Death by Flies, the Biotech station and sickness.

[MattyDienhoff]

I've searched for and read existing posts about these topics, and absorbed a bit of information that way, but I'd still like to pick your brains myself, so here goes.

Just recently I've become very interested in the weird side of TS2. Vampires, aliens, crazy old coots with weather controlling devices on the roof... and I decided to try one of the weird, rare deaths out on one of my sims, death by flies. I read that death by flies occurs when the house is insanely messy, so I got to work. The lucky candidate, one Leo Jankowski, has no neat personality points, so it was relatively easy to coerce him to make a complete mess of his house and leave it that way. I figured this would do the trick.


But apparently not, I had him stand around in that room for days and no gruesome death by a thousand insects occured. So I thought: "maybe it only happens outdoors?" ...



NOPE. It seems that no matter what I try, no vicious swarm of flies appears to devour him. So I'm wondering, is it even possible for a sim to die this way without using InSim to do it?

While I'm at it I thought I'd also ask about the SimSanto Biotech Station reward object, I had a sim who has full logic skill use it and I found that despite the fact he had full logic skill, sometimes medicine wouldn't turn out. He'd make it, then stand in front of the station complaining and shrugging. In those instances he could only dispose of the medicine, he could'nt sell it. Then I had him make a virus, and so far every attempt he's made has seemingly ended in failure because the only option that ever appears when he's finished is "dispose". He can't sell it, and he can't use it to infect himself or anyone else. (like I'd hoped  ) So what's the point? Is it bugged, is it meant to (not) work like this?

Finally, I don't know if this is only my imagination or not, but in more recent versions of TS2 (after patches and EPs), sickness seems to have become a real rarity. In the base game I remember Sims would, more often than not, get food poisoning from eating spoiled food and they would also get colds occaisionally while at work or school. Now, I've seen sims eat spoiled food with no apparent effect and I don't even remember the last time a Sim came home from school/work with a cold or a flu. Call me cruel if you like but I'd like to see more sickness as it seems to be very rare.

[jsalemi]

I think the sim has to step on one of the plates on the floor or something like that to 'anger the flies'.

The medicine station has been borked since the beginning; you never could sell the virus, in spite of what early Maxis/Prima stuff said.  Pescado does have a fix for some of the problems with the medicine station in The Armory (look for the Biostation Fix about 1/2 way down the list).

And there's a fairly well-functioning experimental hack in Peasantry that makes sickness more dangerous, called Realistic Sickness (I think).


Of course, with Seasons you can just put a hot tub outside, wait for a thunderstorm and have your sims sit in the hot tub.  Guaranteed at least one of them will probably die, if not from lightning then from spontaneous combustion (if you don't have hacks to stop it, that is).

(Sorry I didn't include links, but my connection got really flaky and I can't seem to reliably pull up other threads right now.

[phyllis_p]

I seem to remember once reading an account of death by flies in which it happened when the unfortunate Sim started to clean up a mess such as the one your Sim made.  I've never tried this myself, so I don't know wheter it's a true account or not.

[Alexx]

Obviously your flies too small or too young to kill somebody.

[Kyna]

Finally, I don't know if this is only my imagination or not, but in more recent versions of TS2 (after patches and EPs), sickness seems to have become a real rarity. In the base game I remember Sims would, more often than not, get food poisoning from eating spoiled food and they would also get colds occaisionally while at work or school. Now, I've seen sims eat spoiled food with no apparent effect and I don't even remember the last time a Sim came home from school/work with a cold or a flu. Call me cruel if you like but I'd like to see more sickness as it seems to be very rare.

The decrease in colds & flu in your game is probably EAxis sado-randomness at work.  Since installing Seasons I have seen a big increase in the number of sims coming home from school/work with an illness.  Now that I've said that, of course, it won't happen for months in my game  

As for spoiled food, my sims don't eat it as I have noeatcrap in my downloads.

[jolrei]

I recently had two sims get colds/flu or something on their wedding day.  I let them go to their honeymoon and do the "wedding night" thing anyway (they both had the cold anyhow) and it got worse.  The female sim woke up the next morning and coughed and hacked for several sim minutes, until I got alarmed.  I put them both to bed for a while and then had them do nice relaxing things until the "all clear" was indicated.

All this to say that sickness seems to be working reasonably well in my game, and I have more than the base game installed (although not all EPs).

As for death by flies, I've managed it by ensuring that there is no way for the sim to autonomously clean dishes (and naturally no maid).  Once dirt piles up for a while, the flies appeared and ate the offending sim.  I only tried this once, so I'm not sure if it works consistently, or if I just had luck on my side (odd sort of luck).

[MattyDienhoff]

(Sorry I didn't include links, but my connection got really flaky and I can't seem to reliably pull up other threads right now.

No worries, the recommendations are more than enough. Thanks! 

Obviously your flies too small or too young to kill somebody.

I guess I need a mad scientist who can genetically modify them to be extra vicious. 

About the colds, I guess I'll just have to send them out to stomp on roaches more often. 

[pioupiou]

I only had death by flies with piles of garbage. Other spoiled things (plate, pizza etc) never triggered it. I don't know if it is a rule set in stone or not, but it is how it worked in my game for the moment.

[MattyDienhoff]

Excellent, I'll look into that.

[Zazazu]

I only had death by flies with piles of garbage. Other spoiled things (plate, pizza etc) never triggered it. I don't know if it is a rule set in stone or not, but it is how it worked in my game for the moment.

Seconded. Generally, having them cook or grab chips from the fridge and then immediately dispose in a trash can, then cancel out emptying it. Or, if personality points allow, have them repeatedly kick and right the streetside trashcan. This was the only way I've ever gotten death by flies (sans the cheaty Rodney's Death Creator).

[Invisigoth]

I saw a tutorial somewhere once that showed in pictures step by step how to get all of the deaths.  I can't remember where, though.  The way they got death by flies to work was to use some fences (walls would work to) to make a one square wide and about 10 square long tunnel.  They ordered a pizza and then had the sim try to dispose of the pizza, then cancelled it and repeated until 9 of the squares had a garbage pile in it.  Then they closed the opening in the fence so that the sim couldn't get out and told the sim to go sit in the chair (walking through all of the piles).  They said that it might take two or three times walking back and forth like that.  I imagine that you could use the same method with dirty plates.  The important thing was that it was only one tile wide so the sim had a higher chance of stepping on top of the fly covered objects rather than around them.

[eevilcat]

One of the few BBS offerings that I ever bookmarked, PeeWee's death tutorial:

[Gwill]

I seem to rememberPescado studying death by flies a while ago.
From what I remember there has to be a certain amount of trash in the room.  The trash has to be food based (a broken clean bot will not do the trick), pizza is a good source because of a bug/bad coding that causes the original pizza box to reappear if the dispose action is cancelled.  And the sim has to step over the trash.
I did experiment with this a while ago, and I seem to remember managing it with just a small room with 5 plates of spoiled burgers.

[BastDawn]

Death by flies is easy.  Get a dog or two and an outdoor cleanbot.  The cleanbot will activate to vacuum up puddles and eventually break, spewing out garbage onto every available tile.  Have your sim sleep or study through this process, then direct him to turn off the bot and then walk across the lot.  That's how I killed Cyd Roseland in my favorite hood.  No food was involved, but there was probably about 40 tiles of trash.  (And when I say "easy", I assume you have someone in your hood selling cleanbots for an easy setup.  The cleanup, on the other hand, is a bitch.)