Are you new to gardening and are curious how Seasons and the recent patch shakes things up? Or a total gardening savant who wants to know how to prep their established gardeners for introducing Seasons? Here’s a guide to everything that Seasons and the big gardening update patch adds to the in-game gardening experience!
Changes to the base game
If you’re a gardener in the base game, there’s some big changes that have been introduced for all players in the world of plants. Most of these changes are great in that they make having a healthy profitable garden easier to obtain, so your naturalist sims can live their lives in the garden fairly comfortably as their skills grow.
Synchronized plants
All your plants are now set to do a check for watering, weeding, spraying etc. at 6am daily. If your sim prefers to garden at night, it is less likely when 6am comes around that they will need tending to, getting more longevity out of tending to your garden. They also need much less frequent watering, leaving you with more time in the day to do other things rather than keep your plants hydrated!
Do more at once
Some actions now have an ‘area of effect’, meaning you need to do less to get more done! For actions such as weeding and watering, sims no longer need to tend to each plant individually. This depends on the distance between plants though, refer below to a guide on how far apart to place plants or planter boxes to make your garden more efficient.
Better evolutions
The original gardening system had 10 levels of quality – most seeds starting at 1 and through tender love and care would slowly reach level 10. With some of the new features Seasons added, it was necessary to make it easier to evolve plants to their highest quality. This means simmers working without the expansion will find it much easier to grow higher quality crops and make gardening more profitable without the new Gardening career.
Super selling your harvest
Instead of harvesting each plant then selling each stack from the inventory, you can now streamline your garden by selling produce directly from the stem! By clicking the ready to harvest plant, you now have the option to sell all harvestables from that single plant, the local area of plants, or all plants on the lot. This means you can keep what you want, and quick sell the rest far easier. You can also Research your plants to find out their selling price at each level of quality.
What Does Seasons Change?
Harvest by Season
With Seasons, you’re going to want to be a little bit more strategic when it comes to planting your seeds! Each seed in the game has a period when it will produce harvestables, and most have a period when they are dormant – meaning they won’t produce anything during their off seasons. For the smaller gardener, this isn’t a problem – build yourself a swanky new greenhouse using the new glass roof tool (or download one of these greenhouse inspired houses and save yourself the time!) as the seasons won’t impact plants planted indoors. However if you’re looking to really maximise your growing space, knowing which plants are harvestable during each season can help you fine tune your garden to make the most amount of profit possible.
Since plants can only be harvested during their season/s, it would make evolving your plants a bit harder during their dormant seasons. However in the latest patch, the revamp of the evolution system means it takes less time to reach the maximum evolution, so you aren’t missing out too much on leveling your plants when they’re in their dormant state.
MORE WATER!
If your sims are like me, which means you’re a little bit lazier in the colder months, then I have good news! If your budding gardener doesn’t feel like going out in the rain to water – they don’t have to! The rain does affect outdoor plants, giving them their daily dose of H20 (if it’s raining at the 6am plant check!). If you don’t feel like watering, but do feel like messing around with the weather machine, you can set it to rain and that will water them too.
But what about the hotter months, when it doesn’t rain? Don’t worry, you’re covered there too! The new sprinkler object can be placed near plants/planters, and will water all plants in it’s area of effect. Best thing is, your sim doesn’t need to even get off the couch or out of bed to turn the sprinkler on. Or they can just have a good play in the water while it tends to your plants, that works too!
Patchy the Scarecrow
While there’s no birds for Patchy to really scare off, building a friendship with our favourite new living scarecrow can harvest some sweet benefits for your garden! Patchy can help tend to plants, as well as gift you new (sometimes rare!) seeds! While befriending Patchy can have other benefits, he’s definitely useful to add to your growing farm empire.
Bee houses and beekeeping
Another new gameplay item, the bee house, can be super beneficial to gardeners trying to raise their plant quality! Having one or more bee houses near your plots has an area of effect that can increase the growing and evolution speed, as well as having bee swarms “pollinate” (increase rate of evolution) plants that aren’t as close by. The area of effect on these is large too, meaning to effect a decent garden plot you only need to care for a single bee box! But make sure to keep the bees happy, as you don’t want to get too stung caring for your garden due to unhappy bees.
This masterlist on gardening will be especially useful if you decide to start a fun new challenge for your Seasons gameplay! Here’s some great ones that incorporate a lot of farming/gardening elements to get the most out of these cool new gardening changes:
- The Stardew Valley Challenge by Amandieu on Tumblr
- The Living off the Land Challenge by kiwi84 on The Sims Forums
- Differences in the Family Tree Challenge by Arrowleaf on The Sims Forums
- Sim Crossing Challenge by Just A Lime on The Sims Forums
- The Garden Challenge by Cowplant-Pizza on Tumblr
- The Island Challenge by Simproved on the Sims Community Forums
Most of these involve living off selling harvestables – so you’ll wanna keep that table of plant harvesting seasons handy to maximise your profits during your challenge!
Got any great Seasons gardening tips I might have missed? Let us know below!
