I don't have the game, but those two subjects would sway me toward it, maybe, if I had more information about them.
Is there anyone who's advancing in their gardening and cooking/foodie/gourmet etc.? Let us hear your discoveries.

I can only really touch on the food aspect. I really enjoy it, my main sim is only level 7 but the gourmet and regular lines of cooking are pretty neat. There are lots of cakes you can make and the gourmet cakes look like those fancy cakes with fondant that you'd see on cake boss or ace of cakes, those kind of baking shows.

My first Sim wanted to focus on gardening (freelance gardener, i believe is the life aspiration she wants). I have not played much yet but so far gardening is a bit different than what I'm used to in Sims2 (I didn't play 3). You have to buy garden plots in the builder section as you normally would and have the Sim tend to them manually. You get seed packs by clicking on the plot of land. So far I haven't found any garden items (like sprinklers, green house, etc). I am very excited for the gardening because they've brought back the Cow Plant as a rare type of plant you can grow at higher skill.

Gardening and cooking so far do not seem to be related. There is a full career path for cooking but I have not seen one yet for gardening.

I hope this helps

Wait, no green house?

Can anyone verify this, please?

I'm having flashbacks of the Stone's Throw Greenhouse set for TS3. )':

I’m curious wheter it’s possible to fabricate meals entirely from gardening harvests – can you do that or do you *have* to use the supermarket-fridge?

In sims 3 i built my own greenhouses. Build an incompelte room, move your plants overe there, close the room add big windows. But is it possible to do that in sims 4 with the foundation tool? ANyone tried?

The sim I'm playing now is a Mixologist, though she's sort of taken up gardening and cooking(not gourmet) as side hobbies. I'll post a bit about what I've figured out from each of them.

Cooking
I like how cooking's implemented in sims 4. Group meal size is now down to 4 servings, but there's an option to make a "party size" that has more, I believe 8 servings? You can also just cook a meal for yourself. When you get to a certain level(I want to say cooking level 5) you can begin leveling another skill called gourmet cooking, which I think has fancier meals and desserts, probably with nice mood boosts. I'm not going to explore that path on this sim, though. As far as I can tell, you don't have to worry about securing groceries at all. Each meal you cook has a cost that you pay at the time of cooking, which represents purchasing the ingredients.

If you're going into cooking, upgrade your stove ASAP, as the negative moodlet the cheap one gives is pretty gross. Also might want to upgrade your fridge, since fridges can break now! I assume that if that happens, everything inside goes bad or something. It only happened to me once, on my first test family, and I was getting ready to quit to start my real family so I didn't check the food inside.

Gardening
Gardening is pretty neat, though it is kind of involved. The plants grow quickly and give large harvests(about 8-10 food items every 2-3 days for most, mushrooms are faster), and rather than repeatedly uprooting and replanting new produce to get higher quality plants you can directly "evolve" them into higher quality versions, I'm not sure what it is that lets you do this but the plants will sparkle when you can do it. I think you can plant directly in the ground(though I haven't tried it yet), and there's also $50 flowerpots that will work inside(I think it said so in the description) or outside. You can grow fruits, vegetables and herbs, as well as flowers, though I don't know what use the flowers have.

One funny thing I found happened after a sim knocked my trash can over. I saw it, but my sim was busy, so I figured I'd clean the trash later. Well, I forgot about it, and soon enough when I remembered I saw this little bad boy had sprouted!

There's an option to harvest it, but nothing's grown yet so it's greyed out. I can't wait to see what it makes.


When I cook from the fridge, even if I have the ingredients it still costs money. I think it might cost less money if you have them, though, so the cost you're paying is just for the milk, flour, and whatever else you're mixing in there.

Gardening info from Carl's Sim Guide: http://www.carls-sims-4-guide.com/skills/gardening/

Enjoy! :lovestruc

Sorry. I know nothing about cooking.

Yay! Thanks I was waiting for this guide to pop up <3

I randomly found trash plants. Not sure where they came from, but they .. were there.

Trash plant update time! They grow trash fruit, which is pretty much as gross as it sounds. Not quite sure what to do with it.

I'm not gonna lie.

The fact that they added a trash plant and trash fruit (although seemingly useless) is amusing and I think it's cute they took it to that level.

But I'm a huge sucker for culinary and gardening in TS2/3.

I'm curious how I got it. I didn't instruct anyone to plant the trash plant, but I guess my sim's hubby might have done it autonomously.

Mine grew from a pile of trash that I forgot about and left sitting outside. You can see in the screenshot where the trash can is still knocked over, I haven't been bothered to have my sim pick it back up yet. I don't know if anything special has to happen(like an autonomous interaction that I didn't notice), or if it'll grow out of any trash that's left outside for long enough.

Drat. You guys, unknowingly, are talking me into this game.
Your answers have me all :lovestruc
On a side note of that trash thing, do you get flies if you don't clean up for long enough?

I haven't actually noticed any. I've left some plates laying around, and all I've seen are stink clouds. I ended up deleting the trash plant in build mode(couldn't figure out how to un-plant it from live mode, I don't think there's a way until it dies, unfortunately) because it was too far from the garden and my sim kept running back and forth through the house when watering and weeding. But while it was there, I didn't notice any flies, or even any stink clouds.

Trash fruit makes excellent fertilizer! And it's apparently edible, but I haven't tried to eat it yet...or any time soon.

Oh and also, keep that plant away from the rest of your garden because it attracts bugs. Then you have to spray your plants....more time consumed.

Side note - Wild and Normal through Very Nice quality produce is considered sickly and reduces food quality like Foul fish. Good has no effect on quality, and Great or better increases it. For more information, see my post here: http://modthesims.info/showthread.p...803#post4635803

If your sim completes the master chef aspiration, they get a really useful reward trait called
"Fresh Chef". Sims with this trait cook food that will never spoil. They can even leave it on
the counter or all over the house, and the food won't spoil. I have also found out that using
freshly grown (or caught) ingredients can significantly reduce the cost of making food which
is great for sims who don't have a lot of money.

My favorite thing about gardening is grafting plants. You can get new species from grafting like
cowplant berries, bosai buds, dragonfruit, and death flowers. Grafting is also really useful for
sims who don't have a lot of space for plants because you can have plants that grow multiple
things. One of my sims had room for only one big garden planter, and she grew a potato-carrot
plant, a tomato-basil plant, a strawberry-grape plant, and a lily-orchid plant. She also has a
tree that grows apples, cherries, and pomegranates on it. I also recently found out that sims
who complete the freelance botanist aspiration get the naturalist trait that makes them completely fireproof.

Wondering what one uses the bird of paradise for. Anyone know?

Like all unmodded flowers in game, to beautify the inventory.

I had my sims eat a trash fruit, nothing happened I was hopping for a negative emotion moodlet but nope nothing. And they just spawn from trash left untouched outside and sometimes just simply by your garbage can for no reason. So no special interaction needed simply situational based/random spawning.

Ha! Wellll... not exactly, though. I found this handy dandy chart somewhere which I always forget when I get in the game:
"Graft Cherry to Apple to make Pomegranate
Graft Lily to Snapdragon to make Orchid
Graft Pomegranate to Orchid to make Death Flowers
Harvest the Death Flowers, Plant one, and enjoy unlimited Death Flowers!"
And I would add, you will need the death flower after trying to remember that sequence.