More Awesome Than You!

I'm trying an all-vampire household. Major problems arise when the teen vampires try to go to school since they are exposed to sunlight both going there and coming back. This is especially bad when they come back with homework as they waste 3 secs putting the homework down and another 3 secs complaining before they can be ordered to sprint for their coffins. Thing is, teens have to go out during daylight to go to school, unlike adults who can get night jobs. Even young adult vampires can get through university without going to class. I tried sending them to school with the car but that's not enough since they come back on the bus. Is there any hack/mod that allows vampire teens to be homeschooled or to attend night classes? Thanks in advance.

It's not something I've ever tried - never had a vampire.  But if the teen drives themselves to school with the car, they return in the car.  They'll only return on the bus if someone else drives them there.

I don't know if that helps with your problem at all, though  :-\

It does but then there are two teens and one car, so only one guy can drive?

I wonder, can't one teen carpool to school with the other? Never tried it, don't even know if it's possible, I'm just curious.

I'm trying it out atm. If it works then my next (and final) problem is that I'm using the House of Fallen Trees lot in the Maxis Downtown. The garage is a separate shed near the back of the compound and the walk there is almost as long as the walk from the front door to the street. And the house is on a foundation so I can't connect the two. WTB Sims 1 "Hole in the Ground" teleporter.

They can: a teen has the opportunity to carpool to school with all students. Unfortunately only the driver will return with the car.

As for the teleporting: max logic for your teens. Then they can teleport while meditating.

Guess I'll build a massive garage and give everyone their own vehicle.

They're vampires. They can easily just rake in income till they can afford it.  :P

What I'm wondering is why can't sunlight just make them really sleepy or something instead of burning them up? It's a fatal weakness.

Err isn't that the point of being a vampire? :D Sunlight=bad :P

Doesn't have to be *that* bad. It's the Sims, after all. Realism and authenticity should have been sacrificed in the name of producing playable vampire sims.

Strictly speaking, you don't *HAVE* to send them to school. You could just fail. It's not as if you're not going to be around forever. Let me know if it's going to require a "No F- spam". Teens cannot be taken by the SS.

For the cars: if the driveway is long enough (i.e. base driveway + one or more extentions) you can have a car in every driveway-slot (ex. driveway + extention in garage = 2 cars): the cars in the extentions simply disappear when used.

Place coffins as near as you can to the driveway/garage and give the command to enter in coffin when vampires are yet at school; in this way, as soon as they return from school they first drop homework on the ground then immediatly go sleep in coffin, and you save many useful seconds for their sake.

Thanks all for the advice.


True but then they're knowledge Sims (most vampires are); they get all depressed about not going to school and you miss out on the "Get A+" want, not to mention the stupid schoolbus arrives anyway, wakes them up and they burn to death before you can save them. And every civilized vampire has to have an education.

I read somewhere that vampires in bat form are not affected by the sun so the garage doesn't need to be connected to the house after all. If Macrotastics forced the vampires to fly everywhere it would help a lot, especially if it forced them to fly to their carpool/schoolbus.

Macrotastics wont do that since it would rather make your sims run, which is alot faster than running.

I have not seen any evidence of the "bat theory". If it were true, it would most cettainly be taken into account, though. Test and verify.

Inge has a "School Changer" as part of the Sims 2 Institutions objects.
Create a custom Vampire night school and assign it through the aforementioned object.

More information here:
http://www.simlogical.com/sl/Sims2Pages/Sims2Institutions.htm

That's not true, at least in my game.  They all return in the car.  As for the bat-safe-in-the-sun theory:  that's also not true.

For a detached garage, just put in a second floor and inside stairs, or make it large enough to hold all the coffins on the ground floor.  Teens don't have to sleep in the house.  Once they wake up to go to school, pause the game, cancel out the school bus icon, select each one in turn, click on the car, and select 'Carpool to school with/other students,' then unpause.  If you only have 1 other teen vampire only their name will be displayed.  If you have 6, you should get the 'other students' option.  I use this method to send my teen vamps to school, and they all return in the car just fine.  If you don't choose the carpool option for all teens at the same time, some will get left behind (unless you cancel everything out and do it again). That is, once carpooling is the active action for a teen, the car is unclickable and you can't add any more students to the carpool, so do it all at once while paused. 

You can also build a room very close to the bustop to hold the coffins.  That way teen vamps don't travel far outside.  I've used both methods.

Lately, I've been using insimin to stop them from going to school.  I concentrate on skilling for scholarships, and then send them back for a day or so before shipping them off to college.  However, for a while I had a household with 6 teen vamps and they all took the minivan to school each day, and all returned in the minivan.  I had them drop their homework once out of the car and I actually built the garage right off 1 massive bedroom with 6 coffins so they had a short trip back and forth.  Sending 6 vamps to school is a huge pain though.  It should be easier to get students to carpool together.

Cost me 18,000 simoleons to prove the bat theory false. Bat burns as easily as vampire. Sorry for spreading rumors.


If I assigned my Sims to "Flexi School" (thus making them home-schooled) would they need to do anything else to raise their grades? Also, since both of them (plus their parents) are knowledge Sims, will I get spammed with "Get into Private School" wants by putting them in a custom school?

Yes, they would need to use the work table object to generate homework to improve grades.
With my experience, grades remain static when exclusively using the Flexi School template.


The custom schools register as private schools within the interface and may fulfil the want.
Honestly though, I'm not too sure as custom schools use an entirely different set of GUIDs.

Thinking more on the night-school concept, I located this (http://www.modthesims2.com/showthread.php?t=40090) over at MTS2. The modification replaces Private School.

That is good news. Is this a change in OFB?

Don't know.  I didn't start playing vampire families much until I got OFB.  With just NL I only had one family with teen vampires and I already had built a hallway out to the work carpool spot for the parents and I just let the teens use the bus to and from school.    I did eventually get all four teens to carpool to school, but I don't remember if that was before or after I installed OFB.

You CAN connect their garage and house...even with the foundation.
SimSherry has a great tutorial at the official site that I've been using a lot. If you can't find it, or need it explained, let me know and I'll do the translation bit when I get home tonight.

Thanks a bunch for all the advice. I'll use the school hack and place them all in flexi school to avoid any vampire-sizzling action.

It would be so much better logic if the vamps just ran back in the house if they walk into the sun not standing like idiots screaming that they're tired and need to pee and smell and ... It is nearly impossible to save a vamp if they happen to wonder outside.

You could enlarge that garage and put the coffins in there? I know the house you mean and it is a long way to the basement, I had a similar problem with a vamp going to work.

Yeah the "made for vampires" House of Fallen Trees. I was hesitant to mess with the garage because the house is supposed to be some sort of antebellum town mansion with the garage tacked on several decades later when cars are invented. Notice that the garage with the wood/metal siding is "newer" than the house, which is done up in faded brick. Actually the lot is a bit buggy and the lights on the upper stories go out randomly. They still illuminate the rooms they are in, it's just that the bulbs somehow cease to glow and the furniture in the rooms is dark as well. And I discovered that vampires can still be scared to death by ghosts...


All Sims prefer to stand around complaining instead of doing something about the problem, except that for vampires this problem is usually a fatal one. It's all part of the "improved feedback" of Sims 2 over Sims 1, to make the player connect more with the sims. Whereas in Sims 1 a sim might just show a thought bubble indicating that the path is blocked and then wait patiently for the player to deal with the problem, the Sims 2 counterpart will scream accusations at the player and then go into violent hysterics for half an hour, ensuring that the player is sufficiently intimidated to do something about the problem. Although in fairness Maxis did get rid of the hour-long temper tantrums that sims would throw when woken up in the Sims 1.

Monique has teleporters at MTS2: here (http://www.modthesims2.com/showthread.php?t=60666).

Sim temper tantrums are the reason I have lesswhiny (http://moreawesomethanyou.com/ffs/ofb/hacks/lesswhiny.zip) in my game.

lesswhiny didn't save my vampire from burning up.

Too many needs too damn red. He just kept screaming and acting like an ass.

this hack by Squinge might help

Motive Protect Hacked Painting
http://www.insimenator.net/showthread.php?t=24442


edit -  grab JMs "don'twaveatme" hack


it really makes a difference!

Yes, it's a sanity-preserver. But when all your sims' needs are red they will play their "imminent disaster" animations (pee-pee dance, hunger pangs etc.) and the delay is often fatal to a vampire. This happens even with "lesswhiny" and "dontwaveatme".

Btw, I recommend the vampire mod at http://shaklin.net/xoops/modules/PDdownloads/viewcat.php?cid=2 (http://shaklin.net/xoops/modules/PDdownloads/viewcat.php?cid=2) that allows vampires to bite people without infecting them. You can even kill off those sims you don't like. I've been busy killing off my excess townie population (I have 30+ 'extras' for some reason) and resurrecting them as zombies. Fun stuff.

I've seen that hack by shaklin but untill recently I never even had a vampire and mine had alittle problem the other day...

'spolier alert' - for those that have been reading about my sims and haven't read chapter 9 yet
vampires should know better then to play pool outside, specially around noon! and most of the time I go with "what happens, happens" ...I will miss him!

The Maxis scripting AI is not programmed to pay attention to "hard kill" actions like that. There's nothing in the default game which tells a vampire that daytime is not vampire time and it's time to return to the grave. You need the sleep clock "Bedtime call" option for that.

yes, I know Maxis didn't 'do right' by the vampires, I was just being silly  :P

I don't need the sleepclock, my sims rarely sleep  ;D *laughs*

Here is the link to that tutorial (http://thesims2.ea.com/exchange/story_detail.php?asset_id=53552). It is really good and I use it a  lot to add garages to pre-nightlife houses :)

The House of Fallen Trees lot I use has the coffins stacked right next to each other, leaving very little room to put in sleep clocks. Can one sleep clock handle 2 coffins at once?

I've never tried vampires and coffins, but I do know that one sleep clock can handle two sims.

I would assume that it would work likewise for vampires, two coffins, two vampires, one sleepclock.

Yes. One clock can handle two sims in any normal, sane configuration of beds per room. Just don't try to stupidly assign two sims to a room with only one single bed at the same time.

What about three sleepclocks and six coffins in the same bedroom/crypt, using twojeffs' new V2 smart beds to reserve specific coffins for each family member?

That is a legal configuration that is officially supported. In fact, the sleep clock innately detects reservation-by-usage using the Maxis algorithm that allegedly allows sims to identify beds (but is so weak that it tends to not work), rendering the need to use any "reservable" options unnecessary: The Sleep Clock *IS* a bed reserver, and will repel unauthorized personnel via the Bed Nazi functionality. It really is More Awesome Than You.

I just hate my human sims always wanting to sleep in the coffin autonomously  ??? guess I tend to breed goths or something

I wonder if a "night school" mod would be possible?

Trivial, probably already exists.

then you need syberspunks "Vampire Coffin Mod"
http://www.moreawesomethanyou.com/smf/index.php/topic,2575.0.html