I am gardening for pet snacks and wanted to make a suggestion. As I work, it is hard to determine when a spell is going to expire, or if I have to leave within an hour of a garden spell expiring. Then my plants go all day without protection since spells are not renewable at our convenience. What I am suggesting is that gardening spells in the box I have screenshot, show a timer with how much longer the spell is going to last. Also, we need the option to renew or recast a spell convenient to our schedules. If a garden spell is due to renew and I recast it, the timer should begin again to the new cast time of the spell, so we can carry on with our schedules and not leave plants unattended because I had to go to work before it expires during my workday. I hope this makes sense...but spells should be re-settable to a new time if the spell is recast again. Just my suggestion to help this be more convenient for working players like myself, who also travel for work on occasion and may not have access to the game within 2 days or so. But recasting before I leave whether the spell is expired or not should give a new timer that I can keep up with when I return. I hope you understand my request.
I am gardening for pet snacks and wanted to make a suggestion. As I work, it is hard to determine when a spell is going to expire, or if I have to leave within an hour of a garden spell expiring. Then my plants go all day without protection since spells are not renewable at our convenience. What I am suggesting is that gardening spells in the box I have screenshot, show a timer with how much longer the spell is going to last. Also, we need the option to renew or recast a spell convenient to our schedules. If a garden spell is due to renew and I recast it, the timer should begin again to the new cast time of the spell, so we can carry on with our schedules and not leave plants unattended because I had to go to work before it expires during my workday. I hope this makes sense...but spells should be re-settable to a new time if the spell is recast again. Just my suggestion to help this be more convenient for working players like myself, who also travel for work on occasion and may not have access to the game within 2 days or so. But recasting before I leave whether the spell is expired or not should give a new timer that I can keep up with when I return. I hope you understand my request.
Forgive me if I am wrong, but it sounds like you might be misunderstanding one of the game mechanics for gardening (I also misunderstood it when I first started gardening until someone explained it to me).
Our plants only get needs when we 'trigger' them. To trigger needs (and also to push the plants to their next growth stage) we go to visit the garden where they're planted.
Needs will not appear when we are offline or even when we are online but not in that garden.
To avoid wilting we only have to do 2 things: 1. Make sure all needs have been dealt with before we leave the garden (the gardening icon will be green and healthy looking). 2. Log out from anywhere except the garden with plants in it.
If we do this we can leave our plants as long as we like without them developing needs that cause wilting...the new needs will only show up when we visit the garden again
Due to the above, the main use for the long duration spells (eg 48 hours) is for gardens we visit regularly or repeatedly that have plants in them. If we have plants in a place we can not easily avoid going to (eg dorm, house with teleports or tapestries, a house we're also decorating, somewhere we've got a gear/seed/jewel vault etc) we can use the long term protection to prevent every trip needing energy to see to sporadic needs triggering, allowing us to only deal with them all at once when they start to show after protection wears off.
Far from the added protection being for wizards who are offline for a while, it is there for wizards who are actively using the area with the plants or collecting lots of harvests during the time of protection
When the protection wears off, the plants are at the beginning of their timer to start getting needs, they will not immediately get needs when it wears off. We can wait until the needs are present before adding it again.
The only thing I can think of that might be different is the gardening pixie that acts as a like. I'm not sure whether the 'like' only lasts the predicted 48 hours or whether it is applied until we go back after the pixie has expired. I've never got around to checking this, sorry I can't be accurate!
I do agree with you though that a timer would be helpful - especially for those using the protection spells in homes they visit frequently. It would be helpful to know how to budget energy and decide when is best to reapply protection (or if reaplying it is not necessary)
