More Awesome Than You!

Ok, I get the basic steps:

1. Have a Sim die while there is at least one other living Sim on the lot.
2. One of the live Sims will at some point get an Opportunity to bring the Urn/Gravestone to the Science Lab to resurrect them.
3. Complete the Opportunity.
4. Future ghost Sims on that lot can be made playable by paying at the Science Lab for it.

My problem is Step 2.

What can be done to increase the odds of this opportunity arising? I have a Sim living on a lot with 5 gravestones. I keep a few in her inventory, and a few scattered about at all times. It's been about a week of in-game time, and the opportunity has not arisen. Is there a way to force it to occur, or at least increase the odds? What are the conditions here?

Step 1 is actually unneeded.  If you go to the graveyard a lot to play guitar for tips and chat with the ghosts, you'll get the opportunity.  I think the thing that triggers it and increases the chances of the opportunity is your relationship with the ghost.  Unfortunately, I could only find one way to interact with the ghost on my lot, which was dancing to music.

Looking at the code, it appears that phonecall opportunities can occur, at the least, every 2 days and, at the most, every 4 days, presumably from the last time an opportunity roll was performed. The ghost restoration opportunity has a 75% chance to occur per roll. Further, the ghost restoration opportunity has a requirement of "HasHighRelationshipWithDeadSim," but no indication of what, in numbers, that actually means. So it looks like your problem is either a relationship that's not high enough, or a string of bad rolls.

The annoying thing for me is, I think my ghosts could be borked. They never show up anywhere :(. I've gone to the graveyard everyday and they're always no where too be found  :-[

It took a while for me to catch the ghosts actually out. I don't like that they are only out from midnight to 5 am now instead of from dark to light.

Actually, I believe ghosts are simply out for five hours and can come out at any time during the late night. I had one ghost who didn't show up til 4am and he stayed until 9am.

He sat and ate breakfast with the family and everything. He disappeared after clearing the breakfast dishes.

I just had a ghost hang around until almost 1 PM. I suspect it's related to their relationship with residents of the house.

Oh, and thanks guys. It worked. I built up my relationship with the ghost to Best Friend, and within 3 days, I got the call to bring him back. Thanks!

I was able to get a playable ghost. My widower's wife died(by altering the hunger need accidentally) and now I have her as a ghost, the husband works at the Science facility too, and he got the opportunity 2-3 days after moving to a new lot.

Ok, so when a Sim in the household dies, your relationship with it resets? So you need to build your relationship with your dead husband back up? Lame.

And also, for the opportunity to arise, the grave isn't supposed to be in your Sim's inventory? Or can it? Evil Prima sez it has to be in your inventory, I believe. But of course, I am doubtful.

I'm wondering because I've been looking forward to having playable ghosts, and attempted it with one Sim, but after several days, got frustrated and gave up. Meh. Shall retry later.

I'm rather annoyed that you can't choose the various colored ghosts who inhabit the graveyard.

The second time my 4th generation Sim was rejected for Try For Baby with his girlfriend, she said he was "creepy."  I said "Creepy!  I'll show you creepy" and decided he was going to romance one of the blue ghost chicks and have ghost kids with her.  Unfortunately, it turns out you can't select any of the pre-existing gravestones to put in your inventory.

Nor, it seems, is the gravestone of Sim who has been dead too long.  I experimented with the Playable Ghost thing with him in my very first household, decided it was boring, sent him back to the netherworld, and skipped all future opportunities.  Now both his gravestone and his wife's no longer appear in "manage dead," though generation 3's gravestone does.

Playing elders past their expiration date isn't much fun because they've pretty much done everything I want to do with them.  The real entertainment seems to be in playing a ghost who still has a life in front of them, and the adult / young adult dead in the graveyard seemed ready made for that, though many would require a Mid Life Crisis because they have only 1 trait.

One possibility would be to kill a Young Adult Sim and then put the urn on ice for a couple of generations and bring him back.  Is there a "kill instantly" option somewhere in the debug modes, as there was with the tombstone object in TS2?  I find the process of killing via accidents (fire, drowning, etc) tedious and distasteful, and you really have to work at it to kill a Sim in TS3.

 - Gus

well you can always make your own playable ghosts
White: normal death old age
Blue: drowning
Red: fire
Yellow: electrocution
light purple; starvation.
there is a way to get each one:
red for instance make a smalll room add stove, refrig and counter top have them make waffles as soon as its in oven cancel action and watch the fire burn
blue add a small pool add wall or fence around pool once sim is inside then move counter for energy to red and watch them drown.

When in the main menu (the one where it asks you to load your save/neighborhood/start a new game), enter the debug code (testingcheatsenabled true for those that don't know). Go into your lot and on the Sim's Hunger bar all the way to the minimum with your mouse. The game needs to be unpaused to see the result. That should do it, and you'll get a spankin' new Hunger Ghost! Yay. Just beware of any food you leave in its path. Or cute kittens.

You can, you just have to befriend the ghost first. Also, the ghost must be 'in' the grave when you pick it up, ie, not haunting. I've resurrected two pre-dead ghosts now, it works.

All my Sims die of old age. I get far too many options to make them playable. Accepted once and playable ghosts are a big bore besides they occupy space and you cannot have more Sims in the hosehold. If you made them playable, regret it by just put their tombstones back on the ground (it is placed in their own inventory).
Instead I have them to be just ghosts. They are so simply guests and you can have them around from clock 21:00 to 07:00. Relationships increase by contacting them. I had a kid that was born after the grand-mother died. She played him in the crib and build up relation enough to be best friends. Why should I sci-fi them?

You can, you just need a high enough relationship with the ghost.  I played guitar for tips in the graveyard a lot of nights, and I can put most of the gravestones in my inventory.

I wasn't aware of the second condition.  I'll have to look into that.

 - Gus

That wasn't the case for me. The son was just as good of friends with his dad as when he was alive.

Ugh, there needs to be a mod for this. I've been trying to get the stupid lab to call my sim for a week, but no dice.

Have you tried this mod in your game? And doesn't it conflict with the Awesomemod?

I was given this opportunity after stealing a gravestone; once you do this opportunity you have access to raise any ghost after that. Or at least I did; the bubble stays in the menu of the science building from then on.

Read the thread. About five comments down, the author says specifically that it will indeed conflict with the Awesomemod.

You should go to the Awesomemod requests thread, if someone hasn't posted that there already.

That looks like it's just the Debug Interaction Enabler. This already exists in AwesomeMod, so there's no need to download that. Just enable it by typing "setconfig enabledebuginteractions on", then CRTL-SHIFT-Click using the directions for that other mod.

I played Agnes Crumplebottom's lot for several Sim-weeks, and noticed that the higher Agnes had built her and Erik Darling's relationship, the likelier he was to come out haunting any given night. Erik Darling's ghost showed up only once every three to four days at the beginning, but once he and Agnes became romantic interests, he came out almost every night. She was awarded the Opportunity to resurrect him at that point.

What is it that makes the playable ghosts especially boring? Can't they do the same things as every other sim?

That's what makes them boring.  They're pretty much just see-through Sims, with no neat, ghostly quirks.  Fine as Sims, boring as ghosts.

Except they (apparently) can't die. It'd be nice if they stayed at the age they died at, but they age. If you bring back too many (and don't feed them ambrosia) you'd wind up with a hood full of undying see-through elders before too long.

Immortality through death.

Nah, they have the autonomous Scare action. I brought one back and he keeps scaring his daughter. Also his son-in-law keeps getting the want to see his ghost so free points. Not really that cool but it is something.


For some reason, instead of being married to his deceased wife they show up as engaged and there is no option to marry. I'm sad to hear that they don't die. They don't come back at the age they die they come back at the start of the age span. So my sim died at age 92 or what ever and came back at 70ish.

Yes, but that's autonomous.  When actually playing them, they have the same options as fleshbound Sims.  From a gameplay point of view, they're no different.

Also they go 'woooo' all the time instead of talking. It gets old.

The problem is that I can't marry them OR get them to add to active family :(

Huh.  In my game, I had a sim befriend a child ghost, move her onto the lot, bring her back as a playable, and then marry her off to his son.  They now have a ghost baby.

I'd ask how you're not able to do this stuff, but if you knew that, the question might be unnecessary.

1) Went to graveyard
2) befriend a ghost
3) invite him / her to my home
4) Gave him / her ambrosia
5) Became human again
6) invited the same person back to my home
7) Tried to "add to active family" = nothing
8) person became my bf/gf = but add to active family doesn't work...

any suggestions how to do that? Thank you

Ask to move in doesn't work?

My Sim was at a restaurant and had befriended an elder there Nancy Landgraab and while they were talking the Grim Reaper came and she died.  He was mourning so I took him to the graveyard and chose Manage the Dead, and in there was her tombstone, so I took it out and put it in his inventory.  He already had the opportunity from the Science Lab.

So I took him to the Science Lab and had her brought back and she returned as a ghost and she was walking around at the Science lab.  I thought she was going to be human again.  So I left her there and returned home and thats when I noticed it had added her as a family member.  Ugh!  So then she started hanging at my house and causing problems.  So finally I found she had her own tombstone in her inventory so I clicked on it and it had the option to return to the Netherworld.  So I chose that and she vanished from my family list and I thought I was done with her.

Now she appears everynight haunting the house!  How do I get rid of her?

Double posting.
(http://cats.moreawesomethanyou.com/die12.jpg)

This is interesting. What is this "Manage the Dead"? I saw many Sims dieing from old age and actually I get a message that someone is going to die of old age, so that Sims can visit them before they die. But I never saw their tombstones anywhere in the graveyard. It seemed that they just vanished as soon as the grim left. Are they saved somewhere? Are they retrievable? I emptied out the Pleasant graveyeard when I rebuilt my empty hood and would like to fill it up with Sims that really dies in my new hood.

Visit the graveyard, click on the mausoleum and you'll have an option to manage the dead. It pops up like an inventory button, you can hover over the tombstones (game calls them urns) and see who it is. Just place in your sim's inventory like any other object.

Do teens show up? Coz that would explain a lot.

So there I was playing the Goth family, Bella made ambrosia...as a experiment I was trying to make a townie younger.  this was during the haunting hours and as i was trying to get the guest to come and eat the ambrosia...Victor Goth chows down on it becomes alive again, and say gotta go, bye!  Since then he has moved into the neighborhood and spawed a baby...family tree picture has an extra branch now.

"Manage the dead" would do for any sim? I second Euphemism's question and ask a nwe one: what about children?

I played around quite a while now and I never saw the option "Manage the dead" from the mausoleum. I installed a mod called "visit the mausoleum at any time", can it interfere?
Another problem is that all of my ghosts seems to be sleepy as soon as they leave the tombs. I have played the Goth for some days and I get all the ghosts to go out by night but all they do is to look for a bed and nap. Sleep whole day and nights too? It is not enough that the game is soooo slow that it takes 1 Sim hour for only one interaction between Sims - you command "Friendly Introduction" and they take 1 Sim Hour to react to the command. To have them to talk to each other can take 5 Sim hours and so the ghosts time is already gone and they vanish back to their tombs. This is making the game unbearable. I've been playing more TS2 than TS3.
Maybe I should make the ghosts visiting during the day. It seems that they are affected by the same sleep pill that my visitors get. Something to do with too late to be awaken. Huh! why then on the hell EA's ghosts have to visit only late in the night? Can they visit like other normal sims?
Is anyone else having those gawning mouths Sims all the time? I have very few xml mods installed (23 I think) and using Indie/Awesome, but I think this had happened since day one (no mods).

They can indeed die, so to speak.  Eventually, you'll get a message saying that their hold on the living world has dissolved and they cannot be restored again.  I tried to keep my legacy founder around through all 10 generations and got this message around generation 3 I believe.

I only know through what I've heard, and what I heard was that the 'So-and-so is about to die soon' message kept popping up for a playable ghost in another household.

Also, I ran a brief test myself before my earlier post, with the lifespan set extremely short. I saved with a ghost, and then fed the ghost ambrosia, and was able to get an old age death. I then reloaded, ran through again, but without the ambrosia, and this time the ghost didn't die. Admittedly I didn't think to check if the ghost would die at a later time, but it definitely didn't die when it should have. I do plan to redo the test -- for several reasons -- as soon as I have another playable ghost, though that may be a while.

Yeah, it came as a surprise to me.  I just checked the last save that I have before she ghost-perma-died, and it said she was 1114 days old.  Hmm...that number actually seems high, but that's what the Simology panel says.  She was helping raise her great-grandkids at the time.  And, the message I got specifically said that she could not be restored again.

Oh, one other thing...I was playing at the normal 90-day life span when the ghost died at that age.

I love messing around with ghosts. I love watching them around the neighborhood. I have Elvis strolling around the local trailer park, dead golden-age Hollywood stars haunting Agnes Crumplebottom's house (funny how the Ginger Rogers and Fred Astaire ghosts love to autonomously dance!), an old Indian burial mound near SimHenge, homeless hungry ghosts in the park, etc...and this Chaos Mod Painting object mod from MTS is great. It mimics the old TS2 Voodoo Bottle object mod. Forgive me if you already know about it, but I didn't see it mentioned in this thread. And for some reason, it's really buried on the MTS site--IMHO, it should be a Featured DL.


http://www.modthesims.info/download.php?t=356513 (http://www.modthesims.info/download.php?t=356513)

With it, you can instantly kill any (or all) sims on the lot by any method desired. You can also make a playable ghost corporeal again, make any haunting NP ghost on the lot playable, etc. You can make them take on any of the colors. I like this feature because sometimes I like to see plain old white ghosts walking around, but I don't necessarily want them to be elders (i.e., Elvis-Sim).

This has been a real timesaver for me, because after you've tried to get someone electrocuted for the gazillionth time, it's head- (or computer-) mashing time. And burning your sims to death once is enough. Ditto drowning. Also, for machinima purposes, I don't have to do any staging with "moveobjects on" and other kludges.

It also calls any of the facial or body animations you want, again for machinima purposes. A very useful little gizmod.

The poster claims that it will conflict with no tuning or core mod, as it is a "an object with a custom Sims 3 Signed Assembly within it. It does not override any of the signed assemblies already in the game, but instead references it through its OBJK internal file." I, being a modding noob, have no idea at all what this means.

Still, the one possible issue I can see in using it with AM and/or ISM is that you can also set aging on or off on an individual sim basis, rather than household or neighborhood. I don't know yet if this conflicts with the ISM household settings or AM's Sacred setting as I have not tried it.

Of course, you can also accomplish all this by using the Sims 3 Neighborhood Workshop program in between play sessions, but I like something I can use in-game. Once I've 3booted that sucker on, I like to keep it up for as long as I'm playing that day rather than go through all that again. JM's 3booter app, btw, is the only way I can get 1.3 to start without CTDs with Awesomemod installed.

This is so great!!! Thanks for the link! The mod I have in game doesn't give me the option "drown"

I've been wanting to make a TS3 equivalent of a vampire for a while... I want it to look Ghostified, but have the normal sim voice, like it does if you use AwesomeMod's Ghostify option, but I am holding out to see if Pescado adds the suggestion I made to have a submenu on Ghostify that lets you choose the death-style graphics (like sparks for electrocution etc) in case one of these looks better on my vampire. Thought about using the chaos mod painting but the coder says he's suprised he managed to get it to work given that he hasn't done stuff like this in ages... so I was a bit wary of trusting my game to it... wouldn't want to get 10 days in and find there was an bug and have to lose valuable playing hours. But thanks for all the ideas anyway, I'll keep an eye on this thread. :)

My apologies in advance for resurrecting this topic if it's the wrong thing to do, but I've hunted around and it seemed the best place to post a question on ghosts.  I'm looking for some gameplay help with resurrecting some particular ghosts and making them playable.  I've been trying for ages to resurrect the children of the Remington family of Riverview, but nothing works;  I never seem to get the "Oh my Ghost" opportunity at all.   In the first saved game in which I tried this, it took so long that eventually the ghosts stopped coming to the house completely, although other ghosts (Destry Dixon and the graveyard ghosts) seemed to work just fine in that game.

So, after doing some internet research on ghosts and their properties, I started a new game and tried again.  Currently I have  both members of the Jones couple (who are the ones trying to perform the resurrection), with maxed relationships with all four of the ghosts.  Aiden has also reached level 10 of the Science career, has very high logic and has maxed out a few other skills as well, like cooking, gardening, handiness and fishing;  the ingredients for Ambrosia are sitting in his inventory.  He's even made friends with a few random graveyard ghosts in an attempt to trigger the opportunity.  He's played Chess with Jasper Remington, watched TV with the other ghosts, and otherwise hung out with and chatted with them (as did his wife) for days and days of Sim Time, and still nothing happens.  Does anyone have any ideas what I can do (outside of that Chaos Painting on MTS3, which potentially conflicts with Awesomeware) to trigger this opportunity, and can anyone tell me why is it so hard to achieve?

I will give thought to the entire "vampires" thing and may even implement it myself if EAxis is too slow about it, but for now, we need someone to be able to translate the TS2 animations so they can bite necks and BLEH a lot.

In my experience, this is not necc for two reasons.

1.  With a lucky roll, I guess, I've had a sim get that opportunity after relatively shortly after befriending and romancing up a pre-dead ghost.  However, trying the other way has actually taken me forever and a half.  I have some saves I've given up on for just the same problem you mention.

2.  Curiousity got the better of me, so I put on my robe and wizard hat lab coat and ether goggles.  I was specifically testing if you can get the "manage the dead" masoleum option to grab the grave of a sim that died while living alone -- provided you load up the lot of someone s/he befriended.  After maxing CASsie's friendship with Leighton, I had her starve in the park.  (Three times, before I removed the unlucky trait.  Before then, I thought "lulz!pity" from the Grim Reaper was an occasional occurrence with that perk. Er... what are the actual stats?)  Loaded Leighton, and no option appeared.  Hrm.  Checked the park.  The grave was still there, and he could pick it up.  Whoohoo!

Then I got curious again.  This time, CASper died inside his trailer, with new bestest friends in the Bachelor house.  Again, no Manage The Dead.  New CASper moved in, and lo and behold.  Grave.  Not where I left it, but still in the house.  Killed him, and moved someone else in.  Got the burial ground event, and went with it, for fear of wiping the other graves along with the new ones.  Original graves still there, with collectable gems spawned on them like the others.

So it seems character death isn't really all that permanent.  With some patience, luck, and ambrosia, it might be possible to have them up and breathing again.  I think.  I haven't really tried yet.

... Which is completely irrelevant in and of itself to what you said, but here's the relevant part:

What appears to be the deciding factor is your relationship level with the ghost.  Since the graves aren't destroyed, even if they die alone at home, you can gain access to the ghost, and build up said relationship.  I'm not recommending planning it out that way, since it could be more trouble than it's worth, but it still allows for flexibility if this is something you want to push later on in your town.  Or, if your sim actually dies accidentally.  It happens, right?


It kind of bothers me how ineffectual they are in comparison to sims 2 ghosts, but they are purty.  Also, ghost babies/toddlers don't earn my hatred nearly as fast as their living, and gratingly louder, siblings.

I was disappointed to learn that they aged. Seriously?  I understand that it probably keeps the ghost babies from being forever so, but...  I feel like there's gotta be something else that can be checked against.

[Edit: alone, not along.  Though the idea of a die-along is kind of amusing.]
[Edit 2: Gah! Double post fixed.  Sorry.]