Not to be confused with $FLOWER, the primary utility token for the game
After you upgrade your island to Petal Paradise, you will be given a flower bed and beehive, and your gardening journey will begin!
Flower growing begins by purchasing a seed from the farmer's market on your island. There are seven types of seeds, three of which can be grown in any season, and four which rotate with every season.
After buying the seed, you will also need another resource to cross-pollinate your new sprout. You will primarily use fruits and crops, but you can also use other flowers that you've already grown. When you start out, each combination will be listed as unknown, and revealed after you collect the grown flower. Many flowers have more than one recipe, but you will only see the result of a combination if you have specifically bred that seed with that other plant before, even if you've already grown the result of the combination elsewhere (for example, you plant a Sunpetal Seed with Sunflowers, which gives you a Yellow Pansy. You then grow a Sunpetal Seed with Apples, which also results in a Yellow Pansy, but since you haven't bred Sunpetal+Apples before, it will display as Unknown combination).
After you plant a new unknown combination that results in a flower you've already seen, you can tap or mouse over the flower bed to see what it will be. Of course, the full list of possible combinations is available at https://sfl.world/info/flowers, but we recommend experimenting for a while to preserve that sense of wonder. There is also a tab in your Codex that will show all of the flowers you have discovered, how many of them you have, and what combination is required to breed them.
Choose wisely, because once you start a flower growing, you cannot destroy or cancel it. It's unlikely that you would want to, though, since flowers are so useful.
By now you've probably learned that 2 copies of the same item won't give you the same bonus twice. But skills that provide you a chance of +1 flower are a little different. Instead of totaling up each chance percentage into a single cumulative number, each bonus actually resolves individually. For example, if you have the Petalled Perk skill (+10%) and the Butterfly craftable (+20%) on your farm, you do not end up with a 30% chance to get +1. Instead, the chance for each boost is resolved individually, meaning if you're lucky and they both succeed, you will end up with 3 total flowers from one bed. There are a few other NFT items in the marketplace that add flower chance and are surprisingly affordable, so check them out!
Once a flower is planted, the bees start to work. Honey will be produced in the hive for as long as a flower is growing, or until the hive is full. Each flower bed is paired to a beehive, and while there is no icon or indicator showing this relationship, you can tell by looking closely. Every so often, a bee sprite will leave the hive and hover over the flower bed it is tied to, then return. Beds and hives can be placed anywhere on your farm that you like, but it is usually useful to place them adjacent to one another so you can easily manage your honey output. The distance between the bed and the hive has no bearing on honey speed or yield.
One beehive takes 24 hours to produce 1 unit of honey. This is actual time, not tied to the game reset. The skill Sweet Bonus increases the amount of honey from a full hive by 0.1, while Hyper Bees increases production by 0.1. This seems a little confusing, but it results in “1.1 full hive / day”. The base rate of production is 1 per 24 hours, or 0.042 honey per hour (rounded). The skill increases that rate to 0.046 honey per hour (rounded), which means you will have a full hive in 21.6 hours instead. That doesn't seem like much, but will add up more quickly than you think, especially when you have multiple hives.
Bees are finicky, though, and will only produce honey in certain conditions. For one, the hive must not be full. When it is, honey production will stop and the excess that would have been produced when you eventually clear it out will be wasted. For this reason, you can harvest honey at any time. The window for a hive will tell you when the hive will be full, so you can estimate if you will be asleep or away when the cap is reached, and harvest it beforehand to ensure it is always producing.
The other important factor is that a flower must be actively growing in the bed tied to the hive. Once it reaches maturity, honey stops, and won't start again until you harvest the flower and replant it with a new one.
From those warnings, you may think it wise to always be harvesting your honey every time you visit your farm. That isn't necessarily a good idea, though. If you look closely at the hive window, you will see the progress bar has a fractional percentage, i.e. 22.45%. If you harvest it at that time, you will get 0.22 units of honey, and that .45% will be lost.
The other reason is that when the hive is 100% full, there is a chance of a Bee Swarm, which will boost your crop plots. There is no indication in the game as to when you get a Bee Swarm until it happens, but if you don't like being surprised you can check your hive status at https://sfl.world/land, under Resources on the right side.
As you start to make deliveries, you will see many NPCs request flowers, especially Raven, Miranda, and the goblins. Flowers play a role there, but while you're fulfilling your orders, you may also see a Gift button in the NPCs window. Many NPCs will accept flowers as gifts, complementary to their normal delivery requirements. You can gift an NPC one flower per game reset, and earn delivery points which will get you closer to the next reward.
The language of flowers is complicated, and each NPC has certain flowers that they prefer over others. They will accept any flower that you give them, but their preferred flowers will earn more delivery points than others. The character will tell you what they like in their window, and you will see a lightning bolt icon when you select one of those bonus flowers.
It can be easy to forget about flower gifts when there is so much else going on in the game, but they are the key to earning bonus rewards much faster than you will with just deliveries alone. Also, for Valentine's Day 2025, a special gift was airdropped to all players who had given at least one flower to an NPC in the previous week, with a rare bonus for the top gift givers. So, try to give whenever you can!
Every week, the Mega Bounty Board is headlined by a selection of five different flowers, all of which can be redeemed for an amount of Chapter Tickets. Quickly-grown, common flowers are worth less than rare ones, but all are worth your attention if you want to take part in the Chapter Race. Visit Poppy in the Plaza to turn in the ones you have collected, and make sure to do the math on whether growing a more advanced specimen is even possible before the week ends!
Even if you are not pursuing Tickets, you can still benefit from the bounty board. Every flower on the board is also listed on the marketplace under the Limited tab. You must access the listings from this tab, as search will not work for Limited items.
For each of the five flowers, you can buy three of them, and sell one. This is refreshed each week, even if a flower is up for a bounty twice in a row. Some can be worth quite a lot, so be sure to check out the marketplace if you have a few extra. Or, if an delivery requires a flower that you don't have, but is a reasonable price on the market, don't skip it quite yet.
Contributors to this page
librophagus - primary content
iSPANK - minor edits, linking, tagging