Feedback: Updated Gardening System

"agustd;c-16578901" wrote:
I actually like the new system.

Yes, it's a lot more work than before, less money, more things to take into consideration when creating a garden - but isn't that what this game needs? Isn't that the complexity everyone misses in TS4?

Seasonal plants just make sense when seasons exist. Again, I will say, this is one of the little complex touches that make the game realistic. All I see is people complaining that 4 is too easy, things rarely make sense and generally there isn't much thought put into the features we're getting. Now that they actually re-worked a feature to function more realistically and give players some actual challenge, people are displeased...?

I didn't like the way gardening functioned before. It gave you way too much money and would make your sim rich so quickly I didn't even know what to do with all that money.

I'm tired of sloppy gameplay of TS4 and to me the gardening change is a move in the right direction. I understand it's a game, but games are about the challenge of achieving your goals. How is it fun to get your garden to be perfect in a few sim days?

Overall, I like the new system because it makes gardening more challenging. Also cooking is a bit more of a challenge -- you have to decide if you want to go with the Super Sell, or if you want to keep some of the fruits and veggies to make cooking a lot cheaper. Fresh ingredients aren't required but they do reduce the cost of meals, and if you get the Fresh Chef aspiration you can stock up the fridge with leftovers and the family can help themselves, giving your Sim more time for working on skills and such.. My current Sim has maxed the Cooking and Gourmet Cooking, and is close to maxing Baking; might have her start eating at Chez Llama to get the experimental food photos. If I wasn't already considering the Flower Arranging career for her, I'd put her in Food Critic.

That said, there is a major bug with the Bird of Paradise; I had one spliced plant, Daisy and Chrysanthemum, and never got a single flower. I also bought Rare Seed and Seasonal Seed packs (thank goodness for all the money coming in from the Money Tree) and got two Bird of Paradise "seeds", but neither of those plants have produced flowers, and the collection guide says I'm still missing that flower. I have all my flowers indoors (built a greenhouse attached to the back of the house) but nothing. I just need that, wolfsbane (from Vampires) and some of the Granite Falls plants and I'll have the full gardening collection. (I calculated that the best time of year to go for the GF plants is beginning of summer, so I'll plan a solo trip for my Sim to focus on that; winter and spring might be a good chance to do some reading to get her Herbalism skill up.

"Gramcrackers;c-16594675" wrote:
I was upset that about half of a garden's plants were little piles of dirt when they had been mature thriving plants before ' Seasons' changed things. They didn't even sprout and now the growing season is over. At the moment I just don't care for the changes in gardening at all.

Yeah, the returning to the pile of earth at the end of the season then having to start all over again, instead of just going "dormant" but remaining a grown plant like the trees is a bit troubling -- I'll have to see what happens in the spring with my older plants. I've tried to organize the garden so the plants are pretty much grouped by season, and my "special" trees (growfruits, plasma fruit, emotion trees etc.) are on one side of the garden while the "normal" trees (apple, lemon, avocado, etc.) are on the other.

I've got all my flowers indoors since I've got my sim planning to do the Flower Arranging career. Once her two kids grow up to Teens, and her daughter hits Young Adult (but will remain at home because she's the heiress) I'll put my Sim in the Gardening career and see how things go.

"FlamingoKicker1;c-16602589" wrote:
Is this problem I'm having just in my game or in everyone's? When my sims take cuttings and you look at them in your inventory or go to graft something all you see is a generic "garden cutting" but it doesn't tell you what it is from so you are blindly putting a cutting with your plant and you have no idea what you'll get. Is that the way they intended it? I think it would be alot more helpful if it told you which cutting was from which plant.

When you choos Graft... you'll get a list of the cuttings -- if you mouse over the individual cutting it should come up with a "tool tip" revealing what it was from. I've been trying to save space in my garden by splicing the herbalism plants (Chamomile with Toxic Chamomile, or Elderberry and Noxious Elderberry, etc.).

Hello
SimGuruNick posted this on the AHQ EA site thread

Just wanted to pop in here and add that I've filed a tuning bug for our designers to take a look at. No promises on if/how this will be fixed/changed, but yeah, I'll let the design team make a decision

https://answers.ea.com/t5/Bug-Reports/BY-DESIGN-Splicing-doesn-t-produce-new-harvestable/m-p/6914050/highlight/true#M67736

@rosemow Thank you for the link. This is encouraging news and I am thankful @SimGuruNick has taken action. :+1:

You’re welcome :)

Personally I didn't find a problem with gardening before although labour intensive but it gave lots of skill points quickly, so I don't understand why it was changed. Watering was a problem at times, but nothing a garden sprinkler added into the game wouldn't have solved! Keeping plants was only a big problem when you got to level 10 and then quite time consuming, especially with a "big" garden. My Sim opted to join the gardening club and had them come over to help out, found this to be a big help! I have not even explored this with the new patch!

I do like we can sell harvests instead of going into the inventory (as the Sim's inventory is basically a mess) and having to sell. I don't have Seasons yet, I just installed the latest patch and saw the changes to my plants. Until I play a family without any gardening skills I don't really know how this will effect the gardening skill in my game. I don't like hearing reports of splicing not getting the results but I can't comment until I have tried this or how much fun it will be with the new Season's EP. In some ways installing the new Season EP will change my game a lot and how I play. I feel that adding a new EP or Game Pack into the game should not change things too much, just add to the gaming experience.

My thought's about changing things in the game............... Either it has not been thought out what content is going to be added for future packs during development, then as the the years roll by deciding that something needs to be changed. I understand they are trying to make it things different (maybe better) with the addition of Seasons or other packs but for those of us without Season's at the moment we still have to take some of the changes with the patch. I can't every remember this happening with the Sims 1 and 2. All we had were improvements in my opinion not what I think where substantial changes. We had a choice of installing patches back then not like now. The problem with playing the game online we have no choice in patching the game otherwise we have to play offline continually. No choice is there!

I hope I will find the new changes over time beneficial and fun, especially when I install Seasons. I try to stay positive being a long time Simmer since the Sims 1 and continue to play

Oh, I hope they do fix the splicing problem. I gave up on the spliced plants and just had the Sims plant new seeds. I liked the splicing to get bonus plants and it made a big garden half the work.

I'm super confused between the 'sell all' and 'super sell' options... plus using all that stuff doesn't seem to actually sell all my harvestable plants. So confusing and annoying.

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?