I've had the same issue. As troubleshooting process, I started a freshly downloaded project (checked and it worked fine) and only updated VisuMZ_0_CoreEngine and VisuMZ_1_EventsMoveCore to their latest versions (1.81 and 1.50 respectively) and tilling the ground doesn't work.
Animation plays as normal, it's just that events stopped spawning right after updating the plugins.