The Asylum Challenge?

[J. M. Pescado]

I can't imagine trying to get a Silver Gardening Badge with ONE tomato plant.  It would take a while.

Not really. It doesn't really matter how many plants you have. Skillinator can max out gardening on only one plant simply by repeatedly watering it. This is slightly bad for the plant, but overwatering actually grants a short-term health boost.

[DrNerd]

My interpretation of the rules was that any hacks that would make the challenge easier had to come out.  If I'd had No Friends for Promotions, for example, I'd have pulled it.  The only ones I left in that had any impact on the challenge were the Coffee Cup Hack (and I'm not sure how much of a difference it would have made had I pulled it, given that I had no end tables and 3 Sims with 10 Neat), and the Fight Club, which I left in precisely because I knew I was going to have a lot of fights.  I'd have pulled the Skillinator if I had it.  Ditto Bathroom Uses You and Macrotastics, and I DID pull noeatcrap, Autoyak, and the Phone Hack, which hurt.  Oddly, I think pulling wfsanity actually HELPED, because they'd roll bizarre Wants and then get Aspiration for fulfilling them.

I forgot about just watering the hell out of one plant.  Although if you're going by the rule that there's no using juicers, there's no point to gardening in the first place.

[cassandra]

I like trying different strategies.  I seem to remember some restrictions on the Seasons rules, at least as they appear on Boolprop.com:

Oh, yes, here it is:

"-Fishing is allowed

-Your chosen sim maybe a graduate from college however if your sim graduates "cum laude" or higher take away 10, 20 or 30 points from your score

-Garden Plots and/or fruit trees are allowed but you can't use the juicer."

So there's no point in growing veggies for skill points if you can't use the juicer, though fish might be a helpful addition to the food supply. 

My original plan was to open a home business in the front part of the asylum.  My playable truly is that mean--"roll up and see the crazy people!  Five cents, one nickel, the twentieth part of a dollah!"  I figured if he had an LTW like 20 WooHoos or Twenty Lovers, he'd have to meet them all some way.    It just never became necessary.

PB

If you grow a big enough garden, you should not need to buy groceries. Then maybe you will not even need a job, if the LTW doesn't require one.

[professorbutters]

I have to admit that I left the phone hack in.  I don't think I had BRY or BUY, or even Macrotastics in at that point. The only thing I pulled was my ice cream file, because when ice cream is available, sims always choose to fix themselves some.  No cooking skills needed and a disappointing reduction in the chance of fiery death, so. . .

The coffee cup hack is unlikely to have matter.  I had a lot of Neat Sims too, and they valiantly kept trying to Clean Up all the cups until the dishwasher broke and they couldn't keep up with them all.  That was when they really got unhappy.  As a reward for finishing, I bought them all a dishwasher and you should have seen the big smiles!

http://i157.photobucket.com/albums/t50/professorbutters/asylum/snapshot_f4507aa5_74525c04.jpg

Well, SoWo and the Headmaster don't smile much and Grim kind of doesn't have a face, but I'm sure they were all smiles inside.

Cassandra, the point is that if you can't use the juicer, there is no point in growing eggplants for their skill building properties.  DocNerd's asylum had a Max All Skills LTW; mine was indeed a career LTW; in either case, the eggplant wouldn't have helped. 

PB

[J. M. Pescado]

Eggplants are basically of no use whatsoever in gaining skills, because the effort involved in farming them represents a net loss: It will take more time to farm them and consume them than it will to just gain the skills normally.

[jolrei]

Eggplants are basically of no use whatsoever in gaining skills, because the effort involved in farming them represents a net loss: It will take more time to farm them and consume them than it will to just gain the skills normally.

The only way this would be worthwhile then is if you want the sim to gain gardening badges and the eggplants would simply be a bonus by-product of the activity then.  The primary goal would not be skillinating in this case.

[J. M. Pescado]

The only way this would be worthwhile then is if you want the sim to gain gardening badges and the eggplants would simply be a bonus by-product of the activity then.  The primary goal would not be skillinating in this case.

But you can't even PLANT eggplants without a gold gardening badge! This means that if you're trying to gain a gold badge, you'd never get ANY eggplants. Besides, the customary method of gaining gold gardening is to drown a tomato plant. A SINGULAR tomato plant. It actually produces thriving fruit if you finish growing it, but tomatoes don't produce any useful products, so you'd just dump it as raw FPV anyway.

[jolrei]

Oh, well.  To hell with it then.

[Jack Rudd]

The only way this would be worthwhile then is if you want the sim to gain gardening badges and the eggplants would simply be a bonus by-product of the activity then.  The primary goal would not be skillinating in this case.

But you can't even PLANT eggplants without a gold gardening badge!

Silver badge, actually.

[professorbutters]

Unless somebody creates a new spin on the Asylum Challenge, there's no real benefit to earning badges.  The final score is calculated on how many days you were incarcerated--the fewer, the better--the skill points of the inmates, and their final aspiration score, minus deaths, using Influence, etc.  Sims won't autonomously earn badges on a residential lot that I know of.  I suppose if you wanted to do a home business "roll up and see the crazies!", your playable might eventually earn a Gold Sales badge, and that might be a fun money maker if you didn't have a career LTW.  But I don't think you could assign the non-playables to business-type tasks, and that's the only way I know of getting non-playable Sims to earn badges.

It would be interesting to try the home business angle.  I archived the lot I created--the Count Fosco Home for the Distraught--which was set up for this.  Maybe I'll run another asylum and do it if my playable rolls one of the WooHoo or Friends wants, or even "Earn 100,000."

BTW, some people buy a double bed if they have a Romance Sim.  Forget about it.  Those lazy inmates always want to *sleep* in it.  My Sim wound up WooHooing in the car, which seems to be allowed.  I was never able to determine if hot tubs, photobooths, etc. were allowed.  But if you want your playable to WooHoo, don't count on the bed.

PB

[DrNerd]

My gut reaction when someone suggested eggplants was that it was essentially a zero-sum game: too much work for something that could be more easily achieved by other means.

My only hesitation with a home business would be in allowing the customers access to the kitchen.  There's a rule against locking doors in the Asylum; maybe you could fudge that and lock the kitchen for Household Only, which would enable the inmates to feed themselves, but would ban the customers, but then you'd still have to worry about the negative stars that would happen from inmates committing Suicide By Pancakes.  My experience with playing Club Dante for the first time was that it took about five minutes for a Townie to light the place on fire.  The kitchen at Club Dante was summarily replaced by a hot tub.

[professorbutters]

Huh.  Some of those rules are *definitely* new--I played mine in November.  There used to be all sorts of rules about locking the door to pets, which are now gone:  the rules about no locked doors now say "but the patients can only access the beach from T-Th, so lock the gate to the beach at other times."  I don't see how you can have no lockable doors and yet lock the gate to the beach.

My plan was to have a front of house, essentially the parlor, with one door that allows or does not allow entrance to the rest of the house. I planned to make that door Household Only.   It's the same design I used for De Beers' home art gallery.  There was a microwave in the front, and a mini-fridge, which is also possible to light on fire.  I just didn't want townies eating the asylum food, using the toilet and probably breaking it, etc.  The dance sphere was also behind the locked door, as I didn't want townies to bogart it completely.  I also went for a "splendidly Victorian and yet somehow still wretched" look.



My reading on the locked doors rule was that you couldn't save any goodies for yourself.  So the patients had to have access to the kitchen:  you couldn't just cook and leave food out for them.  And you couldn't have a claimable room with a bed in it just for your playable.

The rules for FT also now state that you can only Tinker with the car but not drive it.  This puzzles me, as there was never an explicit rule against the car in the first place; only against leaving the lot for any other reason than work.  As it happened, I never opened the business, and the car was only a WooHoo mobile.

Oh, yes, and who cares about negative stars?  The idea was to attract non playables my Sim could WooHoo if he wanted to.

PB

[DrNerd]

I might be looking at an old copy of the rules; I didn't bother to look at the BV rules, since I don't have BV installed.

Sure, if you were using a business to lure Townies for WooHoo, negative stars wouldn't matter, but if you were using it with a Fortune Sim...  You know how they freak when someone loses a star or the business loses a rank.

[Jelenedra]

Where can one find updated rules?

[DrNerd]

I'm pretty sure Prof and I were looking HERE when we did ours.  AFAIK, SimScout hasn't updated his/her rules since the original.

[Giggy]

I did a little experiment with the architecture for the Asylum Challenge,

I made the house open planned meaning no walls on any of the rooms except for the exterior (Of course the rooms are outlined with rug dividers in the PETS ep to break off the bathroom, the living room, the kitchen and the bedrooms) which surprisingly was the most simplest to do as I didn't have to fuss with the wall toggle and my PC would be as laggy as heck.

Edit: Yeah I hate unnecessary walls of text too

[rohina]

Dude, that is a crazy long unfinished sentence. What are you on about?

[DrNerd]

I think it's that he was using rug dividers instead of walls to separate the areas, so he could see all of the Asylum, all the time, and the patients didn't have trouble with naked people in the bathroom.

I did something similar with areas of mine, masking off the phones with rug divider, so they didn't wake up a couch-napper when they rang, and masked off the shower/tub so that the shy Sims would use it with a roomful of Sims.  Not sure if it acts as a firebreak, though.

[Callista]

Well, I just completed this challenge. I found it fairly easy; I lost one Sim to a fire while my controllable sim was at work, though.

My controllable sim was Knowledge with a LTW of becoming chief of staff. That was fairly easy. I ended up romancing a co-worker and getting him to give me promotions.

It did take 31 days, though.

I had six fires.
One patient kept beating up on two girls. The girls ended up being best friends... shared misery, one supposes.
Every patient but one--a Popularity sim--was in constant aspiration failure. I've never seen the flour baby before this. Kind of cute, actually.
Four out of six surviving patients actually maxed out their Creativity.

My controllable sim actually got abducted by aliens! She was female, so no babies. (Thankfully. What's the rule on alien pregnancy in this challenge? Do you have to let the social worker take the baby, or can you try to raise it?)

There was one big hurdle. Because I used the money cheat to build a nice, roomy asylum (it worked wonders--the sims almost never got stuck in traffic jams), I also had the rule, "You may not buy anything else during the game except to replace stolen or repossessed items." There was nothing mentioning replacing destroyed items--and wouldn't you know it, somebody let in a stray dog on the first day who promptly ate one of my beds! And during the third week, just after my fatal fire (after which I removed one bed and one chair), it happened again!

I ended up spending nearly two weeks with two beds and seven Sims. Surprisingly, there were only six collapses.

The ghost of the dead Sim wasn't very troublesome.

I got my last promotion on Tuesday of the fourth week, making 31 days total. Afterwards, I passed out while the kitchen caught on fire and two patients had nervous breakdowns.

Scoring:
20,  never used influence
138 total skill points on surviving patients
33 for 33,000 aspiration points (most of them from the aforesaid Popularity sim--three of the surviving patients had zero!)
6 friends of the household. I had eight, at one point, but had a habit of keeping them just above friend relationship.
-31 days institutionalized
-20 for one death

Total score: 138

Oh, and this is my first post, so hi, everybody. 

Edit: Hmm, this would have been easier with the modified rules. Being allowed to lock pets out would have saved my beds...

[Callista]

Finished the challenge again. I could have had no aspiration failures, but I let two happen by letting a wolf in and not paying bills.

Total score, 193. Don't think I can do better, so that's the end of that.

Snapshots.

[sloppyhousewife]

Thankfully. What's the rule on alien pregnancy in this challenge? Do you have to let the social worker take the baby, or can you try to raise it?

Babies aren't allowed. Period.

You can not have a baby or move anyone else into the lot even if someone else dies.

[professorbutters]

I would suppose that in the extremely unlikely event of a baby, you'd have to let it be taken by the social worker.  But I'm puzzled as to why there was an abduction at all, unless you didn't have any other logic-building items (i.e. the chess table.)

PB

[Callista]

I chose the telescope as my logic-building item. There was no chess table.

So I suppose you either have to have all female sims or not have an expensive telescope, or else have a rule that you have to let the social worker take the baby.

Second time around I used the chess table... I got a higher score (193), but I also cheated on the personalities to make them all randomly extreme rather than random star signs... So I don't know whether it was the extreme personalities, the difference in equipment, or my having learned how-to that made the difference in the score. Or just luck. Probably just luck.

Do you have to use the easel to build creativity? I used instruments both times; but they have high Fun ratings and I'm not sure if that's allowed, whether the Fun>7 just applies to the TV or not.

Another observation: I think it's theoretically possible to complete this challenge without any aspiration failures because of how the aspiration bar stops dropping automatically when it hits that last line before deep red. You would have to prevent fires, sickness, and anything else that a Sim could possibly fear, plus have a healthy dose of luck.

[DrNerd]

If you had an expensive telescope and an uncontrollable male Sim who got abducted, he wouldn't live long enough to have the baby.  Because of the way they generally choose to take care of their Motives, he'd do whatever was Fun until that bar was maxed, and consequently starve to death, or else he'd stop having Fun to eat, and fall asleep in his plate when his Energy motive finally tanked, and starve to death.  You can Call Household To Eat, but there's nothing to make him go to bed, or pee, or shower, and if he has to pee, he won't eat, and if he's smelly, he won't eat or sleep, and if he has to sleep, he can't eat, and if he's bored, he won't care that he's tired, stinky, and starving...  He'd never survive for the baby to be born.

Even if he did survive through the birth through some miracle, unless you have antibabyharassment, you almost wouldn't be able to get it taken away, given the baby coding.  Even if you had your playable leave it outside, as soon as one of the uncontrollables got hungry, they'd run out, grab it, and feed it a bottle, and you wouldn't be able to stop them.  It'd be stinky, unless you made your playable change its diaper, but the uncontrollables would be cramming bottle after bottle down its throat.  As a toddler, you might be able to get it taken, if you left it outside in summer or winter, because the toddler coding is so much less aggressive, although the uncontrollables would probably still feed it and take it inside.

I'm guessing that's why people choose the chess table over the telescope, aside from the fact that the chess table also builds relationships, where the telescope doesn't.

You don't have to use the easel.  If you have Fortune Sims in the mix, the instruments are a better bet, because they'll fulfill the Earn Some Money Want from collecting their tips, but they can't sell the paintings they do (unless you have that hack and leave it in), and busking is pretty much the only way Fortune Sims have of earning money in an Asylum.

I had three Aspiration Failures, all fire-related.  At some point, you just have to assume that there's going to be a fire, or a mess leading to roaches, or someone's going to pee themselves or green-fume or pass out or fall off the Dance Sphere, and that'll be all it takes to bring the Sim Shrink around.

[Callista]

Yeah, you're right, I didn't even think of how pregnancy would affect an uncontrolled Sim. They were barely keeping themselves alive as it was--the third day would kill them if the first two didn't.