@SimGuruNick wrote:
I'm not sure this is necessarily a bug, I think it might just be part of the new gardening design. Evolutions have slowed down, as it's now an end-game long-term goal. The Evolve commodity starts at around 50, and evolution is available at 100. Fertilize gives a solid amount of evolve commodity, depending on the quality of fertilizer but it's around 8. So you need to fertilize a plant about 7 times before it's ready to evolve. There are other factors that can affect the evolution rate as well, such as sheltering the plant. Sheltered plants have the benefit of being protected from the seasons but the evolution rate is much slower. Bluebells, for example, evolve 4x slower when sheltered than when not.
I will look into filing an issue regarding the Lessons not explaining all of this thoroughly enough. But if, after reading all of this, you believe that your game is still bugged and your plants just aren't evolving period, I would appreciate a save file to help us investigate. You can find more info for sending me your save in the following link, thanks much! https://answers.ea.com/t5/Bug-Reports/INFORMATION-How-to-Send-User-Files-to-The-Sims-4-Team/m-p/6065302
I'm happy that gardening has been given so much attention, But, what about players who play with more than one household? Or, players who rotate between many household? I don't think the devs have taken rotational players into account. As things stand I would need to play exclusively with my gardening household in order to make any progress on a garden throughout the cycle of seasons.
I play each of my household for one sim week. I have at least two household in each world. But, only three household have gardens. Sorting out the gardens has become a nightmare. Not because of the seasons, but because the underlying mechanics are so unfriendly to rotational play. Even switching to two weeks per gardening household won't really help.
I had to play my gardening Sim Spring to Spring plus Summer and Fall before getting 7 Apples, 2 Cherries and a Pomegranate from my spliced Apple/Cherry/Pomegranate tree. And this was playing exclusively with that household. This was with a pre-patch, per-Seasons garden. Maybe it needed that long to sync up, but even so that's a bit much to expect of us.
Do I think this is a bug? No. I think this is the result of not thinking something all the way through.
If a plant needs to be fertilized SEVEN times before it evolves and a Season lasts seven days and there are five levels of quality and a plant doesn't need fertilizing every day and sheltered plants take longer to evolve, how long will it take a plant (plus they all grow a different rates) to reach the "excellent" quality?
😕