Get Plants of Superb Quality: How to Evolve Plants in Sims 4

What’s The Benefit of Evolving Plants?

Evolving plants isn’t about changing the growth rate as the growth rate depends on the species of plants and can’t be changed. Instead, it’s about the quality of plants and their harvestables. If you want to earn a living by selling fruits and veggies from your garden, evolving plants will be something you’d want to invest time in.

A healthy plant can give you up to 6 produce per harvest. The more evolved your plant is, the higher the quality of its produce, which means more simoleons for you with every harvest. Even if gardening is just a side hustle, learning how to evolve plants can still be a good source of extra income.

If you have a Freelance Botanist Aspiration, evolving plants is a part of completing it, so learning how to do it will get you faster to that Naturalist Reward Trait. Not to mention that healthier, more evolved plants will increase the quality of your herbal remedies and meals, plus make them more delicious! 

Tracking Quality of Your Plants

Similarly to skills, plants also have levels to which they can evolve. These are Normal, Nice, Excellent, Magnificent, and Perfect. If you are just discovering how to evolve plants, to check at which stage your plant is, hover over a plant and you will notice a bar with 5 sections, ranging from pale green to intense green color, to mark the plant’s current health.

Plants are typically ready to evolve when the bar is close to the end of either of these five sections on the progress bar. Once they have reached maximum health at a low stage, you will get a new action unblocked, which is Evolve. If you are wondering how to evolve plants, know that a plant that is ready to evolve will have sparkles around it. This is your signal that you can proceed with the Evolve action. 

Evolved plants need to stay healthy to stay at their evolved level, though, as the progress meter can go both ways. The health of your plants is changeable. Even if you have grown a plant of perfect quality, you will need to tend to it regularly as with a lack of care, their quality can be downgraded to a previous level. Eventually, if neglected for a long time, your plant can die, no matter how evolved it was. 

Would you like to become a professional gardener? Check out this Gardening Career Guide!

how to evolve plants and keep them healthy?

Only healthy, nourished plants can evolve. Now, when you are learning how to evolve plants, it is important to learn how to care for your garden properly. There are a few ways you can ensure your plants evolve to the upper stages. You will need to do a lot of fertilizing, watering, removing weed, and spraying for bugs. You will also need to harvest produce regularly to ensure quality produce, and, most importantly, practice your gardening skill. So, you will need to do all of these to get that perfect quality produce you are hoping to get.

More on SnootySims: Learn about the Sims 4 evolve all plants mod!

1. learning gardening skill

Developing a gardening skill will come naturally to any Sim who loves growing plants. The higher your gardening skill level, the more options you will unlock that will help you take good care of your plants so that you can evolve them. Although doing this isn’t an end goal, to know how to evolve plants and unlock important actions, you need to level up a bit.

The lower you should opt for if you want to grow high-quality plants is Level 3, as this level unlocks the ability to fertilize plants, which is essential for evolving them. When they reach Level 7 Gardening Skill, they will unlock the ‘’Tend Garden’’ option, which will make your daily gardening easier, and water and weed more plants by clicking on just one plant. The higher the skill, the more efficient your Sim will be when tending to their garden.

2. Harvest regularly

While harvest doesn’t impact the process of evolving plants per se, not harvesting timely can prevent you from getting higher quality produce and more simoleons from a harvest. Even when you know how to evolve plants and have successfully evolved them, you won’t be able to get a higher-quality harvest if you haven’t collected it before evolving.

Only once the plant is harvested and evolved, you can get started getting harvestable of higher quality in the future. So, harvest your plants regularly, no matter the current quality of the plant. So, if you are wondering how to evolve plants quickly and get top-quality fruit or veggies, harvest first, then evolve a plant.

More on SnootySims: 40+ Farming Mods and CC: Have a Bountiful Harvest in The Sims 4!

3. Water Every Day

How to evolve plants faster? One thing is certain – your plants will surely be grateful if you water them regularly! The good news is, all your plants, no matter their stage, rate of growth, or quality, will need to be watered at the same time. Every morning, make your Sim check plants and water them. Dry plants will look paler than the rest. If left without the water for too long, their health will deteriorate.

Tired of the old pots and planters? Enrich your garden with Gardening CC & Mods!

4. Eliminate weed & bugs

There are two reasons for plants not evolving – weed, and bugs. Both of these feed on your healthy plant and can prevent you from evolving it successfully. They both can appear every day, but they don’t have to, so it’s important to check for them daily, in the morning, by zooming in on your plants. 

When you notice weeds, just click on the option ‘’Weed’’ or ‘’Tend Garden’’ and you are good to go. If your plant has weed, you’ll see it at the base of the plant. Once you remove weed once, you are good to go until you notice it again. However, out of the two, bugs are a bigger issue simply because they are harder to get rid of. 

Plant-eating bugs are a real issue, and learning how to evolve plants will require you to learn how to deal with these devils. You will need to take care of those meticulously, as they are much more harmful that weed. If a plant is infested with pests, you will see black bugs around it when you zoom in. If the Seasons option is turned on, you will see them mostly during spring, and they are less likely to attack your plant in winter. When a plant is attacked by these creatures, you will also see an interaction ‘’Spray For Bugs’’. Unlike weed, be prepared to spray for bugs a few times before they perish. Do this as soon as you notice, and your Sim is in the mood for gardening, as bugs can damage the plant pretty fast, if left unattended. 

5. Fertilize

Your journey to learning how to evolve plants will also include fertilizers, probably the most important factor in evolving plants. After all, this is food for your plants and will be a key component to growing a healthy plant of good quality. Luckily, you can unlock this action quickly, as it becomes available once you reach the Level 3 Gardening skill. 

Once you have selected your desired fertilizer, click on the plant you want to nourish and select ‘’Fertilize’’. This will open up a menu of the available fertilizers your Sim currently has. If this action is unavailable, this simply means that your plant is fed with nutrients, and doesn’t need fertilizer just yet. This option will be available approximately twice a week (the cooldown period is around 4 days), which gives you enough time to grow or collect a quality fertilizer. With that being said, not all fertilizers are the same. 

Explore the new Sims 4 Greenhouse Haven Kit on SnootySims!

How to choose a perfect fertilizer?

A general rule of thumb is that expensive fertilizer is a good fertilizer, so when choosing which to use, look for the price first, and this applies to both fish and plants. You can use plants, mushrooms, and fish of any sort. On top of that, you can also benefit from having bees around. So, how to evolve plants by choosing the right fertilizer? This is what you can expect from each fertilizer:

1. fish

If you are struggling and can’t evolve plants, opt for the best fertilizer of them all – fish. However, no matter what your fertilizer of choice is, try not to opt for those that value less than $50, and for fish, you can make a decent fertilizer by using pricier fish with a price range from $50 to $300. 

The high-quality fish fertilizers are Tuna, Salmon, and Wolf Eel. Mountain Lionfish and Sturgeon are also high-quality but also valuable, so look at their value to discern whether you gain more by using them as a fertilizer, or by selling them. When choosing fish for fertilizing, don’t pay attention to rarity, but focus only on fish price and freshness. A Piranha for instance, despite being a rare fish, has a value of $27 in the best-case scenario, and as such isn’t much of a fertilizer. You want your fish to be as fresh as possible to be used or fertilized, so make sure to keep all your high-value catches in the fridge. So, if in doubt about how to evolve plants, avoid using spoiled fish.

2. Plants

Compared to fish, any plant you use as a fertilizer will be a medium-quality fertilizer at best, unless you use Growfruit. Growfruit, however, isn’t an easy find. To get it, you will have to have an access to rare seed packets, which cost $1000 and are unlocked when you reach Level 10 or Gardening skill, and hope to find it in one of them.

In ideal conditions, when choosing how to evolve plants, always look for the most valuable, highest-quality fertilizer you can get. However, it is also important to know that a medium-value fertilizer is better than no fertilizer at all. So, if you don’t have any pricey fertilizers in your inventory by the time the plant is ready to be fertilized, use the most valuable that you currently to avoid skipping the opportunity to fertilize.

3. bees

Another way to elevate the health of your plants is by getting bees, who naturally pollinate and fertilize plants. Placing a bee box is a great strategy for finding ways how to evolve plants. Put one (or a few) near your garden to help increase the effectiveness of other fertilizers, as bees will do this by default if you care for them properly. Having bees in the backyard will help you save the most valuable fertilizers for the most important plants. You will find a bee box in the buy mode, under Outdoor Activities.

The bee box impact stops at 5 Sims building squares, so place it as close to the plants you want to evolve as possible. Bees alone can’t evolve plants to the next stage of quality, but they will surely keep your plants healthy, especially if you don’t have enough fertilizer for them all.

Fertilize & Evolve All Mod for fast results

If finding ways how to evolve plants seems time consuming, you can use a Fertilize & Evolve Mod created by Carl that allows you to fertilize and evolve all plants. The mod allows you to pick a stack for fertilizing, and use everything from that stack to help you fertilize more effectively. It is a time saver if you have a big garden and hate clicking a thousand times on every plant and every fertilizer. You are still using your own resources from the stack, so you are not cheating on the use of fertilizer, just saving time picking.

If you can’t evolve plants one by one, the mod also allows you to select an Evolve All option, where you can evolve every eligible plant individually. This won’t mess up your natural way of doing things in the garden, just make fertilizing and evolving more efficient.

To take gardening one step further and make it easier, try out No Fig Deal Garden Mod.

using cheats to evolve plants faster

In the end, if you can’t evolve plants and have no time to tend to the garden, collect fertilizers, and fertilize, you can always use cheats. All you need to do is enable cheats. Press CTRL + C + SHIFT, type in testingcheats true, and hit Enter.

Once the cheats are activated, go to the plant you want to evolve, press SHIFT + click on it, and under Gardening choose Ready to Evolve to get it to sparkle and unlock the Evolve option. Then, click on the plant again with SHIFT + click, and select Evolve. Your plant is now evolved to the next stage of quality! You can use this for all five stages and on as many plants as you like.

Conclusion

This was our guide to evolving plants. Discovering ways how to evolve plants takes time and a little practice in your garden, but it is incredibly rewarding. Growing healthy plants is an enjoyable mission, and can yield enough simoleons to make a living out of gardening. With time, watering, spraying for bugs, weeding, fertilizing, and love, you can achieve a lot. Enjoy your Sims 4 gardening!

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