This is an improvement but the mini game could use some more work.
It starts the moment you get into the interface rather than the moment you click on the dragable bar. You still have your inputs during and after affect the minigame or the regular game when exiting. Like if you're scrolling the bar up suddenly you're staring at the sky. If there was a buffer before and after you could probably get rid of this minor issue.
I'm also confused on whether you can sniff the same plants twice or more. Is it time based? So you can sniff the same plants again later if you're careful? There were quite a few plants in the starting area. Wheat, cactus, corn, these all seem hard coded to only give you one sample regardless of how well you do in the minigame. I should be getting 4-6 but they always only gave 1 sample.
Also the speed at which you move in the open world versus the village seem different. It seems slower in the open world but maybe its just there's not much visual feedback on how fast you move or that the scaling is still a little off. In the village jumping felt like moon shoes. In the open world jumping felt like trudging through molasses. I still slide down surfaces, except now the screen jitters if I try to fight it. As well as jumping while on a slope sending me laterally rather than vertically. There's something up with the collision. You made it less floaty by making the character heavier but it's created a different issue it seems without solving the original one entirely. I found the movement in the village to be fine. Even if the jumps were floaty, I prefered it to the open world navigation still.
It would be interesting to either have more variety in minigames, or having differences in reward and cost for different types of plants. I'm consistently getting 4-6 per samples so I'm not in any peril of losing the game any time soon.
Ideas for minigame variation;
A bar that fills and lowers and you have to time your click to land in a zone. The closer to the bullseye the better. It wouldn't be timed, but it wouldn't yield as much samples as the one currently in the game. Like 0-3. But it wouldn't take much energy either.
Hitting keys that appear on the screen like a combination. The faster you input the keys, correctly, the more you get at the end.
Filling up a bar while holding a specific key. Another bar fills faster than the main bar. if the secondary bar fills you fail. So you have to let go of the keys in order to let the second bar cool down. The main bar fills slower but also empties slower.
I didn't hear any music. Or sounds. If there is music and sounds the sound wasn't working. The sensitivity of my mouse was fine.
Overall I liked this much more than the first version, and it retained my attention far longer before I grew bored. It was far less frustrating.