Most of my sims have family friend count in the 30s and I don't even notice the family friend requirements for promotion. Only one sim has had that issue, she was a moved-in townie who is now living alone with her twin babies after the death of her fiance. That's literally the only time I've ever run up against that requirement. I've actually considered making a mod to increase the required family friend count for some jobs, like the ones in the politics and show business careers.

Julian has now got his 31st best friend. Downtown Romance teen Jemma Jeffrey, who was already his friend, invited him and Andrew to Christmas Dinner with her rather impoverished family because Andrew is one of the few Sims in the neighbourhood who can cook a turkey properly. The Rev. Elspeth Anderson from St.Simeon's Parish Church came too. The Jeffrey family are rather overstretched rather than really poor. After the meal Andrew admired the little Christmas tree that is all the Jeffreys can afford.
Jemma's father Peter is sleeping on the sofa dreaming about rich Sims.
Then Julian came and admired the little tree too.

Your friends in Veronaville wish you all a Very Merry Christmastide. (Perhaps just a little belatedly.)

I discovered that, although it usually takes three nights on a residential lot for a ghost to spawn, this does not apply in apartments. Stephen Tinker died, and haunted the next apartment I played right away - and I play one-day rotations, so only one night had passed in his own household.

I think the problems (some) people have is with the number needed for some careers, or that said family friends can just be random schmucks off the street. I've said before that this is one thing I felt 3 did better: there, only some careers require making friends, but they have to be your Sim's coworkers/boss.

Hmm. I'll have to look into that next time I feel up to editing the hobby lots again.

Not every sim is a social butterfly who wants lots of friends, some of whom they only know because they required them for work and not because they actually wanted to be friends with them. I hate those type of friends, who you then never speak to again except to call when you get the warning that you're about to lose them. I hope that isn't like RL. I'd rather know who my sim's friends are and why they wanted to be friends with them.



This. Only some careers and friends relevant to the job.

It depends a lot, I think, on which generation of sims it is and whether it's a single family or multiple family neighborhood.

My Apocalypse sims are always grinding for enough friends to get promoted, and other than that one lucky (unlucky?) townie who is the next spouse, that's all they're good for. There are no outings or socializing, or parties, or any of that fun stuff. It's just the nature of Apocalypse. And it's one reason why my non-challenge neighborhoods are pretty much always pre-mades: they come with some built-in relationships, or at least there are sims they ought to logically know who can be introduced to them to build those friendships and enmities.

I'm not a huge fan of community lots, though I'm using them more now with Chris' community lot time, because they now don't screw up all the schedules. The sims who ought to show up never do, and the sims who ought not, always do. I haven't quite figured out the right combination of hacks to accomplish things like one sim in a family being a snob, or disliking nature, while others in the same household do. Lana Mann should never show up at a place like Red's Fifties Diner, but her husband Rich Mann absolutely should, he's got to keep an eye on everything.

If one Sim dies while on a date, the date ends up incredibly bad and the survivor says they don't want to ever do it again. I don't think that's gonna be a problem, okay?



But she still left him $890 so maybe it wasn't quite as bad for her.

Aw, reminds me of that time Goneril's entire household accidentally almost burned to death, save for Desdemona who actually did burn to death on a date with Sebastian. Fun times.

I thought my TS2 was dead. Not even Body Shop would start, and TS2 just locked up the computer altogether, everything after I Alt-Tab defocusing, requiring me to Ctrl-Alt-Del and log out to get the computer responding again. Forcing TS2 into windowed mode at least made it so the computer was responsive and I could kill the task. But for "fun", I decided just to wait it out. It took Body Shop four minutes to start and TS2 fifteen.

It must be AMD drivers. I've seen others with AMD graphics experiencing this.


TS3's Charisma skill serves as a friend requirement.

I had Angela search for a roomate after moving into an apartment and after choosing a sim, there was a popup with "NO, I DON'T THINK SO" with the sims face LMAO! Never seen that before, so funny. Anyone know exactly why this might happen? I checked Angela's relationships and they've never met before.

Update: I should have read the full post. The AMD user reported that making TS2 high priority in Task Manager makes it start faster. I shaved it down to five minutes.

Kinda got a twofer today, both things I learned earlier but never posted about:

• I'm sue most of us know by now that adult Sims can autonomously tuck in their child- and teenage children, but I noticed that teens can also do so for their child-age siblings. (Or half-sibling by aliens, in the case I observed.)
• With Apartment Life, if you get the Catalog Discount reputation reward, anything that normally costs §0 will have its cost increased. Granted, it's only §1, but still.

This is in the middle of the little "park" under the Downtown art museum. Truly a modern work of art, worth every penny

There's a pink elephant at the bottom of the toddler bowl.

Children gain no fun from the cooking TV channel.

Playing Pleasantview. Mortimer has died, and eventually, Alexander goes to College. Who is the parent in the cutscene? Bella!

It's amazing how Bella Goth makes an appearance in the game now and then. Is she alive? Is she dead? No one knows????????????

Yes. I saw this in a video.

It's because there's some programming thing with her, she's dead ins o far that she's prevented from showing up anywhere, but not dead enough to make her portrait in the Family Tree grey scale.
And the selection of the parent in the "going to uni" video was likely programmed without taking that status into account (since it's only one Sim after all) so Bella shows up in the video.

Kestrellyn's mod should fix the Bella Goth thing:
https://modthesims.info/d/612211

There's some sort of bug in my game with the restorable car which makes it impossible to complete. Sigh...

I found a bug that makes it so easy to get money

Basically, you need to get that reputation reward that lets you buy things for cheaper. Then, you buy something, and then sell it, and for some reason, the buy price is lower, but the sell price is still the original buy price! (E.g. a lamp that normally costs 50 will cost you like 44 because of the reward, but when you sell it it will still sell for the original 50)

This can easily be exploited by buying and selling some expensive item, giving you a large profit margin. I guess it makes sense, since you're getting discounts on *buying* but the people you sell it to pay the market price, but still, easy way to make money

There are so many "exploits" in the game for making easy money that it's actually harder to avoid them than to make use of them.

I don't see how that's a bug, sugoisama. That's how retail works, both in real life and in The Sims 2. You've bought a lamp for 44 Simoleons and sold it for 50. That's only 6 Simoleons profit. At that rate you're going to have to sell an awful lot of lamps to grow rich. Remember, before you start, you have to buy and furnish your shop. You have to buy your initial stock at only a small discount. You probably have to pay staff. In a Sims retail business there's a steep learning curve, learning sales, the cash register and restocking. You've probably had to borrow money to get started. 6 Simoleons profit on a 50 Simoleon sale amounts to a 12% margin on sales, and I can assure you it's not a lot. I get my retail Sims business owners to take all the wholesale discounts they can get, but they're still struggling. Running a small retail business is generally a recipe for long hours of backbreaking work with very little to show for it. I've seen my Sim shopkeepers in tears at the end of a hard long day's trading. Frankly I think they're heroes.

I believe the received wisdom is that the way to make a Sims 2 shop profitable is to put up the prices as the business gains stars. But my shopkeepers know their customers, and so do I. Veronaville isn't a wealthy neighbourhood. There are a few rich Sims living there, but most of the townspeople have to watch how they spend their Simoleons. Quite apart from the morality of it, there's no point in trying to charge more than the customers can afford.

The other day I was with Malcolm Landgraab and Marion Hutchins at the Electronics Supercenter. It's at level two. Business was steady but slow. There was a steady flow of customers -- about as many as the inexperienced Marion could cope with on the till. But most of them bought cheap radios. Nobody bought anything really expensive. Over the long hours the shop was open, it did better than break even, but not much. It's going to take a very long time at this rate for Malcolm to really grow rich. If he'd had to pay Marion, the session would have lost money. The morality of keeping her the way he does, as a sort of live-in house-guest is really rather dubious. Does not paying her wages perhaps amount to modern day slavery? Having seen that it works for Malcolm, Florence Delarosa is thinking of doing the same -- asking a teen to move in with her to help in the shop. She doesn't really want to, but she can't see another way. Her florist's business just isn't making enough to take on a paid employee.

In real life I ran a small gift and craft shop a few years ago. My margins, at about 50%, were generally a lot higher than my sims can get -- even with wholesale discounts. But the volume of sales was never high enough to really cover the overhead costs, and after two years I had to give up and look for a job. My Sims' experience in retail is rather similar to my own.

Running a small neighbourhood shop certainly isn't a licence to print money. Support your local shops! And encourage your Sims to do the same!

Well, no, actually. The way retail works in the Sims 2 is you open a business and mark objects for sale, and when you do that you get your discount on the cost, but you don't get to just sell the object at full price via buy mode after you've gotten the discount, you actually have to convince someone to buy it first, and then you have to ring them up before they get frustrated and throw their bags on the floor. There's a whole entire EP dedicated to a specific process of reselling objects that was obviously the one that you are intended to use by EA, so being able to circumvent that process is clearly a bug.