Feedback: Updated Gardening System
The June 19th patch made changes to the gardening system. There are now only five stages to evolving plants from normal to perfect. And if you have the Seasons EP some plants will grow during certain ...
Forum Discussion
Largely copying my two cents over from the evolving/grafting issues thread, with a couple of extra thoughts thrown in.
At first, I wasn't particularly impressed with the new evolution system. It definitely feels slower and less rewarding than the old one, but after playing for a few sim years across a couple of saves, I've come around on it. I like that you see significant results by using pet poop and fish fertiliser. I feel like it produces greater results than even using perfect plant fertiliser, but that might just be subjective.
I also like that there's a real benefit to having your plants outside during their "season", in that they grow faster, evolve much faster, and seem to produce a higher yield in most cases. It's worth the effort of juggling between greenhouse and garden each season for the extra benefit. And it makes me feel more like a real gardener, which is great because I have a black thumb irl!
I love the bees, even if they don't particularly seem to love my sims... I have two hives in my greenhouse, and I play classical music to keep them happy, but my flower arranging sim just died of old age and my other sim isn't high enough level to make bee-calming arrangements so she's constantly getting stung even though she's at max relationship with them! They seem to be quite grumpy all throughout winter, even though they aren't dormant because they're inside.
Even so, they're a fun bit of gameplay that I find very rewarding despite how simple their interaction set is! I love them more than expected!
I'm also really enjoying having Patchy around, although I don't recommend having him out when your sim is just starting out in their gardening journey, because I found that he'd be out and doing all the gardening jobs before I could stop him and then I couldn't get skill points. Similarly, it can be hard to have him around when you've got children and teens you're trying to push through Manners & Responsibility because he'll have all the housework done before they get home from school, and it depletes the amount of progress they can make...
HOWEVER, I'm really not impressed with the new grafting system. In three years of sim play in my playtesting save, with 20 grafted plants, I did not *ever* produce a new plant from splicing. No orchids (4 plants ready), no birds of paradise (4 plants ready), no dragon fruit (4 plants ready), no bonsai buds (4 plants ready), and worst of all, NO DEATH FLOWERS (again, 4 plants ready).
And I had to spend A LOT of money on rare seed packets to get the grafting materials for death flowers, given that I never produced the items I needed from splicing.
Seriously, it's totally unacceptable for 20 plants to fail to produce a single spliced item across three years of sim play.
Why even bother to have a grafting system at that point?
At first, I wasn't particularly impressed with the new evolution system. It definitely feels slower and less rewarding than the old one, but after playing for a few sim years across a couple of saves, I've come around on it. I like that you see significant results by using pet poop and fish fertiliser. I feel like it produces greater results than even using perfect plant fertiliser, but that might just be subjective.
I also like that there's a real benefit to having your plants outside during their "season", in that they grow faster, evolve much faster, and seem to produce a higher yield in most cases. It's worth the effort of juggling between greenhouse and garden each season for the extra benefit. And it makes me feel more like a real gardener, which is great because I have a black thumb irl!
I love the bees, even if they don't particularly seem to love my sims... I have two hives in my greenhouse, and I play classical music to keep them happy, but my flower arranging sim just died of old age and my other sim isn't high enough level to make bee-calming arrangements so she's constantly getting stung even though she's at max relationship with them! They seem to be quite grumpy all throughout winter, even though they aren't dormant because they're inside.
Even so, they're a fun bit of gameplay that I find very rewarding despite how simple their interaction set is! I love them more than expected!
I'm also really enjoying having Patchy around, although I don't recommend having him out when your sim is just starting out in their gardening journey, because I found that he'd be out and doing all the gardening jobs before I could stop him and then I couldn't get skill points. Similarly, it can be hard to have him around when you've got children and teens you're trying to push through Manners & Responsibility because he'll have all the housework done before they get home from school, and it depletes the amount of progress they can make...
HOWEVER, I'm really not impressed with the new grafting system. In three years of sim play in my playtesting save, with 20 grafted plants, I did not *ever* produce a new plant from splicing. No orchids (4 plants ready), no birds of paradise (4 plants ready), no dragon fruit (4 plants ready), no bonsai buds (4 plants ready), and worst of all, NO DEATH FLOWERS (again, 4 plants ready).
And I had to spend A LOT of money on rare seed packets to get the grafting materials for death flowers, given that I never produced the items I needed from splicing.
Seriously, it's totally unacceptable for 20 plants to fail to produce a single spliced item across three years of sim play.
Why even bother to have a grafting system at that point?
