Sorry to nitpick, but I just cannot agree with that.

A person who has command of technique and craft is just a good craftsman. An artist also has - in addition - his own, unique vision of the piece of reality he's trying to represent or imitate. There are no 'real' artists and 'unreal' artists. There are just artists, craftsmen, and morons who think they're artists because it makes them feel good.

I'm also tempted to debate the point that an artist knows why he achieved an aesthetically pleasing result. Well, maybe in retrospect, given enough time... IMO in all the big artistic breakthroughs  there's something I'll call the X factor: a combination of special circumstances which makes the artist do something unusual, to attempt something he's not attempted before. Note that 'special' here does not mean 'extraordinary'; it can be something as simple as a nagging toothache (as one art historian has it, the inspiration behind Munch's "The Scream").

Interesting thread, this. Spent two hours smoking and reading instead of playing TS3. Now, I have a question for everyone here: How do you feel about these two text strings from our favourite game: Write A Non-Fiction Novel and Write A Fiction Novel?

Interesting. Whenever I grow a death flower from a seed found fishing, it's Normal quality.  Happened about a dozen times so far.

That's not quite true. There are 4 special plants, and you can tell all of them apart as soon as they sprout. As you pointed out, the money tree sprout is very distinct; so is the flame fruit, it's the only ground-hugging plant of the four specials. That leaves two stake plants - the death flower and the life fruit. You can identify the life fruit plant because it starts to wilt the moment it's planted, just like the money tree. But of course the plant sprout is different.

What I do is move all wilt-upon-planting specials into a single row. All the stake plants in that row will be life fruit plants. I keep those, and destroy the money trees (I allow myself just one. The game throws so much money at one that it gets boring).

You might have well found this one out in the meantime, as this is an old thread. If so, my apologies for boring you. Well, maybe I'll throw in another tip, hopefully useful: If you want plants and trees that never turn barren, plant them, nurture them to the harvest stage, and move out to a new home. I've been harvesting life fruit like that at my old address in my current game for something like 6 weeks now - one needs a constant supply of those things and repeatedly planting them gets tedious.