This pip doesn't plant his acorn.

Seems there are just too many plants too close together.

Mmmm. Mmmm. Okay, aha, fair enough.

Implementing this through some sort of collision boxes (kinda like distance to the nearest plant but taking plant size into account) would have been much more intuitive to me. It would allow repeating any specific pattern that you've found.

I found this pretty important because experimenting with pips planting plants is one of the few experiments in the game you can't naturally undo (i.e. you can't bring back live soil easily once you dig it). So when i find a pattern that works, i expect it to keep working. So it was kinda frustrating. Thanks for reading my excuse!

It's intuitive enough to me. I think I started with a different assumption than you did; I assume that the number of plants inside a certain radius matters, not just the distance to the single nearest plant.

Yeah, i mean it's probably even realistic to have this smoothed out.

But gameplay-wise i'd rather have every entity's behavior be easy to observe and reason about.