The Sims 4

Eve Spiritus is now pregnant!

Eve had little Abigail Spiritus after rushing to the hospital in the middle of the night (naturally) in the middle of a blizzard. All returned home safely. Adam went to his gardening job in the morning and had a very unusual experience there with a plasma-sucking plant. So strange!

Had some great sims experiences last night!

Abigail Spiritus is now a toddler and progressing nicely. I randomized her trait when she aged up and she got "wild child" which means she is more energetic and likes being outdoors. She's a very happy toddler and mostly behaves well, but periodically she takes off all of her clothes and walks around, even venturing outside naked in the snow. Her parents usually catch her at it and tell her stop taking off her clothes, but so far the behavior continues. It's hilarious to me, but probably not so fun for Adam and Eve.

So once the weekend was over, I switched back to the house of Count Vladislaus Straud and continued working on his science career and J's mixology skill, and then...THEN...!!! Winterfest!!!!

It was the BEST day! I had them decorate the whole house with Winterfest decorations and then J invited over his entire Mixology club, which were about six or seven humans, for a grand Winterfest meal. I didn't have Vlad invite any vampires because they have trouble eating human food and get sick. So J cooked up a huge feast after everyone arrived and they all gathered around Vlad's huge table for a big ham dinner. Vlad of course tried it and got sick so just started talking about Winterfest and singing Winterfest songs.

After the meal was over, the entire group started cleaning up, and not only did they clean up the meal, but the entire house as well!

Then I had them all gather around a huge present stack to open presents and everyone had fun opening presents. Then they ALL together sang Winterfest songs around the fireplace with the remains of the presents on the floor and the lit Winterfest tree nearby.

Around 8pm all of the fireplaces in the house suddenly went dim and Father Winter appeared! He handed out presents as well and hung out for a bit with the group, and then at midnight disappeared back up the chimney. (He actually walked into the fireplace as he vanished, so neat!)

At that point, J ended the gathering and so all of the guests went home, and then Vlad and J had their own, more romantic, time together to end the whole day.

Everything was just so perfect and no pressure!

Vlad got abducted again and enjoyed the experience and the household celebrated New Year and today is the first day of spring. A few days ago, Vlad and J adoped a German Shepherd named Maximus. He looks fierce and likes to bark a lot, but he actually has a very friendly personality and tends to be a scaredy-cat (er...dog). He is potty trained and I found out that dog poop can be used to fertilize plants!

I have future plans of moving Don Lothario into his own place in San Myshuno. He is friends with Vlad and J and so I really want to get him set up as the ladies man he's always wanted to be, and I feel like he really needs his own place versus living with the Caliente family.

Vlad now has finally grown a cowplant! Yay! Since it lures sims to their doom with cake when not fed, he has it down in the basement near his science lab behind a locked gate that only he can access. Being a vampire, he is not tempted by human food, so everyone in the household and visitors should be safe from it. He's in the process of growing another one so that the current cowplant won't be by itself (though I did put in some Sixam fly traps in the enclosure as well.)

But growing the cowplant gave me an idea for my alphabet legacy family. Since Adam is a gardener and will also need to grow a cowplant for his aspiration, I am going to have them start a cowplant death cult and he will build a temple on his property. Then as each sim in the family reaches adulthood AND the heir has produced children of his or her own, the older generation sims will offer themselves as sacrifices to the cowplant and hence die and become ghosts.

Then the younger generation will commit to having the ghosts rejoin the household and then these ghosts will move to somewhere and live normal "lives" as such, but as ghosts! I think I will give them all short lifespans too so that it won't take so long to build up this ghostly community. Maybe these ghosts will have a whole lot with a larger temple devoted to cowplants. We shall see!

The cowplant idea is also good for making sure most of the ghosts are adults instead of elders since elders are a lot more limited in the game.

Of course, the rest of my sims world will likely view these cowplant devotees as a bit strange, but then what else is new when it comes to sims?

Oh dear, it seems that Vlad got abducted one too many times and now he's pregnant!

Also Vlad is having some recent trials with Caleb Vatore, though it's not either of their faults but mine. I ran into a relationship bug where no matter how high the relationship bar between them, they were unable to be friends. The internet said that I would need to destroy the existing relationship to fix the problem, so now both the friendship and romance bars are both in the red and they are Declared Enemies. Vlad is now going to need to completely ignore Caleb until all of that decays away and they completely forget they ever met (the game does relationship culling). Then supposedly they can build their friendship normally.

I'm just not sure how long it is going to take or even if it really does work.

Managed to finally invite the ghost that kept haunting the lot into the household. Haven't decided if he will live in the manor long-term or if I will move him out to some other lot. A new ghost is haunting the lot now, so I suppose she has the haunt job that he used to have.

The tutorial seems to keep on going. Or else I'm missing something. Maybe I'll just skip on to the actual game and go with the flow.

RnRClown wrote:

The tutorial seems to keep on going. Or else I'm missing something. Maybe I'll just skip on to the actual game and go with the flow.

I don't even remember the tutorial! I think there is an option to turn it off in the settings.

Going with the flow seems like it would be more fun anyway!

The dog, Maximus, ran away but came back after a day or so needing a bath.

And Vlad just had a purple baby boy...so cool! Named him Xerxes Straud. I looked in in the family tree and it says the mother's name is "Senior Pollination Technician #4" and she is purple too! I wonder if this baby will inherit any of Vlad's vampire traits.

It seems I've run into the same relationship bug with Caleb's sister, Lilith Vatore too. I think I am having issues with them because Straud met them before the patch that fixed the bug from happening, but did not fix the existing issue.

As it is going to take forever for Straud's relationships with both of them to decay naturally, I have a plan, but it's a scary one.

First I am going to have Straud get the vampire ability to Drain Life Essence, and then I am going to have Straud mix a Cure Vampirism drink at the bar and throw it at Caleb to "slay" his vampirism, turning him into a normal sim. After he is "mortal" again, I will have Straud drain his life essence which will wipe out all of his memories of any relationships. Things will go back to before he ever met anyone. Then I will have Straud immediately turn Caleb back into a vampire.

The cost is pretty big considering that Caleb is a Grandmaster Vampire now and will very likely go back to being a Fledgling, so he will have to work back up to it from the very beginning. Secondly, he will have to regain all of his relationships with his sister and nieces/nephews.

But it should all him to make friends with Straud as normal after all of that.

If it works, I'll do the same thing with Lilith.

But I suppose since vampires are always doing weird things anyway, it won't seem all that unusual to any other sims who may be watching.

It seems like it worked. Drained away Caleb's vampire spirit and erased his memories and then built up a relationship normally until they became friends! Yay! However, it seems there is a cooldown period on using vampire powers on him, so I will need to wait until that's done before I can have Straud turn him back into a vampire. If all goes well, Lilith is next! Then I can play their household and get things back to normal with all their relationships.

Hopefully these are the only two sims affected, but at least now I know how to fix it if I come across it again.

On a negative note, Vlad keeps trying to use drain life spirit on his partner J and I keep clicking it off. I'm concerned I won't catch him in time, so once he is done with fixing Caleb and Lilith, I will reset all of his vampire powers so that he no longer has that one. I think I will also remove it from the other vampire in the neighborhood who has it as she has used it autonomously and wiped out the memories of one of Vlad's co-workers simply because she had the misfortune of trying to visit Vlad while a Vampire Council meeting was going on. Since Vlad is trying to get 20 friends for an aspiration reward, she created extra work for him since he had to make friends with her all over again.

I'm so happy! After the cooldown period, I had Caleb invite Vlad over to the house and then asked him to turn Caleb back into a vampire and he agreed. There was another waiting period of a couple days before he fully turned, but then when I went into his vampire powers menu to see if he had any points, I found out that he had ALL his points from before AND he went right back to being the Grandmaster Vampire that he was! He is back to his normal self again and no longer bugged. The only thing is for him to rebuild any other relationships he lost.

Now I need to do the whole process over again with Lilith, but now I know for certain that it works!

Then I can get rid of that mind wipe power from Vlad and any other vampires that have it so that they can't use it autonomously.

I think the worst thing out of all of this is playing the Vatore household for so long with only one vampire since they have 3 babies and one toddler living there and so when Lilith went to work and only humans were left to care for all of the children and they all wanted to sleep, it was super crazy. So I determined that before I messed with Lilith, I would get Caleb completely back to his normal vampire self since I didn't want to care for all of those children with no vampires in the house (since vampires never need to sleep.)

All my vampire - relationship issues are now fixed, though I don't believe it really had anything to do with the vampire part, but just that I've been playing the vampire families. All vampires that were "cured" to fix the problem that should be vampires are back to being vampires again.

So then I felt safe to age up Vlad's baby into a toddler and then had to spend a bunch of time trying to figure out the whole alien form thing when I was trying to customize all of the outfits. I *think* I have it figured out now finally! It seems that the alien form is always going to be "naked" and bald and cannot be changed, while the alien disguise can be changed to anything and can wear clothes in all categories.

So things were all starting to get back to normal when suddenly Vlad gets abducted again! What the....? I had alien abductions turned off on the satellite!

Then I checked the satellite, and somewhere in the midst of all of the switching around families and everything, abductions were no longer turned off. So then I hoped and prayed he didn't come back pregnant and well, guess what?

He came back pregnant. Again! AAAAAAAHHHHHH

Now I only hope and pray he doesn't have more than one. Yikes!

Vlad just had another baby boy, Xeno Straud. While Xerxes was a purple color, Xeno appears to be a light blue or bluish-green. They have different mothers, but both mothers are Pollination Technician #3, so not sure how that works in alien social structure.

On a different note, I'm really loving the Science career. Even though Vlad has reached the top of that career track, I still love going to the job with him and doing all the things there. I'm also slowly upgrading the science lab and I put in a style chair so I could redo the regular clothing of the Lab Techs working there so they don't appear in town in ridiculous townie fashion. Each time I visit there with Vlad, I do a little bit more to spruce things up a bit!

It's one of the hidden areas of the game so the only time it can be visited is when a sim goes there to work. There is a picnic area near the highway though, so you can see regular neighborhood sims visiting there and cooking on the grill.

I was curious to see if I played another sim in the science career if Vlad would be there in the lab as well, or if it would just be the "townie" sims, so I switched over to the Goth household and decided that Mortimer Goth would be a scientist. So had him join the career and on his first day of work, all the regular "townie" Lab Assistants were there AND so was Vlad! So it seems that whatever played sims get into that career, they will all be there working together during the day (but you only control the sim you have active at the time.) Yay!

I decided Bella Goth would join the Acting career and I am thinking about having her be a vampire at some future point, but haven't yet made up my mind on that one.

Cassandra Goth is still a teen in this game and they have her focusing on music, but I'm thinking she may be a Doctor or Veterinarian. Alexander is a child, but maybe he will do something with magic. He has this kind of "Harry Potter" feel to him.

Then I switched over to the Caliente household and had Don Lothario move out to his own place. I'm not really sure why he was living in that household anyway since in Sims 2, they were neighbors and had their own houses. So the household had 28000 simoleans, so I have him 1/4 of it and so he left with 7000 and bought the cheapest unfurnished apartment in San Myshuno that was still vacant and used most of the 7000 on the deposit and basic furnishings and an easel for painting, since he is a painter.

The apartment was practically empty! But rent is only 500 simoleans a week.

So I've been playing with Don for a while. His traits are Active, Romantic, Noncommittal, and Alluring (from having a "love" aspiration of Serial Romantic.) So in pursuit of this aspiration, he already has three girlfriends at the same time and he's in the process of kissing ten different sims. After he accomplishes that, he will need to earn gold status on three dates and have had eight boyfriends/girlfriends. Then he will receive a reward trait as "Player" that will never cause other sims to get jealous no matter what he does.

He's been painting a lot so has those all over his apartment walls now, has a stereo (permanantly on the romantic station) and a cardboard dance floor. He's been selling "duplicate" paintings when the flea market comes around to the district. Longer term goal is for him to buy an art studio lot and display and sell his paintings there.

I did some cleaning up in my neighborhoods last night. Randomly generated sims had moved into some of the empty households, so I went around evicting them and then changed the settings to not allow random sims to move in. Since I wasn't always sure which sims were random and which sims were premade, I looked up the families in the sims wiki to make sure that I didn't accidentally evict them. Then I made sure all of those sims as well as some of the "homeless" sims I liked and wanted to keep were set to "played" so the game won't randomly clean them up one day, I went back to regular play.

I very briefly went into Johnny Zest's house to check his genealogy since I had seen on the wiki that he had been disowned by the Laandgrab family, but unfortunately, he had no one in his family tree besides himself. Then went back to Don Lothario. He is now up to having 5 girlfriends at once and 5 kisses. He needs 10 kisses for his aspiration. Once he has these, the next set of aspirations will be easy since he already has 5 out of 8 girlfriends and has 1 out of 3 gold level dates.

In between all of these things, he is continuing to work on his painting skill, moving up in the painting career, and doing an odd job here or there for extra income. His goal is to get 7000 simoleons to spend on buying a "retail store" on the island and open up a painting studio right there on the beach. Since he only sells his duplicate paintings and has used most of his money for fixing up the apartment, it is taking a while.

Since it seems he is always at work or it is always raining/storming during flea market day, he bought his own street gallery display that he can set up anywhere and sell paintings on other days beside the flea market. I'd finally had enough after he got everything set up at the market, sold a couple paintings, and then watched as he and all the other sims dashed for shelter during a sudden violent storm that then lasted the entire rest of the day and into the night. No wonder most sims are scared of these storms!

So I've managed to complete Don Lothario's love aspiration and changed to a new one to work on that requires various things in San Myshuno where he has his apartment. I also had him buy a lot over in the tropical area of Sulani so that he could open up an art studio and a hangout for the mixology club he's in. So in the process of doing that and his new aspiration, he was on his way back home from the island to the still very snowy and cold San Myshuno and decided to set off fireworks at the Humor and Hijinks festival and then go to the museum next door to paint a mural there (part of the requirements of the city aspiration.)

So he had reached the museum and was at the mural spot when the camera yanked over from him to a different view, and a woman covered in ice staggered into the nearby courtyard and fell over dead! Sims started to gather around her yelling and weeping, and Don Lothario autonomously came over to "witness death" as his action queue now read.

Then the Grim Reaper appeared for the woman and Don attempted to talk to her and did manage to chat with him for a bit before he left, leaving an urn of the woman's ashes in the courtyard.

Turns out she is a single mother of three boys in one of the other neighborhoods, so on a whim, Don took the urn and brought it back to his apartment with the idea of befriending her ghost, inviting her into his household so that she would then be free to move back in with her family, ghostly as she now was. Perhaps someday she could then be fully resurrected should she and her family pursue such a thing, but as a ghost, she could still continue to live her life, so to speak.

Her ghost has remained elusive for two nights so far, but perhaps she will appear this next night to haunt the Lothario apartment!

Success! She finally came out of the urn a couple of midnights later and Don spent the entire night talking to her and finally getting her friendship up to invite her into the household. Then she left and moved back in with her family, so they have their mother back again, albeit as a ghost. She had to rejoin her clubs and her career track, and from the beginning, but as she was previously only level 3, it won't be difficult to get back to that level. Now that she is safely at her home, I can go back to working on Don's art studio and figuring out who may be next in the sim rotation.

I like the fact that this thread is 99% bekkilyn just providing updates You should do a lets play and put it up on youtube!

BlackSabre wrote:

I like the fact that this thread is 99% bekkilyn just providing updates You should do a lets play and put it up on youtube! :)

I absolutely loathe lets plays. I much prefer getting text updates like these.

I'm not a huge Let's Play fan, either. Speaking mostly as a consumer. They can be quite the time sink with much fluff and filler. Serious editing is often required if not for proper talent when going live.

Write-ups, though, are wonderful. They're more respect your time aware. More killer. Less filler. I've found much enjoyment in these Sims 4 updates - kudos to you, bekkilyn - and can only imagine how much more time would have been required to watch events unfold in real-time. Our author also tells it rather well!

Thanks all! It's fun posting little updates here and there!

Maybe one day I'd consider doing a Let's Play, but right now I'd rather spend the two hours playing than the two hours editing.

So I switched over to June Kay for a bit because I decided she would enter the Detective career track, which is another one of the Sims 4 "active" careers where you follow your sim to work and actively do different work-related tasks, this one being to solve crimes and other various tasks that go on in a police station.

She lives in San Myshuno in an apartment with two neighbors on her floor. They have the same mail carrier as Don Lothario who lives in a different district of San Myshuno. One of her neighbors is Babs (can't remember last name) and Penny Pizzazz (who I plan to have join the Acting career due to the fact that somewhere in San Myshuno is a huge poster of her and so it just seems that she would be famous for something).

I don't have any spectacular plans for June Kay as of yet and still haven't really figured out her personality, so will just see where things go with her as she continues on the Detective track.

It's finally spring, so much less chance of freezing to death drama, though the days are still cold.

I almost forgot! Sims who live in apartments have apartment-related issues to deal with such as noise from neighbors. I think no matter what the sim personality, they ALL seem to love death metal when they are being noisy next door! Then your active sim has the option to knock politely on their door or pound on the door to yell at them for making too much noise!

So I decided to groom a sim for university. I wanted one who would specialize in computers and robotics and eventually set up a robotics company, so I chose a very unlikely pre-made sim in San Myshuno. His name is Steve Fogel and he lives in a very small, cheap apartment. His fashion sense was horrendous. He was very overweight and had a scraggly beard and a wore a billed cap.

So I started up his household to see what I could do with him. First, he had an aspiration to do something with comedy but had no comedy skill and he had a career as a petty thief. I noticed that despite his appearance, he had maximum fitness skill! So then I decided to have him pursue the bodybuilder aspiration and get back in shape AND I decided to give him a makeover.

He shaved the scraggly beard and now just has traces of facial hair. I left his hairstyle alone. Then I went through all of the different outfit types and gave him a more sports/collegiate wardrobe. Nothing too preppy.

Just doing all of that made a huge difference in his appearance even before starting any sort of healthy eating or workout routines. I also had him quit his job as a petty thief. He can hack computers if he wants a more notorious activity, but he's not exactly into the more physical versions of crime.

After a few days in the gym (if only it worked this way in real life), he had shed all of the extra pounds, and gained lots of muscle and is in perfect physical condition. He's also been working on programming skills, video game skills, and mechanical skills, and applying for scholarships. He was turned down for the distinguished degree program for computer science, so I had him keep working on things until he could apply again and the next time he applied, he was accepted! He is not living on campus, but commuting from his apartment.

He even has an athletics scholarship for soccer to help pay the way, and with his other scholarships, his school is paid in full.

I'm currently only having him take one class in his major and one in his elective so I can see how everything works and also I want him to work part time doing freelance work rather than being a full time student. At some point, I'll age up one of the teenagers after completing enough high school work and have that sim live on campus and do the whole campus thing, but I think most of my adult sims who go to university will commute from home.

Anyway, it seems this sim only needed a bit of TLC and he has really blossomed!

I started playing this this week. I've never played a Sims game before, and typically have trouble enjoying more sandboxy games like this, but I wanted to try something outside my usual fare.

After the tutorial, I created a couple Sims based on how I answered some questions. I know the stereotypical thing is to create people you know but I was always kind of uncomfortable with that idea, so now I have two randos living together. My first problem is that the house only came with one bed. I basically had them taking turns between the bed and couch before my wife, who has played way more Sims than I have, suggest I put a bunk bed in instead. It didn't even occur to me to do that, so clearly I have a lot to learn about the game.

For now I'm just going after their career goals and poking around at the various features. I have the Seasons expansion installed, and nothing much else. We'll see how far I get!

beanman101283 wrote:

I started playing this this week. I've never played a Sims game before, and typically have trouble enjoying more sandboxy games like this, but I wanted to try something outside my usual fare.

After the tutorial, I created a couple Sims based on how I answered some questions. I know the stereotypical thing is to create people you know but I was always kind of uncomfortable with that idea, so now I have two randos living together. My first problem is that the house only came with one bed. I basically had them taking turns between the bed and couch before my wife, who has played way more Sims than I have, suggest I put a bunk bed in instead. It didn't even occur to me to do that, so clearly I have a lot to learn about the game.

For now I'm just going after their career goals and poking around at the various features. I have the Seasons expansion installed, and nothing much else. We'll see how far I get!

Awesome! What a wonderful discovery experience you will be having as you explore the sim world and it's residents.

I've played sims since Sims 1 and not even once have I ever created someone I knew, either personally or in a celebrity sense. If any such people were in my games, it was because Maxis/EA put them there.

I need to get back to my Sims 4 game soon! It's so fun!

I'm kinda jealous actually that you're discovering the Sims 4 now. You're in for a treat, and the expansions add so many great features over time.

I never really got into The Sims 4, but they just released a Star Wars expansion pack for it today, and it sure does look cute af.

I’ve played somewhere between 8 and 10 hours now. The game provides a lot of laughs, but I’m not sure if I’m enjoying the basic loop of improving skills and activities to satisfy Aspirations and work towards job promotions. Hanging out with friends can be fun, and I know there’s a ton of stuff I haven’t seen yet. I’m wondering though if there’s something more specific I should be looking into, or hidden gems I should check out.