This is for the achievement hunters who don't want to throw out their perfectly good plants, but still want the "farming" achievements:

• Leaving home to face the world
  
• Pleasant little garden
  
• Small ecological disaster
  
• You are really good at growing plants; maybe you should take it easy!

There are a few guides out there that talk about how to maximize the efficiency of your plant turnover, but here we're going to actually manipulate your game save data, which will get you all the achievements in the space of 10 to 15 minutes, depending on your mousing skills and level of motivation. What we're going to do is make backup copies of your game data, go in and throw plants into the garden, then restore the backups and keep doing it again until the achievements trigger.

I guess it's worth mentioning that if anything could be considered "cheating" in a single-player game, this would be it; only proceed if your conscience is clear. :) For me, my pots are just the way I like them and I'm not into the whole "evolution of my pot contents" thing, so even though I could easily have gotten all these achievements the normal way by now, this process saved me a bunch of extra hassle.

1. Right-click the game in your library and go to "Properties".
   
2. Click the "General" tab.
   
3. Look in the "Steam Cloud" section.
   
4. Make sure the "Keep game's saves in the Steam Cloud for Viridi" checkbox is not checked.
   
5. Close the Properties window.

EDIT: Reserve Course Student ( https://gtm.steamproxy.vip/id/paracritter ) noted in the comments that the Steam client's settings UI has changed over time, and the setting is in a different place. Thanks for the update!

First off, make sure Viridi is not running.

Next, find your data directory; it should be in this subdirectory of your Steam installation:

[Steam installation] > SteamApps > common > Viridi > Viridi_Data

Now make a directory anywhere (I made mine right here in the data directory); this is going to hold your data file backups. Copy (do not move) all "planterInfo*.dat" files into the new directory. As of right now, in my installation that includes two of them because I have two pots (the original pot, and the Grove pot); you should have one file like this per pot:


Again, make sure you copy the files, don't move them...they still need to exist where Viridi can read them.

EDIT: Strelec ( https://gtm.steamproxy.vip/id/danima ) and Reserve Course Student ( https://gtm.steamproxy.vip/id/paracritter ) noted in the comments that the only file(s) that are necessary to copy are the "planterInfo*.dat" ones (one file per pot). I haven't specifically tested it myself but with two people saying it I'm ready to update the guide. If it ever comes up in the future, the previous instructions were to copy all files with a *.dat extension. Thanks for the info!

It's time for the moment of truth; launch Viridi and throw out as many plants as you can. Don't worry, you'll be getting them all back just the way they were. If you backed up your data files properly, everything should be fine, but if you want to be safer on your first pass, just do your least favorite plant on its own and verify that it comes back when you reload.

Note: It's possible you can also test by starting when you have at least one plant that needs water. If you water it and then when you come back it's back to "Thirsty" or "Parched" then you know the restore worked. I haven't technically tested this, though (has anybody else?).

To throw a plant into the garden, select it and click the "move" button (the one to the left of the plant's name/status). When you click the "move" button, it will change to the "delete" button. Click it again to throw the plant into the garden (that's Viridi's way of saying "delete"). You'll see the achievement notification immediately when you throw out your first, tenth, 50th, and 100th plant.

Now that you've thrown plants into the garden, it's time to get them back by overwriting Viridi's current game data with the backup copy.

Make sure Viridi is not running, and open up your game data directory:

[Steam installation] > SteamApps > common > Viridi > Viridi_Data

Now open the directory where you copied all the "*.dat" files, and copy (again, don't do a move...do a copy) the backups into the real game data directory. If you get some kind of "do you want to overwrite?" confirmation message (you almost certainly will), confirm that you want to overwrite what's currently in the Viridi directory with the files from the backup folder.

That's really all there is to it. Now that you've restored your backup save data, everything is back to the way it was before. Depending on where you are in the process, you may want to do some or all of the following...


If this pass was just a test (you only watered thirsty plants), launch Viridi again and verify that the watering statuses are back. If not, then you'll need to start over from the beginning (probably after waiting long enough for another plant or two to get thirsty so you can test again).


If you threw plants into the garden but still don't have all the achievements you want, launch Viridi again and keep repeating the process until you're satisfied with the results.


If you've gotten all the achievements you want, then you're done!

If want Steam Cloud synchronization on, you can turn it back on now. Steam may give you an alert about the cloud version's and the local version's being out of sync; you can probably choose either option ("overwrite from local" or "overwrite from cloud") since the two sets of data should be the same, but if your plants were the way you wanted them the last time you closed Viridi, then "overwrite from local" would be the safest choice. The astute reader may note that you could use this "overwrite from cloud" feature as a recovery method of last resort if something goes wrong; that's probably true, but I didn't want to put it in the guide and then have it not work because I'm not 100% familiar with exactly how Steam Cloud Sync does its thing.

You can delete the game data backup directory you created, if you like. It's not needed for anything, but personally I like to keep one around in case I ever neglect my plants for so long that they dehydrate and die. I guess that would be cheating too. :)

The following people have helped keep this guide up to date by providing corrections in the comments which are now reflected in the guide; thanks for the info!

• Strelec ( https://gtm.steamproxy.vip/id/danima ) noted in the comments that the only file(s) that are necessary to copy are the "planterInfo*.dat" ones (one file per pot).
  
• Reserve Course Student ( https://gtm.steamproxy.vip/id/paracritter ) both confirmed Strelec's observation and provided info about the new Steam Client settings location to toggle Cloud Saves.
  
  • I haven't tested the file backup myself, but now that two people have confirmed it, I feel like it's good to go. The previous instructions were to copy all files with a "*.dat" extension.

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