Ask for a sheaf, not a plant
Saltlight Cove needs a picture for everything you can hold — ten crops, forty goods. Drawing fifty icons by hand is weeks. Generating them is an afternoon, if you can get the machine to make the right thing.
It could not make plants. Ask a 3D generator for "sea oats" and it hands back a hut. Ask for mint and you get a hut with a green roof. We already knew this — the palm trees in the game are hand-built in Blender for exactly that reason.
Then the obvious thing: the icons in a farming game aren't growing plants. They're the harvest. A sheaf. A bundle. A jar.
A sheaf is an object — it has volume, weight, a silhouette. That's what these tools are good at. Every prompt got rewritten from the plant to the bundle:
a tied sheaf of golden sea-oat grain stalks, pale straw-yellow heads, bound with a thin twine band
All ten crops came back clean on the first pass, foliage included.
Kelp took two goes
Kelp came back as a coil of brown rope. Perfectly good rope. The fix was to name the failure inside the prompt:
broad flat ribbon-like leafy fronds with wavy frilled edges … NOT a rope, NOT a coil, NOT brown cord
Green, bladed, correct. Telling it what you don't want turns out to matter as much as telling it what you do.