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Making Money with the Gardening Skill

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Gardening is a cool way to make money in The Sims 3. It is a favorite of many because of the gradual progression of your crop. As time goes by you'll accumulate more and more expensive plants. These can have a big impact on your gameplay. Let's learn some tips to be better gardeners and make the most money doing so.

Start with the most expensive thing you can grow. You can collect seeds, but it's just as good to buy foods in bulk at the supermarket. That's right, the ripe produce at the store can be stuck in the ground. These plants won't start as high in quality as seeds do, but you can have many of them.

Lay out your garden in rows, and buy sprinklers. You can leave them on 24/7 and it will not hurt the plants. For a more realistic approach, get a few levels in Handiness until your Sim learns to upgrade the sprinklers to auto water. Buying your first sprinkler will save you enough time to study handiness at the library here and there.

It will be a few days before your crops are ready. In the meantime, keep them watered. Use something cheap as fertilizer until you can afford the good stuff. With plants that are worth more, you will see a quality boost from using fertilizer that will make it pay for itself. Fertilized plants grow faster and will be worth more.

When it's harvest time, you can sell multiple plants in your inventory by dragging the box in your inventory to the simoleon icon. Stock some of them in the fridge, and your Sim will now cook with those ingredients whenever they get the chance. That boosts meals' quality, which will give you a more powerful moodlet from eating.

Look around the graveyard in Sunset Valley to find special seeds. You'll also find them while adventuring in the graveyards's catacombs. To do that click the building in the center and choose 'Explore'. Check back every day for more special seeds, which can be planted at gardening level 7.

If you feel the need to cheat your way to a great garden, that is a simple matter. When you enable the buydebug cheat, you'll be able to select from all the plants in the game. You can place them pre-planted and some will even be ready to harvest. I think most people should experience roughing it to really appreciate the gardening aspect of the game.

Two special plants are life fruit, money tree, and death flower. Death flowers prevent your Sim's demise -- it's traded to the reaper in exchange for life. Money trees' harvest of money bags are worth a ton of money and don't die so long as you take care of them. Life fruit is utilized in the level 10 cooking recipe, Ambrosia which grants Sims immortality and raises the dead as ghosts.

Use the skill journal to keep track of your gardening skill challenges. This will help you to boost your Sim's gardening potential. Other things you can do to boost potential are the green thumb trait, the super green thumb reward, and using garlic, life fruit, or vampire fish as fertilizer (never death fish).

Gardening is a rewarding skill in The Sims 3. You can make loads of money, have a happy Sim that always accumulating happiness points, and cook the best meals possible. There's a lot more to the gardening skill but this should be enough info to get you started!



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I have a couple of cool new offerings from James Giddings, who not only shared valuable data on transfiguring tiberium, he also gave us a couple of handy autohotkey scripts to share.

Folks who hate the long load time when first starting their game, especially when it comes to loading a Dynasty or Legacy file, will appreciate the first offering. Jagid's Autolauncher is not a mod, but will help you all the same. Run this script from your desktop after a brief and easy configuration, and it will automatically open Sims 3, cancel the video, load the most recent saved game and pause your game when it's done. Automating this process lets you go do something else with your valuable time while the game loads. The second offering is a gem cut calculator, which will tell you just how much profit you'll make from a gem using the various cuts available. Download it from our gems page.

Building Contest #10 is up:

"Once Upon a Time...." That may be the start of a story but it's your job to set the scene! How can we have a story if there is nowhere for the story to be set? What would the Pigs do without their three houses, where would Snow White and the Seven Dwarves live? They need their homes and they've got to be right from a storybook!

Pam's Dreamweaver DecaDynasty Story is up to date. Here is where we last left off. If you ever want to check for the most recent, see her topic on the forum.

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