My Sim Julian (Andrew's husband) says, "I think the solution is simple: if you don't want to be bothered doing laundry, don't wear clothes!" Andrew is shaking his head!

I find it funny when the welcoming wagon is made up of inhabitants a completely different subhood. Yeah, okay, these Bluewater Village sims walked all the way over to the outskirts of Downtown.

@Bulbizarre : I'm fascinated to see who turns up for the Welcome Wagon. The only rule seems to be that only Sims who are available at 12:30 p.m. that day are eligible to take part. i.e. They're not at work or school. In a vanilla game that would rule out teens, as then finish school at 1 p.m. But in my game some teens have dropped out of school, and, almost none of them are going to school just now, because it's the the Summer Holidays (Vacation) in Veronaville. So I am now getting quite a few teens coming. In the latest one Zara Higgins (a teenage foster mother with two adopted kids) got three teens, all of whom live in the same street or the next street. Often it's local Sims who come to visit, but sometimes they come from much further away, or they're townies. Sometimes two of them are locals but the third one comes from another sub-hood. Some Sims seem to be regular supporters of the Welcome Wagon and will travel quite far to visit new arrivals. Sometimes, especially in the earlier days of a neighbourhood, when there are fewer Sims around, only two Sims come for the Welcome Wagon, and/or they don't come till the Tuesday.

But I'll never forget the time I had 3 Sims come from Bluewater to Downtown. They came to welcome Bianca Monty to her little downtown house in Mendoza Lane. Bianca moved to that house quite early in my game, when I was starting to include the pre-made playables in my very loose rotations. No Welcome Wagon came on her first day, nor indeed on her second day, so we began to think she wasn't getting one. Needing money to live on, she took a job in the business career. It wasn't until her first Saturday that three visitors from Bluewater, all of them business owners, arrived to welcome her to Downtown. Maybe not surprisingly, she was out at work when they came. So they just hung around outside her house for about an hour, before going home to Bluewater. I had a suspicion that maybe the real purpose of their visit was to drum up business for their shops! In Sims time it was five days since she moved in. But in Real Life, such is the speed that I play at, it was over a year! I hadn't even bought Open for Business when she moved in, far less attached Bluewater!!

My welcome wagon is usually retired elders and pregnant teens. Quite the spectrum.

I think that Pescado's 'localwalkbys' fixes that, as I tend to only get sims that live nearby.

I think I prefer the variety of Welcome Wagon visitors that I get with Maxis rules. Here is an old picture of Jack Gill with his Welcome Wagon visitors:


I have enlarged this very old picture a little, to help you all to see it, but this lowered the quality still further. Sorry. The picture was taken on Jack's first day in his Mendoza Lane home in downtown Veronaville on 24th April 2013 -- eleven years ago today. The picture was featured today in the "On this Day" memories feature that I get with Windows 10 and OneDrive. Jack's Welcome Wagon guests were all Veronaville townies. Left to right they are Regina Tsvirkunov, Demi Love, and Edward Mellon. Demi shares my Real Life surname, which makes me think she must be a distant relative (though I hope I've a slightly nicer personality than she has!). Regina is one of the nicest Sims in my game, almost as nice as Tricou teen Ravi Bertino, who moved in with Jack a couple of weeks later. Both Regina and Ravi are extremely good Welcome Wagon visitors, because they're both extremely good listeners. I think one of the best ways to make a newcomer welcome, is to listen to what they have to say. Sometimes, when three friends who live near you come together, they just chat and play among themselves, and interact very little with the Sims they've come to see. Regina really did help young Jack to settle in. Within a month or two they had become best friends, and they've stayed best friends ever since. I'm sure Regina would willingly have taught Jack how to study, but Jack fairly quickly got an A+ grade through his own efforts. Jack then stopped going to school; by his logic, if he knew enough to get an A+ grade, he couldn't see the point of cramming even more knowledge in in school. After Ravi moved in, it took him a few weeks to persuade Ravi to drop out of school too. He then announced to the world that he and Ravi were "Students at the University of Life". Instead of school, the two of them started going to all-day nightclubs! I suppose they learned something there.


A quite unrelated thought -- I think Don Lothario is more popular with Sims than with Simmers. Especially among female Sims in Pleasantview.

I had a long convoluted dream today of my game during my nap, where how I was trying to synchronize a race between pixels in the game involving getting to X point. I think it involved using chariots.

Then I woke up and was slightly sad because it is one of the things you cannot do in game-there are no races of any kind possible. The animations for it are beyond the game's mechanics and programming.

Surely you could use the jogging animation. It would be the BHAVs to make them compete that might be difficult. I'm sad that they didn't make swimming races.

You can't make races but you can make survival competitions. It's a bit random who will survive starvation the longest

Quickly asking round my Sims, but it seems none of them want to take part in Hunger Games. I'm pretty sure I wouldn't want them to!

But could we not have a simple "Race you across the pool" between friends? Have two Sims in the swimming pool, both at the same side. Pause the game. Tell them both to "Go here" to the other side. Unpause the game, and see who gets there first. It might not work, but I can't see why not. I must give it a try soon. I'll also try a simple running race, with "Run here".

Maybe Eaxis could bring out an "At the Races" EP for TS4. AFAIK they're still making new stuff for TS4, and they do have horses, don't they?

Last year we had a video game round in a singing competition that I was doing on Youtube, and I used my sims 2 videos as filler in the deliberation video. If anyone's interested in seeing some of my fantasy hood, my Vampire Diaries inspired City, as well as hear my voice, here's the video As a side note I'd be super interested in hearing members' voices here, that'd be so cool. After I hear someone's voice, I always read their messages in their voice.
Anyway, the video is an hour long so if you don't want to watch it all, here are the time stamps for the sims footage: beginning, 3:23, 7:29, 20:14, 46:40, 49:23, 51:15, 52:25, 57:22 to the end
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oA2XDeSv_-w

If I say criminal, fire and drama - does it sound like sims?

Cables were stolen at the electricity substation in my area. Short circuit, fire (big fire).
I have just survived 8 days without electricity. (And lucky we are, because they could pump water with generators, I even had warm water due to a solar geyser, and the moon was bright every night. Some of the small businesses offered help - you could load your cell phone battery for free, and if in need of boiling water, you could bring a flask). Still, it was a rough 8 days, but I got through, with a lot of help from my daughter who does not live too far away from me, a portable radio with new batteries (it talks all day long) and a sincere gratitude that we have water and warm water to boot.

This morning at around 4am, the lights finally came on.
I decided that today is a good day to play sims all day long And I did. (All the neighbours were doing their laundry. I decided that one more day was not going to make such a big difference).

I am now considering playing the whole day tomorrow as well

That does sound like sims!

Wow, it must have been worrying- you've had it bad enough with the load shedding, now this! Hopefully you'll have good services from now on, glad you got to play for a while!

Thank you Load shedding is suspended (probably due to the election next month, but let us not be negative )

The local service here is actually good! The damage from the fire was enormous, and fixing it was never going to take less than a week. Almost all the electrical components were destroyed - transformers, panels, high voltage cables, etc. We were being kept informed by the local council every step of the way; after every phase was completed and tested, etc. (I just hope they catch the cable thief who started it).

I played for 9 hours

I like how new adults starting with 29 days left to elder perfectly matches the time for their firstborn to become an adult. 3 days of pregnancy + 2 days as baby + 3 days as toddler + 7 days as child + 14 days as teen = 29 days, so without going to university the parent would become an elder right when the firstborn grows up to adult. Then uni messed it all up because most of the time I do send them to uni anyway so the parents will still be young when the kid moves back.

Do kids that go to Uni get less time in the Adult stage?

Nope. They graduate and have 29 days. Which is fine - people who go to University tend to live longer in real life, too. (This is due to factors that don't apply to sims but eh.)

Without elixir, I find the adult and elder lifespans too short. Too much time pressure for reproduction and it's far too easy for sims to never see their grandchildren born, let alone grow up. My mom didn't turn elder when I achieved adulthood and my grandmother didn't die till her great-grandchild was a toddler.

Hmm, I don't understand why the kid going to Uni would mess up the parents' ages then. The parents won't have aged by the time the kid gets back and they'll have exactly the same age difference as if they hadn't gone to Uni.

That's a playstyle issue. It depends on how you coordinate the slower University pace with the main neighborhood.

I never understood why the adult life stage is so short compared with the others until I watched a video that explored all the different Sims games from a game design perspective. It seems that some people play Sims in a goal-directed way so the age stages are designed to give some challenge - the duration is basically timed with the expectation that a player will attempt to get a player married, have children, and try to max out their career, (along the way doing all of the skilling, socialising and so on that they need to) and is designed to be challenging for that specific scenario.

My preference is for it to reflect real life in some ways. The spacing of life events and ability for grandparents (and great-grandparents!) to meet their descendants and interact with them is very important to my playstyle.

A week ago somebody kicked my rubbish bin (trashcan) over. It's a big wheelie bin, and it wasn't windy, but I found it lying on its side. So I guess someone must have kicked or pushed it over.

I find all lifespans far too short, including, maybe especially, my own! I can, and do, give my Sims more time with "Aging off", but there's not much I can do about myself. I've already lived longer than my two nearest male relatives. Btw, I was nine when maternal great grandparents died, so I have quite clear memories of them.

I can't get my [head] heart around the idea of someone I love only living for ninety odd days from the cradle to the grave. Hence I've been playing with aging off from the get-go.

I disagreed! It's very realistic! Speaking as an adult*, there is seemingly never enough time to get things done. Contrast with life as a teenager, when you have 14 (!) sim days. not a lot of responsibility and all the time in the world. School, summer. the quest for the First Kiss, shit, just being a teen, it is all in a near endless parallel universe. **

I do believe they botched elder , which is way too long, because the developers knew teens, and knew about being an adult, but did not (yet) understand being middle aged.So they skipped it, and so made the "rest of your life" the longest life stage ever.

* OK. I lied. In Sims terms, I am a newish elder. Go me.

Anyway, if pregnancy, baby and toddler times are reduced, you'll see more children, and more grandparent and , mathematically possible, great grandparent scenarios, which would be nice. That said, there are a few ways provided in game to extend lifespan. (Remember the elixir of life is featured in the game intro...)

;** with University installed, I use the 8 semesters to replace the back 7 of teenland. So all my teens goto the College after 7 days. With UC installed teens are clogged with repetitive pet and college wants, so they may as well go and find a life at UNI

*** I have middle aged in my game. Keeping notes, I have adults"borrowing" 6 days from elder. I give them an older-looking makeover, and rethink their daily activities. Results vary.