Have any of you ever set up an entire society of PlantSims? How did you structure it? Did you still have families by marriage play a role, or did you just have clonal reproduction via PlantBabies and no traditional family roles? What other aspects of PlantSim society and culture were different from more traditional and realistic society? I'm trying to kind of mentally map out a fantasy setting before I start to physically (digitally?) create it in-game, and so far I've figured out good roles for vampires, werewolves, and witches, but I want to figure out a way of making PlantSims into their own thing much more than any of the rest of them (kind of with an eye towards the Fair Folk / Faerie in OLD folklore, where they're much more like the White Walkers and the Children of the Forest in the early seasons of Game of Thrones than they are like Tinkerbell or Cinderella's Fairy Godmother.)

I don't really know much about Faeries in folklore, but I have played PlantSims before.
I usually have a large group of them on a single lot with very little technology, not even plumbing. (I usually use objects from Castaway Stories converted to The Sims 2)
As for relationships, very untraditional. Usually I have the Plantsims in several relationships at once (no jealousy), as I feel that's what human plants would be like (Their pollen gets spread around a lot). When a plantbaby is formed, I have the whole commune take care of it.

I would be interested to know how your other societies work. I do play a lot of occult sims, except werewolves. I don't really like how they look (I prefer mine looking more wolf than "were").

Your idea of ​​creating a plantsim society seems really interesting to me. Maybe creating a neighborhood with a naturalistic-magical aesthetic would be fun. I guess creating a kind of neighborhood that was a secret forest would give it a lot of immersion. I always did traditional couples, what BagelTheDog has said about doing multiple love relationships without jealousy I think would fit the plantsim a lot.

I had a PlantSim society within Riverblossom Hills. They were matriarchal and lived in Gardens. Each Garden was run by a Matriarch and a Gardener. Because they were within the Empire, there was pretty much one Garden per subhood, and the Grand Matriarch had an additional Garden in the main hood. When a Matriarch retired, her position would be taken by the next eldest female (so not necessarily her daughter) who didn't already have her own Garden. The eldest Gardener would always move in with the youngest Matriarch, to help her learn the ropes.

There was also a Shaman and his apprentice, who lived in a Grove. They took care of graves until the ghost spawned, and then transferred the grave to the cemetery. PlantSims are immune to being scared by ghosts, which I didn't know when I started, but it fit the story perfectly.

The PlantSims grew all the Empire's food, cared for orphans and the elderly, and no new houses or commercial properties could be built without their permission; permission was fairly easy to obtain in the subhoods, but in Riverblossom itself it was rare that anyone besides the King's Daughter would be allowed to build. They held everything in common, so funds (which mostly came from the families of the deceased when the Shaman went to collect the urn, so the rich paid far more than the poor) were always shifted between Gardens as they moved around. They could marry if they wished but mostly the Matriarchs reproduced by spores.

The Council of Matriarchs was the governing body, and was composed of all the Matriarchs plus the Shaman and Head Gardener (the eldest Gardener). The Grand Matriarch was in theory the equal of the King, but given that she controlled food production and the care of the dead, only a very foolish king would not accede to her wishes.

This thread is giving me some ideas, I've not played with plantsims a lot!

I had to think up some rules for Plantsims because I found them rather boring

So I introduced an in-between "Age stage" for mine. Once they grow into adults, they are considered Young Adults until such time as they have maximised their enthusiasm in Nature. Young Adults are much like teenage sims - they aren't allowed to get full time jobs (I have no mods for part time jobs, so they have no jobs) and they spend their time socialising, skilling and studying nature. They can date, but they can't spawn plantbabies and they are not encouraged to marry, move out of home or woohoo. I tend to give them "younger" clothing and hair/makeup in comparison to the more mature Plantsims who are allowed to get jobs, marry, make plantbabies etc. If they want to take the potion to cure plantsimism at the end of this period, they are allowed to, but it's unusual for this to happen later in life.

I liked the idea that they will naturally make spores of happiness when they are happy but that this drains their motives so they need to refill them often. But I can't remember if that was a mod or just an idea somebody had.

I also leave them with close to vanilla agespans, whereas non-plantsims in my game have longer lifespans.

I love the idea of them looking after graves! I might have to bring that in.

I'm trying to figure out an elegant solution to my decision that an Ecological Guru will be the leader of my PlantSim Forest (which I'm still treating as old-school scary Fae for storytelling purposes). Since the Natural Science career that leads to that position requires a university education, it can't be a PlantSim who was born a plantbaby, it has to be someone who at least started off as a normal Sim before becoming part of the PlantSim Forest, which rules out basic hereditary monarchy (not that that's a bad thing, since it'll force their story to feel more different.) At this point I have two favorite approaches, though both still kind of leave a few plot holes that I'm not sure how to fill...

Option 1: PlantSims will occasionally "abduct" normal Sim children at a young age and raise them entirely within the Forest, drawing some inspiration from fairy tales where human children were abducted and then became part of the Faerie court, with the idea being that by the time they reach young adulthood they'll be so integrated into the natural world that they wouldn't have any reason to want to return. I feel like this could be interesting, but I'm not sure how I'd justify them always returning to the Forest after their university education.

Option 2: PlantSims will almost always reproduce by plantbaby, but when the Forest needs a new leader, some ritual will be used to decide which two genetic lines will be merged, and then two PlantSims from those lines will "try for baby" and produce a normal Sim infant, who will then be a legitimate part of the community, and maybe more plausible as a leader when considering the university storyline. The problems here are, first, what kind of ritual would make sense? It's not just going to work as a marriage based on love or even a politically arranged marriage, since it has to have some mystical, otherworldly sense to it (since this child will be very unique within the Forest, and definitely have a "chosen one" type of vibe), and second, if they're so self-contained how do I then keep my PlantSim Forest "scary" enough to the rest of my medieval Sims that they'd justify a Night's Watch-esque order to guard the borders of the forest, and have these green-skinned dryads be the type of monster small children would be terrified of, and even adults who don't really believe anymore still wouldn't want to cross?

For option 1: Perhaps the idea is that university education is similar to the "Rumspringa" experience youngsters from the Amish community can choose to go through. It's an experience of mainstream sim culture - they are then allowed to make the choice once that period is over, but they are choosing for life. They can either return to the Forest and accept all the aspects of that lifestyle, or be banished from it, never to see their PlantSim family and friends again.

For option 2: Maybe base it on chemistry: There's a version of the matchmaker's crystal ball somewhere which shows the highest chemistry between two sims, although that might also not show any plantsims. Cyjon has a pizza box object which will show attraction between two sims, which could be helpful instead.

To make them scary, I think I'd have them exercise some control over crops, perhaps not a huge amount in reality, but just enough to start some stories. Starvation is a very real and terrifying aspect of crop success! Maybe you could work in the Garden Club, somehow, considering they sell the plantsim potions, and judge the quality of gardens. Or just think up some activities that the ordinary sims could do (purposefully or accidentally) which would anger the plantsim folk and cause retaliation by sending poor weather to hamper the crops.