Could you explain to us retarded kids how to place sprinklers correctly? I notice that when I go to place the sprinkler, it will use up a certain number of squares, depending on its size. But the water doesn't appear to actually hit all the squares. So are we supposed to go by the placement grid, or where the water appears to hit?
Sprinklers cover all tiles their placement grid overlaps, as long as those tiles are all in the same "room".
Also, I never see the sprinkler water after the sprinklers are placed. It only shows up when I am in buy or build mode. Is that normal?
If by water, you mean the dome, yes. The sprinkler will only display the dome during build/buy. At other times it will randomly trigger and produce a (very laggy) sprinkler effect.
I wonder because I notice that my Sims seem to water the plants that are covered by sprinklers as much as the ones that don't have a sprinkler. (I've been doing some of both to observe the differnces).
How are you watering? By Water Many, or Macro Garden/Be Farmer? Water Many will water all plants below a certain water-accumulation threshold, as well as the plant you clicked on to trigger it. The Sprinkler, however, raises the water level of plants to a lower level that is below the water-many threshold. Both are perfectly adequate for the plant, but the sprinkler will not ordinarly block the Water Many behavior, thus creating the illusion that the sprinkler does not eliminate the need for watering. Macro Garden detects when a plant is covered correctly by a non-broken sprinkler and will pass it up for watering if your sim already has a gold badge (and therefore does not need the badge practice of performing manual watering).
And what does it mean when a plant appears to be dripping? At first I thought it meant overwatering, but I've seen Sims continue to water these plants as much as the non-dripping ones.
A dripping plant is overwatered and will slowly lose health over time until it stops being overwatered. This can happen if you use Water Many because the plant you clicked on to water will always be watered again, even if it doesn't need to be. The Skillinator's "Gain Gardening" feature will also deliberately overwater a plant because the act of watering a plant grants badge points, regardless of necessity. It also raises the plant's health in the short term faster than talking to it, so a sim in Macro Garden may deliberately overwater a plant to raise it quickly to thriving status before harvesting it. And if your sims are doing it autonomously (do they?), then they're just going to fuck things up, you know they're stupid, don't let 'em do that.