Gardening: Minimalist (Part 1)

Nothing is more frustrating than finding you’re too short on energy to take care of every single plant.  Especially during harvest time, when you are looking at valuable crops and plants, you may feel inclined to purchase an Energy Elixir to save that Silver Trumpet Vine or Maelstrom Snap Dragon that you’ve been so attentive to.  If you’re more interested in aesthetics, this post may not be for you.  If you’re focused on obtaining the rewards from Gardening rather than building the greatest looking field, please continue!  The purpose of this guide is to help you design an energy efficient layout for your plants, in addition to understanding a few more mechanics of the game.

First, let’s determine how far you can position a “Like” from a plant, as some furniture items do take up collision space (the amount of room around an object that prohibits movement or placement of other objects).  The main idea is to allow yourself to understand how much you need to compress your plants together so that they can all benefit from the same “Like” (Tropical Garden Gnome) without using up too much House Capacity (how many items you can place in your home).  Each Garden Gnome does represent a loss of a unique or interesting housing item, so let’s find out how large their “Like” aura covers.

I used pots here not only because it is indoors, but to save me energy from having to dig a hole, and energy from having to remove that plot.  If I wanted to save more gold, I could always use Enchanted Pots over regular ones; plants that don’t need Enchanted Soil can use it anyway!  (There was a question during Ravenwood Radio last night about the difference between regular and enchanted soil; the only difference is what the soil looks like, but there is no change in a plant’s growth rate).

I mouse-over my plant to show that the Garden Gnome is indeed taking effect on the Stinkweed.  Keep in mind Stinkweed requires a Small plot.

Eight pots were placed in a straight line, and the Stinkweed is still affected by the Gnome.  I ran out of Small Pots, but that doesn’t limit my distance in this experiment!  I can just bring the second pot to the end and count that as a ninth:

Take note of where the Gnome is positioned on the pot farthest to the left (ninth).  When I placed the Gnome on the very end of that pot, the Stinkweed no longer had any “Likes.”  But, when I moved it to the middle of the ninth Small pot, Stinkweed is happy again.  There are various interpretations to how you can quantify this, but I’m going to say that the maximum distance a “Like” can be away from a plant is eight-and-a-half (8.5) Small plots.  How about the distance for Medium and Large plots?

About 5.5 Medium Plots or 3.5 Large Plots, based on the picture above.  So, linearly from left to right, the Gnome can affect a single row of 19 Small Plants or 11 Medium Plants or 7 Large Plants.  Now that we know our range for “Likes,” we understand how far away our Pet Cannons or Regal Dragon Statues or Piles of Sand can be before they lose effect.

In my next post, we’ll look at diameters of AOE Gardening Spells to determine some strategic layouts.  Thanks for reading, Happy Harvesting!