Gardening - can plant quality be cheated?

"Simmerville;c-17309107" wrote:
I musrt admit I might have misunderstood the term "growth time", it's easier to understand now that I started the project. I thought different species took different amount of hours to develop from a harvest to the next spawning of crops. But I now realize the growth time means from planting to mature (or first crops spawned). It's very difficult to tell the exact hours from game play because they all seem to spawn at 5 AM and if the plant is not old enough that spawning will wait 24hrs. To most gamers this detail might be less interesting anyway, because if you leave your lot to play another lot, the hour count will probably get affected. Anyway - most scientific projects deal with a ideal setting, don't they? :)

Ah, okay, I can see how that would be confusing, no worries. :) It's interesting that @sirguylittle has plants producing crops twice a day. To my knowledge that has never happened in my game since the Seasons gardening update patch. It happened before the patch, but not afterward. My plants very, very rarely produce 10 harvestables everyday either. Okay, Sir, fess up, what's your secret to getting such a magical garden? :p

Huh, I haven't had any problems with my basil plants. I've had that inventory glitch though. It usually is fixed after I close the game for the night and open that save again the next day. You might also want to try repairing the game if that doesn't work.

@dearie_blossom Okay, so it isn't just my game then, I wondered about that. Thanks for letting me know. *sigh* It's a good thing I can find a workaround for most bugs/glitches in this game and still have fun. There's so many of them that never seem to get fixed. o.O

On another note... is the Perfect Basil crops bugged? My sim can harvest the basil plant, but the crops in her inventory can not be moved (cursor will not show a hand), and the item info panel (telling value, quality etc) is not showing either. All other crops works as normal, and Basil normal quality used to work, too.

"mcrudd;c-17308363" wrote:
Thanks for the mention @Karababy52 :) @Simmerville I also upload perfect seeds if those are easier for you, since seasons its so hard to download a full collection plantroom and place it, most of the harvests will go back to beginning stages and take forever to grow out again, and unless your walls are full hight then you even lose some of your plants. You can find my full collection of perfect seeds here This way you can pick which ones you wanna plant too. Happy simming :) Otherwise if you go in my gallery I have a room full of growfruit, I find those to be very good fertilizer to get the evolve option more often ;)

Thanks for sharing on the gallery! I started my project with help from local farmers (and the cheat), but knowing there is a backup to download at any time is very useful. Might use it for the coming seasons if I don't have all the plants I want. I'm focusing on common, uncommon and just a few rare plants for now. Might do another round with the rest of the rares later,

I had to split my project into 4 sections, of obvious seasonal reasons. I'm growing them outdoors to get the max number of crops as it will be less harvestables if the plant is sheltered. I'm now done with most Fall species. And - it's time consuming even when I use those fantastic cheats and full speed most of the time. Taking notes means a lot of pausing, but I like this kind of projects occasionally. I'll now handle my notes for this season before I move on, but I will of course need to use the same strategy in order to make every specie comparable. Fall was probably the busiest season of them all with about 25 species, and my sim had 3 items of each specie, just in case there would be any variety (there was not, so for the next 3 rounds I'll use only 2 plants (one for back-up).

So fun to read all your input, I'm learning a lot today!

"sirguylittle;c-17308236" wrote:
@Simmerville I have a little new information for you. I had been playing other games recently but just happened to have started a new game in TS4. I planted a few things on the morning of the first day and watched as 5AM came around the next morning. As expected Basil, Carrot, Parsley and Spinach were nearly ready.
The first harvestable on each plant showed up around 5:02 and it took about 30 minutes for each plant to have 10 harvestables.

I had my Sim harvest them around 7-9AM but what was new was that I happened to look just after 5PM and they were starting to produce harvestables again, 10 each around 5:30PM.
These 4 plants are fast growers and it looks like you might be able to harvest them every 12 hours and that there is a 5PM check as well as 5AM :)

(This would explain my earlier comment that I was sure I had seen plants with harvestables appearing during the day, it must have been after 5PM.)

Yeah, I noticed that crops do add for about 30 minutes, so a good thing to wait. In any case, my test farmer never got up that early, so I never harvested until several hours later in the day. I checked for extra crops at 5 PM but had none. It surprised me that some (all?) plants can reproduce crops in a very short time. A mushroom that was harvested at 1AM had new crops 4 hrs later - I would not have expected that, so I believe the hour of harvesting is less important.

"kalaksed;c-17308620" wrote:
i'm kind of amazed, but also rather unsurprised, that nobody seems to know about the actual gardening cheats... when those were released, they became one of the very few threads i ever started... didn't see much traffic, and the concept seems to have been long forgotten (...well, by everyone but @Starfree now that i continue reading)

also, a thing to know is that plants will spawn different numbers of harvestables outdoors vs sheltered. an outdoors plant should spawn more harvestables every day while it's in season, while an indoors/sheltered plant will spawn fewer harvestables daily, but also be harvestable when out of season

and the spawn rate for rare harvestables on spliced plants is abysmal (as sirguylittle points out just above me), but there are ways around this for virtually every rare... orchids, the one most people have problems with, for example, get mailed to your sim when they complete... either the space rock or the aliens collection

just in case, here's my gardening cheat thread: https://forums.thesims.com/en_US/discussion/943173/new-gardening-plant-cheats#latest
and also just in case, even though i've seen plenty of others mentioned, i have a pre-island living 'full perfect greenhouse' on the gallery, too... it includes one of each emotional tree, since those act up now. really should get around to updating to all the new packs...

I *love* the cheat!, and yes, it's actually very flexible. I've not explored it full potential yet, but with this cheat I could actually have used all 5 quality versions for my project. It would have been so easy! I made a mistake once, setting a plant to wiltered status, and although I was able to set it to perfect, it probably stayed wiltrered because it never spawned any crops at all. Luckily I had 3 plants so I got my science info anyway. It was not until the end of the Fall project that realized the reason why it did not give any harvest.

I'm not doing spliced plants, would probably be too complicated to deal with all that info :) My goal is an updated botanical table, with the base info shown in 4 different sortings.

"Karababy52;c-17308847" wrote:
... @Simmerville Ah, okay, well just thought I'd include the link in case you hadn't read it already. I'm sorry the list of growth hours for plants hasn't been updated. Hopefully Carl will do that some time in the near future. I shouldn't have assumed they were still correct. I apologize for the info dump too. I just thought it might be helpful in your quest to grow perfect plants quickly if you didn't want to cheat for them. Glad it was appreciated anyway. :)

I musrt admit I might have misunderstood the term "growth time", it's easier to understand now that I started the project. I thought different species took different amount of hours to develop from a harvest to the next spawning of crops. But I now realize the growth time means from planting to mature (or first crops spawned). It's very difficult to tell the exact hours from game play because they all seem to spawn at 5 AM and if the plant is not old enough that spawning will wait 24hrs. To most gamers this detail might be less interesting anyway, because if you leave your lot to play another lot, the hour count will probably get affected. Anyway - most scientific projects deal with a ideal setting, don't they? :)

Great tips on how to use those cheats @kalased, thanks! Especially good to know it works for plants not on your Sims lot. I've been frustrated a few times with plants I wanted in Sylvan Glade not growing very fast because some of my Sims weren't able to stay there long enough for them to grow much. So those cheats will be a handy time saver if I choose to use them. Might still just harvest the old-fashioned way, it gives me a satisfying sense of accomplishment. But for some Sims that do other things besides gardening, if that's not the main focus, I'll definitely consider using it. :)

EDIT: OH! Just thought of something, I could use that cheat for the Science Lab garden! Yay! \o/ Okay, that just made my day. lol

Thank you both @kalaksed and @starfree for the tip about the plant cheats! I enjoy growing plants without cheats, but if there is ever an occasion where I do want to evolve plants faster for whatever reason, it's nice to know there is that option to use! :)

You're welcome @mcrudd! I've never downloaded perfect plants from the Gallery myself, but it's nice knowing the option is there if needed. Thanks again too for your tips on how to get perfect emotion berries when I needed to know for my Gardener Sim pursuing a perfect garden full of every plant available.

@Simmerville Ah, okay, well just thought I'd include the link in case you hadn't read it already. I'm sorry the list of growth hours for plants hasn't been updated. Hopefully Carl will do that some time in the near future. I shouldn't have assumed they were still correct. I apologize for the info dump too. I just thought it might be helpful in your quest to grow perfect plants quickly if you didn't want to cheat for them. Glad it was appreciated anyway. :)

@kalaksed, I use the "growth" & "evolve" cheats all the time ☺

"secretlondon123;c-17308483" wrote:
I've grafted plants onto sage but some just never spawn the rares.

You have to graft the right combinations to get rares, for example to get a dragonfruit you need to graft a snapdragon cutting onto a strawberry plant. (You can do it the other way round but strawberry grows faster and is the better host.)
The spawn rate for these is very low and it can seem like you never get any rares but you need to persevere. From Carl's Sims 4 guide the weights are 500 for common, 100 for uncommon and just 1 for rare, so only 1 out of every 600 harvestables will be rare.
If you are just trying to get a harvestable for the cutting, say you want some roses, then use a Parsley plant as the host as it is the fastest growing, just a couple of hours to mature and be ready to graft onto after planting it. Since grafting resets the growth state, then it will regrow quicker than anything else and you will get a harvest sooner.

I've grafted plants onto sage but some just never spawn the rares.

Thanks for the mention @Karababy52 :) @Simmerville I also upload perfect seeds if those are easier for you, since seasons its so hard to download a full collection plantroom and place it, most of the harvests will go back to beginning stages and take forever to grow out again, and unless your walls are full hight then you even lose some of your plants. You can find my full collection of perfect seeds here This way you can pick which ones you wanna plant too. Happy simming :) Otherwise if you go in my gallery I have a room full of growfruit, I find those to be very good fertilizer to get the evolve option more often ;)