More Awesome Than You!

I am getting a couple of kids which I have been studying them really closely. It appear that they only inherit genes from one parent/ one side of the family. E.g Son with mother's features  (he look almost 80% of mother's male version) and grandpa's eyes.
almost nothing I can find from the father's side.

Another female kid is the female version of the dad. Dad is really good looking but a female version of him looks... :-X

Can SimPE help me to check whether the son inherit genes from both sides of family?
I suppose I could just take a look at the DNA. but how about shape of eyes, shape of nose and stuff like that?

This is getting disconcerting for me. I need an answer to this  ;)

Well, the genetic features (hair, skin tone and eyes) depend on whether the features are dominant or recessive (just like in 'real' genetics - yeh right).  Anyway, if you're using CAS sims, they only have one set of genes to pass on.  So, if you have a parent with brown hair and a parent with blond, the kids will always have brown hair because brown is dominant - they inherit that gene from one parent and it wins out over the blond one (which they also inherit from their other parent).  So, the kids of that couple will always carry a dominant brown gene and a recessive blond gene and will all be brown-haired.  Sims have two slots for genes but only express the most dominant.  It's when you get into the second generation that things get interesting.  At that point, the parent sims (who were the children in the previous generation) can pass on either their dominant or their recessive gene to their children.  Depending on what their children get from their other parent, you can end up with blond kids.  The parent would have to pass on their recessive blond gene while the other parent would have to pass on a blond gene or a red one (red is most recessive IIRC).  So the blond skips a generation but can appear in the grandkids.  Sorry, if that's not an appropriate answer.  If you have a grasp of genetics, you don't really need me to explain that.  Real genetics, of course, is far more complex.

As for the face shapes: nose, chins, mouths, etc., wiith my own sims I've seen a mixture in my offspring.  As I understand it, the game blends features of both parents faces together.  No features, however, are dominant/recessive like the so-called 'genetic' features so you should see a mix as I do.  However, I have seen cases where the face of a child more closely resembles one parent than the other.

Oh, I forgot to add.  I usually look at the genetics using the Sims 2 Database programme - no reason really except that I find the layout clear and it shows what genetic material the kids inherit from each parent.  I guess you can do it with SimPE too, it's just that I like that.

Ok thanks but these are not CAS sims (for CAS sims, I know they only have one set of genes to pass on) . These are my 5th generation sims.I understand about the genetics part but not the features part. But thanks for explaining to me anyway :) Its always good to be reminded of how those recessive and dominant genes work :)

But if the game blends the features together, does it mean we cannot tell them apart at all with any program?

oh yes, I prefer to use SimPE to look at DNA simply because I don't want to install another program  :P

The only thing I can suggest then is that you either have custom genetics in the families (always dominant unless you alter them) or have just run into a genetic bottleneck (AKA bad luck) and the parents are only passing on the one eye colour or hair colour.


Essentially yes, I would guess.  I have seen information about (what I take to be) face shapes in SimPE but working out who got what from where is going to be a major fiddle.  It's not easily extractable information like the eyes, hair and skin tones.

Regarding the Sims 2 Database, what I like about it, is that it shows the genetic inheritance with a little chart.  It shows that Grandma passed on her blue eyes, while Grandad passed on his green and then that child 1 got the blue eyes and child 2 the green and so on.  It makes the connections visible which I don't think SimPE does, although the information is there in SimPE readily enough.

I don't tink I got a genetic bottleneck but its odd. For example, there is the 5th generation sim who  inherit a lot of dominant genes from her father while her hubby is a in born sim which I got from some one else (a CAS sim, in other words).

The child inherited dad's recessive blond hair (am i right that black hair is dominant- the mom is black haired?), his lips and shape of eyes (from my close visual observation). At most, she got her mother's nose and that's only a hard guess on my part.

If I look at the hubby in bodyshop or CAS, his child will look like almost the female version of him.

This "Sims 2 Database" sounds like an interesting program. Could you provide a link so I can check it out? Thanks  :D

http://www.sims2db.com/ (http://www.sims2db.com/) 

I can't live without my Database!  That is my "precious", as boatnana at N99 would say.   ;D

--green

Black and Brown are dominant, Red and Blonde are recessive. Of course you can have custom hair colors that look like these but function completely differently (which is why everyone needs to bin their damned hair unless it's purple or something).

The facial features as far as I am aware work differently. I don't think one feature is dominant over the other other than I believe the child has a slightly higher (60/40 IIRC) chance of getting the facial features of the parent of the same gender over the one of the opposite one. This is for each facial feature, not the whole face as a whole, so 60/40 on the eyes, 60/40 on the nose, 60/40 on the lips etc. The game basically does a random mishmash and puts the features together. You can see this by using the child creator tool in the CAS. The hair and eyes follow defined patterns (dominant or recessive) but the facial features are pretty random.

I guess you just had bad luck. I also know from experience some faces do not blend together very well. Basically the more different they are, the more freakish the kid will look. :O

Ah thanks much!  ;D

If you have the debug cheat enabled in your startup.cheat file, you can use the "simdna [first name]" cheat. That pops up a box that shows all the sim's genes and which facial characteristics are dominant.

Another thing to note is that for old neighborhoods, at SOME point in the distant past, all sim genetics got munged, and sims all became homozygous for whatever they visibly had. I think there was a thread about this, and nobody ever entirely figured out why this happened, but I recently discovered it in my neighborhood via SimDNA, and had to reconstruct everyone's genetics back to genesis again by hand. Some people actually had to be changed when I discovered that with any correct sequence, the outcome they had would have been impossible.

You know, I think the whole DNA thing is screwy anyhow. I just checked the DNA of a baby sim I had born into the game. She's got red hair (recessive) inherited from her mom, except the problem with that is, her mom has black hair and is a downtownie with homogenous genes for black/black. I never messed with her DNA either, so where the heck did the red come from?  ???

so you mean color of hair etc? But for me, I have no problems with color of hair, color of eyes. Its the shape of the lips, the shape of the jaw etc.
Does the game mess this up in old neighbourhoods? This is a very old neighbourhood with more than 5 generations in it. I consider that as old.

Motoki, I had this happened before too. Have you checked the mom in SimPE? Maybe that will shed some light.

Mayhaps, Motoki, the same thing happened to your sim that happened to one of mine.  A sim married her professor.  His hair is brown, hers is blonde, and their baby has blonde hair.  I don't know enough about messing with genetics to have created that on purpose, so it seems to have been a fluke.

Sometimes townies have dyed hair. If you want to be really sure of their hair color, you have to check them in SIMPE.
That's the only sure way to make sure what their hair color really is.

Did you check the mom's genes with SimPE? Many of the NPCs in the game have different genes from their appearance, the most famous example probably being Kaylynn who has black hair but blonde genes.

From what I know, the inheriting of facial characteristics does not depend on the gender of the child, but rather which features each parent has labelled dominant. A dominant feature has something like a 60% chance of being passed on. With each sim, the chances of a feature being labelled dominant or recessive depends on their gender, yes. So, a female sim has a higher chance of her eyes being dominant, for example. So, she has a higher chance of passing on her eye shape to her kids, either male or female.

Wait a minute!  LOL  No, she didn't marry a prof!  It was the policeman, Dorian Kaucher!  Since he came default in the game it's possible he was created with another hair color then 'dyed'.  I was thinking it was a prof in a neighborhood I had used DeleteAllCharacters in, but it wasn't.  At any rate, maybe that's what happened.  How do you see in SimPE what his genetics are?

ooo Motoki - that sounds like a testable theory!

Cracks knuckles.

I'm glad someone posted the link to Sims2DB - I got the info about it from here.  Someone here works on the project I think.

Oh I had that happen with Amin Sims.  I was told some of the townies/downtownies die their hair.

Finally I am getting the answer I need. How about the rest of the features such as jaw shape, ear, lips etc? Where did you get the above info from? Where can I find out more? Thanks!

I checked TS2Enhancer and the mom's hair is not only black, but genetically her mother and father's hair color were black too. There is no one further back in the family tree because the mom is a townie and the dad is a CAS sim.

Even so, 60/40 is for all intents and purposes not a whole hell of a lot different than 50/50. I do remember the 60/40 ratio though. I don't recall where I read it. The Prima Guide (for the original game) maybe? I'm not sure if it's possible to alter the ratio, or change how a particular feature is marked dominant and I wouldn't even know where to look for it in SimPE.

Again, if you try using the create a baby tool in the CAS it's all pretty randomish with features. It just doesn't seem as cut and dry as the hair and eyes are. It could well be 60/40, but 60/40 is pretty close to random anyhow.

I noticed that quite a few of the new OFB townies had totally different genetics to what they were presenting in game (so I changed them).  Even Gilbert Jacquet is genetically blond, not black, so I changed him as well.  I really don't know why they do this, it seems to pointless.  The only reason I can think of is, as I've suggested before, so they will have stupido players who haven't even heard of SimPE, go "Ooh, I SAY, how did two black-haired parents get a red-haired child?  Townies must have grandparents after all!" or something along those lines.  In fact, I actually did read a thread like this once on the official BBS, where someone was insisting that townies had grandparents you couldn't see.

Yes, the genetics of the facial characteristics are confusing. I used to be under the impression that once a certain feature, say, and eye shape, is labelled dominant, it stays dominant throughout the generations (that's what it says in the guide... ). But then I noticed that when Brandi had her third son, a male clone of herself, his listed dominant facial features differed from hers. So, apparently, the dominance of each feature is reassigned for each sim, and an eye shape that got inherited as dominant may turn recessive, and so on.

I just checked the guide on this. (Keeping in mind that the guide has inaccrurate information on some other genetics issues) it says that, when a sim is made in CAS, each region of the face is randomly labeled dominant or recessive, but the chances of a certain feature to be labeled dominant depends on the gender of the sim. A male sim has a 66% chance of his brow, nose or jaw being labeled dominant, and "only" a 50% chance with eyes and mouth. Vice versa for females (but there are more features listed in the DNA in SimPE than these five mentioned, so it's incorrect at least in that regard).

About the chances of the features being passed on, the guide says that if one parent has a dominant feature while another recessive the child has a 66% chance of inheriting the dominant one. When both are dominant or recessive, then the chances are 50/50.

But, considering how correct the guide has been on some other issues, I wouldn't count on this information.

Makes you want to run head first into a brick wall, doesn't it?  Grandparents you can't see .... mutter mutter


Well, that kind of makes sense.  Men have more prominant brow ridges than women, and less gracile jaws (on the whole).  Maybe what it is, is that when a man passes on his distinctive jaw (dominant) to his daughter, it then becomes a recessive feature because she's a female.  I didn't know the facial features were supposed to be linked to gender and genetics.  I thought the children just got a mix.

Okay, boy do I feel dumb.  :-[

I found the source of the mystery black haired child's recessive red gene. It wasn't from her townie mother, but her CAS father. I had forgotten I had done this, but he was one of a group of sims I made in the CAS via breeding, cross breeding and rebreeding various sims over several generations instantly in the CAS so I could end up with sims who were attractive and had features that mixed well with my other sims to make nice looking kids.

Basically, I'd take a couple of template sims, use the create a baby tool a few times until I got a kid I liked, aged the kid to adult, save the sim, delete the parents, make another one via this method, breed the two, and maybe delete the parents and so forth. So the dad came out of the CAS with recessive red genes and recessive medium skin though he has tan.

Well that's one mystery solved.  :P

I used to do that with my CAS. I never thought of deleting them though. I always just dropped them in a pool since it's a nice quiet way of dying.

Well if you delete them in the CAS before you load the family it's no big thing. Plus you only have room for 8 sims and I was doing a whole bunch of generations and cross breeding so I had to get rid of some before I could make even more. ;)

Thanks for typing this out. I think the guide might be correct in some of the points above. It is possible that recessive genes can become dominant. For instance, green colored maxis eyes. The grandmother (mother's side) have green colored eyes and it was passed on to the grandchild when both parents have customised eye colors (so here its 50%-50%, I suppose) . But other than that, every other feature of the father was passed onto the baby girl - nothing was passed from the beautiful mother to the child. The child look ugly ( actually she looks realistic and might be considered pleasant looking in RL but since we are playing a game of dolls, i want my dolls to be perfect) and now I am thinking of a pool accident.

Its very strange. I noted that when the child inherit a particular skin color of a parent, the child will inherit all facial features of the parent whom it inherit the skin color. I don't know if these 2 are related but I have several instances of this occuring.

This is getting extremely disturbing for me... >:(

Jysudo, I'm not sure whether this would help you or not...
http://www.joodiff.com/simgen02.htm

There are hacks you can use to give kids surgery. The red security panel from the Woohoo set at Valdea.com and the Insimenator can both do it.

Just be aware that it doesn't change the DNA that they pass on, just their appearance. There is a way you can fix their DNA to match their new surgery face though. There's a tutorial on how to do it with SimPE over at MTS2.

Also, some homely children grow up to look quite attractive as adults and the reverse is also true sometimes.

In general, how the kids look has always been a mixed bag with this game and 2 attractive parents never guaranteed and attractive child.

Part of the reason I did my little CAS quick breeding experiment was to get faces that look nice and mix well with other faces. It worked with the first child of 2 sims made that well. Well, as a child her eyes were small and squinty but a bit of subtle makeup helped that. Now she's a teen and quite pretty.

Motoki, thanks but I am not getting the kitten killer. I seriously have waay too many hacks in my game. I only use the ones from here now.

I grow the tot up to see her adult face. That's how I know she looks exactly like her dad. To confirm, I even go into CAS and generate the female version of daddy. And yea, as alike as 98%  :-[ the 2% is the eye color inherited from maternal grandma.

Well if you got her to grow up then she can use the Maxis surgery machine that comes with University. :) TwoJeffs has a hack so it can work on teens too.

Wow , I never thought of doing that what a great idea.I must try that ;D

Speaking of genetics has anyone noticed how the ugly features on a Sim turn out to be the dominate traits and all the attractive features turn out to be recessive? At least I have.

Take for example 2 Sims are  user created . They look great by themselves but because they were so altered in CAS or Bodyshop to look like some celebrity or cartoon character but their offspring invariably turn out looking not so nice. We're talking freak show material folks  :o.
Hideous looking doesn't even come close to describing them. I usually grow them up ,  ahem..that is if they actually do grow up cuz we all know how "accidents" can happen  ;D ,then use the plastic surgery machine to make them presentable. Thereupon I don't let them procreate. Too bad I didn't save them before I got OFB and  used a clean install because I could have used them to run a freak show in the back yard and charged the other Sims admission to view them.

BTW has anyone noticed if green is recessive to blue? I have 2 Sims that I had created in Cas where one has a custom blue eyes and the other has custom green eyes. All of their off spring (6) so far has the custom blie but not the green. Pity though, it's such a pretty green and I had hoped it could have been passed on

Celebrity sims make the WORST breeding material! They are so distinctive looking. Really when breeding sims the more generic, even if it's pretty generic, the better.

I think Maxis made the DNA homozygous to correct the crazy strangetown and Veronaville DNA issues- it seems like the easiest, most obvious thing to do

Hmm, well, all the sims inherit a skintone gene from both parents, and the expressed skintone of the child may be different from both of them if, say, father is S1, mom S3, and the kid ends up S2. I don't think the skintone and facial features are linked in any way, probably just coincidence



Since those are custom eyes, whether they are green or blue has nothing to do with the dominance. The game doesn't "know" what color they are. Generally all custom eyes are equally dominant, and if you have two custom eye genes, they both have a 50/50 chance of expressing. But I think there are ways of making custom eyes recessive, too, so that might bring some complications to it.

Did you add genetic material to the custom eyes? If not then it is a straight 50/50 shot of getting blue over green. If you did add genetic info, blue and green should have the same genetic trait (2) so again....50/50.

It's not even so much the distinctiveness of their faces as how it seems people go about making them. My guess is that they start with a template that is only kind of close to the face they want to end up at, if at all, and do a lot of tweaking with the various fine-tuning sliders to ge tthe face how they want it. Problem is, a lot of that fine-tuning can introduce weirdness into the features that isn't readily apparent - maybe the nose has a slight bump at the bridge, no big deal, right? - that ends up looking weird and deformed when you switch the sim's gender or it breeds. I've had some amount of success with using a default template close to what I want and then blending in other templates to get even closer, and only then using the fine tuning. I often go back and blend in other templates if I notice something a bit odd happening to the features, then go back to fine tuning. It's more work but the result is better.

There's also the issue that some celebrity sims are made by people who are making a sim based on a celeb by what they think the celeb looks like, not what s/he actually does, and/or doesn't take into account the inherent limitations in building a sim's face.

You're kidding right?  I can't tell most celebrities apart.


InSim isn't the kitten killer - it's just another large scale hack that invades your game.

People tend to make those celebrity sims have extreme features and almost sort of be a charicature. And Renatus is right, the people who make them tend modify them extremely from the average sim templates. The more different a face is from another the more freakish the kid will look.

I found the best way to insure good looking kids is to (from a CAS couple) is to use the same sim only change the gender on one and make them more feminine more masculine and change hair color and eye color. My children never look the same as each other and they're never deformed.

How on earth would they look different when they are mostly going to be clones, due to their parents having nearly exactly the same facial genetics? That doesn't make any sense.

Anyhow, it's hogwash that the sims have to look very similar to have kids that look good. There are certain features that do not mix well (long faces with short is a good example), but one can have a pretty decent variety of facial features in sims and still have the children come out looking pretty nice - if one is willing to not assume they will be horribly ugly just because they aren't supermodel material as children. Sim kids are usually funny looking, much like real children. I'm finding my custom neighborhood is a good example of that - only one kid so far has come out with questionable looks, and he's still a toddler so he may well grow into them.

They don't look exactly the same because I used the same face as a template and changed it, the parents still have different features. They're just have more in common so the features don't clash and get fugly.

Well, cariacature is different and I'm sure you're right about people using extremes when they make sims but I still can't tell celebrities apart.  I think it's because I'm not very interested.  It's then you realise that a lot of people in the public eye conform to a narrow set of facial variables.

The problem with celebrities is that they are all too skinny and have these very pronounced cheekbones that look horrid in the game.

Not look similar, but just certain features have to be roughly similar. It's hard for me to explain. Like I tend to make my sims have smaller eyes (less Anime/dollish) and have their faces higher up so they don't have a huge forehead. If I breed them with a townie they might, say get the mom's low mouth and the dad's high nose and look freakish with this huge space between where the nose ends and the mouth starts. Does that make sense?

Of course they can look different, it's just that you don't want to go blending extremely different features.

Yeah, that makes sense.

It's hard for me to tell, sometimes, when someone says 'have to have similar features' if they mean that sims have to be kept consistant in style (Realism vs cartoon) or if they mean they all have to look very similar, period. I have run into people who did sincerely mean the latter... but then, those sorts were usually the people who got really annoyed whenever they had a sim that looked like anything other than 'generic pretty white person'.

I know what you mean - the Maxis default face templates are too cartoony/anime for my taste too.  I got AllenABQ's face templates (s/he posts on here doesn't s/he?) but, they don't work for default townies in a new neighbourhood.  I like them though - they make for more normal faces to start with and I think they get used for newly generated townies (so works with deleteallcharacters - though I might be wrong about that).  I read an interesting site when I got them, I think AllenABQ said he based the templates on ideas from that site.

http://www.sagesims.com/tutorial_anime.php

Yes, you can set dominancy in custom eyes.  My daughter has made some eye colors and set their genetics accordingly.  I threw out all my custom eyes because of the dominancy issue a long time ago but went back to using some after she made these.  You can find them at www.springhole.net/bogsims if you're interested.  

So true!  I really should keep pictures of all my sims because most of the time if the kids aren't downright funny-looking they're homely as all get out!  Once they age transition some of them turn into right attractive sims.  (Please note, I didn't say beautiful--that only happens once in a while in my game.)

Maxon, the replacement templates definitely will work on newly generated townies. I use AllenABQ's templates, myself, and while they aren't completely to my liking they are a damn sight better than the templates that came with the game. It's really only the NPCs who end up pulling from the templates in my game since I make my own townies, but those NPCs fit with the rest of the neighborhood.

I once took out the replacement templates because I wanted to use one of the defaults and the replacement changed it too much, and was horrified all over again by the default templates. Eurgh! A few are workable, but the rest are horrid without extensive reworking. Needless to say I put the replacements back in immediately.

The problem I have with most of the replacement templates that are available are that most of the faces look TOO similiar. So the townies all look the same.  :-\ Allen (something, forget the full screenname) suggested a group of people making different simmies for a collection, that way it is a lil more diverse. I'd be all up for contributing, I just don't think I could tackle making my own replacements myself.

How could InSim "invade" anyones game? it dosen't do anything unless you select something for it to do, its not a global hack  ::)


edit - really didn't need the extra "could"

Jelenedra, I've noticed that problem too, and with every other set I've seen. It's not so bad when you want them so your NPCs don't look like googly-eyed circus freaks, but it's not so good when you rely on them for game-generated townies and such. Some of the faces look more similar in Body Shop than they really are - that dead-grey mannequin flattens a lot of detail - but overall, yes, they are too similar.

I keep meaning to make a set, myself, with a variety of ethnicities, but keep not doing it because my project list is already stupidly long. Nevermind that all of the time I've spent here I could have made five sets already *cough, ahem*.  ::)


Sleepycat, I can only guess that a lot of functions that require reading documentation to figure out equals big bad nasty that will take over your mind and make you cheat forevermore! Or something. I dunno, there is a hell of a lot of stuff in it but I recently found out it is dead useful for any situation in which I need to alter relationships, usually in townies and adoption pool kids where I don't want the teens that I've made be related to their arbitrary CAS parent. Once I figured out where those options were, I ignored the rest. Easy. Sure, the file is big for a hack, but it's smaller than most of the individual clothing items I have, so any impact on loading times is minimal - if I thought it would be a problem I'd find an outfit I was no longer particularly attached to and delete it. Again, easy.

I agree. It's very useful for setting relationships and is AFAIK the only thing that will let you set relationships in game. SimPE will let you do it of course but it's a pain in the ass to exit and reload. The CAS only gives you limited options in terms of setting relationships. You can't for instance make an elder parent of a child etc.

My problem with insim is that I would only use like two functionalitites of it and ignore the rest. I don't want to have to download all that mess if I all I want is the morning after pill for my simmies.  ::)

Haha, 'all that mess'. It's one file. Rather bigger than I remembered... so I'd have to delete, say, three outfits, or maybe a folder of hair. Whoo.

But what mess it? Just use what you want and ignore the rest. It's not a global hack and if you get the object version it doesn't even mess with any menus. Now I'll grant you I could say a choice word or two about it's creators, but I won't go there  8) but there's nothing wrong with the object. Not getting something useful to you because it does other things that are not is just shooting yourself in the foot.

Did you guys see the list of new features, I love the new adjuster!


- Budget Adjustor (Sectional):
• Add Simoleons (100 Scale, 5,000 Scale, & 25,000 Scale)
• Subtract Simoleons (100 Scale, 5,000 Scale, & 25,000 Scale)
• Pay The Bills - Pay bills without dealing with the mailbox.
• Auto Pay Bills (On/Off) - Automatically pays bills (when it is turned on) as they are delivered.

It is not the size of the file that gets me, it's that I don't want something in the game that I feel gives me too much opportunity to cheat. I'm already addicted to boolprop. I max out all my sims' interests so that they won't have bad conversations, and I mess with their personality points and drag it around so that they have more points in something than they should.

I just don't want the temptation.

That's nice. I've really missed payatthebox and the macro still needs a table, but now we can't place a table under the damned mailbox because it's "out of bounds".  ::)

Well as some of you may have seen from my posts, that aspect annoys me too, the opportunity to cheat. But there's already debug mode (or 'boolprop' in BBSese) and I know about it and it's a tempatation to cheat that I can't get rid of so that kind of throws that excuse for not using insim out the window. Plus it just does some things that I can't otherwise do without shutting down, running SimPE and reloading and I HATE reloading.

That was another thing it altered a bunch of things that I had no clue about because I had never used insim. I am a firm believer in not messing with stuff I don't know anything about. If you haven't already guessed with all my unending rants of "Is this right? I don't want to change anything until I know for sure.'" posts in the other threads.

 Err... isn't that what the documentation is for?

Hey, I didn't feel like going through it. It didn't interest me enough to get it. Sooooo. If I don't want, I don't want it.

Why didn't you say that in the first place?  ;) So much protesting...

But, but.... protesting is FUN!  ;D

Although I probably will end up getting it eventually. Especially since my risky whoohoo mod is putting one of my families out of house and home.  :-[

Well it's totally up to you, but it doesn't change anything unless you tell it to, so as long as you don't go messing with stuff that you don't know what it does, you should be fine. ;)

I use the Destination version of InSim and I find it very handy when I really need the features for something.  For example, if I want to change a sim's astrology sign and get them a personality to match.

I also find that if you think it would be too much of a temptation to use, if you're lazy like me most of the time you aren't going to go to the trouble to spawn a bunch of objects and go through 50 gazillion clicks to get where you want to go. ;)

Just move the mailbox over a square, you can put the cover on then (payatbox)  :)