About Home Garden Fruits and Cooking skill

I just tested my sim family. I emptied the fridge and let one cook with the normal ingredients from fridge, and found they're still getting +3 epic meal boost. I sold most of the fruits and vegetables leftover in the storage box, and left only certain rare plants in the back garden. There's no point to look after home garden now, also the price of the harvested things isn't getting expensive any more.

I don't see a difference in the food quality in the quality of the vegetation, but I do see a difference with the cooking quality of the appliances.

They don't effect the meal at all which I find really stupid. I miss having to buy groceries! The gardening system is nonsensical this way.

The gardening and cooking of TS4 need a major overhaul. We don't have very many plants, recipes should be free if you have the ingredients on hand, the quality of the ingredients should matter more, and stronger moodlets for cooking meals with ingredients as opposed to buying them.

The only time I ever do a garden any more is when I have a sim who has the aspirations dealing with gardening, otherwise, it's too time consuming for almost no reward. The only thing I feel they got right with gardening is that the plant gradually improves in quality, instead of dying off after a certain number of harvesting.

I did forget, there is one other thing involving gardening that hasn't been mentioned is the Science Career. You can't make those (I forget what they are called) potions without certain vegetation in their personal inventory.

Gardening was the main thing I used to do in TS3. Not so much in 4, and it's left a serious gap in my game. I love having poor/struggling/homeless sims and sustenance gardening was very important. You can still do it in 4, but something is definitely lacking.

The best thing about gardening is that the moodlet from eating a (for example) normal grape and a perfect grape stack so it is very easy to keep your sims in a 'Very' emotional state, which is handy for painters needing to be Very Inspired to produce better paintings.

Also good to let toddlers munch on a harvestable to keep their moods up, especially after a nightmare etc.

"NZsimm3r;15498905" wrote:
The best thing about gardening is that the moodlet from eating a (for example) normal grape and a perfect grape stack so it is very easy to keep your sims in a 'Very' emotional state, which is handy for painters needing to be Very Inspired to produce better paintings.

Also good to let toddlers munch on a harvestable to keep their moods up, especially after a nightmare etc.

I love your tip. Yeah so I just deleted most of the plants except for the ufo and dragonfruit plant. I also stored deathflowers in the storage box just in case, otherwise, I don't need all the other cooking ingredients.

@calaprfy Yes you're right. Some fruits are still good to keep in the back garden like dragonfruit and UFOs.

@papersuitcase I agree. I miss the grocery store and book store in the sims 3.

@LaBlue0314 Same here. My sims already completed the aspiration, so they don't need to keep looking after their garden with all kind of plants. It's just more work for them. Just in case, I let my sims move into an empty lot, left one each all kind of fruit on it and saved it onto my library. I can use it if I need them in science career. thanks.

@SageRainWillow Yes same here. I always start the gardening first in the sims 3. :)

@Jeansoo you can also put the plants into your family inventory. That's what I do when I don't have the time to care for them. Then you can just take them out to care for them and harvest them when you need to.

I do wish the flow of gardening was better. In TS3, everything happened at one time (5am, I think?). You could go out and water, weed, and harvest, and be done for the day by 7 or 8 if your garden was large. In TS4 everything happens all over the place. You can water the plants, then harvest, and three more plants need watering. Then you weed, and two more are ready to be harvested again. Harvest, now there's one with bugs. You never finish. I love to garden, but it makes it hard to do anything else sometimes.