During the recent sale, I upgraded from Sims4 limited to deluxe. I also added seasons. I previously had Get To Work and Outdoor Retreat. I immediately noticed that fertilizers and bees didn’t work like Carls and other guides claimed. I decided to test them.
It takes about 3 1/2 minutes to fertilize a plant so that means that there must be 72 hours 5 minutes between fertilization. If you start fertilization at 10:00 on Sunday, finish on 10:04, you will not be able to fertilize that plant again until 10:05 on Wednesday.
My first test was 33 different normal quality plants and $20 excellent fish, each fertilizing 10 sage plants. There turns out to be NO GOOD OR POOR FERTILIZER. On average, it took 18.9 fertilizations & 60 days to bring a sage plant to perfect quality. The average for 10 sage plants was within 10% for all 34 fertilizers.
First: there is a random factor in fertilizer. For example, fertilizing 10 sage plants with Orchid, One sage leveled up twice to excellent quality with just 4 fertilizations, two required 6 fertilizations, Six required 7 fertilizations, and one needed 8 fertilizations, for an average of 6.6 fertilizations to evolve twice to excellent quality.
I had two groups of control sage plants, 10 that were never harvested, 10 that were harvested daily with the rest of the plants. It took exactly 95 days for all 10 sage plants to become perfect if they were harvested daily, 96 days for the 10 that were never harvested. This indicates that each fertilization, on average increases a plant’s quality by just under two days. (1.85)
It also doesn’t matter the quality of plant, sage of normal quality, mixed quality, and perfect quality were all within range of 18.7-19.8 fertilizations. The one surprise was foul fish only required 16.8 fertilizations, 15% better than the average fertilizer, so IMO if you have foul fish use them, otherwise don’t bother.
For Beehives, having a beehive next to a plant does not change the time to become perfect, the control group that was neither fertilized or had swarms released to pollinate nearby plants remained 85 days.
You do get a quality boost when you release a swarm to pollinate nearby plants. The range of effectiveness of a swarm is a 5 unit/yard/meter radius, not a 5 unit diamond. Each plant has a “””root zone”””. Most root zones are a full unit square, and if any portion of the root zone is within the swarms effectiveness, that plant gets a boost, increasing the effective range from 5 to 5.49 units radius for most plants, 5.24 for grapes, mushrooms and other plants that have the smaller root zone.
The effectiveness of releasing swarms to pollinate nearby plants depends on if fertilizer is also used, and the number of swarms per day. It varied between 12-24 hours reduced per swarm released, making swarms between 1/2-1/4 as effective as fertilizer, but as you can use multiple hives and multiple times per day, you can increase a plant to perfect quality in less than a week.
It doesn’t matter the number of plants in a swarms area of effect, the average number of swarms and fertilizations was within 10% of each other regardless of if there was 10 or 40 plants in a swarms area of effect.
I am running widows 7 on a desktop with 8 gig of ram. Based on when I was playing before I got seasons and digital deluxe, I believe but can't now prove that the fertilizer portion remains true if you don't have seasons.
Edit: I am adding 5 JPEGS of the spreadsheet and other files as the system won't allow a single PDF.
