I have the original SIMS with the Hot Date and Livin’ Large expansion packs… and a few questions.
How is a couple of wage-earners supposed to manage having a baby? I tried this once and lost the kid after a day… because of parental neglect. (I couldn’t figure out how to hire a nanny or babysitter, and I wasn’t about to derail the mother’s high-paying career.)
Is there any fix for a genie-bestowed object landing outdoors, where it is immovable, other than exiting w/o saving and replaying it, but rubbing the lamp indoors only, and where there’s ample empty space for stuff like billiards tables?
What are your tips for your Sims’ social lives – making friends and holding onto them, at least long enough for a job promotion? I think the most friends I’ve gotten a Sim to get was seven or eight, but it’s hard to retain them long… while working up job skills for that promotion. (So far, I’ve found some success with going to the parks and hosting picnics, with long conversations with a soon-to-be-friend, and buying balloons for dinner parties at home, to be helpful, and there’s always the genie’s magic to help out.)
Personality/interests shaping – I love how you can change a Sim’s knowledge through reading magazines, but unfortunately this seems to be a zero-sum system… if you max out on, say, “celebrities,” the Sim will lose points in other subjects (like “outdoors” or weather"). Any way to make them all-around good conversationalists, or should I instead focus on making all Sims good all-rounders, with mid-level grasps of all topics?
After running the program for awhile, I’ve got a neighborhood with a couple of nice but expensive empty houses… and no cheap starter homes. Any new Sims or Sim families start out with, IIRC, $10,000 or $20,000 (instead of the $40,000 they’ll need to buy into the house).
I’ve only just discovered the household robot, with my wealthiest couple. So far, it’s been very helpful, although a Sim does have to turn it on. Any drawbacks to using these 'bots that I should be wary of?
The best thing about The Sims is that often, like life itself, weird stuff happens that you didn’t expect. You didn’t think that your Sim would fall in love with another man whose kitchen receives nightly visits from the ghost of Donald Trump after he died of starvation, but when it does, you can’t help but be amused. (Yes, this actually happened.)
You can play fair and have the parents alternate taking a day off from work to stay home, or you can install a hacked crib from Cheap Frills that doesn’t get the baby taken away if you neglect it. . The social worker will come and care for the kid, but won’t remove it. Plus, I think it ages the kid from baby to child faster than the original crib.
I’ve never even used the magic lamp, but I think there’s hacked versions of that too.
Throw parties using hacked objects. There’s things like friendship paintings, for example. And my favorite object is a hacked end table that means Sims talk to each other and get friendship points while in the same room (they don’t actually have to have a conversation, their score goes up automatically).
Another aspect I’ve never really played with.
5)Ctrl-Shift-C; Then in the box that appears type (without quotes) “rosebud” for $1000 simoleons. if you add “;!”, that repeats the cheat. So typing “rosebud;!;!;!;!;!;!” gives you $7000. You can type as many of those ;! as you like.
Or enable testing cheats (boolProp TestingCheatsEnabled true), go to a Community lot, shift-click on your Sim, spawn Tombstone of L&D, then click on the tombstone. There’s an option that says something like “make me friends with everyone here”. It’ll take a while to update but your Sim will instantly befriend every Sim on the lot who is capable of making friends (i.e.: not Crumplebottom or the Charlatan).