anything (even weeds) to appear on the crossbreeding plots, and got 10 timing points ranging from 23 seconds to just over 19 minutes. I think I'm better off if I spread it into a full 80-crop field, then take them home to scan, and re-plant the best 40 (and repeatedly crossbreed 40 at a time). It might take longer overall, but at least that way I won't be just sitting there staring at a few crossbreeding plots, waiting for something to grow there.

Quote from MauveCloud

With a different world, I trimmed my stickreed supply down to two 4/5/0 crops, and timed how long it would take for anything (even weeds) to appear on the crossbreeding plots, and got 10 timing points ranging from 23 seconds to just over 19 minutes. I think I'm better off if I spread it into a full 80-crop field, then take them home to scan, and re-plant the best 40 (and repeatedly crossbreed 40 at a time). It might take longer overall, but at least that way I won't be just sitting there staring at a few crossbreeding plots, waiting for something to grow there.

I've been using the latter method with some help from NEI's highlight mode, but now I'm wondering: is it possible to use NEI's regex search to highlight scanned seeds based on both the growth and the gain stats? (since they're on successive lines of the tooltip)