First, to bring everyone up to date: I was able to obtain a bag of cat food at the regular grocery store yesterday. I have been forgiven. For now.
When we last left Dean, he had just (accidentally) pledged to the Tri Var sorority. The ladies are not so great at doing their homework, but they do know how to pass the time.
By blowing bubbles, of course. You know college kids and their bubble blowers! Always with the bubbles.
I cringe whenever I send a Sim to college. College is an additional 24 days added onto your Sim’s life, and with so few college-related obligations, it’s a perfect time to beef up their skill levels. This is great from a strategic perspective, and also for knitting, but incredibly boring for the human controlling the game.
I believe the kids call this “grinding.”
Anyway, when not ensconced in the library with his textbooks, Dean took time out to catch fireflies.
I also sent him out to the nightclubs a few times, to look for a lady friend.
One of the delightful things about the Sims 2 is that the characters you aren’t playing can show up on lots as NPCs. One night, Dean ran into his great-uncle, Baxter Shin.
This kind of interaction is possible because when you’re busy playing Lot A, the Sims on Lot B go into stasis and don’t age. In The Sims 3, your Sims will continue to age even when you aren’t playing them. I still haven’t decided how I feel about that.
I also sent Dean out one winter to build a snowman. He built a devil snowman (his choice). Later that day, the penguin stopped by, and talked to Dean’s snowman about crime.
Meanwhile, the clock was ticking. As Dean approached his junior year in college, I started wondering if I would have to set him up with a date through the Gypsy, as I had for his father before him. I had sent Dean out into the world several times, but he hadn’t encountered a female Sim with whom he had chemistry.
One day while he was fixing breakfast, he randomly rolled a Want to “flirt with someone.” Since his aspiration meter was low, I decided to have him flirt with the first Sim who walked past.
His sorority sister Brittany Upsnott awoke and came downstairs. I commanded Dean to goose her. (So rude!) To my great surprise, they both fell instantly, madly in love with one another.
To be fair, I know of at least one case where that kind of thing happened in real life, too.
The summer of Dean’s senior year in college was a brutal one. First, Tiffany collapsed of heatstroke in the upstairs bathroom. I know not why. I think she was taking a shower.
Fortunately, Dean was able to revive her by dousing her with a glass of water. But the possibility of a dousing came too late for poor Heather, who went hot tubbing in the heat of the day.
(In case you were wondering: no, her surviving roommates did not automatically receive straight As after her death.)
Finally, Dean graduated from college. I had him loiter around the sorority house for 2 more days, until Brittany could graduate as well. Then Dean returned to the family home.
I bet he’s wondering why his house is filled with a bunch of old people who stubbornly refuse to die.
I love Sunday Sims! I have to agree, sending a Sim off to University was pretty boring. It did allow for a great deal of knitting time though. But still. Boring. I’m not sure how I feel about that addition in Sim 3 where the non-played lot still ages. Maybe its a good thing I don’t have a single computer in my collection that is powerful enough to play it. Blessing in disguise.
The Sims world is strangely compelling. And completely nonsensical in a weirdly logical way.
Tell me, when I play this stuff, I’m always scrabbling to keep the Sim alive without collapsing from exhaustion or hunger or lack of fun. How do yours manage to have such varied lives?!
That’s a really interesting question! I think it’s partly from experience, I spent SO much time playing Sims 1. Seriously, a year and a half, pretty much every waking minute that I wasn’t at work. And often when I was. (I worked night shift, and brought in my laptop.)
I prioritize their needs thusly:
1. Hunger (that’s the one that can kill them)
2. Bathroom (quick enough to remedy)
3. Sleep
4. Fun
5. Hygeine (no one ever died of being stinky)
6. Social
7. Comfort (I pretty much ignore this one entirely)
8. Environment (ditto)
Sims can get by on one meal a day, if you make them go back for a second bowl to top up their hunger. I usually try to feed them twice a day, or they start getting cranky.
If you’re living in a multi-Sim household, have the Sim with the highest cooking skill make a meal, then put away the leftovers. Use those to feed the other Sims, because the higher your cooking skill, the more filling the meal is. And it’s faster for the other Sims to get leftovers than to try and cook on their own.
I usually try to keep them on a relatively “normal” sleeping schedule, and send them to bed around 10PM. Sometimes this means sending them to bed before they’re very sleepy, but if they end up waking up early, they can do skill-building stuff.
When I’m running a multi-Sim household, I usually manage them by the color behind their thumbnail pics on the left side of the screen. I watch my main Sim most of the time, until I notice one of the other Sims going yellow. I click over, see what they need, send them off to get it, then go back to the main Sim I’m playing. I also keep an ear out for that “ah, yoo hoo!” and frantic wave they give when one of their Needs goes in the red.
Sometimes I’ll run through and pick one Want off each Sim’s panel to fulfill, just to keep them from going into aspiration failure. I try to look for Wants that involve buying things. If they’re running low on cash, I buy the thing, wait for them to get the aspiration bonus, then go back into Buy mode and sell it right back. I also make a lot of use of the action queue. I may click over to a secondary Sim and queue up 3-4 actions (use the toilet, take a shower, fix dinner, go to bed) before going back to the main Sim.
For my main Sim, I try to top them off at the beginning of the day. I wake them up, and stack up a bunch of actions (use the toilet, take a shower, fix breakfast). If you can get everything well into the green once a day, you should be mostly set for the next 24 hours. And I always spend their aspiration points on the Needs Decay bonuses, to keep their needs dropping more slowly.
I also tend to keep my households small. With more than 4 Sims, I start feeling like it’s too much of a juggling act to manage everyone. I usually have one main Sim, and consider the rest of them to be “support staff.” Each Sim has one basic duty: in a family, the child’s duty is to do homework, one parent is the primary caregiver, and the other one works to bring in income. The kid just has to be fed and sent to bed, the caregiver is responsible for doing the cooking and cleaning, and the wage earner goes to work. One benefit to college is that you can skill up your Sim, then when it enters the workforce you don’t have to spend a lot of time skilling them AND juggling the work schedule.
I tend to mentally group game actions and items by the needs they fulfill. Serving a meal gives you food, social, and comfort. The bubble blower gives you fun, social, and comfort. The hot tub gets you all that plus a little bit of hygeine (but it can be lethal in summer). Pool tables are another great one, you get fun and social, and everyone likes them. The chess table gets you fun, social, comfort, and logic. And so forth.
That being said, I definitely have some weaknesses in my playing style. I’ve never gotten a Sim all the way up the career ladder, because I can’t be bothered to juggle all the friends you need. My kids rarely get better than a B average, except for those freak kids who LIKE homework. And I have yet to have a Sim fulfil their lifetime want. I boggle at players who can raise families AND hit the LTWs once a generation! That’s way beyond me, at this point!
Oh, and just from a practical standpoint: if they’re running low on more than one need, I try to find something that will fulfill as many of them as possible.
Hunger/social = serving a meal
Hygeine/comfort = bubble bath
Hygeine/fun/social = hot tub
Fun/social/comfort = chess table or bubble blower
Fun/social = pool table
Here’s what I do concerning the job ladder (I find the friend-making aspect boring), and to set this up you’ll have to get one working Sim fairly high up the career ladder. Then, once their child becomes an adult, I wait for the high-ranking parent to bring home a friend from work. I cultivate a romance, etc. between the heir and the friend from work. After they’re married, the heir gets all the friends their new spouse brings with them. It’s just a matter of skill building in the appropriate areas to move the heir Sim up the ladder, and all you have to do is maintain the friendships. It’s easy in succeeding generations because high-ranking Sims bring home friends who are also high on the ladder. Hope this made sense, haven’t had much coffee yet. (I’m in a really, really different time zone.)
Also, I was wondering: what do you do with the spare heirs? It always kind of bothers me to abandon them.
I love your Sunday Sims updates. They make me LOL.
That’s certainly an impressive, um, “bubble blowing” device the sorority girls have. (And do I spy a “tramp stamp” style design on the backside of one of their tracksuits?)
The penguin is devious– DEVIOUS, I tell you! He is up to no good. You just know he secretly is a Mafia boss with all of his snowmen minions. You’d better keep an eye on him before your whole Sim world falls apart.
That’s definitely a “you’re still on notice, food lady, so watch your step” look, there.
Reading about your Sims is WAY more fun than playing the Sims would be for me. Thank you for that.
I met the penguin over the weekend. He gets around. I really wanted him to come into the house, but he wasn’t having it.
My neighborhoods are trying to kill off all the males. Ned Piemaker got hit by lightning and died (and his wife, one of the Lashkmis) is totally ready to get married again, and then everyone in another house was at one time or another on fire. Only the dad died, but they took away the twin sons for neglect. DUDES WOULDN’T CALL THE FIRE DEPARTMENT. I would have sent them away with child services, too.
One of the lessons I’ve learned from the Seasons expansion pack is: put a fire alarm on the OUTSIDE of the house, too! M’damn trees keep getting struck by lightning and catching fire!
I agree that if someone won’t call the fire department when stuff is on fire, then they shouldn’t be allowed to keep children.
in that last picture does Dean look like Adrian Brody…?
[...] I remembered the story of how Dean Alphabetti and Brittany fell in love. I decided to give it a try. Garamond and Jimmy had become BFFs, with a relationship score of 100, [...]