And in other news, I seem to have been banned from Rentech.com as of right now. The reasons for this are completely unknown. Ladies and gentlemen, we are at war.

Ah, but the wabbit *IS* time with its parents. A toddler using the wabbit can simultaneously interact with its parents, gaining easy, easy relationship boost without disrupting skill gaining at all. Well, okay, maybe not easy, easy. Actually, they mostly have a lot of bad conversations, because toddlers obviously cannot talk about anything interesting. It's kind of slow. But it's not like your parents have anything better to be doing, right?

The piano can be another source of fun, but if you just need Fun Refill, Flamingo Kicking is powerful enough that the fact that you gain no skills doing it is completely offset by the more powerful training you can get from the Lie Detector under an instructor.

Teen skilling for me currently involves mop-up. Most of the work has already been done by childhood.

I prefer to use career objects extensively, because otherwise, your parents and grandparents sit around pretty uselessly as an untapped resource.

I generally clock-time my sims, so they don't really oversleep anyway. One nice thing about the Cooking and Mechanical rewards is that you can "overdrive" a sim well past their normal energy-quit mark, forcing them to continue until they're about ready to pass out rather than letting them stop to whine about it. By then, their calculated bedtime mark usually has arrived, and I can have them wake at a civilized hour alongside their parents for more training. Teens, on the other hand, have access to both caffeination and the Energizer. SLEEP IS FOR WUSSES! Not to mention if they're still not finished yet, they're behind schedule, and have already failed to break the speed record, and so must be driven harder!

I try not to wait that long for maximization, because Knowledge sims get majorly jacked in their skillpoint wants at Uni: They don't get ANY, and thus Knowledge is basically a dead aspiration in Uni. Have your lifetime platinum or suffer badly.

The pool scholarship takes *FOREVER* and doesn't pay all that well. I tried to get it once, but takes well over a day of continuous pool to get it that high, and there's no feedback like there is with the Dancing scholarship. And while the Dancing Scholarship is USEFUL, in the sense that getting there unlocked Bust-A-Move, one of the power-cycle socials that makes friend-building a snap, pool is useless, and your sims will likely never touch a pool table again for as long as they live. As a source of fun, it is vastly outclassed by flamingo-kicking, and provides no other useful collateral benefit that isn't similarly vastly outclassed. While it's possible to gain relationship points with other sims while playing pool, it's vastly outclassed in both fun and relationship boost to the point where you can kick a flamingo to max fun, then Bust-A-Move your way to 100 in far less time than it would take doing pool.

Suffice it to say, Pool, like every other new Maxian obsession, is completely worthless and not worth the bother to acquire or use. It has no practical application, unlike the Dancing scholarship. For a puny $1000 or so, it's not worth over a day of effort.

Sorry, nope. The ones I have currently seem to have grown out of it. I'll see if I it reappears next generation, though.

Don't pay too much attention to how the toddlers and children look. The facial features aren't really even close to well-defined until they're at least teens, and even then you only have a rough idea of whether they're going to ultimately turn out okay, or whether they're still fugly. For instance, the children of Sim-Me tend to inherit both my prominent headbrow and my enormous dome, with the result that they come out looking like little Klingons because of the compressive effects of pre-adult simskulls. Although I suppose it's still kinda cute. They do turn out slightly less like Klingons by adulthood, though. Now if they were slightly more swarthy and had forehead spines, they wouldn't even need costumes.

Well, it's not so much a "challenge" as it is "sense". The game isn't any harder or easier when maintaining time-sync, but it makes a hell of a lot less sense when your kids are elders and your parents are still adults.

If you're using the baby macro without turning on "Always Smart Milk", the baby controller automatically detects this condition and will not feed a baby more smart milk if "Always" is set to Off and the baby is already smarted.

It's more than just a personal choice. The skill rate of the muffin oven is insuperior, so even if the muffins were not maddening, it would still be an insuperior, low-value choice.

Actually, in the teen stage, you don't need the thinking cap ever if your smart milk stuck during toddlerhood. You will remain smarted even unto teen: In fact, it will last forever until you move out or delete your sim. Note that you will temporarily lose this ability if you go to a community lot (your sim is reinstanced there), but it will resume when your sim returns home. However, if you delete your sim at home and force him to respawn by the mailbox, he will lose it. The bottom line being that thinking caps are no longer necessary at all, and if you wear a thinking cap, you will not gain a cumulative bonus, you will simply lose your smart milk stuckiness and actually learn slower.

The Skillinator autodetects this and bypasses thinking cappage if it is unnecessary.

Well, it does have to wait for the ghost to stop routing, since otherwise the ghost will get a weird teleporting-back-and-forth effect without actually going AWAY. I could try increasing the pulse rate again, though.

There: Tripled the pulse rate on the device. It should scan slightly more often. See if that helps.

Known issue. Yoga is a very, very finicky interaction for some unknown reason. The matter is under investigation.

There's varying levels of character files with no data. "Orphaned" files that are referred to by no actual memory or ancestry of any intact sim can be wiped through the laborious process of erasing all "invisible memory tokens" and then erased entirely from the game cleanly. Ancestral files, even if their actual character resources are stripped, should be kept in the game for historical value.

Well, if you're after maximum speed (as well as all skills), you may not actually wish to train toddlers to walk. Training them to walk can actually be counterproductive, as it removes their ability to spin "in place" when someone tries to pick them up, or when they try to move to a nearby object: Instead they will stand up, turn around, and then immediately sit down again, somewhat of a waste of time.

I also don't personally exploit the "chain training" bug, because this is basically a deliberate exploit and trivializes the system entirely. Anyone who uses this has effectively invalidated the speed contest.

But other than that, children basically spend all their time gaining skills, because their choices for anything else are fundamentally crippled, and they're basically useless otherwise. Most actions are unavailable to them: Their only real choices in socials are Chat, Play, and Joke, and Hug: They can't really chat with non-children because they only talk about stupid stuff and thus cannot sustain a conversation without annoying everyone almost immediately. The play interactions are slow and not ideal for pure relationship building. Joke pays out badly on all counts, and is mostly useful only as a spacer. Hug requires way too much to be of any real use, since if this interaction is usable without rejection, you're already pretty high up.

There is one interaction that works reliably every time and never annoys the subject: Ask for a training. And so this is the dominant method by which children build relationships with adult family members.

And I suppose you let them play with it, rather than hawking it for cash?

I believe this is the Blank Icon Bug. One of the causes is believed to be the Remote Control Car. Don't buy these things. You need to replace the objects.package in your Uni install directory (TSData/Res/Objects/objects.package) with the one on one of your Uni CDs.

My solution has become pretty straightforward: Macro->Skillinator->Gain X. Let 'er rip. I mean, sure, you could argue that skilling is boring and thus you want to stretch it out, but hey, haven't you ever heard of "Work Before Play"? The fact of the matter is, children have no social interaction choices worth spit. They are utterly incapable of holding a conversation with anyone but other children, and even then, this is kind of a stretch. Mostly, like real children, they simply annoy everyone. And since they can't really *MEET* very many other children, what with the inability to go anywhere or do anything, combined with the extreme shortness of the age stage, that leaves skilling. Socialization is left for the teen stage, when they actually have nearly the full range of interaction choices available to them. If a child is going to do any socialization, he's going to be doing it over a chess board or while watching the Yummy channel, or not at all.

Plus, children actually receive a significant advantage to skilling, in the form of the Stuck Smart Milk. If your child happens to be a prodigy as a result, with the 300% learn rate, you're pissing it away by not skilling, because they'll lose it when they move for college.

Lastly, dragging out boredom is not interesting! If skilling is equated to boredom, then it will be even more boring to procrastinate it. Why not get it done while your opportunity costs are low?

I think the reason toddlers are deformed is simply because you're cramming the features of a full-sized head onto something much too small for it, so it gets a little warped. It simply appears that the game is poorly optimized to render toddlers, and that very little attention has been paid to them. This is pretty obvious when you notice that by default, there's no way to even change their hair, which is all the same, and that you don't exactly have a lot of choices even when you can. It is clear that toddlers are not really considered a high priority.

And babies are incapable of expressing any features other than eye, skin, and hair colors, and the latter, you have to look at their eyebrows pretty closely sometimes to tell the difference.

It sounds like an invisible stuck fridge object of some kind. Generally, the solution is to set the offending square on fire using Buyable Fire.

I'm not sure what is meant by the "average" face. There's a certain amount of "blending" that goes on to average out two faces that are very different in the parents, but there's no "smearing into the generic bland face" that goes on over time if you breed certain characteristics. If you didn't have this blending effect, you'd get some interesting facial deformities.

Ultimately, though, the reason that sims tend to look the same is because people tend to look the same.

Sorry, but if you want the sims to rise above their piss-poor programming, you're going to have to substitute someone else's programming instead.

Some needs are treated more aggressively than others. Some conditions suspend things. For instance, a sim will not eat until a MUCH lower point if he expects to receive free food from work or school soon. As for "energy really low", I'm not really sure how low you meant by low. Social is not inherently balanced, though: If a sim has no friends that need calling, he can't use the AutoYak macro, and is reliant on the "sitting" thing to regain social. Otherwise, since all his relations are maxed, he has nobody to call and must simply wait for the bunny. The three needs you mentioned as "not working" are the ones that I'm extremely fascist about, and this appears in the idling macro as a result: Food is expensive and wasteful, and if a sim starts to run out of energy well before bedtime, he normally will seek caffeine. If none is available, he's made to suffer until he gets much lower. Eating food is considered only as a last resort action.

Because babies do not obey the same limitations as created sims spawned normally. Alien babies don't actually have "really weird" distributions of personality points at all, in truth. Pascal's two aliens clearly resemble Pascal, while Vidcund's alien clearly is Vidcundish.

That's because the Maxian premades have personality traits that are uncorrelated with their astrological sign, whereas if you create it in CAS, personality determines sign, and dragging the personality bars in debug mode changes the sign as well.

Unknown at this time. Too many packing peanuts is not a problem, though. In fact, I like packing peanuts, they're a vital ingredient in the creation of napalm, a substance that I use in abundance here as both a pesticide and for home defense....which I suppose is really the same thing as pesticide.

Same personality is very common, due to the fact that the game can only generate 12 different personalities (all townies have archetype personalities for their sign), and the often-mentioned "Firstborn" effect which makes sim personalities nonrandom.

The reason they have the same face is because townies are generated from the "Archetype" faces you see in CAS. This means that if a townie rolls the same face, the same hair color, the same skin tone, and the same name, it'll look like the same person.

All review of the code suggests that the phenomenon you observe is purely imaginary, because Sims do not actually learn from their mistakes, as they don't have attempt-memory. This is why sims always fall into the same ruts over and over: The pool table, the Myshuno, the TV, all are common sources of sim obsession, even though they do not provide the level of motive boost they claim to. If sims were really intelligent, they'd all end up doing the stuff they're told to do by Macrotastics!

Mausoleums are structures elevated on foundations wherein urns are placed. It exploits a weakness of ghosts, namely, the inability for them to cross a foundational boundary without using the stairs like everyone else. Once a ghost is trapped in a mausoleum, since ghosts spawn at the last place they manifested, unless so clogged with ghosts that they can't spawn there, they will not be able to leave. Of course, there's no telling where a ghost will appear the first time, although it seems to be localized around site of death, and if the ghost spawns outside, he'll be able to move again.

The Ghostbuster will prevent this, because if a ghost stops moving in a room with a Ghostbuster, he will get zapped back to his urnstone, which is probably located in aforementioned mausoleum, trapping him.

Other weaknesses of ghostly movement include the inability to cross a pool without using the pool ladders or boards, and the inability to cross water created with the water tool under any circumstances. Basically, with regards to foundations, pools, and water, ghosts are limited to the same movement methods are regular sims.

Tons and tons of debugging options. May prevent your game from exploding in a big fiery ball visible from space. May cause your game to explode in a big fiery ball visible from space if misused.


ffsdebugger.zip

RTFM:
FFS Lot Debugger (v2.0b) for TS2 v1.0p2 - TS2NL v1.0p1
Made by: Flying Fish Systems (J. M. Pescado & Doctor Boris)

Special Thanks To:
Twojeffs, for Stuck Kicky Bag Deletion

Congratulations to: Draklixa!

INSTRUCTIONS:
Place in your MYDOCU~1\EAGAME~1\THESIM~1\DOWNLO~1 directory.

FEATURES:
I. FIX AWOL HEADMASTER
     Detonates the Headmaster Controller, which can become corrupted and
     prevent the headmaster from appearing correctly on your lots.

II. UPGRADE PRE-UNI SIM
     Upgrades an Adult or Elder sim to 6 want slots/2 locks + Uni graduation
     with no major. Most useful for pre-Uni sims so that they aren't
     permanently confined to second-class citizen status.

III. CLEAR STUCK PARTY
     Destroys the party controller, which can become corrupted and result
     in the inability to hold parties, neverending parties, or corrupted
     party scoring. Any currently in progress party is immediately terminated.

IV. RERANDOMIZE SIM GENERATOR
     Scrambles the sim generator by advancing the sequence a random number of
     places to avoid the identical-child-personality "firstborn" effect. Will
     exit the lot without saving as a side effect. Save before use.

V. SET/REMOVE LIFETIME WANT BIT (non-Original)
     Grants or revokes permanent platinum LTW status in a sim. Use for bugged
     LTW satisfactions where status is not granted, to remove if you simply
     don't like it, or because you're a cheating lamer.

VI. UNFREEZE VISITOR MOTIVES
     Removes "static motives" flag from all visiting sims and dormies.

VII. KILL STUCK BILLS
     Deletes all potentially stuck bills hiding on and off the lot.

VIII. CLEAR OFFWORLD LOITERERS
     Indiscriminately removes all sims loitering invisibly off-lot. May cause
     undesired side effects if used at the wrong time.

IX. REENABLE CONTROLS
     Attempts to reenable build/buy/save/exit.

X. KILL GHOST EMITTER
     Deletes the "haunted" emitters which cause sims to freak out at random
     objects, even if ghosts are not present on the lot.

XI. FIX BROKEN MOOD BOOSTS
     Fixes the platinum-asp mood boosts for all sims on the lot.

XII. UNSTICK ME (debug mode only) (experimental)
     Attempts to unstick a sim that has lost the ability to move for some
     unknown reason. Experimental.

XIII. NUKE STUCK MOVE OUT
     Nukes the college move-out controller, which can become corrupted and
     prevent sims from moving out of college.

XIV. RETRIEVE MISSING SIM
     Attempts to retrieve a missing sim which is stuck off-world by teleporting
     it to the mailbox and forcing an error.

XV. UNBLOCK FRIDGE TILES
     Attempts to remove stuck invisible tiles potentially blocking fridges.

XVI. FIX FUNKY MOVEMENT (debug mode only) (experimental)
     Attempts to force a sim back to walking normally and stop the "iceskater"
     effect. Experimental - intended for testing only.

XVII. RE-GIVE DIPLOMA (debug mode only) (Uni)
     Re-issues a sim's diploma in the event that it is lost/stolen/eaten.

XVIII. MAKE ME SMART/STUPID (debug mode only)
     Applies or removes "stuck smart milk" effect to sims.

XIX. FORCE ERRORS (experimental)
     Forces all objects of specified locality (all/in-world/off-world) to
     error. Do not run while debug mode is ineffect or thousands of error
     dialogs may appear! May crash, freeze or spam your game. Consult your
     doctor before use.

XX. TEST IQ
     Returns percent-learning rate (100 is normal) for current sim.

XXI. RESPAWN TOMBSTONE (debug mode only) (experimental) (NL)
     Regenerates a tombstone for a dead sim. Note that the dead sim must be
     the selected sim, which means you must spawn him somehow, then make
     him selectable and choose this command.

XXII. Nuke Stuck Poobags (NL)
     Removes stuck invisible flaming bags of poo from horrible dates.

XXIII. Nuke Stuck Airplanes
     Removes invisibly stuck paper airplane reserve tiles.

XXIV. Fix Broken Selectableness
     Fixes broken selectable bits occasionally found on newly moved-in sims.

XXV. Fudge Astrology (debug only)
     Forces a sim's astrological sign to the one corresponding to the number
     chosen. Useful for creating sims based on real people with personalities
     that may not match Maxian archetype.

XXVI. Wipe Mystery Sim Memories
     Removes all irrelevant "Mystery Sim" memories on freshly created so your
     sims can experience the relevant moments with some real sim instead of
     blabbing about this mystery sim thing. Option not available on sims with
     chronologies that removing these would invalidate.

XXVII. Remove CLP (debug only)
     Removes the community lot populator object if debugger is on community
     lot. If you don't know why you want to do this, don't touch this.

XXVIII. Decimate Neighborhood (debug only) (do not use!)
     10% of your neighborhood is randomly given the death token, causing
     immediate death on lot load. DO NOT USE THIS OPTION. Will give warning
     box if you attempt to touch it.

XXXIV. FIX WEREWOLF HAIRINESS
     If your werewolf is stuck in perma-hairy mode, try this button to perhaps
     cause him to become normal (during the day anyway). Not available at night
     when you're supposed to be hairy.

Not all options are displayed unless applicable to current sim and situation.
Not all options displayed are applicable.


COMPATIBILITY:
Compatible with all FFS Hacks. Standalone object. Tested for TS2NL v1.0p1.

WARNING:
Do not open, crush, dispose of in fire, put in backwards, short-circuit, or mix
with non-awesome hacks - may explode, leak, or catch fire, resulting in injury
and/or death.