Vanilla Plants Expanded - Flowers - Seasonal Flowers, Blooming Gardens and Decorative Plants for RimWorld

Vanilla Plants Expanded - Flowers is a decorative gardening mod for RimWorld that introduces new flowers, seasonal blooming cycles, plant aging, and additional interactions with colonists. Instead of remaining unchanged throughout the year, flowers now respond to the seasons, develop over time, and contribute differently to the beauty of your settlement.

The mod expands colony decoration with flower gardens that require attention throughout the year. Blooming plants increase environmental beauty, older flowers become more attractive, and colonists can enjoy smelling flowers during recreational activities.

New Flowers and Seasonal Blooming

Vanilla Plants Expanded - Flowers introduces a collection of ornamental plants with individual flowering periods.

Main gardening features include:

• Seasonal blooming: Flowers bloom during specific periods of the year, reaching their highest beauty values.
• Changing appearance: Outside their blooming periods, flowers appear as ordinary plants.
• Plant aging: Flowers become more beautiful as they grow older, gaining stacking beauty bonuses.
• Winter dormancy: Many flowers lose their leaves during winter and enter a dormant state, temporarily providing negative beauty.
• Temperature management: Players can move flowers indoors when outdoor temperatures become too cold.

This system makes gardens change throughout the year and rewards players who maintain their decorative plants over time.

Garden Maintenance and Weeds

The mod introduces a Weeds event that can affect flower gardens and reduce their attractiveness.

Players must maintain their gardens to preserve their beauty and prevent unwanted vegetation from interfering with their landscaping.

Because flowers gain additional beauty as they age, keeping established plants becomes more rewarding than constantly replacing them.

Smelling Flowers and Colonist Recreation

Blooming flowers also provide an additional recreational activity for colonists.

Characters seeking recreation can interact with flowering plants and smell the flowers, receiving positive mood effects.

This gives decorative gardens a purpose beyond improving the environmental beauty of a colony.

How to Grow and Relocate Flowers

Players must first complete the Horticulture research project to unlock the new flowers.

After researching the technology, flowers can be planted in two ways:

1. Place flowers inside ordinary flower pots.
2. Create Blooming Flower growing zones for outdoor gardens.

Unlike ordinary crops, decorative flowers cannot be harvested. Once planted, they remain available as permanent ornamental plants.

Flowers can also be removed and replanted elsewhere using the mod's relocation functionality.

This allows players to redesign gardens as their colony expands or move valuable plants indoors during cold weather.

Special Flower Effects and Apiary Integration

Some flowers provide additional gameplay benefits beyond appearance.

Special interactions include:

• Marigolds: A room containing a blooming marigold will never be selected as an insectoid infestation target.
• Hydrangeas: Their flower color is randomly determined for each map and remains unchanged.
• VFE-Medieval 2 apiaries: Each blooming flower counts as four flowers for apiary calculations.

The integration with apiaries makes flowering gardens useful for colonies that also engage in beekeeping.

Seasonal Behavior and Save Compatibility

Vanilla Plants Expanded - Flowers can be added to an existing RimWorld save.

Flowering follows fixed Northern Hemisphere seasonal dates, even on maps with permanent summer conditions.

For example:

• Aprimay: Spring.
• Decembrary: Winter.

This means that flowers continue to follow their scheduled blooming and dormancy periods even in regions without conventional seasonal temperature changes.

Individual flower types cannot be described as having identical blooming schedules, since each follows its own seasonal cycle.

Authors

• Oskar Potocki - Mod design and artwork.
• Sarg Bjornson - Programming.
• Vitalii - Storyteller artwork.