Blue....10/14/2023 Well it has been 3 months since I began the NSB Challenge and I think I may have accidentally done a speed run. The ability to graduate high school early and begin university classes as a teen, coupled with the cereer boost that degrees provide, has made career goals very easy to achieve. The hardest part is waiting for the next heir to grow up, since I usually accomplish all the tasks for the current one while the next one is still a toddler or sometimes younger.
My Gen 9 Green just had their Gen 10 Blue baby so I already have plans for completing the challenge....But I JUUUUUST might roll my Blue Gen heir right into one of the other variations, though some look more complicated and I don't know if I'll have the patience to do it again. Also, some use packs I don't have or parts of the game I basically disabled, so I'd have to figure a workaround. Variation 1 | Variation 2 That being said... I just ticked off all Green's tasks, now I just have to sit back and keep accepting all the invites while I wait for Blue to grow up (she just became a toddler). Berry Challenging7/10/2023 I'm pretty sure I've shared earlier that my style of play is what I call "genealinear" - In that I start the game with 1 family, and I just keep playing the heirs of that family down the family tree. Sim A1 marries Sim A2, they have babies: Sim B1, B2, B3 (maybe more!). I choose which of the kids will be my next main sim.... So Sim B1 gets married and has C1, C2.... I take C2, they get married and have D1, D2, D3, and so on... And that's the family that I play. I just keep moving to the next gen. I have MCCC so the other kids always do their own thing (or I manipulate their futures a little).
If I get "bored" or want to change it up a bit, let's say I'm on Generation 7 but I don't want to play the Gen 8 kids as adults, I'll go back up the tree a bit, and follow a different branch down to Generation 7, and then play those Gen 8 kids and follow that lineage down. If I get REALLY bored, that's now I ended up doing the 100 Baby Challenge, the Millionaire Gold Digger Challenge, the in game scenarios... and now it's let me to the Not So Berry Challenge. What's interesting is that this style of play, just one generation after the next, fits my style so well, so this should be a lot of fun! I tackled starter homes this week!2/11/2023 Well... I woke up on Wednesday and chose violence.
I had watched Deligracy's video of her renovation of Streamlet Single. She completely revamped it, adding an extension and everything, but as she did so, I thought to myself, "Self, what would happen if you tried to re-do this house but didn't change the main structure? And - AND, what if you kept it affordable as a starter?" So, I set out to do just that, and I did! It was extremely difficult, but I managed to create both a fully base game starter home, as well as a starter that mixes in a few things from other packs (mostly Dream Home, Eco, and City items). I'm extremely proud of how it turned out. That led me to a new mission. Why not re-do the entirety of Foundry Cove and do the same thing with Crick Cabana and Daisy Hovel - no change to the external size or shape, just mild updates to the columns and siding, and make new base game starters? So I did. I also built something for Bargain Bend that fits the same aesthetic - the biggest accomplishment though, is that I did all four of these lots in a total time of maybe 10 hours. Usually it takes me that long just for one house. I present to you, the Foundy Cove Makeover! I did it! It took me 11 months, but I wish there was a way to find out how much time was spent on the actual save file, especially knowing that I spent the summer doing mostly building. There is a small personal asterisk, however, and one regret. Between MCCC and neighborhood stories, the adult children who are moved out would go on to create families of their own. So finding new donors was never going to be a problem, and I realized early on I would complete it with just one matriarch - the additional challenge that I set for myself was to find donors that were not directly related to my matriarch, and to do so by downloading/adding as few new households as possible. I succeeded 96.8% of the time. On several occasions there were connections between donors, or between the children. But on two occasions, and to add insult to injury, those occasions occurred nearly back-to-back in the last quarter of the challenge, the donor was one of Malibu's great-great-grandsons. So... those four kids are Malibu's kids and they're also her great-great-great-grandkids. 😕 And lastly, the thing that I regret, was not using MCCC to mark the adult children to never die or never age, because I wish I could have a photo with Warren and Sage and Senna. 100 Baby Challenge Progress10/25/2022 I've just passed the halfway point - kid #54 is an adult now, and kid 61 is born. And my matriarch is right on the edge of aging from young adult to adult - which means I can probably get the rest done with just one matriarch!
I'm trying to take some of my own advice, not stressing myself out with the toddlers, but also I'm not worrying about keeping twins or triplets on the same level anymore. If one toddler gets to 3 before the others, they're geting aged up. But now that I'm over the halfway hump, I'm all in! I'm starting to run into some truly wild interconnections, like royal lineage inbreeding style overlaps. Kid 57 creates a whole lot of wreaths instead of branches. Granite Falls Renovation7/15/2022 My Granite Falls renovation is complete.
I will not be editing the campground however all 4 cabin lots have taken on a mind of their own. My intial plan was a series of cabins reminiscent of ones I've visited but then everything changed. Below you can see an overview, to get a feel for these new yellow, red, blue, and green rentals. Project Updates5/26/2022 Since I started playing with multiple saves for the first time, I've realized I don't utilize my library/gallery the way i should. See, I've primarily played one save file, just a very rich family tree, and I just pick someone from the next generation to be my main sim. One file, and I just keep going. But now I have a 'scenarios' save, the 100 Baby Challenge save, a save for me and boyfriend... and I wanted to move one of my scenario families into an apartment, that I realized I'd built in the main save and never saved to my library. But at the time, I did NOT feel like jumping back over to the main save to get it, so I just did my best to recreate it.
Then I wanted to take the 100BC family on vacation, and the vacay home I wanted, same thing. This time, I was NOT about to rebuild it (it was the Private Island one), so I realized that I had to do something. Plus, I had a number of CC-heavy builds that I really wanted to change to make them more gallery friendly. And when I say CC-heavy, I mean it's very likely that the only Maxis items in a house are the toilets and the stairs. So unless I give someone directions to download an entire Peacemaker catalog, all they'd really get from me is the shell. Plus, I have so many more packs now, which means I don't need to rely on CC as much. Don't get me wrong, I still use a lot of it for personal play, but it's much easier for me to build now. So I went on a mission. One, save all my stuff to my library so that I can use it across my saves, but also, scrub my builds of CC. I'm also very excited because with this new pack/kit/whatever, coming our way, I may re-do the outdoor theather, and this might influence my Granite Falls ideas. So, my current projects:
Gold Digging Cabins - Random Update3/16/2022 I have officially started the Millionaire Gold Digger challenge. I'm 2 husbands in, she's pregnant with the 2nd's baby, and while she WAS up by §150,000 or so, she's now down to §11,000 after building a new house. However, this will be her forever house, I'll just have the sugar daddies move in and out.
I've also downloaded TMexi's All Scenarios mod, so now I have access to the scenarios that have already expired, and I might consider tackling a few of the older ones that I ignored. Could be fun! Lastly, I already revamped all the cabins in Granite Falls, but I think I'm going to go back in and re-do a few things. I had no intent on sharing them when I first did them, so I was quite liberal with the CC use. My plan is to go back and re-do them without CC, also I have a couple that used CC bunk beds, which I no longer need. Furthermore, I want to create two versions - one with Peacemaker's Screened In series, and one that will use Snowy Escape windows but I haven't decided which pack has the best doors to replace the screened ones. Island Living is the closest to what I have in mind but it's not exactly what I visualize there. Stay tuned. 100 Baby Challenge Take 2 - Followup2/7/2022 Oh. My. God.
Doing this challenge with all packs - and therefore more little things to use - has been so much easier. First of all - if you are doing this challenge and you have the Tiny Living Pack, if you build your own lot or use one with no traits, you NEED to use the You Got the Touch lot trait. It doubles the skill rate. My kids are toddlers for a maximum of two days (Good Schools from City Living, too). I'm about... a week in at this point, 16 kids have reached adulthood and she's pregnant with #19. I'm making good time. Malibu has 17 days left to young adulthood, when she reaches adulthood I'm going to use mccc to change her days to 24 (normal lifespan) instead of 35 (my custom lifespan), but I think there's a good chance I could finish this challenge with just one matriarch. Might be two, but we'll see. I've always tried to just do single babies (because of those toddlers!) but with that You Got the Touch and good timing, I can make it work. Right now the house is just Malibu, one teen, one baby, and she's pregnant. Can't wait to see what she has! 100 Baby Challenge Attempt #21/31/2022 Well... that was a mild fail.
While the intent was there, using my PS4 solely for my 100BC due to not having any mods or CC to slow me down, realistically, I couldn't do it. Let's be honest, if I'm gonna sit on my PS4 for hours at a time, I'm gonna be playing GTA. I'm honesly surprised I got as far as I did. So - we're starting again. I took a look at what all my mods actually affected, and made a few adjustments. I still have the one that slows down time (my game time minutes are about 1.2x a normal game minute), because that one requires a restart every time you change it, so to offset it, I changed motive decay to go slightly faster as well. I thought that'd I'd changed lifespan to something ridiculously long but I was wrong. Normal young adult and adult lifespan in the game is 24 days for each, and I had changed mine to 35. I increased baby to 4 (game is 3), toddler to 10 (7), child to 15 (13), teen to 20 (13). This is workable. I can use that same mod to give my matriarch 24 days left to the span when she ages up. As far as all the kids, my added days is actually a hurdle if I don't get their skills up/get A in school, because I'm stuck with them longer. But I don't think it'll ever be an issue, I usually get them leveled up in plenty of time. I think I have increased bills so that's at least an extra challenge and not a benefit. I might have to keep a close eye on WW to make sure it doesn't interfere with pregnancy. I can't remember if I checked to box to make the WW fertility//birth control/chance of pregnancy settings apply to regular woohoo... Luckily, I already have a good game plan for getting started, having already started it once. |
As you might have noticed, my name is Melissa, and I've been playing Sims since The Sims was even a thing. We won't discuss how old I was at the time I first played Sims 1, let's just say that I was not a child.
Topics |