I've had no trouble fulfilling "cobbler and X" with X cobbler.  X being grapes or watermelon, that I can recall.  It's not difficult to make a specific kind of cobbler or pancakes, just make sure the cooking Sim has only that kind of fruit in their inventory (vegetables don't matter).

I've yet to see a Goopy Cabonara and Ice Cream Wish, though I've seen several people mention this one.

 - Gus

The taxi is slower than the adult bike, let alone the cheapest car.  If money is very tight, the bike is a cheap step up.

 - Gus

I'm rather annoyed that you can't choose the various colored ghosts who inhabit the graveyard.

The second time my 4th generation Sim was rejected for Try For Baby with his girlfriend, she said he was "creepy."  I said "Creepy!  I'll show you creepy" and decided he was going to romance one of the blue ghost chicks and have ghost kids with her.  Unfortunately, it turns out you can't select any of the pre-existing gravestones to put in your inventory.

Nor, it seems, is the gravestone of Sim who has been dead too long.  I experimented with the Playable Ghost thing with him in my very first household, decided it was boring, sent him back to the netherworld, and skipped all future opportunities.  Now both his gravestone and his wife's no longer appear in "manage dead," though generation 3's gravestone does.

Playing elders past their expiration date isn't much fun because they've pretty much done everything I want to do with them.  The real entertainment seems to be in playing a ghost who still has a life in front of them, and the adult / young adult dead in the graveyard seemed ready made for that, though many would require a Mid Life Crisis because they have only 1 trait.

One possibility would be to kill a Young Adult Sim and then put the urn on ice for a couple of generations and bring him back.  Is there a "kill instantly" option somewhere in the debug modes, as there was with the tombstone object in TS2?  I find the process of killing via accidents (fire, drowning, etc) tedious and distasteful, and you really have to work at it to kill a Sim in TS3.

 - Gus

I finally got the initial "plant eggs and cheese" opportunity after bringing my 3rd Sim up to 10 Gardening.  It's not clear what triggers it beyond luck.  It's certainly not career, because this Sim was my go at farming, he was unemployed and did nothing for money but raise crops.

 - Gus

I'm grateful that chatting doesn't suck anymore.  It used to be one of those useless actions that the Sims would do on their own if you weren't controlling them every second, like napping on the couch.

I'm also grateful that they didn't re-introduce blogs.  I never want to see a "blog about..." Wish again.  Though they'll probably bring it back in an expansion, knowing them.

 - Gus

From a game-balance point of view, it makes a certain amount of sense because Children's requires that you develop an unrelated skill.  Of course, that ignores the fact that Biography and Autobiography, which aren't particularly easy to unlock, are the worst sellers on the list.

I slightly resent that a category that doesn't really exist is so high paying.  A "vaudeville novel" is a contradiction in terms - by its very nature, vaudeville is not something that translates off the stage.  It's fairly low-quality entertainment even when it is on stage, so it's annoying to see it as the penultimate literary form.

No figures for the bottom two categories, Fiction and Non Fiction?  Though from experience they're both low.

 - Gus

I strongly suspect that the two share a common library.  Which gave us both the elaborate options for textures and pudding faces.

 - Gus

Good point.

I just ran the "have 13 perfect fish in fishbowls" lifetime wish.  Easiest one I've done so far, but planting perfect fruit would be even easier than that.

Fishing deathfish is grotesquely overpowered.  It's not hard to farm $4K-$6K a night.

 - Gus

Well, considering you can store the fish in your refrigerator for a month and then use them to stock, or put them in fish bowls for that matter, Sim Fish are obviously very resilient.

 - Gus

That's the piece of information I was missing.  It also explains some of the behavior I was seeing with my rescued fatty.  I stopped paying attention to her for a while, and she started to pork out, and I was wondering how that happened.

I find this model very annoying.  Granted, gluttony is something you really have to do deliberately, and Sims will tend to exercise on their own, so a relatively simple model would end up with a household full of thin, muscular Sims every time, which is undesirable.  Still, I think they could have done a better job with fitness / fatness decay without forcing it this way.

So, I'm assuming the Body Sculptor changes a Sim's genetic values?  That would explain why it exists, beyond convenience compared to exercise or force-feeding.


Given that TS2 had problems with simulating 10+ Sims on a much smaller playing field, I think it's impressive that it renders and simulates as many as it does.  Computing power has of course increased since then, but it's clear they're doing some intelligent abstraction of remote events, yet they're still reasonably convincing when you swap rapidly between two distant locations.  The abstraction does show a bit when you do something like look at a remote location when it's been idle for a long time.  If a kid visits another house, and you swap to the kid, everyone is pretty much standing around doing nothing when you first look.

 - Gus

I can see why fertilizing doesn't affect produce quality.

Produce quality is far more important in game terms than quantity, unless you're selling produce for profit, which is a marginal activity.  If fertilizer affected quality, that would swamp skill, traits, and perks.  Earlier in this thread Czezechael claimed to get perfect plants by fertilizing with perfect apples.  If this were so, the "grow 8 perfect species" lifetime want would be trivial - harvest 8 perfect apples from some earlier Sim's garden, plant 8 species, success.  You'd need enough skill to plant Uncommons, but you wouldn't need skill 7 for Rares.

It's apparent that both skill and traits affect produce quality, and the boost in quality you get from planting.  A low-skill Sim will get a Normal plant from planting a Normal seed, but a high-skill Sim will get Nice.  Or possibly better, I should experiment at some point to see if multiple grade boosts are possible.

 - Gus

You're right, I'm not following.

I thought it worked like this:
Each Sim has a Fatness and Fitness variable.
You can set the initial values of these variables in Create A Sim.
Cardio exercise reduces the Fatness variable.
Strength exercise increases the Fitness variable and decreases the Fatness variable.  Though presumably it doesn't change the Fatness variable as quickly, otherwise what's the point in having both options on TVs and Stereos?
Eating while full increases the Fatness variable.

The part I'm not getting is a distinction between the current Fatness / Fitness and a "genetic" fatness / fitness.  Or how a change by the Sim Mutilator is different from changes from game actions.  Just repeating "it's irreversible" doesn't clarify this, since I don't see how this prevents changes to Fatness through exercise.

 - Gus

So, there's some sort of hidden limit to how far you can change a Sim's fatness / fitness variables through game actions?

 - Gus

That fertilizer table is highly useful.  Particularly since there's no in-game way to predict which items will be more effective.  While the Life Fruit, Lobster, and Death Fish results are intuitive, there's simply no way you'd know that Garlic is better than Bell Pepper.

It's worth noting that if you haven't found any Life Fruit seeds, fishing is your only source for high-quality fertilizer.  However, this is only a very early game issue.  Once any of your households manages to grow a life fruit vine, other households can forage for life fruit easily without having to take a chance on an unknown Special seed.

 - Gus

I've taken in a fat townie and slimmed her down through exercise.  Maybe I'm not understanding what you mean by "irreversible," but it sure appears you can change these numbers through gameplay.  Though it does not work on Sims who are merely guests, rather than currently part of your household.

 - Gus

They're under "child development" at the book store.  I fiddled with them once, but gave up when I felt they used too much parental time.  I did not realize the toddlers could read them on their own.

Logic:

"Counting for Those Who Cannot"
"Squares are not Triangles"
"Being Smart for Fun and Profit"

Painting ones are pretty obvious, they're about finger painting and such.

There's a series of Harry Potter parodies, but I've never used them.

 - Gus

I've had a Sim end with a Death Flower seed in her inventory after harvesting a "wild" death flower, as well as a Death Flower.  By "Wild" I mean one I'd planted on an earlier lot and not stuck around to harvest.  So it's possible, but rare, to end up with something beyond simply recycling the Death Flower if you plant it but don't have the Green Thumb trait.

Personally, I don't care much about Death Flowers.  Accidental death seems neigh impossible in this game.  You have to do it deliberately, i.e. repair an electronic device while still singed, or force them to stay in the water while exhausted.  Since it's never really accidental, why would you want to prevent it?

There's an Opportunity that calls for one, but otherwise they seem of little value.

 - Gus

Unlike most of the similar Wishes, it appears that "Paint X masterpieces" counts from the point where you roll the wish, not the current total.  I've fulfilled it successfully, but I had to paint 5 more masterpieces, not 5 total.

 - Gus

This explains why I have a household that has the name of my original household, but which contains Sims that are not in any way related to that household.  They got a random Move In and the old Sims died of old age.

It also explains why the Sims I moved out to be with their spouses all died without spawn.

I'm not sure the existing model is fixable.  I hate parthenogenesis, but a stable population model would require that reproduction work like aging.  Every time a Sim dies of old age, the game should build a list of suitable households, those with two romantically involved adult Sims and additional space available, and add a baby to a random household from that list.  If there are biological bars to real reproduction (same sex or two old), we can assume it's an adoption.  Or just don't include those households in the first place.

It needs to be event-driven.  The completely random approach means odds are that births simply won't match deaths if you restrict parthenogenesis.  Given what you've said earlier about other Sims code, I get the idea that the Sims design team thinks in terms of polling instead of events.

When two Sims develop or improve a romantic relationship, there should be a chance that one Sim moves to the other household.  That'd be a much more natural progression than the current Move Out / Merge Household approach, which requires a series of unlikely events to get this common and expected change.  Though I'd put a bar on this happening if either Sim has the Commitment Issues traits.

 - Gus

You're not.  The specs are pretty simple.

Chance of a boy = 50%.
Change after eating one serving = 15%.
Maximum change = 50%, to either 0% chance of a boy, or 100% chance.

The 50% limit is probably just to permit some indecision.  I.e. you can eat 100 servings of apples, and your Boy chance will still be only 100%.  Thus you can eat 7 servings of Watermelon and get 0% of a Boy afterward.

3 servings of anything = 45% chance, so you really need 4 to be absolutely sure.  I've done sex selection several times now, and it's reliable.  What can trip you up is you Sim eating things you don't realize have the wrong fruit, either deliberately or on their own.  Or simply not eating enough, early enough.  If you start on day 2, when they typically roll the "Have Boy" or "Have Girl" Wish, they won't get hungry enough to eat 4 times on their own.

Fruit Parfait and French Toast contain Apples, but don't say so in the descriptor.  Eggs Machiavellian contains watermelon.  Stu Surprise can contain either, and you'll never know because the name doesn't change.  Ditto Peanut Butter and Jelly.

It appears that your Sims check their inventory before checking the refrigerator.  So if you're going to cook something that includes a random fruit (Pancakes or Cobbler) that does say, put the right fruit in the cook's inventory and put the wrong fruit in the refrigerator.

 - Gus

I've never seen townies or guests busking.  It seems to be an action that's restricted to your active Sims.  Since other households are very approximate in their simulations, I think it would be difficult to tell if a trivial amount of money vanished when they tipped.

 - Gus

Those are pretty good.  Better than what I was thinking along those lines but didn't do, such as "The Smurfs Are Eaten By Sharks."

 - Gus

I stand corrected.  I rather assumed that the way his name is bandied about, that he was the team lead.  Apparently, he's "VP in charge of the Sims division."  That's something else entirely.  In my experience, people that far removed from actual development don't do much.  Beyond annoy the development team, of course.  Touting a VP or an executive producer in connection with the title rather than the real lead designer is a typical PR department move.

I was curious who the actual team was, and that doesn't seem to be readily available information.  I guess EA is more interested in The Sims 3 being an "EA Game' rather than a "Will Wright game."

 - Gus

I was deathly afraid that hideous townies were going to make the game unplayable for me.  I went to great lengths to correct this in TS2, what with replacing the face templates and sometimes completely replacing the default Townies because I was sick of Goopy and company.  And you know, I feel exactly the opposite of how you do about TS3's faces.  Yes, puddingface is a problem, but the worst puddingfaces are acceptable, versus the hideous gorilla-fish hybrids that TS2 regularly generated.

I can't go back to TS2 after playing TS3.  The vastly improved Want system, the wealth of personality traits versus just 7 aspirations - one of which is a joke, and one (pleasure) that I find deadly dull - the entire neighborhood as one seamless lot, the ultra-powerful recoloring tools, even the way the entire neighborhood ages.  There's stuff missing that shouldn't be, and I'll continue to bitch about that.  But I just can't go back.

It doesn't work like that.  Design leads don't get profit sharing at the project level at EA.  At most, they get to participate in the Employee Stock Purchase Program, which is sort-of like free stock options - you pay the cheaper of the price at the start or the end of the period.  So if the stock goes up, you can make a good bit of money, provided you set aside some of your salary for that.

If you're going to ascribe mercenary motives, target EA management, not the development team.


I was put off by the Store at first as well, but then I realized it was pretty much the same as the TS2 "Stuff" packages.  None of which I bought.

 - Gus

I appreciate that there are now real differences between the careers, rather than the same cookie-cutter mold of 2 skills.  Though I find the "gardening and fishing but no logic" focus of the Science career track weird.

The Law Enforcement career, though, is creepy.  Because of Reports.  You gain performance points for turning in reports on your neighbors.  Not criminals, just any random person on the street.  The more of a dossier you assemble, the better your score for informing on them.  The more I played with a Law Enforcement Sim, the more it seemed like the proper name for the career was Secret Police.

 - Gus