I had to stop playing to make dinner, so might as well add to the thread -
I'm playing a fairy with the traits angler, loves the outdoors, green thumb, natural cook and gatherer (one of the new ones), with the Greener Gardens lifetime wish. I have an outdoors lot with a pond and a ton of trees as well as a shack containing the bathroom and a gazebo-like thing with a kitchen inside. There are two fairy houses, a bungalow for 425 or 450 and a castle for 625. They have exactly the same stats (three stress relief, three environment and four hunger I think from memory) so I went for the bungalow because it's cheaper and, imo, pretty cute. There are also fairy houses out in the "wild" - so far I've seen one at the arboretum and one at the point down the track past the cemetary. As well as counting as a bed, you can change your clothes, drink pollen punch to relieve hunger (though not the whole bar) and throw a house party. I didn't get asked to invite any Sims when I tried that, but if you have more than one fairy they can probably all hang out at it because the house is a group activity. Basically, if you don't mind drinking pollen more than once to refill hunger, you can live out of a fairy house except for bladder and hygiene bars. The pollen also gives you a moodlet of +10 or +20 that lasts 2 hours.
Fairies can also play pranks on people, so far I have the option for chattering teeth and hot head - my girl autonomously cast chattering teeth on the first ghost she saw, there were a few ghosts hanging around the community lot just across from city hall. With other fairies they get options like fairy frolic where you both turn into your true fairy form (a little ball of light the same colour as your wings, the same thing you do when you go into the fairy house) and fly around together, improving social and fun. With any other sim you can talk about flowers and brag about playing pranks, too, and I think there was something like playful prattle?
The alchemy bench is 850s, which I couldn't afford because I spent all my money on a lot too big for me and plants to fill it, but you can research and mix on the bench at the elixir consignment store. So far I've learned two recipes - can't recall the name of the first one but it prevents you from getting "lonely or bored" and you can make it with any food item. The other is Ad Nauseum, which from the description seems to just make you nauseous, and the ingredient is any insect. (Speaking of, there are a bunch of insect spawns at the elixir consignment store. I've got several butterflies and ladybugs there.) The challenges are to make 250 elixirs so that you can make three at a time, learn all recipes so that you don't always use up the ingredients, and to throw potions at 50 sims to make them less annoyed when you throw harmful ones and even like you for throwing beneficial ones.
I need to get around to getting my peashooters etc though since I've already had a zombie come through my yard (which is, of course, my entire house). I had to use moveobjects on to move it out of the way and fence off my garden before it ate everything, but I needed to do that anyway since I have Pets installed and there's a couple of horses that run around everywhere.
As for gatherer and greener gardens - so far I have not yet failed to catch any insects, so gatherer seems to be helping out there. As well as making that easier, gem cuts and metal smelts are more valuable and you harvest better plants. For greener gardens, I don't yet seem to have the ability to make plants bloom. I'm not sure yet if I need higher gardening (I'm up to 6) or practice my fairy magic to learn more spells, but I'll experiment further unless someone else has found out already.
I'll get some screenshots later tonight when I'm back on my desktop.
