More Awesome Than You!

And are juice effects the same?

I can't tell, but if the quality of produce makes no difference, I see no point in wasting my sims' time chatting up all the plants until thriving. I don't ever sell the vegetables.

I haven't seen yucky juice provide any benefits.  Only good stuff.  I may be mistaken.

What happens if you have a mish-mash? Some good and some yuck?

I was really hoping there would be something about this in The War Room.

I don't know.  Perhaps El Presidente will see this and comment.

According to the Prima Guide (and we all know just how accurate THAT can be!) the quality of food does affect the hunger point satisfaction in a 1-2-3 manner.  Example: a bland tomato offers 1 point, tasty offers 2, and 3 for mouthwatering.
This also applies to the juices.  I've not made any juices, but the guide says that only tasty and mouthwatering will give you the "Power Juice".

So, yes, the higher, the better, but how much time you want to spend chatting up your plants is up to you.

I have noticed that juice made from mouth-watering fruit/veg always delivers the bonus effects e.g. eggplant juice gives skill points and orangeade random badge points. Juice from tasty fruit/veg doesn't always give the desired effect and juice from bland fruit/veg has no additional benefits. I'm fairly sure that if you mix qualities that the resultant juice takes the lowest quality as I have made the mistake in the past so sell anything that isn't mouth-watering. The orangeade and eggplant badge boosts were fixed in one of the Seasons patches. Depending on your gameplay style it can be worth the effort being nice to your crops and tending/watering plants is a useful fun building pastime for children prior to homework.

Macro Garden FTW!

Always Perfect Gardens FTW.

Shift-click boosting cheat at harvest FTW.

Cheaters!  :D

No, I do of course, use Macro - Garden, but it's pretty boring watching sims conversate with all the zillions of plants and trees for hours on end whether I'm doing all the clicking or not.

Although in bigger households, I just send the elders out there to do what they will since they often haven't got much better to do.

Also note (and maybe you guys already know this) that it doesn't seem to make any difference if you only talk to the plant just before harvest.  I've had nearly dead plants that I talked up to thriving just before harvest, and the harvest was still mouthwatering.  They don't have to be thriving the whole time.  I also have a "talk to plants faster" mod.

FPV is about 1/3 the value of a "thriving" plant. Juice benefits do not exist for non-mouthwatering produce. All non-thriving produce is useful only as vendor trash, to be converted to cash or limited FPV.

It takes much less talking to bring a seedling up to thriving than a full-grown plant, though.  On top of that, thriving plants are much less susceptible to weeds as they grow, so it's a significant time savings to talk to them as they break through the soil.

Both of these are not-trueities. Weed probability is unrelated to condition of plant. Health boost for talking is linear and does not depend on age of plant.

What do you know.  Must have been a placebo moment.  So, does anything affect the probability of weeds, apart from being grown outside?

In the base game? No, nothing. Not even outside/inside. With Awesomeware: Outdoor plants are much more susceptible than indoor plants by several orders of magnitude.

Is there any point continuing talking to a plant past the point when the produce becomes mouthwatering?  Looks to me like sims just keep on talking until the produce has maxed out some invisible bar.  I've been assuming juice would have maximum effect if the fruit was mouthwatering and cancelling sims out of talking to plants to pick. 

Supposedly, the higher your sim's gardening badge the longer it is in between tending times...meaning weeds don't sprout near as often if a gold badge sim tends them instead of a no badge sim.  I say supposedly because though this is what is said in the Prima guide I haven't tested it out fully in the game.  From what I have done in the game though, it does seem to hold true. 

Thriving is thriving. Exact thrivingness is insensitive, but yes, it is, in fact, trying to max out the invisible bar before autostopping, which gives it a bit of buffer room so it doesn't immediately drop in mid-pick.

Thanks for confirming.  I've been running a few places with large plots and it feels like the sims are wasting a lot of time talking to thriving plants. I've never had a quality drop mid-pick - or not that I've noticed.  I guess I assumed that the quality was fixed at the starting point, but I guess you're telling me that it's set at the end of the animation.  So is this buffer an appropriate size to prevent the drop, or would a little fine tuning on the macro-gardening be possible?

Once a "Talk to" is ordered, control falls over to Maxis and does not return until the code decides that it is done. It is estimated that it will not waste more than 2 or 3 talk cycles, and often it helps.

I can see how that would seem that way, however. There really is no way to get the health of the plant up once it starts to fall because of the insects (since spraying doesn't improve the health of the plant), short of talking to them or overwatering (which only works for a very short time, then causes the health to drop again). When you first plant a seedling, it is healthy, but by the time a plant is ready for harvest they tend to be sickly, and so it takes more time to talk them up to the point of "thriving."

Pescado, is it only 1/3 the food points for all produce harvested below the "thriving" level, or does it decrease gradually and bottom out at 1/3 for sickly plants?