@CGrant56 wrote:
<snipped>
There is a short cut I've found though on some plants. Once they are big enough to get the option and your sim has a certain level of gardening skill, you can take cuttings and do grafts. That's what I usually do for the tentacle tree once it gets big enough just to get the fang flower faster. Also, grafting trees with small plants can really reduce the footprint of a garden if the grafts take and the spliced plant will bear both harvestables. Before Seasons, it worked perfectly every time. Now though, sometimes it doesn't but I have found that eventually you can get a good spliced plant that bears at least two harvestable if you keep trying and I've even managed to get a few to give me three by splicing a plant twice. You have to be careful though. On Sixam, every time I have taken a cutting off one of the alien plants, the plant dies. They do come back eventually. On regular plants, it takes two cuttings fairly close together before most will die.
For new plant gathering, I do more grafting than harvesting, because I find it easier to take care of the plants on my home lot. A couple of things to keep in mind:
- The harvestable spawn rates for grafted plants is weighted on the rarity of the plant - commons are weighted the highest, then uncommon, and rares will spawn, well, rarely 🙂 (
commons are weighted 500, uncommon=100 & rare=1. edited because these values are likely wrong, as they were determined before the Nov 19, 2019 patch that increased values)
- The growth rate, harvest season & maturation rates are all decided by the base plant.
Knowing these two things, I thought I'd share a couple of tips I've learned.
If you have a common plant and graft an uncommon and a rare, every time it spawns harvestables the game will run a random selection process. As you can see by the numbers, the chances of the rare are very, very small, so it can take a very long time to get that special rare harvestable in that way. If you're looking to get a rare plant that can only be created by special combo grafting, then you may have to suffer through many cycles before you can get the actual harvestable; for example, grafting an apple (common) with a cherry (uncommon) to get a pomegranate (rare). Or, save your game right before 5 am, see what generates and then quit without saving until you get the pomegranate. (or buy rare seed packets lol)
If you just want space saving, or want perfect harvestables with an equal chance of spawning, then graft to a plant with the same rarity. You can evolve one rare plant up to perfect and then graft any number of rare plants to it. The random selection process will weight every one of the rare plants equally so you will have perfect rare harvestables from every graft. I use this technique quite a bit - bring home a graft from a normal quality plant, graft it to a perfect plant of the same quality, add a couple of days of tending and now you can harvest and plant a perfect one from that graft.
If you have Seasons and your goal is to have harvestables available year-round without shelter, you can choose to graft onto one of the all-season plants like sage or lemon. Since the base plant determines the harvestable season, anything grafted to an all-season plant will produce harvestables all year round. Just keep in mind the rarity of the grafts, as the random generation is still going to be in effect.
