Hello, I'm used to playing my old save where I had tons of money and dragon fruits, etc. Well, I started fresh and I'm playing as a musician mainly creative, cat lover, music lover. I'm in a small house with a small garden, I can't afford much more, Seasons is on and I'm living the simple living lot trait where you have to use fresh ingredients to cook. Well, my gardening skill is about a 6 and so is my guitar skill, my job is a career performer, I haven't advanced far in it yet, I also like to garden on the side. Seems all I can grow is real cheap stuff like parsley and sage, green peas and mushrooms, and earning tips doesn't do much for me, and the job itself is a bit low in earnings. I can't write songs yet as well. So heres a few questions, based on what I've mentioned what steps you would take to make more money, faster. Is fertilizing my plants with a 3-dollar sage, or holly plant even worth it? Is singing very important to my job, which basically has my daily tasks as write jokes and or practice music. I want to build relationships with other sims and get a cat and have a small family before I become an elder. Seems like in my old save, I had access to expensive seeds like dragon fruit, bonsai buds, etc that came from my house inventory.... that's not available now which im ok with, its just that seems like I should have more money, IDK?

I assume you know of money cheats but I also know you're new to TS4. The downside is that you can't earn achievements on console when you use cheats. A way to cheat without actually typing in a money cheat is to grab a dragon fruit plant off of the gallery. Use the search function and you should find tons of em uploaded as rooms. Same thing can be said for a money tree if you don't want to earn one legitimately. There's an old glitch to wait until the money tree is ready for harvest and instead of harvesting, put it into the family inventory. Seeds will appear in the inventory and you can start building a huge money tree farm in no time. Just remember it keep it locked up as other sims will harvest your money.Painting and writing books is the best way to earn money besides gardening. Build a greenhouse for that garden to keep them in season or put them in pots and bring them inside. You can always adjust the sims lifespan settings (or turn off aging) if you need more time. I do this all the time. Don't forget you can Google guides too to find all sorts of gameplay tips. Many of us simmers who have been simming for years still look to guides for info. The Sims Wiki & Carl's Guide are my go to sites.

Another idea is to turn any park into a community garden. I built a huge greenhouse in the Willow Creek park. I filled it with all the plants a sim needs to graft. (Just look up harvestables grafting guide) This way sims don't have to search worlds in the right season or depend on seed packets to get ahold of everything they need for grafting.. example: dragon fruit (best selling). I got all the plants full grown off of the gallery. The quality is up to you. Avoid perfect quality if you want your sims to work on evolving the plants themselves. There's a guide for fertilizer too. If I can pull up links later I will. :smile: Guides: Gardening Plant Quality and How Fertilizers WorkGraft and Take Cutting to Get Rare Plants

Snapdragon is a starter plant and doesn't require any skill I'm pretty sure. Wild plants need to be full grown to harvest. They can only grow if you're on the same lot and that can take several trips.A community garden works best when the plants are full grown already so you don't have to wait. That's why I grab them from the gallery for community lots. Once you harvest the plant, you may need to return the next day right before 5am for it to bloom again but it won't take much time since the plant is already mature if that makes any sense. Unfortunately there's a gardening glitch EA hasn't fixed and may never fix where plants can revert back to dirt. I don't know what triggers it. It always seemed random in my game.There are 32 harvestables that can be collected in the base game and 61 more were added with content packs, with a current total of 93. They are collected through finding them in the wild, grafting, or purchasing seed packets from the computer or garden plot and planting them. The harvestables from content packs are often found in the corresponding world of the pack that introduced them.Since Seasons, all plants will start growing every 5:00 AM and will have reached their maximum number of crops for that day at 5:30 AM once they are fully grown. The update made it very difficult to measure the growth rate of each plant. Some plants always mature after the same number of hours, with others the hours vary greatly.via Sims Wiki Sims 4 Gardening

"AlienTusks;c-18207344" wrote:@SimplyJen Ok, this brings to mind something.... sometimes you can search around the world and find wild growing, good quality plants like snapdragon for example, but it want let me pick/harvest them it only allows me to view or uproot and destroy....Is it because my gardening skill is not quite high enough?Plants in the neighborhoods will only grow when you're there for awhile. What I do when I want to harvest from a plant in a neighborhood my sim doesn't live in is turn a lot in that neighborhood into a rental. Then I have my sim rent the lot for a few days until they can harvest from the plants that I want in the neighborhood.

Either play on Long, or turn aging off. You're going to have to grind your Sims' musical skills. Make them proficient in violin, guitar and piano. If you can, add the Digi-Organ (Portable piano thingie) to their skill. When your Sim has the required 9+ skill level on each instrument, write a song in each of the categories. Click on write song and then choose one from the menu. The piano and the organ each have six musical types, which are the same but sound different. You get six, for each instrument. The guitar and violin have five categories each. This will give you a total of twenty-one songs. Just write songs, don't bother with lyrics, they won't be recognized by the Starlight Academy. (Which grieves me to no end.) Don't license them right away. Wait until your Sim has some celebrity points under their belt. Then license one at a time. When you get the pop-up telling you the latest song you licensed received a nomination. Go to the Starlight Accolades the very next Sunday. Best of luck.

Tips for just starting new game Gardner, musician, need to make money having trouble??

14 Replies

SimplyJen
Seasoned Ace
3 years ago
I assume you know of money cheats but I also know you're new to TS4. The downside is that you can't earn achievements on console when you use cheats. A way to cheat without actually typing in a money cheat is to grab a dragon fruit plant off of the gallery. Use the search function and you should find tons of em uploaded as rooms. Same thing can be said for a money tree if you don't want to earn one legitimately. There's an old glitch to wait until the money tree is ready for harvest and instead of harvesting, put it into the family inventory. Seeds will appear in the inventory and you can start building a huge money tree farm in no time. Just remember it keep it locked up as other sims will harvest your money.

Painting and writing books is the best way to earn money besides gardening. Build a greenhouse for that garden to keep them in season or put them in pots and bring them inside. You can always adjust the sims lifespan settings (or turn off aging) if you need more time. I do this all the time. Don't forget you can Google guides too to find all sorts of gameplay tips. Many of us simmers who have been simming for years still look to guides for info. The Sims Wiki & Carl's Guide are my go to sites.
Thehiddenreturn
3 years ago
@SimplyJen Thanks for your input. And I will look into The Sims
wiki and carl guide, I'm aware of those sites but haven't looked deeply into them yet. I know money cheats but I'm against using them completely except on this occasion and that is when I take control of an unplayed household that has a growing family and needs a bigger house, so I play them just long enough to use the Money X cheat where X becomes their money then I move them into a more appropriate home using this cheat does not bother me. The other things you mention Is sort of like a cheat/glitch and I like to play by the rules for the most part and want to earn what I have legitimately. In my old save I started as a writer, got to level 10 writing and was earning maybe 2500 dollars a day, which is good by the way, but once I got my wife sim heavy into gardening with a descent amount of dragon fruit, and other high-priced plants, I would rake in maybe 25,000 every other day. Eventually I got to the point where I had more money than I could ever need and that took away from the game a bit. But those websites I've glanced at and seem pretty cool I'll look into them more. And I like to play with sim life on long, and seasons last 14 days each which gets a bit lame during winter. Thanks...
SimplyJen
Seasoned Ace
3 years ago
Another idea is to turn any park into a community garden. I built a huge greenhouse in the Willow Creek park. I filled it with all the plants a sim needs to graft. (Just look up harvestables grafting guide) This way sims don't have to search worlds in the right season or depend on seed packets to get ahold of everything they need for grafting.. example: dragon fruit (best selling). I got all the plants full grown off of the gallery. The quality is up to you. Avoid perfect quality if you want your sims to work on evolving the plants themselves. There's a guide for fertilizer too. ~~If I can pull up links later I will. :smile:~~

Guides: Gardening Plant Quality and How Fertilizers Work
Graft and Take Cutting to Get Rare Plants
Thehiddenreturn
3 years ago
@SimplyJen Ok, this brings to mind something.... sometimes you can search around the world and find wild growing, good quality plants like snapdragon for example, but it want let me pick/harvest them it only allows me to view or uproot and destroy....Is it because my gardening skill is not quite high enough?
SimplyJen
Seasoned Ace
3 years ago
Snapdragon is a starter plant and doesn't require any skill I'm pretty sure. Wild plants need to be full grown to harvest. They can only grow if you're on the same lot and that can take several trips.

A community garden works best when the plants are full grown already so you don't have to wait. That's why I grab them from the gallery for community lots. Once you harvest the plant, you may need to return the next day right before 5am for it to bloom again but it won't take much time since the plant is already mature if that makes any sense. Unfortunately there's a gardening glitch EA hasn't fixed and may never fix where plants can revert back to dirt. I don't know what triggers it. It always seemed random in my game.

There are 32 harvestables that can be collected in the base game and 61 more were added with content packs, with a current total of 93. They are collected through finding them in the wild, grafting, or purchasing seed packets from the computer or garden plot and planting them. The harvestables from content packs are often found in the corresponding world of the pack that introduced them.

Since Seasons, all plants will start growing every 5:00 AM and will have reached their maximum number of crops for that day at 5:30 AM once they are fully grown. The update made it very difficult to measure the growth rate of each plant. Some plants always mature after the same number of hours, with others the hours vary greatly.

via Sims Wiki Sims 4 Gardening
DragonAge_300905
Seasoned Ace
3 years ago
"AlienTusks;c-18207344" wrote:
@SimplyJen Ok, this brings to mind something.... sometimes you can search around the world and find wild growing, good quality plants like snapdragon for example, but it want let me pick/harvest them it only allows me to view or uproot and destroy....Is it because my gardening skill is not quite high enough?

Plants in the neighborhoods will only grow when you're there for awhile. What I do when I want to harvest from a plant in a neighborhood my sim doesn't live in is turn a lot in that neighborhood into a rental. Then I have my sim rent the lot for a few days until they can harvest from the plants that I want in the neighborhood.
GalacticGal
Legend
3 years ago
Either play on Long, or turn aging off. You're going to have to grind your Sims' musical skills. Make them proficient in violin, guitar and piano. If you can, add the Digi-Organ (Portable piano thingie) to their skill. When your Sim has the required 9+ skill level on each instrument, write a song in each of the categories. Click on write song and then choose one from the menu. The piano and the organ each have six musical types, which are the same but sound different. You get six, for each instrument. The guitar and violin have five categories each. This will give you a total of twenty-one songs. Just write songs, don't bother with lyrics, they won't be recognized by the Starlight Academy. (Which grieves me to no end.) Don't license them right away. Wait until your Sim has some celebrity points under their belt. Then license one at a time. When you get the pop-up telling you the latest song you licensed received a nomination. Go to the Starlight Accolades the very next Sunday. Best of luck.
mightyspritesims
Legend
3 years ago
The above tips are all good. Here are some more
- Keep expenses low in the early stages of the game. House and furnishings should be small and simple so that bills don't go above 1000-1500 until you're well established with a financial reserve
- Playing for tips in public lots is good because you skill up at the same time as earning money, and it counts for the "practice music" part of your career goal.
- Entertainer is a basegame career, but Singing is a City Living skill. It's fun to use together with the career, but it has no direct effect on it
- Since you do have City Living, don't forget to attend the Romance Festival and Spice Festival to get the seeds, especially the fancy flowers at the Romance Festival
- Since you have Cottage Living, remember that you can shop for new seeds at the garden stand.
StuffyMarx
3 years ago
You can plant roses that you're given as gifts. Willow creek has a couple of wild rose plants you can get for free.
Wild fruits and vegies are a good way of starting up your garden. Foraging can get you plants like onion, strawberries and potatoes which are good as cooking ingredients. Once again, Willow Creek has wild spawns for these plants.
Evolve as frequently as you can, and plant out evolved produce. When you get grafting, go nuts with multi-species hybrids. An apple, lemon, pomegranate tree saves a lot of ground space!
Use your excess Parsley as fertiliser.

Carl's guide to plant locations : https://carls-sims-4-guide.com/skills/gardening/plant-locations.php
Stina1701A
Seasoned Ace
3 years ago
You can make good money when your sim get the ability to create songs. You can only license one song each week but the royalties you get each day is good. It can go from 200-500, even up to 700 simoleons a day. Busking can also net you some nice profit. My preference is going to a bar around 6pm to 11pm-12am and my Sim could get 100 simoleons easy, and even more depending on how high the music skill is. You can even busk while creating a song.