Apartment Base Squatting: Viable?
rufio:
Something occurred to me while moving sims in and out of apartments recently; you can move a sim into an apartment lot from the neighborhood, and save and exit without actually choosing an apartment. If the common area of the apartment has proper accommodations, it should in theory be possible to persist indefinitely on the apartment base lot with no bills, no rent, and no having to pay any money except for food. I tried to actually play this out, but due to unrelated errors (apparently there are corrupted urnstone tokens in my test hood) I wound up quitting and didn't get around to finishing the experiment.
Things I noticed:
- Unlike on community lots, the presence of a grill does not mean that you can use it to make free food. If there is a fridge in the common area, you can use the Make/Make Many options from OBF to generate food (which cost money, TS1-style). If you have a cell phone (or, probably, a phone in the community area) you can apparently still order pizza and Chinese food.
- You can get a job, assuming that there are computers on the lot. Obviously, there's no newspaper. Presumably the carpool still comes, though even if it doesn't you can probably still walk to work.
- You can't go to community lots, or at least you can't call a taxi. You might be able to use a car placed in the common area, or walk, though - I stopped using walk to community lot long ago, since it seems not to play well with one of TJ's hacks. There is an option on the cell phone for asking someone out on a date - presumably, you could ask them out to a community lot, end the date, and then do whatever you wanted to do on the community lot.
- No neighbors, since the neighbors don't show up to claim apartments until you claim one yourself. Presumably, if you move other playable sims into apartments, they will show up and can be interacted with. (I was actually in the middle of trying this when an error popped up during the move-in video and the game had to be killed from the task manager. Sigh.)
- No reward objects, since you can't place anything.
- There is a slightly annoying message that comes up occasionally telling you to pick an apartment, but it could probably be killed easily with a mod.
- The landlord never goes home, acting as a perpetual live-in maid/gardener/repairman. Nice.
So, what I'm wondering here, is whether there are obvious problems with this? Are there places in the code that don't check for this situation (i.e. sim is living on an apartment base lot, not a sublot)? Are there horrible errors/corruption that could occur because of this?
The possible use I was thinking for this is that if it works, it would be possible to start a sim from absolute rock bottom - you would still need some money for food though, at least initially, until you started getting some money from a job. Also, if you moved in a sim and discovered that they were still a small amount short of what they needed to rent their apartment, you could have them squat for a while to get the money they needed. This would also be a way to sort of approximate the the homeless vagrant thing you can do in TS3. Not being able to go to community lots kind of sucks, but if there's no real important reason why that was disabled (is there one?), it probably wouldn't be too hard to change that.
J. M. Pescado:
I don't really recommend this, due to the aforementioned inability to go anywhere. There is also the fact that TS2 is not a twitch game, and therefore, anything possible is easy, if boring. A sim that has a limited environment, cannot leave, and cannot alter its environment will either die, if you are bad at this, or be very boring as you settle into a repetitive grind.
rufio:
Well, I imagine that most of the drawbacks could be modded out - I guess I'm really asking whether doing so would be a terrible idea likely to cause BFBVFS, or if there's a very good reason to not have a sim living on an apartment base lot. In any case, the point of this obviously isn't to be a long-term situation, but a way to start a sim off with nearly nothing before getting them settled into a better place. I'm sure you could make a macro to play the game for you in the optimal way, but as I'm sure you can appreciate, TS2 isn't really a game that you strive to be optimal at, at least not if you want to have fun with it. Also, something I really liked about the idea of apartments was that they made having families with very little money more viable, but not in a way that made it too easy - before then, if you had less than a certain amount of money it was next to impossible to even set up, and once you had enough to set up a lot properly, there was no challenge, and (more importantly, IMO) no real feeling of having accomplished anything. This is just taking that a step further, really. It may well not turn out to be terribly interesting, but I want to know that doing this isn't going to break stuff before I go and mess with it more seriously.
Zazazu:
Honestly, you'd be better off just designing a slum apartment for your sim so that they would have full mobility. In a building I had on my old install, I had a studio that was about 7x4 with a 2x2 bath attached. It rented for just over $100/week. I can't recall the downpayment, but it couldn't have been that much. In order for the sims to level up (reproduce), they had to get a new place. I just barely made it, finding a third spouse for the Free Love seed when they had two cribs squeezed in that tiny spot. In addition to having no space, the lack of spots for skilling equipment adds to the challenge.
Always apply the magic wand to your apartment buildings. It makes a huge difference.
rufio:
Quote from: Zazazu on 2009 November 24, 05:03:46
Honestly, you'd be better off just designing a slum apartment for your sim so that they would have full mobility.
Yes - I thought about simply making 1x1 "apartments" in order to accomplish the same effect, but that seemed rather inelegant, and the fact that you could save the lot without moving the sim in made it seem like there might be another way to do it. The downpayment is most of the issue I have with the apartments, actually - I can appreciate why it's necessary, but I was kind of hoping that the basic fixtures would be more or less immobile, like they are in real apartments. Forcing sims to be content with fixtures that are not actually part of the apartment (that they therefore cannot sell) approximates this.
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In order for the sims to level up (reproduce), they had to get a new place. I just barely made it, finding a third spouse for the Free Love seed when they had two cribs squeezed in that tiny spot. In addition to having no space, the lack of spots for skilling equipment adds to the challenge.
Well, my play style is very different than yours - my sims don't generally reproduce very often, or very early in their lives. The few that are currently getting pregnant every other minute are actually the ones who live in huge houses with more money than they could ever need, for some reason. Every once in a while someone has an unwanted baby that can't be easily supported, but then it just gets sold to the child labor camp after it levels up and can take care of itself, after a fashion. Unwanted spawn are hard to deal with, but after the first couple unwanted spawn challenges it just wasn't that interesting to me anymore, and playing the game as an endless series of child-rearing episodes isn't really what I want.
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Always apply the magic wand to your apartment buildings. It makes a huge difference.
Ahh, I always forget to use the magic wand - I'll have to remember to do that. I didn't realize it would have that much of an effect on apartments, either.
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