More Awesome Than You!

MYTH: Something special happens when you reunite Bella from Strangetown with the Goth family, either by moving the Goths to Strangetown or Bella to Pleasantview.
STATUS: FALSE, unless you consider corrupting your neighborhood files something special. Bella will not regain memories. The Goth children will not recognize Bella. What WILL happen is that your neighborhood files will be corrupted by duplicate copies of the Goth relatives and/or anyone Bella happened to meet prior to moving. Don't do this. Absolutely nothing cool happens with Bella.

MYTH: Alien abduction is more likely if your sim has high interests in something, gazes from an elevated platform, or at certain specific hours at night.
STATUS: FALSE. Alien abduction occurs with a straight 0.05% (NOT 5%) chance per cycle of stargazing. For practical purposes, this is somewhat worse than your odds of becoming a road waffle if you dash across the street without looking. If you're still alive to read this, you're probably not gonna see an abduction anytime soon unless you cheat, install a hack, or play the Curious brothers.

MYTH: The Headmaster instantly rejecting a family on arrival is caused by poor-quality yards, furniture, family funds, or other family state. Improving your yard, making your family richer, making the members like each other more, or improving their grades even when they are already above a C will make him more tractable.
STATUS: FALSE. The headmaster's snooty 1700 departure is caused by a bug relating to the saving of your game after calling the headmaster. Do not save your game after calling the headmaster. It is advised that you do not call the headmaster hours in advance. Call only shortly before or during hour 17 (5pm), and he will arrive immediately. Do not save after calling the headmaster until he leaves. If you do experience a snooty instant-departure, the headmaster will perform his proper ritual if called back immediately.

MYTH: Children learn skills faster than adults. Alien children learn skills faster than other children.
STATUS: FALSE. The rates of sim skill learning are fixed and invariant with respect to age. Some sims learn some skills faster than other sims due to personality affinities. The wearing of a thinking cap or the effects of smart milk also increases the rate of learning.

MYTH: Feeding a toddler smart milk results in him learning faster when he becomes a child than a toddler who is not fed smart milk.
STATUS: PARTIALLY TRUE. A toddler who receives smart milk can, in some circumstances, have his skill-boost-rate attribute "stuck" similar to the fashion of a stuck emitter, or perhaps the snooty-headmaster-departure. A freshly nuked toddler may also carry over his effect briefly into childhood. However, this represents a bug and does not occur consistently. Some children may stick and become "smart" for their entire childhood, others may not. No pattern has yet been discerned.

MYTH: Lazy sims require less sleep.
STATUS: FALSE. Despite what is claimed in the blurb text for Lazy/Active, lazy sims have higher energy decay rates and therefore require more sleep than active sims, not less.

MYTH: Parents frequently produce identical children.
STATUS: PARTIALLY TRUE. This effect is actually a bug, the "firstborn effect", caused because the personality generation algorithm of TS2 runs on a deterministic sequence that is reset to the beginning everytime you start the game. This can be most clearly witnessed in CAS, where you will get the exact same series of sims every time you restart the game: Aries, Aquarius, Cancer, etc. The effect extends to babies of a couple, so that if you have a baby, then save, quit, come back later, and have another baby, the second baby will be exactly the same in personality as the first. To break this trend, at the start of every session, you should go to CAS and roll an arbitrary number of sims, then discard them. The number should be be different and arbitrary, or you will simply be advancing the sequence a fixed number of steps every time. The genetics of a sim is determined by various rules of inheritance and can result in similar-looking offspring if you do not understand how traits are inherited.

MYTH: Sims of certain astrological signs have better or worse compatibility with sims of other specific signs.
STATUS: FALSE, as of TS2U v1.0. Compatibility, romantic or otherwise, of two sims, is determined entirely by their present relationship state, personality, and conversational interests. Sims which have low interest in another sim's high-interest topics will have poor conversations and thus build relationship slowly. Sims which have personality types that make them less inclined towards certain social interactions will have slower relationship build. None of this is directly associated with astrological sign, as the sign is fixed, but both personality and interests are mutable. The actual sign itself has no effect. This may or may not change in a future expansion pack.
TRUE as of TS2NL.

MYTH: Thinking caps improve a sim's ability to teach skills to other sims.
STATUS: MOSTLY FALSE. The thinking cap can only affects the teaching of Toddler Walk/Talk/Housebreak skills. It has no effect when used to teach other sims on career objects and will simply waste charge.

MYTH: Brandi Broke's (Pleasantview) third child (at start of scenario) is always male.
STATUS: TRUE, assuming the game is not tampered with in any unusual way. It has been confirmed that the gender of the resulting child is nonrandom and is caused by artifacts relating to the way the Make Character primitive generates babies and the unusual status of the father's character file. Actions like resurrecting Skip in SimPE would alter the outcome.

MYTH: Tipping the service NPCs improves their work.
STATUS: FALSE. Tipping the service NPCs will improve their relationship towards the tipping sim, but relationship has no effect on the actual quality of work performed by NPCs. Sufficiently high-relationship will cause them to ask if you want them to hang out after work. This dialog box can interrupt the flow of gameplay and may be seen as a detriment. However, no effect occurs on quality of work.

Myth or the real deal, J. M.: the pregnancy modifier token adjusts the percentage chance for a couple to have twins. You are, Oh Fishing Fiend of Farspeaking, more awesome than me!  ;D

There is a pregnancy modifier token that does affect twin chances, but it is not a factor that you can influence: Food does NOT affect the pregnancy modifier token, it simply appears on your sim for unknown reasons, possibly randomly, or in connection with being a twin. In any case, it is not an effect that you can influence through any specific known action.

I suspect that Prima writes their guide while the game is still in Alpha, as a lot of the random crapola in those books is stuff that is often a more complicated version of the actual system. Also, the guide for TS1 included some business about "chance cards" (not what they actually called them, I think) where you made a decision. This wasn't in the actual game, but it was in the sequel. I have a hard time believing that Prima invented this out of whole cloth and then Maxis implemented it.

Prima obviously writes their strategy guides from the Design Document for the game.  Many things change between the time Prima gets their version of the Design Document and the time the game is actually shipped.  Sometimes there's even an updated Design Document when the game ships, but don't count on it. :)  And by then it's too late to modify the Prima guide.

Hook

All's I can say about Brandi Broke is that the woman will NEVER have girls!  I can't get her married, so she's adopted FOUR different sons: two babies, a toddler, and a child.  I am trying like hell for her to adopt a girl--then neglect all the boys. ;)

Not true.  My Brandi Broke married a fellow by the name of Matt Riffraff (who had 2 daughters himself, Kayla and Layla), and they had a daughter, Bridget, followed by twins Bart and Beatrice.  Beatrice is nearly a clone of Brandi, but with green eyes.

(Layla became a romance sim when she aged into a teen and I'd had hopes she would break her stepbrothers Dustin or Beau's heart, but while they lived in the same house they only ever had family interactions.  She now has wants to flirt etc with Dustin now they're living in separate houses in university though ;D)

Brandi Broke *CAN* have girls, but there are a few factors which promote boys. Brandi's third child, the one she starts pregnant with, is always a boy as an artifact of the way baby genders are determined: Because Skip Broke is "unlinked", the child is always a self-pollination of Brandi. In such a case, the game is programmed to always produce a baby that is the opposite gender of the mother, so you're going to get another boy. This gives Brandi 3 guaranteed boys to start with, completely nonrandomly. If, for some reason, you want to give her *MORE* children, you have a 50/50 shot of getting yet another boy. What's more, Brandi is pollinated at game-startup. It is possible, by sheer random chance, for this pollination to result in twins, which, by the rules above, will always yield twin boys if this happens. You can easily get 4-5 boys out of Brandi with very little "random" involved yet.

Sorry, I meant my Brandi Broke.  She's got seven kids now (four adopted) and they're ALL boys!  It's driving me nuts!

Well, the odds of 4 independent children (your first 3 are fixed to be boys and not random) being boys is 6.25%. This is slightly better than the odds of rolling a 1, which, as any D&D player can tell you, happens constantly. 'sides, you can hardly claim Brandi is having those children at all if you're adopting them from the Ugly Baby Generator.

Yep, especially if I've touched your dice recently, or if I'm rolling and I'm the DM. Never fails. Anything with random generation in this game is kinda screwy, and ALL GAMING DICE HATE ME.

Heh, you're probably just not very good at at. Anything with 6 or fewer sides is my bitch.

My friends won't even let me *touch* their dice anymore. I consistently get not-quite-critical misses and generally low rolls. Except if I've accidentally made some encounter slightly too tough for the PCs to handle. Then all the NPCs start rolling crits constantly and the PCs start dropping like flies. Which would be okay, if this didn't happen only when I *wasn't* trying to kill the characters off. If I try to kill them, then my rolls start sucking again.

Hey, JMP, I'm currently working on a Newbie's guide to TS2 for Worldsims.  Can I include a link to this thread in it?  Because this is good stuff and answers a lot of the questions we get asked over and over?

Sure, go for it.

Quick question... does the number of a particular gender in the neighborhood have any influence on the genders of new babies? In other words, if you have more females in the neighborhood, does that increase the chances of new babies being male or vice versa? I seem to get a LOT of boy babies but I'm not sure if there's anything more than odd randomness involved. Thanks for any answers, oh awesome one. ~KG

There's a possibility that it's sadorandom in such a manner, but I've never managed to get enough of an imbalance and had enough time to actually statistically rule out the possibility that any such runs are simply random chance. Also, there's "stickiness" in the random number generator which can potentially bias results as well.

Did you mean pseudorandom, or was that pun intentional? :D


Anyhow, what JM said.  I'm leaning toward a theory that an individual player will develop certain habits in starting up the game, entering households, and doing things that would pulse the random number generator.  The random number generator seems to start with the same seed each time the game is started so there is a distinct possibility that you are seeing repeatable phenomena in the sex of the children.

Intentional. Sadorandom, as in "pretends to be random but is actually sadistic".

Awesomely put.  I'll have to add that one to my list of Bon Mots Worthy of Stealing as soon as I file the serial numbers off.

Is it only if the mother has the token that this can happen, or can two sims have twins if the father is the only sim to have said token?

Well, i have to say that....

The ability to learn skills faster than other is caused by ageing in platinum mood

Please post your test conditions and the results of your tests so that we may study them and try to duplicate them.

Hook

What do ypu mean...test? I didnt make a test i just noticed that twins with the same personalities have  learned skills differently cuz one grew uo in platinum

It's not true if other people can't duplicate it.

yeah as the saying goes "If it isn't documented it didn't happen"

Nobody is questioning whether it happened. What they are questioning is WHAT precisely happened and why.

You can't just assume that because you observed two events that appear to happen together that the one MUST lead to the other. That is a fallacy. There may be several other things that also occurred which had more or less affect on the outcome which you did not observe. There may be little or no connection at all. In fact, the order in which you observe these things occur may not even be relevant.

To prove cause and effect, you have to understand the source of the effect. That requires understanding exactly what you are looking at, and how to relate that understanding to what you are observing.

If that happened in my game, the first thing I'd do is check whether both twins still had their smart milk 'stuck'.  Chances are that one of your twins lost the smart milk stuckage along the way and therefore learned at a much slower rate.

My point is that there are other situations that can cause different learning rates for twins in the game - I wouldn't assume it was the platinum effect without further testing.

Way back shortly after Sims 2 first came out and no one knew where the fast learning skill came from, I posted on the Maxis BBS that it might be related to toddlers being read to by their parents.  I did NOT say that reading to toddlers caused the fast learning skill.  I too have had twins grow to children where one had the fast learning skill and the other didn't.

One observation does not make something fact.  Someone had their pregnant Sim eat cookies and then had twins, and concluded that eating cookies was what caused twins.  And the rumors started flying.  As far as I know, there are *still* people on the Maxis BBS who believe that eating cookies causes twins.

You will notice that I did not say you were full of shit wrong.  I simply asked you to post your test conditions  so we could try to duplicate your results.  For all I know, growing up in platinum might have some effect... or at least growing up not-platinum might kill the fast learning skill.

Now, about testing.  Has it occurred to anyone that some of us will run the same scenario as many as 50 times trying to learn what affects the outcome of some particular action?  I've actually done that with the fast learning skill.  I've also done it with the headmaster scenario.  Once you find something you think causes something, then you have to try to disprove yourself.  I was always able to get Sim children with the fast learning skill once I'd discovered it was related to smart milk, but I was never able to get rid of the fast learning skill once a Sim toddler had it.  I even bathed a toddler recently hoping to get rid of the fast learning skill, as Pescado states that bathing a toddler can make it go away.  The Sim kid still had fast learning after being bathed, but that was only one trial and isn't conclusive.

So when I say "test" I mean TEST, dammit!  Noticing something happening once, then posting as if this were conslusive proof just doesn't cut it.  Sorry.

Hook

Extensive testing is the only true way of finding cause and effect. Many serious sim-players, such as Hook, Posie, TreyNutz, etc. have spend a lot of time testing things through to try to at least eliminate random occurances. Hook is absolutely right, posting statements such as this one as fact is not something that will do anyone any good.
I've had one toddler grow up in gold, and one in green; both still had the faster learning skill, and using the eye in the sky, I found out that both still had their smart milk stuck. Platinum might have an effect, but one observation does not a research make.

Actually, the scientific method for proof demands consistently non-negative results. Your observation there, for example, conclusively proves beyond doubt that the platinum mood does *not* have an effect on the "sticky" smart milk. Proving that something *does* have an effect, however, requires a lot of careful study.

I wouldn´t think that growing up in platinum mood *always* results in a smarter kid, as I´ve just grown up triplets in platinum mood and only two of them have the smart milk stuck.
Therefore they do learn faster than their little brother (poor thing...). I tried with their first cooking point as cooking is not related to any personality, and the two kids with the stuck milk finished earlier.
(As for the amount of smart milk: each toddler got 4 bottles...).
Well, if platinum really had been what caused it, they should all be smart.

Well, being in the sciences too, I am aware that scientific research also demands reproducible results with the same method, so as far as platinum mood and smart sims are concerned, you are correct.

Lovely green sandwich, by the way dizzy2 :D

Im sorry but my computer is broken...well  the one that can play the sims, and so i cant test it.  But this is what I ment

Growing up in Platunim, Gold, Green, or Red might affect the learning skill IF the smart milk is not stuck.  Try testing it, but withought feeding the toddler smartmilk.

Nope, growing up Platinum has no effect on learning skill.  I have had MANY toddlers grow up platinum (this isn't hard to do) and if they've never received smart milk, they will not learn any faster than normal.  The only thing that causes them to learn at accelerated speeds is the "stuck smart milk" as described by Pescado.  That's because this is a "bug" and not really intended to happen.  You can see this when using the baby controller and clicking on "Test IQ."  A child with a stuck smark milk attribute will have an IQ of 300 while a normal child will have a base IQ of 100.  This has consistently been proven over and over in my game.  The toddler must transition with their IQ still at 300 because once they turn into a child, you lose the ability to feed smart milk and can never get it back.  I haven't tested it much in Nightlife, but Maxoid Tom said the stuck smart milk bug was supposed to be fixed.  I haven't had a chance to test this out, but I'm going to be having a new batch of toddlers soon to check it out.

The stuck smart milk glitch, or fast learning skill, doesn't appear to have been fixed in Nightlife's patch.  I recently transitioned a toddler and the child had an IQ of 300.  I even bathed the toddler to see if it would unstick the smart milk... it didn't.

Only one trial so I don't know if it'll be true for everyone. 

Someone once claimed that learning all three toddler skills was what caused the fast learning skill.  So I tested it.  I beat it to death, actually.  In the end, the only thing I could claim for certain was that a child who did not get smart milk as a toddler would not have the fast learning skill.

Hook

I have a child that I believe has stuck smart milk post NL patch (I think). I don't have the baby controller or whatever you use to check (I had understood it was not NL compatiable)

Well that's what I thought and then I asked some others here who had been using it, and they said it worked fine other than not being able to directly command older sims to hold the child.  You can always instruct them to put them in the crib to get them to pick them up.  So I started using the baby controller and I haven't had any problems but I am sure a lot more sane with it in my game. 

I believe the baby controller is the only object that will show a sim's "IQ."  I tried to get JM to put this option into the lot debugger so I wouldn't have to keep the "Eye" around after the toddlers grew up, but he didn't do it.  >:(

Right and right Rainbow ;D

In my game the eye in the sky works as well, except for the hold command. I can't rotate it though, but since I didn't have the time to stick around too long lately, so I don't know whether that's been fixed. Maybe I should download again and try.

I don't think it has.  I checked out the dates and they are still the same.  But not being able to rotate it doesn't really bother me since it doesn't affect anything anyway.

I whole-heartedly agree Rainbow. The no rotate problem is really no problem. I just have to place the cribs in the right places. I rather put up with a few (temporary, right JM?) problems than not have 'the eye in the sky' ;)

  That is very interesting--I had to go through SimPE to check everyone's memory of the Tricou's death and some NPC's and townies that haven't even been activated yet had a pregnancy modifier and some were male.  That means that they are more inclined to have twins??  Any thing else??  I remember seeing that in an old game in one of my sims that had 3 sets of twins(made it easier to have her 10 babies).  Can you delete that with any safety or add it???

Hm, before I got here I had already seen every "THIS WILL MAKE YOUR SIMZ HAVE TWINS!!!11!!!ONE" rumor debunked except one, which was being treated as genuine -- that Geminis, or perhaps only a couple who were both Geminis, had a higher chance of having twins. Any indication that this is even a tiny factor (are they more likely to have the token?), or should I report that one back as false too? I'll be posting a link to this thread regardless.

Sorry, the Gemini this is similarly bogus.

Cheesecake Myth similarly appears bogus. Cheesecakes or lack thereof appear to have no effect on the twin chances. Sorry.

man, maxis sucks. First they say cookies, then cheesecake. I think they just want everyone to get fat sims.

As long as you're updating this, you might as well update the zodiac "compatibility" entry which changed with Nightlife.

 - Gus

Well, he does say, "TS2U v1.0." and "This may or may not change in a future expansion pack."

Although now that OFB is out, he could update to mention that it did indeed change with NL.  But we all know that he is such a busy, busy man. :D

Here's a question -- when PRECISELY is it determined whether a particular pregnancy will result in twins, and has that timing changed in natural twin pregnancies in OFB?

(The sad thing is, I don't even care much myself -- if I wanted twins that badly I'd just cheat -- but in another forum, which I originally joined to learn more about the game, I am now one of the better-informed people there, and there's a lot of misinformation about twins that I'm trying to correct.)

Twins are decided at conception, although gender isn't.  If you save your game before the screen saying a new baby is on the way, then you can reload as many times as you want to get a different gender.  But the number of babies is stored in the pregnancy token, so if you are having twins, you'll get twins every time you reload.

According to JM's research stated above, the chance of twins is not changed in OFB.

Edit:  Fixed wrong word choice. ::)

Wasn't asking about the chance, actually... just trying to get all my facts straight so I can tell these people definitively that a) if they want twins so badly they're going to have to use a hack or a cheat, and b) no, seriously, you did NOT have a single birth, quit without saving, and then get twins instead from the same already-existing pregnancy (or else it was a glitch, but I personally don't believe it happened at all). I've been assuming that the time when it's determined if the pregnant Sim is having twins is when the lullaby plays, and I don't really expect that it has changed in OFB either, but confirmation would be useful.

Of course, they'll probably go on believing whatever they want to believe anyway.  :P

Well, JM did say that the code has not changed in OFB.  It may have been in another thread where he said this, but I don't remember the exact thread off the top of my head.  Maybe searching for "cheesecake" would bring it up.

JM mentions it in this thread.

http://www.moreawesomethanyou.com/smf/index.php?topic=3278.msg96477#msg96477

Thanks Taz, I was just reading that post!  This is indeed good news.  I can now enjoy my cheesecake with impunity!  ;)

You're welcome Rainbow.  :)


Is there something you're not telling me hmmm....  ;)

Hmm...I'm not sure what you're talking about.  ;)

We'd better carry this conversation elsewhere before JM kicks us out of the War Room. :D

http://www.moreawesomethanyou.com/smf/index.php?topic=3320
Important:  Info about the Cheesecake & Twins Fix.

Heh, so apparently, it *WAS* supposed to exist, but....WAS BROKEN. yay.

I am glad that my post about this cheat was rehabilitated...:). Felt kind of stupid after posting about it...:).

And thanks TJ for the fix  ;D ;D

Rainbow, I think you got the first sentence the wrong way round. Gender is decided at birth (that's why you can reload), but twins are not. (Decided at conception, though you can force them now.  ::)

Dangit, I know what I meant. :P  I swear that's not what I typed...someone changed it after I posted it.  ;D

I'll go fix it, but you quoted my mistake.   :-\

So what are the chances of twins with a pregnancy modifier in place for 1 or both parents?
It's 10% for sims with no modifier I believe.

Does the pregnancy modifier do anything else or is it only about twins?

Is the pregnancy modifier inherited?  Game observation says twins run in families. 

I think this is where we have got to on twins including info from the two threads referred to above. 
The following affect the chances of twins:
1. The Pregnancy Modifier Token: This token appears to only be set once in the age controller. 
2. Disease: Being infected with a disease appears to negatively affect your twins chance.
3. Cheesecake affects the chances of twins, but the maxis code doesn't work as advertised. Twojeffs says you have 100% chance of getting twins if you eat cheesecake! If you want to lower the odds, he wrote a fix. (does it depend when you eat cheescake?  I have a report of eating cheescake, but no twins)

Actually, the Maxis code is broken so that it works 0% of the time.  TwoJeffs has two fixes.  One fixes it so it actually works, but the way Maxis wrote it, it occurs every time (100%).  The second fix TJ made modifies the odds to 50%, still high for some people's preferences. 

Maxis also said your sim would have to eat cheesecake before woohoo, but it was unclear how long before woohoo the cheesecake effect would remain.  In TJ's examination of the code, however, I believe he said it only had an effect after getting pregnant.

TwoJeffs edited his post to say the Maxis code did work, but not as advertised.  He didn't exactly say in his hack thread how it did work though and I didn't notice anything about when you have to eat it.

Those were the results in my own game. Cheesecake resulted in twins only if they ate it after becoming pregnant, but not before.

is this another Myth?
"The more fit your sims are the more likely they will conceive in one or two tries."

I haven't noticed any difference in my game.  I have noticed along similar lines though that as my sims age it becomes more difficult for them to conceive.  Sims with 23 days left usually have no problem getting it in one.  Sims with 5-6 days left frequently take 4-5 tries.

Yep, total myth.

This would explain why my newlyweds usually get pregnant right away, but the folks who've been married for a time have a bit more trouble when trying for the second or third kid.

The age of the parents doesn't have an effect in the default game.  Mods such as the InTeenimater take the age of the mother into account, making it more difficult for her to conceive as she gets older.  In the default game, though, the odds are the same, depending on where you have them woohoo, regardless of her age.  The only thing would be if she only has 4-5 days left to becoming elder, I assume because she wouldn't be able to carry the baby to term before transitioning.  JM says there is a small window of time that she actually becomes fertile again, something like before noon 4 days before transitioning.  Then after that, she no longer can conceive, unless she were to drink Elixir or something, of course. 

This is true.  There's a very old bug in the code which causes this.  I think it's between 7am and 11am on the 5th day before her Elder transition or some such thing.  The bug is actually that the infertility logic kicks in too soon due to an arithmetic error.  InTeen plugs this discrepancy, and of course replaces it with a different fertility model altogether.

There is an unfortunate drawback to that, however:
(http://www.moreawesomethanyou.com/crapola/kittenkiller.jpg)

Yes there is a small window for a soon to transition sim... That Smith woman can become pregnant if when you first enter the house..you immediately have them try for baby...( it might take 2 or 3 tries) but I found that it works. Of course she does transition while they are still babies though.

My data is completely unscientific. It just seemed to make sense since newlyweds always got pregnant right away, but the others all seemed to have more trouble. I'm not doubting you guys, though.

What about this theory: is it complete balderdash?

"Mary-Sue Pleasant's first chance card is rigged so that however you respond to it, you lose - she gets demoted and ends up coming back early."

No, that one's true -- it's one of the scripted actions that comes with the game as a sort-of 'tutorial'  thing.  However, I believe you can ignore and and continue on normally.

Yeah my problem is that Daniel never got the maid in the sack in time for him to be "accidentally" caught.

Ditto! I couldn't get the timing right either.  :D

That and if you have the cutscenes on, the kids get home for it in time, but not Mary-Sue...

I wasn't aware the idea was to be caught, so my success-oriented mindset dodged that bullet entirely. When the chance card dialog popped up in the middle of rel-fixing, I simply casually batted "ignore", as I do with most low level cards since the benefits rarely outweight the risks, and never found out it was rigged anyway until way later.

Yeah the whole point is to have tutorial dealing with jealousy and break-ups. As, Mary-Sue immediately wants to break up with Daniel.

But of course you knew that. =)

Well, that's what it said in the Prima Guide.  No matter which option you choose, the result would be Mary-Sue coming home early, and supposedly "catching" Daniel in the act.  But you have to time it just right because if they start to woohoo too soon, Mary-Sue won't notice when she gets home because she's crying about getting fired.  By the time she's done, whatever it is that alerts the sim that their spouse is woohooing is gone, so she is still blissfully unaware.

Most of the Pleasantview scenarios are broken since NL, unless you load the lot at least once prior to installing the XPs.

Is it rigged for the Caliente girls too?  The Mortimer walk by is clearly rigged, but how about the burglar? When I first played them they got burgled, one of them got pregnant, promoted, fired and dead in short order.

The burglar is rigged also. The rest is just you sucking.

I guess I suck.
I've been playing this damn game since it first came out and I've never noticed these "hidden" tutorials.
This might be the wrong place to ask, but what other "hidden" tutorials are there?
Also, I've heard about several scenarios that were in the game (like the power outage) but were taken out although the code is still there. Any truth to this?

Feel free to point and laugh/poke with sticks as appropriate.

You can - or at least you could in the past - spawn a scenario tester in Debug mode (boolprop testingcheats enabled -> shift+click on a sim and click the menu till you see Spawn, Scenario Tester...). One of the scenarios dealt with a power outage, during which you still have to keep your family and your guests happy. Kinda weird to get the message and have plenty of electronical stuff still running. Guess it was intended to work with the not added weather function.

Hmm, I know one of the other scenarios is Pablo (?) Curious getting abducted the first time he star gazes (resulting in two alien kids in the Curious household. And the Spectre lady dies of old age in like three days of playing her lot I think. And the Dreamer wedding party.... And Cass and Don's wedding setup is supposed to teach you to make sure people are in a good mood before rushing them to the altar. Those are all I can think of ATM.

The Dreamer what...?
Who's marrying whom at the Dreamer's home?

Not Dreamer...sorry... the Oberon and uh...Titania in Veronaville...

I don't play the Maxis made characters since they bore me. Once though, I played as Don Lothario a little bit and yes, he comes with a mini-tutorial. A little message will just pop in the upper corner every now and then. Stuff like, "Don's place is a mess! Call the cleaning service and hire a maid," or, "The showerhead is leaking. Don needs to fix it."

LOL, really? It was a roof raiser in my game... and it was only the first party I ever played. Only problem was I had already played the Caliente sisters beforehand and married Mortimer off to Dina, so Alexander got left alone after Cass & Don's wedding and I almost lost him to the social worker!

LOL, oops.

But anyways, the Prima Guide implies that if you don't play Don's lot first and get him to whoohoo with the Caliente sisters, he'll turn Cass down at the altar (due to low aspiration) and she'll go into aspiration failure.

Ah... now that I might have done...

But then again we all know how notorious those Prima Guides are... and how ridiculously easy it is to get someone to marry your sim...

That's not what the Prima Guide is saying.  If you play the Goth lot first and marry Don and Cassandra, then you can't play Don's lot and go through that scenario because he will no longer live there.  And the reason Don turns down Cassandra if you try to marry them too fast is because of their borderline relationship score, not his aspiration.  This only applies in the base game, because after NL, chemistry has an effect causing sims with good chemistry to accept interactions at lower levels.  The first time I played Pleasantview when I first got TS2, Don left Cassandra at the altar, and I went on to have her marry a sim I made for her.  I played the scenario again later after installing Uni and NL, and I couldn't get him to turn her down.

HelloKit, I don't understand something about your story.  If you had Cass marry Don in your game, then Don would have been moving in with her and Alex, so why would the Social Worker come to get him? ???

There is another Caliente scenario.

If you move in Mortimer as soon as he walks by the lot (by marrying or just moving him in), you get a message saying something like "Three's Company! It's time for Nina to find her own place."

Rainbow I don't play this hood much but I'm guessing that Mort had moved out with Dina,(Leaving Cass with her brother in Morts old house). The wedding between Cass and Don was so good the Limo came and Alex was left alone, hence the warning from the social worker?

Hmm, maybe that was it.  I didn't have a wedding party for Cass when I first played the lot because the mini tutorial said to "click on the arch" so the only guests were Mort and Alex.  I don't think I've ever had a limo in a house where a child would have been left alone.

Yeah that's what happened. Since I had already moved Mortimer out, I had to throw a wedding party so he could be there, and being literally my first day playing the game, I didn't know about the limo... or the social worker.

Wow, you'd think Maxis could have warned you.  :(

I had it happen once. With work, if there's no nanny or teenager, the parent simply won't go to work and leave the kid at home alone. With the wedding, they automatically rush off to the limo, no matter who's left behind. I had a single mom marry a guy and they left her kid at home. I quickly had the kid call the Nanny and life was okay.

I think that since Cass wasn't the mother she didn't get the warning about not going.

I know that a teenage sibling can leave their toddler sibs at home without the dialogue if their parents aren't home.

Now that's one I've never seen.  I always make Mortimer throw the wedding party and have Dina move into the Goth house.

All the senarios I can list off the top of my head in the three Maxian hoods.

Pleasantview:

-Lothario:  Hire maid.  Woohoo Nina.
-Caliente:  Get engaged to Mortimer.  Get robbed.
-Dreamer:  Paint
-Broke:  Teach Beau to walk
-Pleasant:  Get fired or demoted.  Catch Daniel cheating.
-Goth:  Get left at the alter

Strangetown:

-Spectre:  Retire from job
-Curioius:  Alien abuction and pregnancy
-Smith:  Birthday party
-Grunt:  Get teen job
-Beaker:  Get promotion

Veronaville:

-Summerdream:  First kiss.  Succesful wedding
-Monty:  Invite Jullete over to make out.  Which propts Tybalt to come over as well and get into a fight with Mercutio.
-Capp:  None.  (At least none that have pop-up messages.  Jullete is wanting to go steady with Romeo though.  And he just happens to be there)

I have noticed lately that the scenarios for Strangetown and Veronaville are broken...When I reinstall I can play the Pleasantview scenarios but Strangetown and Veronaville just dont happen...I get no pop ups on any lot so of course Ill still send Vidcund up to get abducted but he doesnt...There is no party at the Summerdreams and no one wants to retire/get a job/get a promotion...blah blah....I think it started with Nightlife.

Strangetown and Veronaville are definitely buggy in many ways...

I believe NL broke the scenarios.

I certainly don't mind the scenarios being broken. It just means that I can start altering the families in my own way quicker. I didn't really play the preset neighborhoods until recently, when I checked out what I think was the Dreamer house (the family with all the bills, originally) and found that there were no bills anywhere, even though the popup said something about them.

I also revived Skip Broke, simply for amusement's sake. Is that a bad thing? I don't really care about Pleasantview, but I know it will affect the outcome of the baby.

I don't think it's a bad thing.  I resurrected Skip Broke in my own game, as well as Michael Bachelor and Bella Goth.  As long as you do it properly, it should be fine.

I have a superstition/myth that I need either confirmed or exploded please.

Short question first. Does having a total number of living and dead Sims above 8 on a residential lot have the potential to damage the lot? It's not so much a matter of; can you have more than 8 living and dead total on a residential lot (I know you can), but should you? Is it harmful to the lot?

Long story second. I HATE elder Sims. So much so, that when I make a 'hood that I plan to play for a few generations, I make a resthome/cemetary residential lot.

How I do it is:
Sims eventually age transition into elders. I move the elders out of their family homes (because I hate them) and move them onto the resthome/cemetary lot (usually named 'The Hills'; usually manned by one of the elders) and meditate them to death or just outright kill them.

My superstition has been:
When the lot reaches close to 8 total; like say 7 tombstones and 1 elder left, that elder gets a reprieve and gets to live on the lot... forever. Then, I start a second resthome/cemetary lot next door named 'The Hills Annex' with a new elder and continue on.

But, do I really need to do this? Can I just buy a huge lot and stuff as many tombstones on the lot as possible? The reason I ask is that I really don't trust Maxis code, and it sure seems like there are still character files associated with the lot alive or dead. So, I dunno.

Thanks

It will limit the number of random visitors you can get, but otherwise I don't see the big deal. I've had lots that had dozens of playable sims and it worked just fine (albeit a bit slow).

You could always do the whole move tombstones to a cemetary thing and keep shoving elders in the lot.

The only "problems" I've had on lots with more than eight sims is the ugliness of the family's loading picture (purely cosmetic) and the choppiness of my game as my pathetic computer tries to process all of them at the same time (not too big of a deal if I don't go overboard).  I'd say that, due to the frequency of people using mods that allow more than 8 sims and not having anything more serious happen, it's probably not going to break anything if you do it.  Then again, if it can cause subtle, lingering problems that get worse over time until your game explodes (like downloading families in lots from the exchange), then I wouldn't know.  (Then again, it seems as if simply playing the game normally can cause subtle, lingering problems that get worse over time until your game explodes.)

What Avalikia said.

The 8 sims per lot thing is purely to keep players from bloating their lots with sims and then coming to whine about it when their game slows to a crawl/goes asplodey.  There are even rumors that Maxis is working on a cheat to let players break the 8 sim cap in an official version of the game.  So just the grave markers alone won't do much of anything to your game.  Now, what multiple grave markers might mean is multiple ghosts active on your lot, and that will cause things to slow down.  But given that it'll take a lot of ghosts to have a noticable effect, and that you don't have any reason to care about these sims anyways, feel free to go wild.

I think the game caps the number of active ghosts anyway (though I could be wrong).  I usually have a 'haunted dorm' (thanks to 'nouniprotect'), and have had as many as 8 graves on the lot, and have never seen more than 2 or 3 ghosts active at the same time.

I hate them too.  What other ways are there to kill off elders (especially if they have a lot of mechanical points and I can't fry them)?

Twojeff's has an adult/elder hack which makes the adult life longer and the elder life shorter.

Or just lock them in a doorless room, put about 3 beds, about 5 fire jets and turn them all on. Eww...crispy, rinkly, old, skin.

Rugs and wicker chairs in front of a fire place. Indoor firecrackers. Whoo!

Your ageist attitudes merely perpetuate the problem, you know.

I actually never let my sims age to elder. The ONE time I had elders in my game was solely for the purpose of allowing my CAS to have recessive genes. But they were in Strangeville and all of the premade houses there suck so I could never stand playing them. And I wasn't going to build a house big enough for the entire family if they were just there for the genes and the insurance money.

Well, since the newer Elders are now College Grads, I had one wait to get to the old folks home before getting the job that gives up a Cowplant. Now, I Cowplant most of them.

I'm usually patient enough to let them die of old age.  They're often useful in assisting with their grand-spawn, can provide some additional income, and I like to have them spend their last days making friends with poor people so everyone gets rich when they die.

I suspect Maxis helpfully "fixed" this one in pets... I fed one toddler a whole machine full of Smart Milk and none of it stuck!  Although that is a fairly probable outcome, none of my kids who were stuck before installing Pets are currently stuck either.

The hood reset caused by the EP install will cause all 'stuck' sims to 'unstick'. This has always happened. Now whether they really fixed the 'bug' and no new toddlers will 'stick' is another story.

As I remember there are two character files for Michael Bachelor and one is broken.  The details escape me (try the thread about fixing strangetown genetics), but I think you risk resurrecting a guy with relationships that don't match what you expect, no genetics or some other problem  Hence "as long as you do it propperly" for any maxis character.


So what's wrong with elders?  My sims don't age to elder except by accident thanks to elixir of life, but I've got a few and I've also deliberately created dozens of elder sims and had a lot of fun with them.  Maybe it's that I like a challenge.  A CAS made elder or family of elders is harder to play because they have no skills, can't get a real job, have to manage on a very low income, have diffictult/impossible LTWs and suffer from weak bladders.  However they have plenty of time at home.  Grandparents are excellent for encouraging kids - Play the grandparents house, invite the kids over, lecture them till they behave better and send them home.  Sound familiar?   I use elders as employees in shops now and they work out pretty well.   They ought to be gardening really.  I made an elderly romance sim, who is cutting a swathe through the hood - I think of him as early stages alzheimers - my mother in law avoids these guys on saga holidays! Sound familiar?  Two elderly sisters living alone - one likes parties, the other fears them... sound familiar?  They probably need a cat or two.  I have a household of 7 elders and one adult made in CAS - all brothers with every aspiration represented and very different personalities.  Very hard to manage with 20k starting money.   

I tried using Macro > Encourage with some grandparents and their grandchildren, but it never seemed to have any effect.  I checked on the children's personality points by making them selectable, and it never made a difference even if I let them go at it for several hours.  If leave the children selectable, instead of just long enough to see their personality points, the game thinks they are part of the household, and they do get the points for it, but then you risk the school bus coming for them at their grandparents house.  I don't know what kind of problems that would cause.  :(

I haven't tested this with pets, but in OFB I had a family where I wanted to try raising them to perfect personality.  Since the older sibling had time to kill in college, he would often invite the younger sibling over and mass-encourage her.  Once I got back to the main lot, the personality changes did indeed show.

I suspect they have... 8 bottles of Smart Milk fed and counting, none stuck yet...

Of all the bugs they could fix!  They broke things in this EP and left other things broken, just like they have before.  But they would be sure to fix the one but that people actually want.  :P  I have yet to test this myself, but I know that the option on the Lot Debugger to "Make Me Smart" still works.

You expected anything less? The one bug in the game they could legitimately get away with calling a 'feature' and they fix it (allegedly). My guess would be that if they did fix it, they did it unintentionally. A two wrongs make a right sort of thing.

No, not anymore.  But it still pisses me off.  ::)  I'll have to check this one out for myself, though.

Still works for me. Nuked a baby, fast-forwarded until glow faded, still 300. Grew it up, still 300.

Same here.

DK why it works for me but not you.... unless mine is hacked and yours isn't or vice versa.  The hack that springs to mind is comm-skilling.  I have it - do you?  I'm sure this works for me, or I was until you said it didn't.. now I've got to go and do it all over again.

I'm not sure, it was quite a while back, pre-OFB.  I'm not sure if I had NL at the time.  But I never tried again because it seemed futile.

Comm-skilling doesn't affect encouraging, but encourages tend to not be very powerful unless the age difference is large (teens and adults are MUCH less malleable than children!), and the sim doing the encouraging is strong in that trait. 6 points of something may be enough to encourage it, but not very well. A 10 works faster. Also, some traits are more encouragable than others due to the length of their practice animations. Active is easy to encourage. Outgoing is hard. In order to encourage some traits, you have to isolate them from all other sims, or they'll try to harass those sims to "practice".

The age difference is why grandparents are good for encouraging, but I didn't realise that the number of active points made a difference.  Thanks for that useful fact! 

So am I right that it works if Grandparents invive a grandchild over and encourage them - or is Rainbow right and I'm delusional?  Do personality points earned on another lot stick?

  I too await with baited breath the ultimate decision.  Before, encouraging a 0 or 1 to a 6 was hard enough, as the child was usually low in green/tired/needing to eat and that was satisfactory to me.  Now, if i can have my Permaplat-grandparents invite over a grandchild, i won't have to worry about their moods, and can get some of those personality points to a 10.

why would you want them all at 10?  OK - I understand the  "it's there and I want to max it!", but stop for a moment and think about what kind of sim you are going to end up with....  he's so extrovert, he's can't stand to be on his own doing something for more than 5 mins.  he's so playful, he'll upset total strangers by trying to play with them and he's so neat he can't rest until the house is perfect even if it was good already!  I can live with hyperactive and hypernice, but the others.... NO WAY.  I get them to 6 so they can encourage their own kids if they have any and that's it!

   My apoligies, i should have been more specific.   I don't want 10 playful, as that (to me) is the main reason stopping meditation.  I love Outgoing sims, active sims and nice sims.  Playful?  6 would be more than satisfactory to me.  Also a 6 or 7 in neatness fits my play style, i can't stand a sim who doesn't flush.   :)

Ok, the dice gods must hate me in multiple games this week.

I had a sim once who I had max all his personality traits through encouraging. I actually rather liked him. I'm not saying I want every sim like that, but I never really had any problems with him. And he was awesome at encouraging other family members in any trait because he had them all maxed.

I dunno if maximizing ALL personality traits is a good thing. Unless you count maximizing GROUCHINESS...the inverse personality traits are sometimes better than the pointed-ones! And some personality traits are just a tradeoff between two equally valid points and aren't really better or worse at any value.

I mostly just wanted to see if I could do it. I thought he would be annoying but he honestly wasn't. I've had sims with lower or more moderate personality traits far more annoying than him.

I also had one sim in town who was mean as hell. She was always getting in fights and stirring shit up and this was before NL even. I though she had to be a 0 nice but she was a 4. Go figure. She was meaner than the sims I had in town with less nice points than her.

Quantity of nice points doesn't really influence too much. It's more or less a binary quantity: Either a sim is grouchy, and therefore has < 5(00) nice points, or has that or more, and is therefore a "nice" sim who will not choose mean actions. Finer gradation of niceness affect other factors, such as reaction to Evil Jack-in-the-Boxen, but otherwise have minimal influence on a sim's day to day behavior.

so come on guys - what is the truth here?  and has it changed since base game?

It should. But encouraging is a very slow process and when doing it to visitors, you don't really get any feedback of when to stop.

   Sounds like we need a hack for a progress bar.   :)

Just to experiment, I made a sample family, moved the elder out, and had her invite and mass-encourage the broodling.  Encouragement was still available, and had effects when I checked back in on the home lot.  Furthermore, when the trait is maxed out (or minned out, for those of you who prefer it that way), you lose the option to encourage for that trait, so you can tell when you've reached what you want.

Actually adding a personality trait progress bar might be stymied by the dual nature of encouraging.  You want to keep track of the progress towards a new point, but you also want to keep track of it point by point if you want to fine-tune personalities.

thanks for confirming that.  You usually have to stop when the grandparents need the bathroom or the kids go home because it's bedtime, so I haven't hit "not knowing when to stop" as a practical problem! 

Actually I once made two sims and by cheating gave one maxed out points in every personality trait and the other no points in every personality trait.  I just wanted to see what they would be like.  I thought that I would hate the one with no persoanlity points, but he ended up being one of my favorite sims.  He was way better than his wife who was the maxed out sim.  The wants he rolled were a lot better than her wants too and he was the better parent and spouse when acting autonomously.  I suspect it was because he didn't have every fun and dirty item in the house competing for his attention, so he focused more on his family members.  Plus being serious he would rather autonomously kiss and make out with his wife instead of autonomouly play red hands with her (which was her preferred method of showing love :D ).  It was an eye opener and changed what I thought of as positive and negative traits in the game.

Dream

The only trait where "more" is always better is Active. Most other traits balance out according to preferred playstyle, except at the extremes.

A lot of Sims in Strangetown seem to have extreme personalities.

That's because they're strange....
:)

A lot of my alien babies seem to have extreme personalities, too. Is that in the game, or just me?

But of course.  ;)

It's in the game.  I'm not sure if this was in the Prima Guide or not, but a lot of people have noticed this in their games, including me.

Probably has to do with how they coded the Pollination Technician's personality.  I've found that using the 'Re-randomize' option on the Lot Debugger before the sim gives birth to the alien makes the kid's personality more 'normal'.

Using Randomize from the Lot Debugger before having any baby is a good thing!

Really??  Just how bad are they without re-randomising?  :o

I've had only 4 aliens but they all were born with 3 maxed personality traits and just one or two points in the others.  The maxed traits varied from one child to another, but all 4 spawn were quite extreme.  I ended up using their stepmoms to moderate them a little because it seemed that each child had maxed points in the same areas where their fathers had high points.

And I do use the lot debugger to re-randomise just before every birth.

Think you need to re-read the very first post - the original myths post.  Births are "sado-random"   

Take two parents.  You play on Monday - sims have 2 kids personalities X and Y.  You play again on Tuesday - two more kids - personalities X and Y...... you get the drift?  The randomiser always starts in the same place.

Clarification, please:
but the re-randomizer is what you have to do if you want kids that are x-y on Monday and j-p on Tuesday.

and you have to use it at least once somewhere in the neighborhood every time you start the game.

are those correct statements?

Absolutely right.  Though there's no point in running it in a hood if you don't have any births imminent. But it does only have to be run once per hood per playing session.

It also affects NPC and townie generation, so if you plan to affect either pool, it's worth  doing it then, too.

Would it also affect adoption then as well?

Yes, adoption would be affected as well. This may in most cases be an improvement over getting the lazy, defective unwanted children. :P

I use TOLAD to move underachieving teens to a foster family before the social worker gets there.  Between the mood boost from moving and fewer kids to keep track of in the new family, they do quite well.  Haven't had it fail yet!

I was under the impression that the social worker is not a threat to teens.

They are if the teen has an F grade and a pile of homework lying on the ground.  Second day they come home with an F, social worker time...

I've never seen that.  I always thought teens flunking out of school had no consequences at all (other than the inability to go to college, but I never play Uni anymore so that doesn't bother me....)

Does the teen get taken? Where does the teen go? or is the danger that the social worker will come and take the other children?

Yes, the teen gets taken.  Teens and all other kids that are taken away by the social worker go to the top of the adoption pool.  Though I guess to adopt a teen you'd need something like Squinge's hack that allows teen adoption.

I think the SW takes all the kids on the lot, not just the one failing. And I believe the parents are prevented from adopting any kids from that point on -- the only thing they can do is have more babies.

I'm pretty sure the SS does NOT take teens, considering that you could even have them living alone on a lot. From what I remember from poring over the SS code while doing the SS hack, only children and below are affected by the SS.

Actually, I did know this even before I read the first post.  If you re-read my post, you'll see that I was replying to jsalemi with my observation that the re-randomiser on the lot debugger does not give my alien children more normal personalities.  It does make them extreme in different ways, just not at all normal.

Unless it is possible to be more extreme than to have 3 maxed personality traits and two non-existent or minimal ones.  I only have 4 aliens, after all.

Teens don't get taken by the Social worker.  I tried this out once in the Broke family.  I didn't make them do their homework, and they went to school in terrible moods.  Dustin got an F and got fired from his job, and he couldn't get another one until he raised his grades.  Beau and the baby got taken by the social worker, but not Dustin.

I stand corrected. :)  I've never had a teen fail school, but I could swear I read somewhere that teens could get taken.*  But now that I think about it, that doesn't make sense, since they can live alone.





* Probably an idiot Primus guide...

I don't believe the Prima Guide ever said teens could be taken by the SW.

Maybe the Primus guide did, but the Prima guide didn't.  ;D

Ok, so I'm old and my memory is faulty -- feel free to point and laugh... :)