inofficial Clay fan club

How to Grow Lots of Big Weeds

the short and simple answer is:

if you have 149 weeds or less, they will grow

if you have 150 weeds or more, they will not grow no mater what

everything else in this post is just extra information that you may find interesting or useful

—

I got fed up trying to figure out how weeds worked, so I made a throwaway town on my old switch and ran some experiments. the percentages I list is information I got from the guidebook. based on my tests, they seem to be correct. here’s what I learned:

water makes your weeds grow faster. rain, snow and your watering can all count

baby weeds have a 20% chance of growing without water, and a 50% chance of growing with water

medium weeds have a 5% chance of growing without water, and a 10% chance of growing with water

if you have 149 weeds or less, new weeds will spawn. once you reach 150, weeds will stop spawning and your weeds will stop growing

because weeds stop growing at 150, you can only have a total of 149 medium and large weeds combined

you can make all 149 of your weeds into full grown weeds if you want

if you want lots of bushy, wild-looking weeds all over your town, the most effective way to maximize your weeds is to plant exactly 149 weeds in places where you want the biggest weeds to grow. once a day a new weed will spawn, tipping you over to 150, so you’ll need to pluck one baby weed a day until all your weeds are the size that you want. at that point, you can go fill in the spaces with baby weeds

below are the notes I took while doing this process if you’re interested

Weed growing guide:

Okay, here’s what I found out after picking and placing weeds for hours....

I believe you can have 120-150 fully grown/large weeds before they stop growing tall. I have 121, at this point the growth seems to slow so i’m not sure if you can get more than that. As far as I know, if you have more than the limit —say you plant over 150 all at the baby stage—none of them will grow.

you can have 150 total weeds before new ones stop spawning according to the ACNH guidebook

If you want your tall weeds in specific places you have to pluck the ones you don’t want because there 1. has to be less than 120 for them to fully grow and 2. the ones that grow each day are random, so one that you don’t like the placement of might grow instead of one you really want to grow.

If you want to do this all in one go, place the weeds where you want them then time travel, picking the newly spawned weeds each day until the weeds that are in the proper place are fully grown. At that point, you should be able to place baby weeds without them growing

once again, as far as I know, more than 120~ will stop new growth. so if you want all baby weeds, just plant a ton at once. And if you want tall weeds you need to control the new weeds until you have 120 tall ones

You could potentially pick every weed and plant exactly 120, watering them until they grow but I haven’t personally tried doing it this way.

Oh also, based on my observations and the ACNH guide book, the bigger weeds are more likely to spawn new weeds nearby. So, if you have a lot of big weeds, those are the areas where new ones are more likely to be each day.

this is a lot more visible when you click the images to view them at full size, but I’ve noticed that the path you use under your patterns effects what your patterns look like when overlayed. 

the shape of the bricks can be seen through the pattern, so if you wanted to make your own bricks, I’d suggest going with the sand or one of the two dirt options for your base bath. I didn’t include it in any pics to keep them all neutral, but when a shadow from the clouds goes across, the brick patterns become much more visible

the dark dirt also makes your paths look a lot darker compared to the others, but it actually more closely resembles what it looks like in the pattern creator - the other paths all make your pattern look a lot lighter.