So it seems you cannot actually become plantman unless you spray at least 15 times in the same session because the spraying adds a non-existant token that gets nuked on the next restart. All invalid memories from removed objects get nuked without needing to be explicitly cleaned. I checked a few other gameeditions and the token doesn't exist there either. That is fine with me because I find Plantman to be unrealistic, especially arising from pesticides. But what was the thought with this token?

I don't like how high maintenance produce plants are. If you don't have the golden gardening skill or can "talk" to them, their health is miserable from the Bugs and Spraying and inability to make time to tend them at night or while at work. Seems that you have 3 to 5 % chance of getting bugs per hour or 20 to 33 hours on average to the next bug. In practice, I see bugs about every day. They can come immediately after I have just sprayed. There doesn't seem to be a cooldown where the pesticide stays effective.

They want you to place the LadyBug Box to reduce bugs, which I don't find very realistic or nice looking. This is kind of a secret weapon that is not obvious until you looked at the script or read a paid manual.

This can all be modded of course. But I am describing how it is.

The gardening skill seems to be consistent with Open for Business skills, where you are also miserable at the cash register without at least a silver level.

Well, gardening is hard in real life, too. Fortunately you don't need to be very good at growing tomatoes to get something better than what you get at the grocery store.

I always use the ladybug boxes and never, ever spray. (I didn't spray my yard either when I was fit enough to do yardwork. You kill the bad bugs, you also kill the good bugs and render your produce unfit to eat straight from the plant which is one of the greatest pleasures of food gardening.) The first crop of tomatoes is usually a little lackluster but after that tasty is the norm. The bigger your garden plot the faster your sims gain badges, and kids can easily get their fun up after school by gardening! Kids who garden grow up into adults with gold badges.

I wish you could do companion planting in sims. Companion planting is much better pest control than pesticides in most cases, and more attractive, too.

Yes, the gardening skill gain is decently fast, around 15 points off the top of my head from one plant. I only discovered the Ladybug thing today.

I've got a farm lot going with the ladybug box on it, but my sims are still constantly having to spray. And the spray-thing looks so toxic too. Couldn't we have had a natural pesticide option that actually, I don't know, works?
Also Kenzie, who does the majority of the gardening, now has to outsource the spraying to her teen son, because she can't go five minutes without turning into a Plantsim and she's not in the stage of her life where I want her doing that right now.

So do you do more than 15 plants without closing the game? If you had 4 trees and you played for 2 days before going to another lot, you would spray maybe 10 times and then reset the count without any mods.

Yes, I found that teens have some "useful immunities". Young adults also have some. They didn't give them plantman clothes. But of course full adults market as student work fine if you accept the unrealism.

If the pesticide is as strong and toxic as it looks, I think it should last longer because it maybe kills eggs and maggots that are yet to emerge.

The ladybug boxes work fine. They only affect two squares in all directions, but you can get a decently large layout with only two of them and they last forever. An excellent investment! Bad bugs still show up periodically (I think they may be triggered by certain weather conditions; my playstyle makes it nearly impossible to track patterns over time), but you can safely ignore them, I promise, and still get a tasty result.

Extended coverage for ladybug houses. https://mortia.tumblr.com/post/6557...something-a-bit

Invisible ladybug house. https://modthesims.info/d/247599/in...rs-request.html

I'm sure there was a mod for making the radius of effectiveness larger. Or am I just remembering JFade's ladybug swarm and no plantsim mods?
https://sims.jfade.com/index.php-ca...1&subcat=2.html

Edit: Ninja'd by @charity ! Thank you!!

I see that the radius to LadyBugs is 8 tiles, not 2. To offset a 5% chance of getting bugs, you need 4 boxes. I think I will get them and avoid planting lone trees. I do see fruit trees by roadside here. You can get some apples from them in autumn. Small ones, and maybe not every year. I think they should have included more stone fruits (cherry, plum, cherry plums), pears and chokeberries that are native to the temperate climate. I've never in my life seen a lemon or orange tree, except in Fools' Garden. Growing lemons would probably take a greenhouse and golden skill for sure. Some shrubs with fruit could be good too: currants, gooseberry, quince.

I do a lot of gardening in game, I tend to place 1 lady bird loft (I like them, and have a bunch of recolours) per 5 squares of garden and 1 per tree. I have had a couple of natural plantsims but these days I keep bugs down with the Lady bird loft and spray very rarely. I am more inclined just to move one of the LL next to the plants with the bugs. You have to be focused on the garden if you want a thriving garden, just how it is. Sim I am playing now has the LTW to harvest 200 thriving plants, I have no doubt he will make that as the whole family pitches in and 4 of them now have gold gardening badge. This is a farm that supplies the neighbourhood so farming is their life.

I've got quite a few temperate fruit trees, and alternate garden plots, too! Not sure where I got most of them, of course, but Plumbob Keep would be the first place to look. You can't juice them (AFAIK) but they add to fresh food points in the fridge, make sparkly meals, and can be sold normally straight from the tree. I haven't tried Simlogical's packing station with them yet but presumably they work in that, too. Some trees sims can pick fruit off of and eat straight, also. Pears, nectarines, peaches, I feel like I'm forgetting some. Oh, yeah, somebody makes a pineapple, but that's not temperate.

If the radius of the ladybug boxes is 8 tiles rather than 2 it's no wonder I get no serious bug problem! My usual habit is to put out a ladybug house, ring it with garden plots, and plant two trees with a ladybug house between them within a couple of tiles of that. So I'll have overlapping ladybug zones.

Another way to deal with sim bugs is to build a greenhouse, but that's a high start-up cost. Bugs never generate in greenhouses as far as I can tell (which is unrealistic but okay).

I suspect that the reason the highly-toxic pesticides don't last long is that real-life pesticides rapidly lose their effectiveness and have to be constantly rejiggered due to the short life of insects. Any insects or larvae that survive the pesticide long enough to reproduce pass on whatever traits allowed them to survive that long, and proliferate rapidly without competition from vulnerable species; so pesticides are in an arm's race with evolution, which evolution inevitably wins. Meanwhile, the pesticides have killed off pollinators and worked their way into the food chain, depressing the entire environment and making more human labor necessary to make up for the effects of an unhealthy ecosystem. I don't think sims' chemical fertilizers and mineralize the soil the way real ones do, though.

It's a bug that becoming a plantsim doesn't work the way it was intended. Cyjon fixed it.

There is a difference between small plants and trees. For small plants the LadyBug radius is 4. Small seem to be easier to keep in ok health at the start because the health improves from watering, but trees can't be watered.

Do they tell you in the game about the function of LadyBug Lofts? Perhaps the Garden Club tells you? I've not done anything with them.

Do plants inside a Greenhouse go dormant or die in winter? Or are they supposed to be heated?

The bug effect is strong. The "lofts" themselves look like flykiller mushrooms from Mario fiction. I don't see the point of invisible houses. If you go the modding route, you can just mod out the bugs and not bother with refreshing the graphic of the bug houses. Or put multiple Lofts overlapping on the same tile.

I don't know anything about Mario fiction, but the lofts don't look anything like mushrooms to me. Their function is described in the pop-up text when you scroll over them in the catalog, and many people IRL encourage ladybugs and other beneficial insects for pest control (though real-life ladybug houses aren't nearly as effective as planting plants that attract them in the vicinity of the crops). It all seems pretty intuitive to me, but then my mom grew up on a farm and has always been a backyard gardener, so I brought a fair amount of real world knowledge to the game, though I have kind of a black thumb, myself. Different game features are going to be more or less intuitive to different players, and that's not only fine, it's inevitable. I have always used the ladybugs, and have never, ever, not once had a serious bug problem. When my sim gardens fail it's because I didn't ensure that the household included someone with the time and energy to keep up with them - which is exactly why most real world gardens fail. They are a lot of work!

The garden plots keep all year round in a greenhouse, which is the whole point of a greenhouse - even without artificial heat, a glass house at a latitude and in a climate that has a reasonable amount of winter sun will concentrate solar energy enough that the plants can grow even when there's snow on the ground, and artificial light and heat mean that tropical plants can be grown in the polar night, if you've got enough fuel. By some oversight, in the game trees inside a greenhouse will go dormant in winter, though, so the only benefit to having them in there, in a vanilla game, is avoiding bugs. This mistake has been modded, however.

I don't recommend starting with a greenhouse, unless you're really committed to that household living a farming lifestyle. It's expensive up front and you have to devote a lot of time and space to the crops for a season or two, to make the greenhouses pay for themselves. Sims won't mind too much, because gardening fills fun, but the proliferation of nature hobby wants and the necessity of weeding and watering daily and tending trees every few sim days can get tedious for the player. On a farm without a greenhouse, winter gives the sims a chance to do other things besides constant weeding and watering.

Modding out the bugs is a much bigger thing than an invisible ladybug house. And it affects all houses, when you might just want to use the invisible house for one house for a specific reason.

I'm not sure I understand the issue/question here. Gardening us hard in The Sims and there's a learning curve but that's the way it works in real life, too. A higher gardening talent, plantong seasonal crops or getting a greenhouse, bug lofts, etc. can all help. Maybe you'll have an easier time if you look up a guide.

It's hard for Sims to become Plantsims but that's the point too. Becoming a Supernatural in TS2 is generally not the easiest or quickest process. Many require you to befriend NPCs (and the Leader of the Pack doesn't show up every night), having alien babies through abduction has a small chance to begin with, etc.

I have sprayedmore than 15 crops in one session, yes, just like how Sims with big farms/gardens end up watering a lot of plants in one go. I just put yhe game on speed 3 if I don't want to watch the whole process.

Getting 15 plants infected can be harder if you're trying to keep them healthy, but if your goal is just making a Plantsim, you can set out a lot of plants and fruit trees and wait for the bugs to spread.

I recommend cyjon's fix as well.

If you're impatient, there's hacks and objects that let you turn a Sim instantly.

I just use plastic/fake flower beds and hacked trees.

The gardening aspect in the game is overly complicated and useless.

I wouldn't agree that is is complicated. You only have a few actions to choose from. In the vanilla game you can choose Many and the person does what is needed on most plants automatically. But it you need to do it often, and one person must usually stay at home out of workschool to handle this task.

The surprising discovery here was that the likelyhood of becoming a platman depends on how long you have played the same house. And the way it is implemented seems like like it could be unintentional. After you have played for a long time, the chance is 10%, and that is very likely to happen. And I don't want it because having all gardeners literally green and the police not noticing is not realistic. Like the other poster, in the past I played teens and didn't confront this issue.

I think the "guide" about this should be in the game, and not an external reading material. Maybe it is and I've not yet seen it. You got a garden clubber visit, and he told you something, but I don't remember what it was.

I asked about greenhouses because I'm making a mod and want it to be in agreement with how existing plants behave in a greehouse.

I've never had a greenhouse, but I know some basics.

Most greenhouses are warm to hot and humid because of all the glass - it concentrates the sunlight and prevents evaporating moisture from escaping. If you want to, say, grow desert plants in Alaska you'll have to take special measures to increase the aridity of the environment. If it ever gets actually cold a space heater or brazier may be introduced. Many greenhouses - certainly the ones for tropical plant hobbyists and people growing food for market - are wired and plumbed, with irrigation systems and air circulation.

Although the glassed-in bare dirt of the sims 2 greenhouse is possible in real life, by far the majority of greenhouses use planters (often arrayed on tables), raised beds, or vertical gardening, and pave all or most of the floor to reduce mess and maintenance. You might want to look into existing container gardening mods if you want a "realistic" greenhouse.

From a cultivation standpoint, trees are just really big perennial plants. In a sufficiently large greenhouse, fruit trees can be tended and may, with the right care, produce year-round, exactly as smaller plants do. Eventually, however, they will get too big for the environment, unless special methods for constraining their growth are undertaken. This isn't an issue in the game because trees never change size in the game.

Bugs are much rarer and easier to control in greenhouses than in the outdoors. This has both good and bad effects. Bad bugs can still sneak in on plants introduced from the outside if the workers aren't careful, and bugs are small and cannot be 100% excluded from any space humans access. Good bugs cannot be relied on to get in, and unless pollinators are deliberately introduced (combining a greenhouse with a butterfly house or an aviary full of hummingbirds for example) humans will have to do the pollinating. When experimenting with new strains, however, this may be an asset, as it allows control of the plant genetics to a much greater degree than can be obtained outside.

Greenhouse gardening is its own specialty and I'm sure I'm overlooking lots of important things, but those seem like the most important for purposes of simming them.

I still can't figure out if you're saying that becoming a Plantsim is too easy or too hard.

I personally don't find it too hard, it usually takes me a couple of sim days or so, depending on the amount of plants in the lot. Things like becoming a werewolf or being abducted by aliens (without mods) are harder/more time-consuming.

If you think it's too easy... maybe, but you can always mod Plantsims out of the game entirely. It's like other supernatural lifestates. You can simply take precautions so it doesn't happen or you can mod them out.


I honestly don't remember if/how the game tells you. Manual? In-game tips? It's been a really long time, honestly.

If the game really doesn't say anything, I understand your frustration... but it's coming across as kind of weird that you're rejecting the suggestion to check a guide when you're also complaining about not knowing or remembering stuff. What do you expect us to do??

The ladybug loft's description does mention it gets rid of pests, fyi.

What they are saying if I understood correctly, is that you have to spray at least 15 times in a game session. So, if you play your game for a few minutes, then reboot and play again, the count is reset. This makes no sense at all, surely it should depend upon how many times a sim has sprayed in their lifetime rather than how many times you sprayed since you loaded the game?

I don't think the game tells you how to become a plantsim, at least not in clear text of any kind. Pretty sure it has tips for what to do once you've become a plantsim, though (it's been a while since I played with the game tips on, but I vaguely remember some plantsim stuff).

TS2 is much less hand-holdy than for instance TS4, and expects you to play around and find some more or less hidden secrets on your own, with varying degrees of difficulty. There is a plantsim already in the game, so it suggests there is a way to become one, but it seems you have to work for it.

I've managed to make plantsims the "hard" way by spraying trees, but I honestly can't remember if I cheated the trees to have bugs (I likely did - I don't think I've ever had very large gardens that got completely infested, so otherwise it would've taken half an age, maybe been impossible under those circumstances).

Lifetime spraying count sounds like it would be better than a game session spraying count. I'd think the trees spend some time getting re-infested, and if you've got a low tree count, that's likely a long waiting game in that one game session.

A long time ago I decided I wanted to run the neighborhood grocery store as a public service, but wanted it to be an actual business, so I created a public service sim that I cheated money and motives to run it, and in order to stock it with produce I had him plant a massive field of seasons plants and just garden it on speed three with the occasional max motives. I forgot to place any ladybug houses and he turned into a plantsim almost instantaneously. This was before I installed Cyjon's fix.

I never understood 10% being supposedly high. 90% is high.