Why cant we talk to another sim while gardening :/ was it always like this? they should change that. -__-

The Sims 4 is a bit odd with what it allows you to multi-task with. It has always been like this because multi-tasking wasn't even a thing in Sims 1-3. It feels so odd playing the older games now as I'm so used to multi-tasking.

Think it always was like that, and yes they should change it, you can talk to other nearby while weeding or harvesting in real life.
Worse they also removed talking while fishing, loved that in Sims 2, you could put an group of sims fishing and they gained skill, earned good money and socialized fast at once.
it was not as fast as powergaming friends but you could leave them where for hours while doing other stuff
Best advice is to leave sims who gardening or fish alone and focus on others.

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Tread capture, I was about to post another gardening related post.
Does anybody know how value of harvested produce is calculated? First I thought it was only based on plant level, then I thought it was based on quality + number of leafs on plant icon.
Now this don't make sense anymore I have three perfect dragonfruit plants, on has all leafs, one misses a blade. Teen daughter has taken over the harvesting. 26 dragon fruits 4 is $272 the rest is $80, mother had
dragonfruit worth $400.

However it get far worse, daughter has perfect bonsai bud worth $20, mother has some worth $100 and father who only do some harvesting has one worth $495.
Get an strong suspicion that plants increase in value over time and that the value increase is very good.

oh yeah! the talking while fishing as well when i go to the park and see interesting looking sims fishing right beside me and i cant speak uuuhg it seems like something simple they could fix.

It was probably an bit OP, the most insane was an plantsim from another family I played who was fishing in an fishing spot on my active family for weeks constantly, then I returned to play that poor family they was rich, she had fished over thousand fishes and was friends with almost everyone.

I don't understand why kids can't help garden They could help weed,water and harvest. If I remember right they could help in Sims 2.

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Because once upon a time, little Billy ate a leaf, and he died. The end.

Yeah it is really weird that with all the new multi-tasking (which is great) that they don't let sims talk to each other when one of them is gardening. The removal of talking to nearby sims while fishing is doubly surprising. And count me among those who would love it if kids could help in the garden, too. Even better would be if a parent told a kid to go do it and then the kid whined about it, depending on the traits they had.

I do. They didn't have the time or money to make the animations for children. Don't forget that as this was going to be an online game where we were each represented by an adult, children only got added at all quite late on.

Regarding children you could try this mod I posted in CFF a couple months ago http://www.modthesims.info/showthread.php?t=537749 -- it makes it so that children can harvest. Still works fine, I tested it when I looked into it again recently (I have a better method now to add the interactions, but the current version also only does harvesting -- if/when I make progress with that, I will post in the CFF thread, so people interested in making useful little minions out of their sim kids may want to bookmark that =P).

I could also still use feedback/ideas on animations that would work for stuff like watering and so on.

Yeah it's that way with fishing too, I think. I have gardening mods so its way faster anyway, meaning I can just use the socialize options elsewhere. Fishing and not talking also makes sense because some people believe speaking means you could scare the fish away... Somehow.

I wonder if it's this way because fishing and gardening are skills? I don't recall many socialize options for anything that builds a sort of skill.

You could be right, although the Sims do "multi-task" while programming. I put it in italics because they're actually taking turns talking then working on their programming. Of course, "talking" leads to increases in charisma skill and Sims have socialized over chess boards since Sims 1. For whatever reason, gardening and fishing are different. There is that part where gardening and fishing are meditative and I could see some wanting solitude while they engage in those activities, but it's just not always true and I loved how it fishing was social in the past Sims games.