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Gardening - can plant quality be cheated?
Simmerville
Posts: 11,674 Member
I'm doing an experiment to gather botanical information for my sims (will go public). I wonder if individual plants can be set to cheated to certain quality levels? I found I can cheat the gardening skill, but evolving all plants in the game to a top level would still take too long to run the projects as intended...
Buying plants from buydebug won't effect quality? Those I tried did not...
Buying plants from buydebug won't effect quality? Those I tried did not...
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Also, having Bees (place in the center they will fertilize 5 squares) that are healthy and calm will help your plants mature faster. And waking up Patchy will aid in doing gardening.
I don't think there's a way to directly change the quality of the plants though.
If you have city living, wait for the spice festival, there are plants that spawn there with perfect quality, you can take some fruits there. usually you'll find strawberries, sage, parsley and a few others out of season. there is a dragonfruit plant there as well. if that spice festival comes later in the year, that dragonfruit with fruits on them would be a perfect money maker in a sheltered place where you can plant lots of them and make a boat load of §§§.
you can create your own dragon fruits by planting those perfect quality strawberries first and then grafting snapdragons on to them later.
You can also start fishing for medium or large fish, typically you can find a number of salmon on any typical day in the willow creek river behind bargain bend, singleton streamlet and cabana crick, that is if you are there fishing all day, you don't need any specific bait.
if you got level 10 gardening, get some rare seed packets and grow glowfruit, iti will take a while but when you have a few of them, you can harvest them and simply use them as a reliable fertilizer.
It isn't particulary difficult to get the quality up, but yes, it does take some time. altneratively there should be some creators on the gallery who also have these things, you can download one of theirs, take what you need for your own place and delete their creation afterwards.
Also I’ve noticed if you have multiple sims in your household, you can get them to tend garden whilst your off on a seperate lot. When you return the plants are nearly always ready to evolve.
Bees will help your plants evolve on their own if you keep them happy and your Sim can also send them to fertilize close-by plants in your garden. Buying seeds and picking Patchy's pockets for seeds is another way to get rare plants. Or you could graft to get rare plants, but that takes a long, long, LONG time, so it's not the fastest way.
The best fish for fertilizer is sturgeon, tuna, treefish and salmon. But the very best fertilizer is Growfruit. You can buy growfruit at the Ranger Station in Granite Falls if you have Outdoor Retreat. It's the fastest and cheapest way to get it rather than taking your chances with seed packets. Your Sim can fish up Cowberries and Dragonfruit reliably at the fishing spot on the pier in Magnolia Promenade. Again, it's the fastest, most cost effective and easiest way to get those two plants in my opinion.
I've also found that using expensive plants are excellent fertilizer as well, in particular; Bird of Paradise, Lilies and Roses. Anything worth over 15-20 simoleons or more makes my plants ready to evolve almost immediately.
Sage plants grow year round so they are the most desirable plant to grow for grafting. I'd plant a few of them right away as soon as you find them. Hint: It grows in Oasis Springs park. Have your Sim camp out in the park a day or two to give them time to grow. Initial growth shouldn't take any longer than that. I believe they can be found in Starter Herb seed packs too. All plants that have matured are available for harvest after 5 a.m. But you have to be on your home lot or in your home lot neighborhood at that time or they won't produce anything.
Anyway, once your Sage have evolved to Perfect quality, start grafting other plants onto it and you'll be quickly on your way to a Perfect garden. It grows year round and anything grafted onto it will grow year round too as long as it's on the Sage plant. Once you harvest grafted plants from the Sage, make sure it's the right season before planting or build a greenhouse and plant everything in there.
As someone else shared, you can use a cheat to get your plants ready to evolve by turning on testingcheats and then shift clicking on plants. I'm not exactly sure what happens when you do that since I've never tried it myself, but worth a try!
I hope this all helps if you want to actually grow them yourself to Perfect. But, if you don't care how they get to Perfect, just download a Perfect Garden room off the Gallery. @mcrudd is one Simmer I know that has all plants in rooms to Perfect quality that are currently available. She's really great about updating whenever a pack introduces more plants. Good luck!
EDIT: Forgot to add that you can get produce (seeds) in San Myshuno at produce stands too if you can't find something in season. They don't have everything, but worth a look. There's also plants available from the 'purchase gifts' option on your Sims cell. They're very expensive to get that way, but sometimes worth it to get something you can't find otherwise. I use the gift option for tulips in particular and sometimes Bonsai bush seeds too.
Also, the Ranger Station has other plants besides Growfruit too, such as tomatoes, potatoes, etc. Those can be hard to find sometimes. Especially if you're not in the right season to get them from public gardens.
But I came across one more thing... In the past it seems like each plant specie had a set amount of hrs it takes to produce crops. Then there was the gardening overhaul, and it now seems like all plants spawn crops at 5 AM. Does this mean that all plant species have the same routine, or is the various hrs still in effect? I couldn't find much info regarding the growth hours vs 5 AM, so I'll need to do some testing. If there is any known facts on this please direct me to it
Super duper! Thanks
In my experience the game does check at 5am and will generate a crop if a mature plant does not yet have any crop, however I have seen crops appear during the day also. It also takes some time after the first crops appear on a plant before a full harvest is available. This is particularly important for spliced plants as the special may not appear at first and there is still a chance for one to appear until the plant reaches it's full crop.
Also plants take different amounts of time to reach maturity from planting. Parsley is the fastest I know, reaching maturity in just a few hours and will have a crop the next morning, whereas some plants can take several days, Daisy for example takes 4 days to reach maturity.
So, there might be one hourly requirement for reaching mature stage, and another amount of hours from harvest to next crop is spawned? Like for the Daisy, 96 hrs to reach maturity, and than probably 24 hrs between each harvest? Hm... this is more diverse and complicated than I expected. I'm putting together a table with facts, but there seems to be way to much to consider...
It seems that way, I must amend what I said though having re-read my notes, the 4 days for Daisy is the time to get a harvest after planting it, not just to maturity. (So it's probably 3 days to maturity then a harvest the next day.)
I have been doing some testing myself as I have often played a gardener Sim since TS3 but do not have as much experience with gardening in TS4. It seemed that a lot of what I read online was out-of date, especially concerning fertilising.
These are the plants that I know how long it takes to reach a harvest from planting in the morning.
1 day (ie next morning)
Parsley, Spinach, Carrot, Basil, Strawberry
2 days
Snapdragon
3 days
Potato, Bluebell, Sage, Chrysanthemum, Grape
4 days
Daisy
Sims 4 Plant List
After you check out the plant list, I'd advise scrolling up to the top of that page and reading the entire guide. You'll find a ton of very useful information about gardening in the Sims 4.
Thanks. I already read that info and I can't make those hrs on Carl's site to work. I tested a few plants before I started this thread. And those hrs doesn't quite match the new 5 AM routine anyway, so I wonder if his table is a bit outdated on the hours. Don't blame him for not re-checking it after the overhaul though, because there are so many more useful tasks to explore
https://www.ea.com/games/the-sims/the-sims-4/pc/gallery/2D158273E3CD11E98DA1EEB2A79C7201
I don't know if she updated it with Island Living and Realm of Magic, but I put those up if you need them...
Island Living:
https://www.ea.com/games/the-sims/the-sims-4/pc/gallery/7ACF1F8C948411E9876ED63D27D2DDD7
Realm of Magic:
https://www.ea.com/games/the-sims/the-sims-4/pc/gallery/93321395D94611E982BD3A1BE21D5EF6
One thing I have noticed is when you place a room with plants in it form the gallery, you need to set the wall to its highest height first. Otherwise the plants might be too tall to be indoors and your full plant becomes a pot of dirt when you place it.
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.)
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.
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...
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.
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
So fun to read all your input, I'm learning a lot today!
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.
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
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?
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,