Trees and tree issues

[plasmageek]

Is there a secret to making your tree produce 'normally'? I have 12 cocoa trees and it's been weeks and I've maybe 4 of them have produced anything? I've noticed other trees don't seem to produce regularly as well. I thought it was a hidden spacing issue, so spaced them more, removed the banana trees that were near them. I thought offerings to Mara might play a role, i'm offering constantly (really, do this even do anything? I'm about 20+ days without rain)

Also, why do the peach trees have to be up on top? They're HUGE.

Note: I am on the switch version, but since Nintendo doesn't offer forums, this seemed like the best place to post.

[dizzykei]

I was needed bananas, but my trees doesn't produce them, so i pick up bananas on other islands. Maybe offerings to gods somehow influence harvest.

[jabbywocks]

I wish there was some rhyme or reason behind tree production; It all seems pretty random to me. Sometimes it takes weeks to get 1 cocoa and other times it seems like a couple days.

[plasmageek]

So I decided to do some testing. I stayed at my island and collected fruit every day and then restarted the next day. It seemed like the same amount of fruit was being produced each day, so I supposed that maybe I was just getting bad RNG. I burned pretty much all of it to the ground. I kept some pineapple, cherry, cocoa, peach, pomegranate, lemon and some one I've never heard of.

Sadly, this didn't seem to fix production. I was curious how many trees I still had on my island, so I went to plant one and it tells me I only have 6 trees on my whole island....when I have 7 types and more like 30 trees still.

So i burned everything but my pineapple and cocoa and it says I have 1 tree on my whole island...

burn the pineapple and apparently cocoa doesn't even count as a tree/plant. I have 0 trees on my island. Slept a few days to get some cocoa from my non-existent trees (with 0 -2 trees at most producing, always the same ones) and burned all them, too. Now, I truly have 0 trees/plants.

Planted 1 new cocoa and it still doesn't count as a tree. Blackberries and raspberries count however.

I'm not sure how this game is counting trees/plants on our island. I know at the beginning all the pine trees seemed to be counted individually, but that doesn't seem to be the case now for the other fruit trees. And apparently, cocoa isn't a tree/plant, so I'm beyond confused and I suspect the algorithm is too.

[Kiri Kiwibear]

I'm equally baffled by cocoa. I got a few seeds to start with and used them to make a piece of chocolate and then... nothing. I think I've only had one peach as well, but I don't go up there as often because it's a pain to run all the way up and then all the way back down just for three trees. (Or more realistically, jump off the edge to get back down.)

[Igorious]

I have the same issue. I've finished the story, but still get no one seeds from my 7 cocoa trees :(

[Pesky]

So ... a year later, and at least one update to the game later.

All the beach trees (coconut, banana, cocoa, pineapple) are very slow to mature, and very slow to fruit. I don't think there are any bugs involved. They're just programmed to be very slow. This includes the trees on other islands: once you have collected their fruit it's a long time before they produce new fruit.

In my games, the ones which seems slowest are pineapple. I discovered pineapple trees, and immediately bought one pineapple back home and planted it. I had finished the game, including all sidequests, before it fruited.