Guide to Fertilizers (Know Which One is the Best)

If you want your sim grow high quality plants you are going to need some good fertilizer. Sims 4 comes with a large variety of fertilizers with a variety of strengthens. It can be difficult to know which one is the best one to use. There are multiple factors that you have to take into consideration when deciding which fertilizer is the best option.

There are five quality levels for plants: normal, nice, excellent, magnificent, and perfect. Using strong fertilizers will significantly decrease the amount of time it takes until you can evolve your plants to the next quality level. This article will lay out what to look for in a fertilizer, some of the best ones to use, and where you can find them.

How to fertilize plants in Sims 4.

Fertilizing plants requires gardening level 3, sims can do a variety of activities to increase their gardening skills. Such as plant new plants, weed, water, and spray for bugs. You can also gain the gardening skill through reading books, or researching the skill on the research archive machine.

If you want to learn everything there is to know about Gardening and the Gardening skill, I put together a comprehensive guide that goes over everything starting from how to plant seeds.

Once you reach level 3 of the gardening skill your sim will now have the option to fertilize plants. To fertilize your plants you will click on the plant you wish to fertilize, select fertilize and then choose the fertilizer you wish to use. You must have the fertilizer you wish to use in your sim's inventory.

You can fertilize plants every four or five days. After you fertilize a plant, if you go back and click on that plant you will notice that the option to fertilize is now grayed out and you cannot select that option. It will say "this plant has recently been Fertilized." After about four or five days the option to fertilize will become available once more.

Types of Fertilizers

Sims 4 base game included two different main types of fertilizers, Fish and Plants. With the introduction of more expansion packs more fish and plants were introduced to the game giving you more fertilizer options.

In addition, Sims 4 Cats and Dogs introduced a new type of fertilizer. You can use your pet's poop to fertilize your garden. It is actually one of the better options for a fertilizer. You will see a large initial gain in your plant's quality after use.

Sims 4 Cottage Living introduced new types of gardening with oversized crops. They also introduced special fertilizers for these plants. This article does not cover those particular fertilizers.

What makes one fertilizer better than the other?

There are a few different metrics to look for when deciding what makes a good fertilizer. There is the value of the fish or plant, the rarity of the fish or plant, and the quality of the fish or plant.

Some believe that a fish or plant worth more than $50 are the best fertilizers, but that is not necessarily the only metric to base your fertilizer's performance on. I planted multiple mushrooms in my sim's garden and I used a Treefish worth $40 and very rare on one mushroom and a Tuna worth over $50 and not as rare on another mushroom. Between the Treefish and Tuna I saw the exact same benefit in the quality of the mushrooms themselves.

Below the picture shows the quality gain I experienced after fertilizing the mushrooms. I saw the same boost in quality after using a Treefish and a Tuna.

The quality of the fertilizer does not seem to make a difference either. If you leave fish in your inventory for too long they will spoil and become foul quality. I used a Koi that was good quality and one that was foul quality and the benefit from both the good quality and foul quality Koi was the exact same.

Which ones works the best?

After doing some experimenting myself to see what makes a good fertilizer, I found that it is a combination between value and rarity. I have put together a list below of the best fish and plants to use as fertilizers.

After using each one of these fertilizers all my plants gained the same amount of quality. Each plant was newly planted and at normal quality, after using each of these fertilizers each plant was about to evolve to the next level.

Another fertilizer worth noting are your sim's pet poops. With Sims 4 Cats and Dogs, whenever your dog goes to the bathroom outside you can pick up their poops and put them in your inventory to use as fertilizer.

Pet poops work just as well as the fertilizers I listed in the table above. There are a few different types of pet poops, a large pet poop and a small pet poop, there was no difference in performance when I used each of these. The only pet poop that did not perform as well was the rainbow pet poop.

Where do you find the best fertilizers?

If you are looking for some of the best fertilizers in the game, here are some of the spots you can find the fertilizers I mentioned above.

If you are looking for either a Treefish, Pomegranate, Koi, Tuna, or Cowplant Berry you can find all of these in a secret lot called Sylvan Glade. You can enter Sylvan Glade through a unique looking willow tree found in the Foundry Cove neighborhood that is located in Willow Creek.

To enter the tree you will need to go up to the tree and interact with it. At first you will only have the option to view the tree after you do that a few times you will have the options to water the tree and discuss nature with the tree. After interacting quite a few times you will notice a hole appears in the tree and you now have the option to explore. You will want to choose explore and then you will have a series of popup questions that have one of two chooses.

To get through to the Sylvan Glade select the following:

1. Follow the Sound
2. Follow Downstream
3. Enter the Mist
4. Travel to Glade

Once you reach the Sylvan Glade you will have access to a new fishing spot that is home to many rare fish and items. You will need your sim to be at least fishing skill 4, otherwise your sim won't have the ability to catch anything.

Growfruit is a rare plant that was originally introduced to the game in 2016 during the growfruit challenge. To complete the challenge back then, you had to find a sim named Jasmine Holiday and ask her for the seed. Jasmine Holiday has since left the game for good, but the Growfruit remains. You can no longer complete the challenge, but you can still grow the Growfruit and take advantage of its great fertilizing powers.

Once you max out your gardening skill to level 10 you will have the ability to purchase the rare seed packet. Growfruit and other rare seeds will be inside the packets. If you haven't maxed out your gardening skill quite yet, you can also use cheats to get the Growfruit.

You will want to use bb.showhiddenobjects and then search the buy catelog for "Debug" you might have to scroll through for awhile, but you can find both the Growfruit plant and a mature Growfruit tree. Once you place these on your lot, your sim will have the ability to interact with either the plant or mature tree as they normally would.

I wrote an article covering everything you need to know about objects, you can find out how to access all the hidden objects in my guide.

The base game also includes the UFO plant that requires your sim to go out of this world to get. If you enjoy building rockets and shooting off into space your sim will have the ability to get the UFO plant. You have to successfully complete some space missions, and as a reward your sim will earn the UFO.

You can also obtain the UFO by using the same cheat above with the Growfruit. If you have Sims 4 Eco Lifestyle, you can also try dumpster diving. Some players have reported finding a UFO plant by dumpster diving, you may also stumble upon a money tree plant and some other good quality fertilizers.

Sims 4 Get to Work includes both the Quill Fruit and Fang Flower. These are both alien plants and you need to access the alien world, known as Sixam, to obtain these plants. You can do this by creating the wormhole through the scientist career. If you are interested in going to Sixam, you can learn more in my article discussing breakthroughs and the scientist career.

If you don't want to go through the trouble of getting to Sixam, and you have Sims 4 Cottage Living you can find the Quill Fruit almost daily at the Garden Shop. The Garden Shop can be found in the Finchwick Neighborhood located in Henford-on-Bagley. I usually just visit the bar and then have my sim walk over to the town center. It is open from 9:00 am to 7:00 pm and you can purchase the Quill Fruit for $240.

Sims 4 Cottage Living includes the Nightly Mushrooms. These can be found at night at the Isle of Volpe Park in the Bramblewood neighborhood located in Henford-on-Bagley. Nightly mushrooms can only be found at night and are the most valuable mushroom in the game. They must also be harvested at night so you have to make sure you harvest them in time otherwise you will have to wait until the next night.

There are some wild Nightly Mushrooms located near the waterfall. You will see there is a big hill that leads to a small lot, and on the way up there is a bench your sim can sit on. In front of that bench grows some wild nightly mushrooms. If you go by the park at night you will have the ability to harvest these mushrooms.

How to get perfect plants without fertilizer.

If you are only interested in finding perfect plants without the hassle of fertilizing them and waiting for their quality to go up, you can pull perfect plants straight from the Sims 4 gallery. If you search perfect plants in the gallery, many players have saved rooms full of perfect plants.

Do be careful however, I found that some rooms are a bit too full of plants and my computer could not handle loading in that many assets at once. For reference, I play sims on a desktop computer with a decent graphics card and 32 GBs of Ram and still have trouble loading in these rooms.

If you have Sims 4 City Living, when you go to the festivals some include perfect plants that you can harvest. If you harvest them at the festival, unfortunately by the time you take them home they will not remain perfect quality. Besides loading in perfect plants from the Gallery there are no cheats to increase the quality of your plants.