I finally managed to get the orchid in a rare seed packet but am having no luck with the bird of paradise. I’ve tried the normal splicing combination, I took a cutting from the plant at a festival and spliced it onto a plant back home, I’ve even planted the plants that have appeared in my inventory but no flower yet.
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.
Check out my Gallery! Origin ID: justme22
Fun must be always -- Tomas Hertl (San Jose Sharks hockey player)
The evolving needs to be tweaked - if you play with aging on, it's simply not possible to achieve a 'perfect' plant in a Sim's lifetime. Moreover, unless you've planned ahead, you're never going to get the ten 'excellent' plants you need to complete the freelance botanist aspiration. (It took me six seasons to get one excellent plant.) I'd rather have my Sim spending more time tending the plants and getting results from her work. Now, gardening is more a matter of clicking on each plant to see if it needs fertilizer. Otherwise, there is nothing for my Sim to do with her plants - talking to them doesn't seem to help, and she can just harvest or sell everything with one click.
I do like the ability to buy rare seeds - I could never find the cherry trees in previous games, and since my Sims only eat the superfood salad, I needed the cherries to get the pomegranate. I also appreciate that food made with 'normal' and 'nice' quality harvestables is no longer inedible, especially since it takes years (literally) to get plants to evolve.
Supposedly the bees can help with the pollination process and get plants ready for evolution sooner. I have a couple of bee boxes in my garden, and I've been able to evolve plants fairly regularly. (I should move one into my greenhouse; I've heard that crocuses keep them calmer so I could move my crocus pot next to them and see if that limits the stinging. May also depend on the life span and season length; I'm playing on Long lifespan and 2 week seasons; I also had aging off for a bit to give my Sims a chance to enjoy the seasons.
I think talking to plants is less to help them grow and more to help with the Sim's Social needs. Not sure if it builds Charisma as well; I'll have to check that in game tomorow.
Check out my Gallery! Origin ID: justme22
Fun must be always -- Tomas Hertl (San Jose Sharks hockey player)
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.
Check out my Gallery! Origin ID: justme22
Fun must be always -- Tomas Hertl (San Jose Sharks hockey player)
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.).
Check out my Gallery! Origin ID: justme22
Fun must be always -- Tomas Hertl (San Jose Sharks hockey player)
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
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
@PrincessrozeeS Hello
I think I am beginning to understand the new gardening system. It seems they did work out the new system to accommodate the Seasons EP. Even without that pack some of the changes are good. Not everything is a happy change. I am looking forward to adjustments in the grafting system to increase the chances of success.
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?
'sell' sells everything in the planter. if it's one of the bigger ones that can hold 4 non-tree plants, it will sell everything on all of them. 'super sell' has a larger area and will sell everything within about 5 squares or so of your sim. large range, but still can easily have stuff out of reach for it
I have another issue with the new gardening system that I only just noticed when I went back to play my Scientist sim. the plants at the Science Lab have never needed tending to in the four work days that I've played so far, and after harvesting them on the first day back, they have never produced any new crops... I'm not sure if this is just a bug (maybe it's because it's a save from before the Seasons patch), or if this is now "by design" and your sim would need to be on the lot when the plants are supposed to grow their harvestables at 5am. Has anyone else noticed this as well?
...i didn't even think about the science lab thing. plants will only produce their harvestables at 5 in the morning...which is not a time you're allowed to be at the science lab...
Thought I should mention that things seem to have righted themselves. So far produce harvested is staying in inventory and when fertilizing get produce and fish to choose from.
I am happy that the spliced trees are producing what they're suppose to and the spliced plants seem to be doing that also. Only one spliced plant produces only one product.
Thought I should mention that things seem to have righted themselves. So far produce harvested is staying in inventory and when fertilizing get produce and fish to choose from.
I am happy that the spliced trees are producing what they're suppose to and the spliced plants seem to be doing that also. Only one spliced plant produces only one product.
That is wonderful news So happy things are going better.
I am not at all impressed with grafting. I really enjoy grafting and creating the plants on my own if I can. Especially since I have gardens and plants for generations. However, I spliced a plant when the current matriarch of my family was a toddler and I still have not gotten a orchid. Not a single one. There is supposed to be a chance? The chance has to be something like 0.5%. She harvests the spliced plant daily in hopes that the new plant will appear and yet it never does. This truly needs to be fixed.
Thanks to Carl's Sims 4 Guide I started using Growfruit as fertilizer. No worrisome problems with trying to fish or using more expensive items to fertilize. Getting the first one to plant may be tricky. With Outdoor Retreat one can be bought using the Ranger Station at Granite Falls.
Still frustrated by the grafting issues though. Evolving is still slow but a bit faster fertilizing with the Growfruit.
My only issue with the new gardening system is the elusive Bird of Paradise flower. I had a spliced plant that never produced one, then I got two "seeds" in Rare Seed packets which I planted, but the plants have yet to produce a blossom, and the game doesn't recognize that I've found one. It's the last plant I need for the gardening collection so I'd like to get that. I've heard they're supposedly available at the Romance Festival and one of my household Sims is going there to marry her girlfriend anyway so hopefully I can find it there.
I've heard that one of the issues was that it was actually too easy to get some of the rarer flowers particularly the Death Flower -- you just needed one, then you could plant it and be awash in Death Flowers to give to Grimmy or to make Ambrosia if you had Angelfish, and they wanted to make a bit more of a challenge by increasing the chance that splicing wouldn't work.
Check out my Gallery! Origin ID: justme22
Fun must be always -- Tomas Hertl (San Jose Sharks hockey player)
Comments
Has anyone else been successful?
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.
Fun must be always -- Tomas Hertl (San Jose Sharks hockey player)
Supposedly the bees can help with the pollination process and get plants ready for evolution sooner. I have a couple of bee boxes in my garden, and I've been able to evolve plants fairly regularly. (I should move one into my greenhouse; I've heard that crocuses keep them calmer so I could move my crocus pot next to them and see if that limits the stinging. May also depend on the life span and season length; I'm playing on Long lifespan and 2 week seasons; I also had aging off for a bit to give my Sims a chance to enjoy the seasons.
I think talking to plants is less to help them grow and more to help with the Sim's Social needs. Not sure if it builds Charisma as well; I'll have to check that in game tomorow.
Fun must be always -- Tomas Hertl (San Jose Sharks hockey player)
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.
Fun must be always -- Tomas Hertl (San Jose Sharks hockey player)
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.).
Fun must be always -- Tomas Hertl (San Jose Sharks hockey player)
SimGuruNick posted this on the AHQ EA site thread
https://answers.ea.com/t5/Bug-Reports/BY-DESIGN-Splicing-doesn-t-produce-new-harvestable/m-p/6914050/highlight/true#M67736
http://forums.thesims.com/en_US/discussion/817478/hello-come-and-introduce-yourself
http://tinyurl.com/OneRoomOneWeek
http://tinyurl.com/rosemow
My Showcase thread https://forums.thesims.com/en_US/discussion/948861/rosemow-s-rooms-showcase
http://forums.thesims.com/en_US/discussion/817478/hello-come-and-introduce-yourself
http://tinyurl.com/OneRoomOneWeek
http://tinyurl.com/rosemow
My Showcase thread https://forums.thesims.com/en_US/discussion/948861/rosemow-s-rooms-showcase
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
I think I am beginning to understand the new gardening system. It seems they did work out the new system to accommodate the Seasons EP. Even without that pack some of the changes are good. Not everything is a happy change. I am looking forward to adjustments in the grafting system to increase the chances of success.
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?
The issue with plants at the science lab is under investigation as an open issue. You may want to click the "Me too" on the first post.
I am happy that the spliced trees are producing what they're suppose to and the spliced plants seem to be doing that also. Only one spliced plant produces only one product.
Carl's The Sims Guides on YouTube
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC0IIEZuaOermmnQCzudUo-g
Still frustrated by the grafting issues though. Evolving is still slow but a bit faster fertilizing with the Growfruit.
I've heard that one of the issues was that it was actually too easy to get some of the rarer flowers particularly the Death Flower -- you just needed one, then you could plant it and be awash in Death Flowers to give to Grimmy or to make Ambrosia if you had Angelfish, and they wanted to make a bit more of a challenge by increasing the chance that splicing wouldn't work.
Fun must be always -- Tomas Hertl (San Jose Sharks hockey player)