Changing Plant Database?

I am looking into definitions.db to better understand planting seasons and times, found the relevant fields

I might have found a nextgrowthstage descrepancy which makes no sense to me - corn, chili and cotton are never assigned to their 2nd stage, as the 1st stage jumps to 3rd stage

Also what time units (s? m? h?) are used for the growthtime, are they game or real time - what is the interaction with settings day (or daylight?) time scaling. I presume the harvest duration settings variable multiplies these number, but is growthtime time for that growth stage or time since planting to change growth stage

I want to check if gardening is a realistic fraction of the season but set trees to take a very very long time to force making more trails to new logging grounds rather than a tree farm regrowing as if it was just bigger bit slower hempfarm.

Not sure how to go about making a persistent edits that are not wiped with updates - is there a SQL programming interface to use instead?

Quote from james1bow

RE: plant growth rate

That answers things I had assumed which is real time with setting multiplying it - consistent with the way other settings are. I really dislike that as it makes way more sense to have a game day speed then put timers in game days - otherwise you have to tweak every timer when you try to find a game day you like! But dev is not inclined to make that change.

That still leaves the question are these times from planting to stage change, or time of each change?

And what are the real time units of time? 600 are fastest growers so 600s would be 10m that seems much to fast, so maybe it is 600m (10h?) or a third of a season (which would be in IRL a month but here is 10 game day of 30 game day month)

And how to make persistent changes?

And why it skips a stage on a few plants?

If it is seconds that makes some plants really fast then can probably just sit and watch for an hour and reverse engineer if it is since prior stage or since planted times.

there are prefabs assigned for the skipped stages. just the next stage say s1 goes to s3 rather than s1 goes to s2 even though there is a s2 goes to s3.. You would think if dev just wanted those plants to be faster then adjust the times rather than skip a stage.

I know there is a day length adjustment - but wondering if there is a timerescale that just says change all timers so 1s = 1/4s or something like that. Speed it up to better understand then slow it down for better survival.