malymin

While I consider Stardew Valley a better purchase than The Sims 4, as all of its content additions have been completely free, and it being a more focused farming simulator is probably better for people who enjoy farming play than relying on Sims 4's expansions (most prominently Seasons and Cottage Living, to a lesser extent Eco Lifestyle and Horse Ranch), sometimes I do like certain details of how interconnected systems can be in the Sims.

For example: beekeeping. In Stardew, beehouses are just kind of an object that generates honey every few days, requiring no maintenance. They benefit from being placed near different kind of flowers, with certain flowers resulting in more valuable honey, but they don't really benefit the crops (aka, the main thing of Stardew) themselves. In addition, it kind of becomes more effective to just plant a single, valuable flower (such as a Fairy Rose) near a large number of bee-boxes for them to all benefit from its honey, which feels... slightly backwards, to me?

In TS4: Seasons, bee boxes have more needs to tend to, which is fine for the hobby-garden scope of agriculture in the sims - plants are also more fine-grained, mechanically, with you leveling up individual planted crops via fertilizing to increase their output quality, planting those higher-level crops so you don't have to go through the process of evolving future harvestibles, tending to not just watering but also weeding and pests, etc.

But what I really like about TS4 bee boxes is the nature of how they "plug into" the Gardening skill. Bee boxes in the Sims 4, unlike the ones in Stardew Valley, do not yield more valuable honey near fancier crops - honey value is affected entirely by the friendship and mood of the hive. Rather, bees provide a small fertilizer bonus (pretty sure it's supposed to represent pollination, but internally it's considered fertilizer) that stacks with sim-planted fertilizer. This means bee boxes passively help you "evolve" (level up to higher crop quality) your crops, all while providing their own produce (not just honey, but beeswax if candle-making is available) that can be sold raw, eaten, used in cooking or crafting, etc.

As Carl's Guide notes:

Bee boxes are perfect for gardening. They affect plants up to 5 squares away in all four directions. You can cover a huge area (about 20 plants) with one bee box so long as you plant around it. With 2-3 boxes strategically placed you could cover 60 plants. The bee box lend an aura that grants a small fertilizer bonus to all nearby plants, which stacks with regular fertilizer. This leaves you free to use your best fertilizer on your best plants. All of this happens automatically, just care for your bees so they don't slow down the gardening process (the animation of being stung gets tedious if you're caring for a large garden with angry bees around). So the drawback is there - you have to work with the bees to make this a good thing, but your reward is honey and free fertilization bonuses that will evolve your plants to Perfect albeit slowly.

So, think about the gameplay incentives created. A single bee-box surrounded by planters feels more ludo-narratively correct than a bunch of bee boxes around a single flower...

It's also very satisfying to see the animation of the bees flying over every planter box "in range" to "pollinate" the garden, and know it's doing something to boot!

Then you bring in how horse manure (Horse Ranch in TS4, Pets in TS3) is some of the best fertilizer in both Sims games that have horses...

I think it would be neat if ConcernedApe allowed bee boxes in his own game to provide some benefits to crop quality in their "pollination radius", as well as benefiting themselves from flowers in that radius. I would feel more inclined to actually use them habitually then, I think.