The Plague: A Detailed Study

[J. M. Pescado]

What about the little blurb I read in the manual to the original TS2 about Body skill affecting resistance to illness.  Any truth to this?

Not that I've found, but mostly I've been studying the mechanisms of an existing plague, not how one contracts the plague to begin with.

Also, do certain careers have higher chances of making a sim sick?  I've noticed that when my sims do get sick its usually the scientist.

There is zero evidence to support this. Career-operation is nearly entirely handled in semiglobals, which makes them identical in this regard.

[rohina]

I think there should be some chance that the plague would be disfiguring, if the sim recovered. That would add some spicy realism to my medieval 'hood.

[Jelenedra]

You could always get sussiissogoodsims2.net (?) and get her boil and scars make up and costume mask and plaster those on your sims that get sick.

[rohina]

That smacks of effort.

[Avalikia]

Cockroaches can go through walls, right?

[J. M. Pescado]

Cockroaches can go through walls, right?

I believe they can, although how they do this is a great mystery to me. I'm sure it involves some form of quantum-tunnelling.

[Avalikia]

Hmm, in that case I've got an idea.  I need to turn the thatched-roof peasant cottages in my medieval neighborhood into proper disease-infested slums.  I figure if I put a pile of garbage under the foundation then there'll be plenty of disease to go around, especially since they won't be able to clean it up when I'm not looking.

[MaximilianPS]

try to leave alone one sim and one broken "cleaner robot"...
when it's broken the robot will will spit out trash on every empty square of the lot..
in 10 minuts your lot will be filled of garbage and in 20 mintus you game will be uncontrollable 'cuase Cockroaches are everyware 
that's happen to me when i leaved alone a sim and open for business 'bot ... lol

BTW, to stay in topic, i didn't undrestand if the game have an internal calendar.. if so, on the winter the sims shold be more infectable than the summer... they could get "cold" or "flu" just for visiting out-door community lot

[rohina]

Oh, I love that idea. The plague house!

[Ellatrue]

I guess then you could have a broken cleaner robot, and a servo. The servo would then run the business, because it could continue to infect people without dying itself. I mean it's a robot, so I assume they are immune to disease?

Then the only problem, I think, would be to keep the customers coming to your lot. I imagine it would be difficult to get a star and increase the flow of people if everyone freaks out about the garbage and complains.

PLAGUE ROBOT

[buddha pest]

How is the virus from the biotech station consumed?

This has been the greatest sim mystery to me since the question of why they always think about a wall when they eat pizza.

[J. M. Pescado]

It isn't. The Virus is a vestigial feature, rather like an appendix, only some of us still use that. Its only "perk" is that it has, strangely enough, no risk of infection when creating it solo for logic-training. Which is not really a perk because the chessboard is faster than the Biostation, without a trainer, and WITH a trainer, you can't do the virus thing. Plus it's only available around 7 or 8 points. At one point, you might have been able to sell it the Burglar, but this feature seems to be inoperable or cut.

And they think about a wall when eating pizza because the wall is blocking one of their navigational possibilities when moving away from the pizza box.

[buddha pest]

Always with the riddles.

So it just infects sims now and then while they're making medicines?

[J. M. Pescado]

Always with the riddles.

So it just infects sims now and then while they're making medicines?

Yes, based on a fancy algorithm that determines infection risk based on hygiene level, personality, skill, and aspiration. The Skillinator actually takes these factors into account and won't have your sim use the Biostation unless it's safe.

[Ellatrue]

Crappy biotech station, I want a hack to sicken other people with the virus. Stupid Maxis, what's the point of even making it?

[Database]

I believe they can, although how they do this is a great mystery to me. I'm sure it involves some form of quantum-tunnelling.

Ahem. Cracks in walls. Or holes. Cockroaches are good at that sort of stuff.

[kewian]

Do you suppose due to the infamous guinea pig disease Maxis was being extra cautious introducing another potentially fatal disease in the neighborhoods considering how everyone was unhappy with the guinea pig disease?

[Magicmoon]

I noticed that all the flowerbeds were dead, so I deleted them with moveobjectson and replaced them with new ones.  Normally this works, but suddenly everyone was holding their noses and going on about smelly rubbish piles.

I'm wondering if you perhaps had 'move objects on' when you put the new flowers out after manually deleting them?

The reason that I ask, is because I did this once. There were a lot of dead flowers and it would have taken several sim hours to clean all of them up. So I deleted them like you did. But I couldn't place the new flowers without 'move objects on'.

Like you, afterwards they kept complaining about the smell. Then I noticed that there was one flowerbed left in a corner that I missed. I deleted it also. I started to put out more flowers again and still couldn't place them. So on a whim, I decided to 'burninate' the spot rather than do 'move objects' again. To my surprise, it said "One object deleted-smell emitter. So then I used the burninator on the rest of the flowers that I had just placed. Each one deleted 2 objects, the flowers and the smell emitter.

So it looks like the smell emitters were left behind to bug the sims and spread disease.

(I know that this response is a little late compared to the original post, but since no one responded to that post I am guessing that others were not aware of the way the dead flowers work and might want this info for future reference.)

[J. M. Pescado]

Ahem. Cracks in walls. Or holes. Cockroaches are good at that sort of stuff.

If you have cracks and holes in your walls, you have a bigger problem than roaches. Hull breaches are extremely bad.

[kutto]

Do you suppose due to the infamous guinea pig disease Maxis was being extra cautious introducing another potentially fatal disease in the neighborhoods considering how everyone was unhappy with the guinea pig disease?

Bah. Like they wouldn't buy it anyway?

[Myth]

TreyNutz was conducting experiments on Sim sicknesses.  He also was bothered at how easy it was to cure the Sim with minimal effort.

[J. M. Pescado]

TreyNutz found it easy to cure his sims because passing out makes your sim asleep, which means he gets +8 recovery, and all other factors like comfort/energy are ignored. In order to maximize the harm, a sim has to be kept AWAKE, NOT be allowed to sit at ALL, *AND* have comfort/energy < 0. Sitting, whether or not comfort is high or low, grants a +6 recovery bonus, although having bad comfort and energy is -4 each (the sitting bonus does not ignore comfort/energy like the +8 sleep bonus does). Passing out will give him +8, so you can't allow that either, if you want to intentionally kill him. Note that a chair is not required for a sim to "sit"! A sim can be considered "sitting" on a wide variety of things: Terlets, stools, in cars, hot tubs, even the ground. TreyNutz therefore actually created a number of factors that made it much HARDER to die. Optimal RECOVERY would occur for a sim that is sitting and macrocaffeinating when not sitting.

[kutto]

Would optimal DYING be working at a craft station? Or might you have one better?

[fwiffo]

sometime after TS2Original, and as of this writing (TS2OFBp2), sims cannot suffer any plague symptoms, nor spread the plague, on a community lot.

I believe that with TS2U it is possible for a sim to suffer symptoms and spread illness on a community lot, so that was changed sometime after university.  I had a sim catch a mysterious illness from Loki Beaker on a community lot.  There seems to be some special disease related scripting with the Beakers though, so it may have been a special case.  At the time that it happened, the patch for University (the one that came out around the same time as NL), was not yet available.

Also, is it really possible for a Sim to come home sick from work?  I've only ever seen a sim get sick from the biotech station, food poisoning or roaches, and even then it's really rare, not to mention that any of those scenarios are pretty unlikely unless you're incredibly careless or trying for them.

[Frankenbeasley]

I've had Sims come home sick from work. Almost without exception this has occured when the Sim has been using the last charge of a noodlesoother. I'm not sure whether this is some effect of the item's expiration or if it is simply a coincidence, however.