More Awesome Than You!

The Legacy Challenge posted by Pinstar reminded me of a challenge I'm currently trying out in my game. I love the Alice and Kev story by roBurky, and thought it would be fun to do my own version. With the Awesomemod allowing famblies to not have an adult, my poor sims are a girl child and her older brother, who's a teen. They're not exactly homeless, they live in a small one room shack in the woods. I'm mostly making up the rules as I go along, but some of them are: randomized traits save for family oriented for the teen and frugal for the child, no free food in the fridge, no free books on the shelves, no free clothes from the dresser, and they have to take the first LTW offered. After moving in, I sold all the food and books then used familyfunds to take their simoleans down to 0.

Their shack has only the bare essentials. For the kitchen area: cheap fridge, cheap stove, and one cheap counter. Living area: 2 cheap beds, 1 cheap loveseat, and 1 cheap bookcase. I agonized over allowing a bathroom but decided a cheap toilet and cheap shower were okay. No decorations are allowed until they can buy them with money earned. No other skilling items, besides the bookcase (which is useless until they can buy books), either. Also, no alarms are allowed when first starting out, anything lost to fire or burglar is lost until they afford to replace it. They are allowed to earn money any way they can; busking, painting, or writing, provided they can save up enough to buy the tools and have the necessary skills. They are allowed to skill at comm lots though. In my game, the teen has a part-time job and is saving up to buy the child an easel because one of her traits is artistic.

As I said before, I'm mostly making up the rules as I go along, so it's not a real Challenge, just something I'm doing for fun. I'd love to hear of anything someone else is doing similarly or new ideas for this to add to my own game.

Yep, I did an Alice and Kev. As today is the father's birthday, it's a fine time for a report.
 
Rodney Mallard:  Young Adult Male

• Dislikes Children
• Hot Headed
• Loser
• Slob
• No Sense of Humor

• 8 Gardening
• 1 Handiness
• 1 Charisma

Karen Mallard:  Teen Female (started toddler)

• Good
• Slob
• Genius
• Angler

• 3 Fishing

I allowed them to start with only a bench.  The first week's bill was $1.  They took that lone lot near the lake, because it was furthest from town.  But it turned out to be an excellent locale.  I too used one key rule that still made it too easy to be interesting:


Rodney looked up from his bench and saw rocks across the road.  He picked up the kid and then the rocks.  He walked over to the lake to go fishing.  Walking around the lake, he found the apple trees (and lettuce and bell peppers and grapes), so food problem already solved with a practical garden only 100 yards away.  Pretty early he had a 3 apple opportunity, which he was able to fulfill just by harvesting at the lake.  He never got around to fishing; he was too busy gardening.  He also found 3 more rocks near the orchard.   Regarding the rocks, I think he gets 2 gemstones and 3 space rocks every couple days right near his lot.  So he sold them, and had enough for a potty chair and a crib.   Selling rocks and gems and a crop of mediocre produce every few days allowed him to buy a wall and toilet stall. He later got a shower and more walls, and swapped out toilets.  He won the junior olympics with his zero atheletics skill.  The kid did learn to walk, talk and potty and aged up well.  It took a while to get a double bed, and I made a house of a 4x4 bedroom and 3x3 bathroom.It took a few days before I bought the two ceiling lights.   I just noticed I did put in a cheap sink, so they must have had a couple bucks.  ARGH!  They have a foundation!  Now you know they are rich!  When the kid aged into a teen, there was no need to get a part-time job.  The time would be better spent skilling.  

The kid has learning some fishing, but she doesn't get much time for it while running A's in school and visiting classmates as the game proposes.  His gardening is up to level 8 and he is growing all the common (buyable) crops.  He's earned $1168 from gardening.  He's analyzed 9 rocks and had 5 gems cut.  I think he did complete a repair opportunity, and his 1 point charisma was a "meet someone" opportunity reward, iirc.

Storywise, it could have been interesting that he is a Gold Digger, and the kid's first acquaintance was Agnes Crumplebottom, but nothing developed on its own.

And that was enough for me. They'll be NPC's for me now.  It was just too easy walking right into some rocks and apples.  It would have been harder if I at least had to hunt for them, but still not hard enough.  But, what did I learn... What could make it better?

Need a negative "sleeping outdoors" or "need shelter" if outside more than 20 hours or something.  *the only reason to buy walls is for privacy for tub/shower and placement support for things that must be placed along a wall*.  Maybe we need dingos to run off with toddlers.  And pigeons to ensure all your clothing has that undesirable "spattered" look.
I think the "it's dark" should be more severe.
Special case:  Sims that hate children shouldn't be able to sleep in the same bed as a child ... unless they plan to let the kid fall asleep and then physically kick her out of bed for the lawls.
Collectibles kill any semblance of poverty.
Since I started Sims 3  I have wanted to announce the cooking is worthless (except ambrosia, I guess), just based off of buying a $30 pizza every few days if you have a fridge to store leftovers.  Now I see that perhaps you just need one apple tree per sim?  Wow, so challenging when you don't need to buy a fridge or stove.  And obviously I'm already completely disregarding the free meals at the park(s?) and gym.

So, it would be definitely more challenging if you weren't allowed to leave your lot.  But like that's so easy to call stupid.  If you're not leaving your lot, why bother playing TS3 than TS2?  If you're not leave YOUR lot, your not homeless are you!!?!?  Stuff like that  :)

I mean,  next time I have a broke homeless sim, I have a simple plan of attack, still without power-playing:

Find apple.  Plant apple.  Victory is ours.

(http://i42.tinypic.com/2dw9dli.jpg)

(http://i44.tinypic.com/11i1y68.jpg)

P.S.  I see there that they had to splurge on a little table to put a birthday cake on.

Splurge on a table?  I always hold my birthdays in the park, by my sim-self. 

I also did a version of Alice and Kev, but my goal was not to hold them down or keep them homeless. I played it as if the woman I started out with had lost her job and hubby and had nowhere else to go. She started in a "park" type lot next to that place that has the chess tables in sunset valley. She mostly earned her keep by harvesting other people's gardens and using the pot at the park. I never went looking for seeds, bugs, or rocks, but if she happened ot be passing one, she was allowed to collect it and sell it for profit. I let her get a job as a test subject where she met a guy she fell in love with. He, of course, did a hit and run (not planned by me). She had his baby, but he was already in love with someone else. Heh...and I actually thought it would be an easy out for her since he had a spiffy beach house. Anyhow, it took her whole young adult life, but she finally earned enough to move into the cheapest starter and then sell it off for the next one she could afford. Absolutely no cheats were used during this...and I'm very proud of myself for that.

Alice and Kev isn't a challenge, it's how I usually play the game. The fact I voluntarily CHOOSE to do so as a PREFERRED starter option should tell you that this is, in fact, BETTER.

I really need to get around to doing something like this. As surprising as it may sound, I haven't ever worked a sim up from nothing in any of the 3 versions. I always cheat up the funds to an insane amount, build them a huge house and play. They only get jobs if I think about it. I know I've sucked most of the fun out of the game by doing this all these years but I have this obsessive urge to have all the options available at start.

After playing like this with just one family, I think I'm starting to agree. It makes it a lot more interesting and fun when they have to work for every little thing. Like McCrea, I've learned that the "Any way they can" rule for money making sucks when collectibles come into play. To get around this, since IRL it's highly unlikely but still plausible to just find gold lying around, they are allowed to find and sell one collectible for their entire lives. The gardening and fishing is also out, now, for me. They are only allowed to harvest from community plants just enough to live off of, and the same goes for fishing. No more profiting from food. With these new rules, my sims have exactly $79 after one week, and the only thing they've added to their shack is the easel for the child.

It's not so much the entire "moving up from nothing" thing that motivates me to do it. It's the fact that the amount you start with is insufficient to buy a house with good, non-harmful things. Since there is no point in buying HARMFUL things which depreciate and make you lose money, it stands to reason that there is no point in having a house at all, since you won't actually be using it while it has nothing of use. Plus, the game penalizes you for not partaking of its open-world structure.

Take, for instance, the Body Skill. Going to a "gym" community lot grants a 50% boost to the gain rate. As any gamer knows, failure to use a bonus is equivalent to a penalty. Therefore, from a gamer's perspective, all Body skill gains OUTSIDE of a gym operate at a -33% penalty. Therefore, it would be utterly daft to pay from your limited pool of funds to buy a piece of exercise equipment that is 33% less effective than something that is free. A similar bonus is applied to the "work at home" interaction at Libraries, making it the biggest misnomer in the game, as you would always be working from a library, where the computer for doing so is free and outperforms any computer you could thus buy. The same applies to book skilling at libraries: Sims get a read-speed bonus at a library, increasing the rate at which they gain skills from a book. If this wasn't enough, the game will stick you with the "Stir Crazy" penalty moodlet if you continue to defy the numbers and stay home. In fact, the only thing that you can install at home that you cannot get out of a community lot is high-quality cooking (stoves are verboten on commlots)...and it's not as if you cannot get food on community lots also for free, or quality food, if you grill/restaurant it.

In short, unless you can afford to furnish a house to sickening levels of opulence and your sims have nothing better to do with their time and money but wallow in decadent luxury, there is little reason you need a house at all! There's no weather, and in any case you would be unaffected by it while inside a community lot, you don't have to PAY for anything you use on a community lot, when your lot is empty you receive no bills, and nearly everything you can buy is inferior to what you can use in the field.

Is this is a bad thing? Well, as I found in TS2, watching sims at home? Totally and utterly boring. Watching them behave like assholes to each other on community lots and in the open world is where all the action is, anyway. Readers of Awesomeland wil note how scenes of home-life are utterly absent, because there is nothing interesting to see there.

I HAVE to try that out now, for real. The next sim I make is going to be all the way "homeless". Right now, I prefer to have them skill at home whenever possible, because it's easier to keep track of them that way, but with all the bonuses at comm lots, it does seem pretty stupid now. I think I'll try it out with just one sim to get accustomed to the new playstyle, but the logic of this style sounds infinitely better.

The argument of "harder to keep track of" has some amount of merit if the family consists of multiple people...but it is becoming increasingly less of an issue with AwesomeMod's developing "Supreme Commander" feature, which allows you to boss sims around merely by clicking on their headbobs in the map screen, without ever having to even LOOK at them. :P

Supreme Commander sounds beyond awesome. When can Fat Gwilly People expect this?

Shh, the FOJ has been releasing shinies without Gwill having to ask for them, so please don't remind him of that.

Supreme Commander is part of AwesomeMod, so Fat Gwilly People don't need to ask for it. However, it is incomplete and may bork your game, so I have not documented it.

Also tried an Alice and Kev. The fun for me is the sims trying to work their way into other people's houses for food and hygiene, so they are not getting cheap showers, fishing, or selling rocks.
Mother is a Klepto, which seems overbalanced but ends up not being so since she has stolen items useless to them such as a game system while they have no TV, decorations when there are no walls on their lot, toys for young children with no children present, list goes on. The lot is populated with useless stolen objects which I think suits the Insane trait of the sim.

I need to start my own Alice & Kev . . .  or maybe just Kev.  I'm thinking Insane, Kleptomaniac, Loves the Outdoors, Virtuoso, and Loner.  He (or possibly she) got turned out onto the streets by the terrible policies of the previous Leader of the Free World.

When i read the Alice and Kev story, i had to also make a homeless sim for my Sunset Valley.........

his name- Henry Earl. (He was actually based off a guy who lives in my real town)
traits- insane, klepto, Neurotic, slob, and inappropriate

His "house" is really a lot that looks like an over grown junkyard with tall trees and tall weeds. I randomly placed some household items around, but no bed. (only a bench)
he has cheapest stove, cheapest fridge, cheatest toilet and sink. The funniest part about it, is that everything is placed all over the place, so he spends alot of time walking from one place to
the other. I broke down and gave him a bathroom area, i know, but it is still outside because i only gave it one wall. he likes to go to the park and talk to himself, and has made a few
friends. Actually, he likes to invite people over, and one girl actually let him kiss her....now i want to make lots of homeless sims, WHAT FUN!!

My only question is... where do they sleep? If the goal is to have no house at home and therefore no bills, where do you stick the bed?

There is nothing stopping you from putting beds on community lots. If you don't wish to do this, caffeination is also available.

I gave my homeless sims park benches and streetlights as their only furniture. If they want to shower or use a toilet there are plenty on community lots. I don't see the point of having "homeless sims" who own furniture and appliances, they will autonomously take naps on nearby benches or recliners if they are tired.

Furnishing their home lot defeats the point of having them be homeless, since now you have to pay for that crap on the lot! It seems our goals are a bit different here: You seem to be trying to create the APPEARANCE of homelessness, by actually providing them with an extremely badly-designed "home", whereas my goal is to truly capture the full benefits of homeless, that of no-expense, no-money-down living.

It's not even as if it's that hard to crash at somebody else's place. I had a go at the current version of the Legacy Challenge the other day in my custom Riverview. I met, shmoozed and finagled myself a boyfriend in the first day simply by crossing the road and knocking on the door of the mansion there (Trepie your Sim is a pushover, but he has the nasty habit of booting my Sim out of bed at 1 in the morning). This gives me access to top quality bed and bathroom facilities from day one. Not to mention a high end kitchen all without having to schlep down into town. My Sim wakes of a morning and has breakfast, performs her ablutions and then heads into town to use the library where she either works on her current novel, reads, or maybe heads outside to busk. At the end of the day she heads back up the hill, tends her garden (which is all her lot contains atm) and then crosses the road to her boyfriends place. It gets a little harder after the first spawn and next time I do this I'm picking a boyfriend who has a crib at his place.

I wish I had the body and the hutspah to get away with this in RL.

I almost choked on my coffee laughing at this! I used to have a stripper friend who did have the body and chutzpah to get away with this. Her "home lot" was a tiny empty studio, that she only paid for so she had an address. I don't usually associate with women like that, but she won me over with her persistence to win my friendship and the fact that despite her "lifestyle choices", she was a certified genius. Or maybe it was her genius that influenced her lifestyle? It's not for everyone, but by not spending a dime of her own money for so long, and making as much as she did as a stripper, a few months ago she moved to Italy with $20,000 in her bank account.

The warehouse in Riverview is paradise for squatters.  You'll have to put your own stuff in there (I think it contains a bookshelf, a desk, and a loveseat in the upstairs offices to start), but it's roomy enough that you could raise a family in it.

As far as I can tell, that is the entire point of that building, since it has no other useful function other than to be taken up by squatters, which is exactly would happen to it in real life.

Here I was thinking it was actually for the purpose of holding raves.

I think the only way to do a rave there is to have a musical sim show up and start playing and then hope that some random assortment of townies wander by and join the party.

It's much better as a place for sim-hobos (smobos?) to crash until they can afford homes of their own.