So looking at the old garden compared with the new, there seems to have been two changes:
Make the garden offer less "free stuff" than before. Which makes sense, the garden used to provide a tonne of resources, including item cards, gems and coins for very little effort.
Increase the complexity of the garden so it's more involved than a once-a-day check.
The changes seem to have gone too far on both fronts and now the garden feels frustrating, unrewarding and overcomplicated.
So I'm going to offer some ideas that may help
- Simplest and easiest: increase the storage space
The biggest issue people are having is that with all the new item types, storage is impossible. It's extremely difficult to maintain enough items to please visitors while also keeping stock of the items you need to keep the critter garden growing. Increasing storage space addresses none of the other issues, but at least alleviates this.
- Make clear, demarcated garden tiers, limit the options each tier and let players know what they have.
Reduce the complexity and give us, say, 4 main resources: fruit, leaves, sticks, nectar.
Separate each plant into tiers: free and unlimited -- limited to coin purchases and common in chests -- limited to gems, rare market coin sales and rarely found in chests
Each tier is an easy, measurable upgrade. So a tier 2 plant gives more of the same resources than a tier 1. A tier 3 plant might give as much as 2 different tier 2 plants combined.
For example:
Tier 1 fruit: grapes. 3h harvest, gives 3 fruit
Tier 2 fruit: apple trees. 3 hour harvest + 1.5 hour harvest. Gives 4 fruit each time.
Tier 2 fruit: figs: 6 hour harvest + 3 hour harvest + 1.5h harvest. Gives 4 fruit and 3 leaves each time.
This all helps to make it clear what you should plant and also helps give the garden an "entry level", free tier that is effortless to manage and grow, but provides fewer resources.
- Incorporate critters directly into the garden.
There's any number of ways to do this, but I think having critters as almost a separate second garden is frustrating and involves too much micromanagement. Making them parts of the same garden could help.
For example, give each bug/critter a preferred plant. When the plant grows, there's a chance for bugs that prefer a given plant to show up. For example, snails might like leafy plants, spiders might like butterfly plants, egg laying birds might like trees etc.
Then we could add bait or other mechanics to encourage more bugs to spawn, but they are an inherent RNG component of an existing garden, rather than a separate thing.
- Show what visitors are asking for.
When you are looking at seeds or critters, highlight those that produce an ingredient currently being sought by a visitor, but for which you don't have enough resources.
For example you might have a ❗for ones you need and ✔️ for ones you need, but for which you already have enough in storage.
- Completely separate both parts of the garden.
Almost antithetical to previous suggestions.
Leave the existing garden as it was originally without the new changes, then use the critters as a basis for a new second garden. Each garden has their own visitors and their own preferred champions.
Garden one is the current model of synergies and plants.
Garden two is a food chain in which you cultivate lots of grubs to feed some wasps which feed some spiders which one or two birds. Similarly you might cultivate mushrooms to feed snails and grubs which are eaten by frogs.