More Awesome Than You!

I was playing a family with 7 Sims and the pregnant mom gave birth to twins, making a total of 9 Sims on the lot(!)  I've never seen this happen before.  I am absolutely sure I don't have any hacks installed that would allow more than 8 Sims per household, and I didn't use the new "forcetwins" cheat.  The mom was just at the start of the third "trimester" when I entered the lot for the first time after installing OFB, so these might be natural twins.  (The mom's paternal grandmother was a twin.)

On the other hand, maybe the rumors about cheesecake are true.  The hint said "Looking to add some twins to your family? The medical powers of Cheesecake might be for you. Have a slice before you 'Try for Baby' and you may be surprised with the results!"  This particular Sim did eat cheesecake, but it wasn't prior to the Try for Baby, it was on the 3rd day of pregnancy.  And voila, twins....

Has anybody else seen this?

Karen

According to the Prima OFB Strategy guide, yes, Cheescake increases the chances of twins, but it also says that 8 controlled sims is still the max. Weird.

Speaking of twins, ever since I installed OFB I've always had my sim's pregnancies result in twins. I haven't used the cheat, eaten cheesecake, or have hacks that pertain to twins, so I'm thinking it's either a Maxis bug or I've just been really unlucky.

SirLance, twins have always run in spurts in my game.  I can play for a long time, through tons of births with no twins, then all of a sudden every sim in the neighborhood is popping twins, and this is pre-OFB (I don't even have it yet).

You know, I just thought of something!  If cheesecake can cause twins I'm going to have to be very careful that most of my sims don't touch the stuff!  :P  However, in some cases this could be a good thing, like in a challenge family where you may want to have twins, but don't want to use any types of cheats.  The cheesecake would be perfectly legal.

Odds are that many challenges that award points for twins or where twins give an advantage will be revising their rules to account for that, though -- if not to direct people not to use the cheesecake, then to offset the advantage somehow.

Oh dear, and here I thought we'd seen the last of the twin threads. But now Maxis goes and stirs up all the shit again. Let's hope they didn't stick Bella Goth in this expansion somewhere.  ::)

 :D

*laughs loudly and scares the poodle*

Missed you, Motoki, big hugs your way!

My thought was about having twins in challenges like Legacy, where most of the time it doesn't count.  For example, I find it much easier to have twins the first birth, then I don't have to worry about my sim going through a second pregnancy for the 'heir and a spare'.  I agree, if there are challenges that do more with twins they'll likely as not have to revamp the rules. :)

Karen - is one of the sims in your family of 9 an ex fire or police sim?  I had this happen to me with the base game with a Legacy family.  I had 8 sims in the family and the 'try for baby' option showed up - before I knew it I had 9 sims on the lot.

One of the sims was ex firewoman Maura.  About this time I had tried TwoJeffs ghosthack that allowed you to chose who the ghosts would scare.  I got slightly freaked out when the 'ghost' options showed up on Maura - who was an elder but still definately alive.

I was told that fire and police (and maybe burglars?) were flagged by the game as having 'no travesal costs' so they would attend to their jobs without being distracted by their needs.  This flag was the one TwoJeffs' hack used to check if a sim was a ghost or not and I figured the game also treated Maura as a sort of ghost and so didn't count her in the total number of sims on the lot.

Sorry for the ramble - but I am curious to know if this is what happened with your sims also?

I had the exact same twins makes nine scenario occur in a family not long after University came out. I don't remember the circumstances. I put it down to a glitch. Was the woman pregnant during the OFB installation?

The Cheesecake Myth appears to be pure and utter weapons-grade bolognium. Scanning of the code reveals that cheesecakes do not appear to have any special properties, and only the following properties appear to influence whether or not a birth will be twins:

1. 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.

Cheesecakes do not have any special codes suggesting they have any effect on twins, nor is the presence or lack thereof of Cheesecakes apparently tested for.

Yes, she was most definitely pregnant during the OFB installation.  She had her second "bump" just after I entered the lot for the first time after installing OFB.

I'm glad to hear I'm not the only one who's had this glitch.  Maybe it has nothing to do with OFB at all.

Karen

No, there are no CAS Sims or former NPC's in this particular family.

Karen

Is there anything in there that checks the size of the family, at or before the birth?  Because even if the cheesecake didn't have anything to do with it, it's still very odd that I got twins with 7 Sims already in the family.  Just wondering....

Karen

As it turns out, Twojeffs has discovered that there is a cheesecake thing.

Unfortunately, it is broken.

Twojeffs has now modded it to work as Maxis apparently intended.

roflmao

Sorry, couldn't help it.

That figures.  Trust Maxis to screw up something they are heavily promoting with this EP :-) 

So this answers my original question:  What happened in my case (7 Sims, pregnant mom gives birtth to twins, making 9 in the family) appears to have been a fluke, some sort of bug that had nothing to do with the new OFB options at all.  Interesting....

Karen

We know the number of sims is checked before you try for baby and you don't get the options if you are up to 8.  I guess when the lullaby plays and the pregnancy modifier says "hey twins!", it doesn't recheck if that's going to take you over 8 sims.  Speculating here, but that's possible.

Yep I had my ruddy sim eat cheesecake because I am still yet to see twins in my game, when the big day come was it twins? No! Single child again.  Looks like I'll have to get TJ's fix.

Hm, I thought the final final concensus is that the cheesecake does work although not quite as advertised. Eating it after the sim is pregnant, in an unmodded game, is supposed to be 100% chance of twins (I'm still iffy on whether there's a window before woohoo that gives you twins, maybe 3 sim hours?). When did you have yours try?

I had my 2nd only set of totally "natural" twins immediately before installing OFB. The parents are darkest skintone and lightest. One twin boy is somewhere close to the darkest skintone and the other is probably a 2 - somewhere in there. And their features are totally different as well. I'm amused that Maxis makes a game where brothers and sisters look so much alike you can't tell them apart (not to mention having exactly the same stats) but twins? Twins are so different, mind-bogglingly different, they don't even look like they had the same father. Even fraternal twins ought to be closer than that. Silly game.

Twins are determined on conception, guys, not birth. Cheesecake is supposed to work so that if a Sim does Try For Baby within 1-2 hours after eating it, there's a higher chance that there'll be twins.

Eating Cheesecake after a Sim is already pregnant shouldn't be doing anything...  :-\

Yeah but what Maxis intended and what they actually coded are very different things. :p

Test it yourself. Get a sim pregnant, save, let her have the baby, confirm it's a single birth. Go back to the savepoint (after pregnancy started), eat cheesecake, let her give birth. Confirm it's twins.

I hate creating test Sims specifically for these purposes...I guess I'll make her look nice so I can just toss her in the townie pool when I'm done instead of deleting her and leaving an unlinked Sim reference. 20 minutes, maybe...

Yes, it's the baby's sex hat's determined at birth. But the cheesecake theory is supposed to have some sor of coding that when a pregnant sim eats it, she/he will immediately become pregnant with twins. Not sure of the affects it's meant to have if they're already pregnant with twins. Haven't actually tried this out, as I rarely want twins, too much work. ;)

Well you could trust TJ (I'm trusting he's correct the chances are 100% - I was too lazy to test more'n twice and I suspect Maxis just called the ForceTwins cheat anyways as that would be the easiest way to do it) and/or all the people on the thread on this stie somewhere that tested it and posted about it.

Or you can make a nice sim and put her in the townie pool :) I had two pregnancies in my game so it was an easy test for me. The pre-woo thing was too much to overcome my lazy streak. Too many variables - making sure they get pregnant, testing they didn't have natural twins, trying different times - too much for me.

http://www.moreawesomethanyou.com/smf/index.php?topic=3523.0

The Prima Guide tells that eating Cheesecake before conception is supposed to "increase" (by 100%, lol) the chances, not after conception.

I just finished testing this. I had my female Sim eat Cheesecake before she did Try For Baby with her spouse and then I froze both their motives, stuck them on Procrastinate, and fast-forwarded to the 3rd trimester. I tossed another Cheesecake in to one of their inventories, let the birth happen, and she had a single kid. I reloaded, let her take a bite of Cheesecake, and voila, twins!

I guess I hoped too much that Maxis and Prima would agree on a game's "features"...

The hint maxis sent when I registered the game was to eat cheesecake BEFORE trying for baby so thats what I did.

The hint is wrong.  Just because Maxis says it doesn't make it true.  What matters is how it's coded in the game as it was shipped, and people who have looked at the code have not found anything that indicates cheesecake has an effect BEFORE the Try for Baby.

Karen

I know that now because Twojeffs looked at the coding but at the time I tried it I didn't, I just went by what Maxis told me, which from previous experience was pretty stupid to expect they would get it right.

Just reassure me here...

If you are running a business and selling cheesecake, selling to a customer who happens to be pregnant isn't going to result in twins is it?  I hope it's only controllable Sims eating cheescake when you're not looking that you have to worry about!  If one of JM's hacks is eating food in the inventory autonomously, we'll also have to check they don't have any in their inventory.  I'm imagining a horrifying explosion of twins in my hood!

I actually thought that would be kinda cool - talk about randomly ending up with twins. Ok, who's been into the cheesecake :) If my playables buy cheesecake, and I can manage it (I sometimes have problems getting them to eat the bakery items they buy), I'm going to let them eat it and if they end up with twins, well it's their own fault. *I* didn't do it :)

I had a sim pregant with a single baby eat cheesecake and she had twins.  So although twins are decided at conception cheesecake changes it. 

Had another awful thought - I guess this pregnancy modifier is a one time thing only right?  Given that the coding is messed up, I just thought I'd ask that one!   ......imagines a family with twin kids, twin toddlers and twin babies......

Are pregnancy modifiers always one time only?  Or do some of them operate throughout the sims's life to increase the odds of twins?  If so tell me more please!  What are the odds? Who gets it and how?  I'd really like to have this straight so I don't go on giving people bad information on other boards - newbies still get really, really excited by twins.

You all can blow my head off if you'd like, but im not sure the code was fully broken.
I had a family with two couples one wife-wife and one wife-husband, i used a hack off here to get the wifes pregnant (one from each couple) and then i planned on adopting a toddler for the gay couple because they both had wants for it. I checked the stats of both pregnant women with the Insiminator(sp?) and it said they were single pregnant. I had them both eat cheeseke just to see what happened you know? a few hours later, hetro woman gives birth to twin boys Ryker and Roman, fine i think i can deal with that, cool. a few hours later the adopted toddler Nicole arrives, making it seven in the family. Two sim hours later, out pop Genisis and Gideon, out of the gay woman. This makes 9!!! I have a panic attack and self-combust at the thought of two sets of twins and a toddler. Now the TWO sets of twins are nearly toddlers and im scared. But this was all before i got this hack. Explain that, if you would....

The explanation is very simple.  Without any hacks installed, eating cheesecake while pregnant will GUARANTEE twins (100% chance).  See the related posts in Twojeffs' forum about cheesecake and twins.

Karen

But i thought the code was broken??

If you read the thread, it's broken in the fact that it guarantees it instead of making it a chance.  I think TwoJeffs thought it was broken in that it didn't give any chance but found the opposite.

http://www.moreawesomethanyou.net/smf/index.php?topic=3320.0

Ah. Gracias mi amigo/a, heh, i understand now, thanks

Do you have the patch?

Why does it matter?  The patch didn't change anything about the chance of twins.