Lot Sync Timer: how do YOU use it?

[Zazazu]

Talk about "culling", though:  I had that "realistic sickness" mod in my game a few months ago and it did wonders for culling the excess population   I might have to try that again at some point. 

Queen's Cove was culled through illness, though it was done through the tombstone. The death, that is, almost everyone really did get sick due to Aquitaine's huge parties. One of the children had a bad cold and her aunt played with the medicine machine to try to create a cure, releasing an especially deadly variant of the virus. It spread throughout the 'hood. The only ones who weren't exposed were three of the quads, who were living on the other side of town. I then did a dice roll (again, the great "Yes/No" variable) for who would live and who would die.

Before that, I had a sim of the 3rd generation who was keeping herself alive via elixir. When the youngest of the 5th generation had a birthday party, everyone in the family went for a dip in the pool....during a lightning storm. Everyone but the sole child of the 6th generation, that is. Then the 3rd generation crazy decided that cowplant juice was a much healthier alternative to elixir and drank the remaining residents.

[Sivany]

I also play each family a full season, or 5 days. Then I play Uni sub hood 2x3 days = 1 study year. This of course leads to very long study period for the students, they are gone a full seasonal year from the original hood, which is a long time even if they enroll at 10 days into teen-hood. I am contemplating speeding it up and do 2 study years in one rotation..  I use the LST to keep track of the total amount of days played.

That is a lot of time to have them away, a little brother or sister who was a baby when they left would be nearly an adult when they got back, surely? Or their parents would have died of old age. That seems a little excessive!

I can't play my lots on a one day rotation, loading times are too long for me and also I couldn't bring myself to leave a family after just one day, I like to give time for interesting things to happen so I get used to their personalities and can rememebr what I was intending for them to do. When I leave a household at the end of a season I've often forgotten by the time I get back round to it!

[J. M. Pescado]

Yes, the fact that trying to do "even" segmented rotations invariably ends up sadorandomly cutting off someone in the middle of something interesting, or overrunning something that was SUPPOSED to happen elsewhere, is exactly why the Lot Sync Timer and the "Event Tracking" moment was invented. Sims, you see, don't really have "time", they have sequences of events. As long as event A occurs before event B, all is well. It doesn't matter if you play until day 8 on lot 2, if event A on lot 1 was scheduled to occur on day 3, whiel event B, on lot 2, occurs on day 10: As long as the critical event A occurs before the critical event B globally, everything works.

[seelindarun]

This playstyle works better in small 'hoods.  My medium-sized 'hood has about a dozen households, and there is some death, birth, birthday, or graduation happening once every 3 days or less.  Obviously, the retirement home, and the free love commune with fresh uni grads don't contribute many of these milestones, but just a few multi-gen households bring the whole thing to a grinding halt.  I just play an arbitrary interval at the beginning of each cycle, usually 3 days or so.  If some family needs more time, I let it go and then let them sync up on the next cycle.

[muridae]

I play 1-3 days per household, depending on how interesting they're being at the time. I've a small squared notebook which is marked up with the day numbers as displayed on the Lot Sync Timer, with one line per household, which gives me a visual check on who I need to play catch-up on without having to go into a household and check their timer first. Teens get packed off to college at 8am-ish when they have 4 days left as a teen, and return 4 days later. So, if they move to college on day 4 (Friday), they'll move home or to a new place at 8am on day 8 (Tuesday). If I think of it I'll set an event on their family home to remind them/me that their long lost offspring is going to return on that day.

If the returning new adult moves into their own place, the timer then gets used to set the day of week to the correct one to match the rest of the neighbourhood and the Simwardrobe Weather Controller gets used to adjust the season for what it should be on that date.

[gethane]

I can't play my lots on a one day rotation, loading times are too long for me and also I couldn't bring myself to leave a family after just one day, I like to give time for interesting things to happen so I get used to their personalities and can rememebr what I was intending for them to do. When I leave a household at the end of a season I've often forgotten by the time I get back round to it!

I keep explicit notes in the info box. Helps a TON!
http://gethanesims.prismbaby.com/images/miscpics/info01.jpg
http://gethanesims.prismbaby.com/images/miscpics/info02.jpg
http://gethanesims.prismbaby.com/images/miscpics/info03.jpg

[muridae]

I keep explicit notes in the info box. Helps a TON!

It'd never occurred to me to use the info box as a notepad, but it's a great idea. Much more useful than the potted biography that's already out of date by the time you finish a session playing the household.

[gethane]

It works great. Plus, anytime you've been away from playing you can just click on each house from the neighborhood without playing the house and "catch up." Or, as long as I remember to put down who's going to college when, and who's coming back, I can plan my next uni session. I play each year like a sim day. So students are gone for 4 days from the neighborhood. Right now I wait until the teen is 1TDL before sending them, but I think I'm changing that this generation to 7TDL. And every Saturday in my neighorhood, if there's teens, I have a "prom" though it doesn't always work the best.

The numbers are shorthand for things like AdultDaysLeft, or DaysOld (for elders)/ ADL, TDL, CDL, ToDL.

[Emma]

I can't play my lots on a one day rotation, loading times are too long for me and also I couldn't bring myself to leave a family after just one day, I like to give time for interesting things to happen so I get used to their personalities and can rememebr what I was intending for them to do. When I leave a household at the end of a season I've often forgotten by the time I get back round to it!

I keep explicit notes in the info box. Helps a TON!
http://gethanesims.prismbaby.com/images/miscpics/info01.jpg
http://gethanesims.prismbaby.com/images/miscpics/info02.jpg
http://gethanesims.prismbaby.com/images/miscpics/info03.jpg

Gethane-I do that too!

I don't use the Lot Sync Timer although I think I might try it in my nice new 'hood. I usually play 7 days rotation for each family.

[Swiftgold]

Once I finally got my monster 'hood synched with the furthest-played family (79 Days with my favorites, sigh,) I figured out by everyone's memories roughly where everyone should be and manually adjusted some Sims' ages to match. Then I took on the task of synching all the families to 79 Days, with the furthest behind at 59. It took a while, since I also have 30-odd houses, but it's not too bad. I have a big ol' plot going so most of the time it's pretty fun, and I try to consolidate some households when it's possible. Got everyone to 79, made sure everyone was on the same day of the week, etc, and it was all good. I love the synch timer

Now I play in chunks... I find that three days over the Sim weekend and five on weekdays gives me the most to do with being the least boring. Currently synching everyone up to 85 Days before I go ahead again, heh. I equate each day to a Sim year, so if I want to sneak more time in now with BV I send my favorites on vacation for a few days. Since they come back on the correct day and don't age, it works well. I also use the bio to remind myself what day everyone's on, and currently the season.

[J. M. Pescado]

While some people like to sync it so every day N on every lot is always Xday, Season Y, I actually tried to avoid this, because otherwise you get a very quantized timing effect for births, graduations, and whatnot, as everything is programmed by the Wednesday marker. Also, having day of the week and especially season splattered haphazardly means that at least your sims will be able to experience all 4 seasons in a lifecycle, even if some of that will be experienced only as a visitor on another lot.