Hi. I am new and trying out the game and I am seriously thinking of having my sim hire one. I do like the gardening but it is killing my fun. My Sim just has too much to do (MY FAULT ).

I made the "mistake" of giving her the fishing aspiration (which I really loved from Sim 3) and she is a mother of a baby that will be a toddler soon (right after it gets daylight when I unpause my game) and holding a full time job in the computer career thing. Fortunatly...well depends on how you look at it really because she was supposed to be a single mom! But well. She, because of dire straits money wise, not only did she moved in her not even boyfriend more of a fling, she decided to marry him too. Well he proposed despite being a commitment phope (I may have nudged him on).

That did help money wise and now they have a much bigger house and a slightly better house hold items thanks to both their salaries and promotion perks AND from her fishing and gardening. Yes, she does make some nice money from both, but I am starting to burn out.

Soo, how about it? Is hireing the gardener worth it and more importantly. What does such an employee do? Only water and weed and my sim gets to do the rest or does he/she also evolve the plants or even harvest? The last two I don't mind doing myself. Its the mundane things like watering and weeding I hate. Wait. No. SHE hates. Yubb. She

I have Sims with the gardening aspiration and, once they get to a certain point with their skills, I have them hire a gardener. The gardener does the basic stuff - watering, weeding, spraying and my gardening Sims fertilize and evolve the plants. They still end up doing some of the basics, too, but it still helps save some time. I've also learned to graft plants so there are less plants that need attention. You get less produce per product with a split plant, but if you are gardening to supply your pantry with fresh produce, 2 or 3 potatoes at a time is enough, right? I usually put the herbs together on one plant and the root veggies together on another and then combine berries and tree fruits.

Also, to gain rewards faster, it makes sense in this game to change your Sim's aspiration whenever they change activies, for example - gardening when they garden, fishing when they fish, and popularity when they are meeting the neighbors.

That's a good plan to switch aspirations to gain reward points faster, and used to do that myself, but eventually I realised there really isn't anything worth spending those points on besides the sleep replacement potions xD

Yeah, of course. Less responsibility. More free time, and time is money. Not that my Sims would ever know what a lack of either is like...

I usually give my Sims the frugal trait to lower their bills. After that, I'll choose traits that go with the main aspiration I associate with each Sim: Ambitious Sims get the entreprenurial reward, Renaissance Sims get the rapid reader, etc... I rarely ever bother with potions, but do like the reward that allows your Sims to get by with less sleep. It's also handy to have the reward that allows them to discover others' traits sooner, if they are looking for a mate.

Wait, Sims get lower bills with the Frugal trait? That seems kinda cheaty. So what's the downside of it, then?

None! Nobody wants downsides, our telemetry says so! Focus groups indicate that downsides are bad and would make people unhappy! The Sims is a game about being happy! It would be against our vision to portray anything negative about life because life is perfect! The Sims 4 is supposed to be zany and wacky. You can't tell our Weirder Stories™ with all that pesky realism in the way!

I've always wondered what the pros are for using fresh produce in cooking - I'm not even sure how you do it. Are there any benefits?

I think you get an extra moodlet or something.

(Select the refrigerator and choose "open", then drag the produce from your Sim's inventory to the refrigerator. )

I think it improves the quality of the dishes as the quality of the produce increases. I also thought that if the produce was perfect, that the cooked food would last longer, but don't quote me because I've never verified that. Also, having the ingredients on hand in the refrigerator lowers the cost of each dish, unless the Sim purchased the produce at a stand.

It improves the quality of the dish only if the produce is high quality. A "normal" quality plant will act like a "foul" quality fish, and will decrease the quality of the dish even if your sim is max level cooking.

However there is a mod on this website to correct that bit of ridiculousness.

Interesting. I like having a garden, but it always felt to me like it didn't matter that much. I should try it out.

I no longer bother with Professional Gardeners, the last one just let my Cow Plant die, guess they are too scared to go near it.

But Gardening yourself is a good challenging hobby to build up, it also one of the slowest progress skills to build up, and it's helps if you got the Loves Outdoors trait.

Starting reading a skill book or two, it speeds things up, because the very start of it can be the slowest.

In the beginning, one of the fastest ways to build up the skill is to send your Sim into the world collecting wild plants. It helps incredibly with household funds. At the same time, I put my Sim's aspiration to Nature/Curator and have them pick up rocks and frogs, too.

Of couse, all of the wild plants only have the "normal" quality. If you want your Sim to get more gardening experience and make more money, it actually pays to get some flowers to grow at home, especially roses.

I think gardening is one of my favorite things to do in this game and even the Sims who have a different focus will stroll over to their neighbors' lots early on in their Sim life and lift a few high quality seeds to start a kitchen garden of their own.

One tip: the gardener doesn't come on weekends, if I remember right. My Sims always have some kind of garden. I'm terrible with plants in real life, so I live vicariously through my Sims.

I love making them a living by being farmers. I'm working with this at the moment. It's a 40x30 lot with 3 adults, a butler and a gardner. The gardener does not tend to the garden in the weekends. I had to harvest on thursday instead of friday because when they harvest, they can't tend the garden. A backlog is not ok when you risk losing plants.

I love money and my family had 22k income from 1 out of the 2 harvests in the week, and the bill was only like 7 - 8000 a week. Hiring a gardner means I don't need to have a bed for another sim to live on the lot. The butler is someone I don't need to follow up on all the time. The one I have now is a woman and perhaps not quite the look for a butler, but she works her butts off both in the garden and in the house. It's kind of important with 2 toddlers and a kid.

At the moment I'm trying to build up some cans with Icemunmun's canning station. I'm building a store where I can sell it hopefully, and extended the farmhouse. I still have the butler, but they just lost the old eremit from the vacation world, and the teen is about to grow up, they have 2 kids and 2 toddlers, and a bun in the oven. I'm using mccc to cheat my way to a bigger household.

Using their own produce lowers the cost of each dish. My sims has such a big garden, they need the gardener, without him they would be swamped. Very little time for being social.

I was gonna say, that sounds like prime tuning mod material. And is that just a stupid EA mistake or did it somehow get borked by an EP?

"Working as intended."

I see no issue with lower quality produce producing lower quality meals. Your food is only as good as the ingredients, same with drinks.

Oh absolutely, but I don't think "normal" quality store-bought produce should ruin your food.

But the ingredients you can buy at the grocery store are always the same quality, right?

I'm inclined to agree, but consider that the game is trying to give a reason to seek better quality produce. A better compromise might have been the option of purchasing better quality produce from the fresh stands in the city. So, your Sims only get "poor" quality meals when they use normal quality produce? Because mine make meals that are normal quality most of the time and will occasionally make something better or worse. They don't complain about normal meals, either, unless they are foodies,


Actually, they aren't. It depends on the store and even within the same store, not all things are equal. As an example, the tomatoes grown in a green house and shipped from far away are often flavorless. One reason is because they are picked before they are ripe so that they will arrive at the store almost ripe or just ripe, but tomatoes that do not ripen on the vine are lacking in measurable particles of flavor. Compare that to a locally grown tomato, available at the same store.

Certain produce has been breed to ship well, to hold it's shape or to resist bruising when packed in crates and moved across the country, but often the qualities that make it look good and ship well have nothing to do with flavor. Higher quality produce often comes in the form of something locally grown, tree or vine ripened, and perishable.

Also, in my area, some stores will hide their less desirable produce in a package with better quality produce on top or with the bad parts hidden by having it face down.

They already get poor quality meals from "normal" and "nice" quality produce.

What I would want is something more along the lines of recipes are more likely to give you poor quality food by default. Let's face it, you're going to get very poor quality bacon and eggs if you're somehow cooking them with neither bacon nor eggs. Using normal quality produce will increase your chances of producing normal quality food. Higher quality produce will obviously increase your chances of creating food up to the level of their own quality. This would also give us meal qualities in between "normal" and "excellent." Of course this requires all recipes to have some kind of ingredient, which is stupid that they don't already --refer to bacon and eggs comment-- Someday, someday I'll have a sims game where cookies are made with flour.

I'm talking about the in-game grocery store, by the way.

Oh, ok. It felt fair to bring up real life because of what was being said regarding bug or feature about meals having lesser quality if using produce that did not come from the gardens.

Sims 1 had baking with sugar, honey, and mix required as ingredients with Makin' Magic. Yeah, more required ingredients would be fun. But I still don't entirely understand what you are saying about the default meals since Sims most often make "normal" meals with the default ingredients, not poor ones. The poor ones happen on occasion and I'm not convinced that it's just because of ingredients. It may also have to do with the cooking equipment involved - the quality of the stove or refrigerator - the cook's skill level, and chance cards. All of that is fairly believable. Cheap electric stoves will cook foods unevenly or over/under cook them if the cook isn't careful. Refrigerators can get that awful smell that gets into the food, especially with broken seals. And even an accomplished cook will occasionally fail at certain dishes or if distracted.

I'd second your thought for some meal qualities between normal and excellent. I would have thought meals would fall somewhere along the lines of the produce - either "nice", "very nice", "good", "great", etc....