I really like your new hood. What kind of visual editing are you doing? Also, what exactly are the rules of this hood? I tried looking it up with the tags, but alas, it wasn't explained fully. Is this a Zombie Apoc challenge? I'm doing a variation of the one on MTS2, but it takes place in post-War California, circa 1939, if Germans invaded the US. Please let us know your rules for this hood! Thanks! child_of_air <3
Oh dear, this is going to be really long, sorry. :)
1) The pic-editing. I made a Photoshop action to do that. At first, I was going to edit pics of that neighborhood in a warm, low-contrast sepia-tone. Because I like sepia-tone. So, I fiddled with an existing sepia-tone action I had (one meant for regular photographs) to make it work with Sim-pics. It does everything non-destructively, with adjustment layers, so the original image remains intact "underneath." But then I decided that I wanted SOME color but still low-contrast and matte and kind of grainy. So, on top of the sepia-toning layer group, I plopped down another copy of the original image and set a "Soft Light" layer blend with the layers below to merge it with the sepia-toning. THEN I edited a "film" Photoshop action that I had on hand to make it work better with Sim-pics, then ran THAT on the copy of the original image. Again, it works via adjustment layers, non-destructively. Then I reduced the opacity of the "film" layer group and the second copy of the original image so that the sepia-toning below merged better with the added-back color, resulting in the kind of images I've been posting.
THEN I recorded ALL of the above into a one-click Photoshop action that'll work on most Sims-pics. It'll sometimes need to be further adjusted, especially if the original image is really dark, like an outdoor nighttime pic with little or no light source, but for many pics, it's just one click.
I could share the action, if anyone would be interested in having it or fiddling with it for their own use, but it is still dependent on the other two actions that I edited. I'm not sure how to share all three together since one of the dependent actions is bundled with about a dozen others. I don't know how to extract just the one. I suppose I could just share the whole bundle, though. It's a very nice bundle that offers lots of nice effects, actually! :) I'm pretty sure it's one of the hundreds of free ones my hubby has, since he has the ones he paid for in a different folder on the networked external archive drive... Well, if anyone wants it, let me know, and I'll look into it. :)
Now as for the rules....
There really isn't a hard-and-fast set, I'm afraid. I'm kind of making things up as I go along. Initially, this was SUPPOSED to be just a neighborhood to test out some of Sun & Moon's stuff and some playing ideas prior to using those things in another neighborhood I'm developing but where I don't want to experiment. Then it kind of took on a life of its own. *laugh* It has BACC elements merged with the "backstory" of an Apocalypse that can also easily be a "pioneer" or “homesteading” kind of thing with no apocalyptic undertones. :) There are also some elements of an "integrated" playing style. In its pure form that would mean that everything has to be "built" in-hood, with nothing just appearing out of the air. I don't want to go full-on with that -- too tedious and therefore un-fun, IMO -- but I do have some supply chains. More on that further down.
Basically, it goes like this: The end of civilization was coming (Plague, nuclear war, zombies, who knows? And who cares? :) ), and only one person seemed to realize it. That one person was in college at the time. So, rather than focus on his studies so much -- After all, civilization was ending so there goes that MBA and lucrative corporate career, right? -- he focused on making as many friends as possible and convincing them that, "Hey, world's gonna end, we need to get outta Dodge and make a new world." Slowly, he gathered a group of friends -- people who lived in the dorm, a few professors, hell, even a cheerleader -- who believed him and started to make preparations. Everyone else made fun of them, of course, but who cared about that? They were all gonna die or whatever. After graduation, they left, trekking out into the wilderness with (in my imagination) enough stuff like preserved food and potable water and seeds to plant and candles to burn and shovels and saws and stuff like that, to get them by for a while.
And sure enough, they were right! Civilization collapsed. Infrastructure was destroyed or became nonfunctional. Telecommunications systems were gone even if there'd been electricity to run such devices. This group of 16 is out in the wilderness, and other survivors/escapees/whatever are wandering around, too. But the core group has a collectively-agreed-up mission to work cooperatively to make a new and better and simple-living world: Peaceful, completely egalitarian, communal, a world where money and power neither exist nor are desirable, where everyone works together, willingly, for the good of the collective, a world living in harmony with nature. (Basically, my ideal world. *laugh* I really am a communist at heart, only without the oligarchical totalitarianism that modern attempts at communism have been corrupted by.)
At first, they all lived together in one place, sleeping in quickly-built, rough cabins, doing potty business in bushes, collecting rain water for makeshift showers, and eating food that they brought, that they grew/gathered, or that they caught. All the while, they were busy putting together the "raw materials" they needed to build individual houses to live in, each dedicated to a specific function that benefits the community as a whole, the fruits of which would be shared equally with the entire community. Each time a production goal was reached, one person/couple could move off the communal "raw materials" lot and into the lot that could be "built" from the gathered raw materials. And the community grows from there.
Meanwhile, there are those other folks, wandering around alone and frightened and helpless in the wilderness, having escaped whatever the disaster was that occurred. Sometimes, members of the community meet up with them while they're out scoping out the territory. Those poor souls can be brought into the fold as well, added to the communal lot and becoming contributing members of the community.
And that's as far as the "story" goes for now. :) Bear in mind that my neighborhood is age-modded with this mod, so my Sims have PLENTY of time to live out their lives. Not sure playing this way will really work with the standard-length lifestages. You'd have to figure out ways to speed things up rather a lot, I would think or else your founders will be dead before they can even earn a house, much less reproduce and stuff. :) But anyway, the "rules," such as they are, so far:
1) No careers. No vacations. No Uni after the initial "gather your founders" part, if you do that. No subhoods at all. And no money, so if you want to you can give your households a million simoleons because it simply doesn't matter.
2) No electricity. No indoor plumbing. (I intend to add those things as they are "earned," down the line, but only at the earliest when the first born-in-game generation are adults. Haven't figure out exactly HOW it'll be earned, though.) No phones. No nannies, repair people, maids, gardeners, etc., unless you want to set up some sort of in-neighborhood system for that. (Which is certainly doable; I plan to do it later, once my supply chains are in place and I'm looking for "employment" for new people.) No vehicles except "vehicle horses." (Only once you have a horse farm!) Use candles for light sources. Use only charcoal grills for cooking. (Unless you want to download an historical-type oven, but I'm trying to run this with less CC, not more, and I want there to be some big rewards for earning electricity.) Don't use an electric fridge. (I'm using this one.) Use an outhouse, not indoor flush toilets. Use mods so that water has to be gathered to use to fill bathtubs and sinks. Stuff like that.
3) I recommend using the Visitor Controller to ban all but playable Sims from every lot. Also ban mail and newspaper delivery. You COULD make the neighborhood from empty templates and no stealth hoods, yes, but then you're going to lose the "meet people by hiking" thing, which is how "new blood" gets added to this neighborhood. That function draws from the NPC household that includes things like the BV tourists/locals and the hobby leaders and stuff like that. If you use empty templates and whatnot, you won't have that.
4) Get yer founders. I did this via sending Komei Tellerman to Uni and having him focus on making friends amongst the dormies, professors, and Uni NPCs so that all the founders would at least have a strong relationship with him, if no one else, but you could just make a bunch in CAS if you’d rather skip that part. Or if you don’t have Uni installed, of course. :)
5) Build an initial lot to dump everyone on. (I teleported them with the Sim Blender, aged them to regular adults, gave them the extra want slots they should have as college graduates, etc., since they weren’t yet playables in Uni.) Include everything they need for basic motive-filling but not much else. (You could put a working stack of books somewhere if you want them to skill, but really? With no careers, skilling isn't really all that necessary.) There will also need to be ways to make/gather raw materials. Here's the layout of the one I made, with some useful links to stuff I used on it. This lot houses the founders, any new members added to the community, and ALL born-in-game Sims once they reach teenhood, until they earn individual lots.
Note: For me, I did not want kids on this lot. They have to wait until they earn an individual lot for that. So the only place to autonomously woohoo is the park benches I used as seating for eating. But, I have ACR set so that woohoo on sofas/park benches requires privacy...which is hard to get on a lot with no real walls and a bunch of other people living on it. :) If you DO want them to have kids, then they could woohoo in the cabin-tents, but ACR doesn't enable autonomous tent-woohoo, so...yeah.
Note 2: I let the communal lot run pretty much entirely on free will, only commanding certain Sims to do certain things at certain times. That way, the residents form their own relationships and either succeed or fail at taking care of themselves. They also develop different sleep schedules, which is nice for the player, less of them to keep an eye on at any given time. :) It's also easier to NOT micromanage 16 or more Sims at once, naturally. But this, of course, would be up to the player and how you like to play.
4) Earning a lot: The communal lot has choppable trees, the mining rocks from Sun & Moon's mining set, and Nixnivis's blacksmith station on it. I have fiddled with the trees and the mining rocks to make them autonomous, and the rule is that Sims can never be commanded to chop trees or mine ore. They must decide to do that themselves, so production is limited by how industrious your Sims are. Further, the mined ore has to be "refined" (into things like nails and other things that go into a house). For this, I use the blacksmith station, just having a person make that object's basic single horseshoe object as as "stand-in." (This isn't autonomous; it's one of the things that Sims can be commanded to do.)
NOTE: I could share the edited autonomized choppable trees if someone wants to use this idea; I don't think Beck would care. But sharing the edited autonomized mining rocks would break Sun & Moon's policy, so if you want that, you'd have to do the editing yourself. It's not hard, if you can run SimPE.
In order to earn each new individual lot, the communal lot must produce 75 bundles of chopped logs and 40 horseshoes. And each horseshoe “requires” 2 buckets of ore, so you need to keep track of how many buckets of ore you have in inventories and subtract out the appropriate number of ore buckets when a batch of horseshoes is made. (Just sell them "to the air;" money doesn't matter. Much of the crafting in this hood will work the same way, too, with "prerequisite" objects that need to be produced somewhere first, so get used to the technique. *laugh*) So to get those 40 horseshoes, 80 buckets of ore have to be (autonomously!) mined first. Once you have the required materials, remove them from inventories and sell them to the air. Then, you can build an individual lot and move whoever you want to own the lot out of the communal one.
(You might want to adjust the requirements needed for how you play. For instance, if you don’t want to go pure free-will, you should probably have much higher requirements. If you don’t age-mod, then you’ll want to adjust simply because you just won’t have time to earn lots with enough time left over for your Sims to have kids to keep the neighborhood going. So, yeah. That’s certainly not set in stone; it’s just what works for my set-up.)
5) Supply chains and stuff: Before you build your first individual lot(s), you're going to want to choose what that lot will be dedicated to, because that will dictate how you build it. My list of possibilities -- so far, that is; it's ever-growing as I get new ideas and figure out how to implement them -- is as follows:
RobotsFlower ArrangingToy-MakingPotterySewingSpinning/KnittingWeavingCattleChickensHorsesPigsSheepGoatsWineryPaintingDog/Cat BreederBeesBakingMarijuanaCandle-makingFishingHayCornMaxis OrchardBasketryHerbs/WildflowersHunting/TanningTrappingApothecary (Plus reagents, if witches)Blacksmithing
Some of those are Maxis things. Some of them are CC. Some of them don't actually exist and I'm using stand-ins instead. (Like, for instance, candle-making. Sun & Moon's beekeeping set produces beeswax as one of its end products, along with honey. They didn't yet make a candle-making station, though, so in the meantime, I'm just gonna use the robot station or something and pretend. They can make toy robots that can be one-for-one "exchanged" for functional candles, which can then be distributed. It's easy to do because money doesn't matter.) Most of them have "prerequisites." I'm not going to go into how all of these will work because I'd be here for days, but I'll give you one example of a supply chain and its prerequisites and stuff.
Let's talk about the sewing supply chain, clothing and blankets and stuff being the ultimate end-products of that supply chain. In order to have new clothing and towels and quilts/blankets and other nice decorative things like that, first, at the very bottom of the "pyramid," you gotta have someone who'll grow hay. Because you can't have sheep (and other livestock) without something to feed them. And you can't have wool without sheep. (Or growing cotton or flax for linen or making silk or something, and if I can figure out how to make THAT happen, I will. I have an idea brewing for marijuana -- think hemp -- but for now...sheep.) And you can't knit a sweater or produce fabric without cleaning and spinning that wool into yarn/usable fiber/thread. And you can't have fabric without someone with a loom to weave it. And you can't have leather (for shoes and stuff) without someone killing some kind of animal (domesticated or hunting wild ones) and tanning the hides. ONLY THEN can you have someone making new clothing. And at each step, there's a kind of conversion. Like "1 spun basket of wool = enough yarn to make 1 sweater." So, you sell the basket of wool (obtained from the sheep farmer) to the air, then "spin" (via a CC spinning wheel plus an invisible sewing machine to make a few potholders or something as a "stand-in" for the process), then you sell those potholders to the air and use Beck's knitting ball to make one piece of clothing which can then be distributed and used to "buy" one sweater or whatever.
That's how everything basically works in a supply chain, some of which have more steps than others. Producing new clothing would be the longest one I've come up with so far. So, when building your lots, if you want to use supply chains at all, you must start out with the "anchors" of the supply chains you want to have. If you don't want to be that complicated, you could just pick randomly or pick whatever appeals to you.
6) Individual lots: Plop down a lot. On that lot, build a house but leave room outside for the lot's function plus the outhouse, the outdoor fridge, a well/water pump and a garden. (Eventually gardens can go away, once you have enough food-producers that can consistently produce enough to distribute amongst the population. But until then, folks will need to grow stuff.) The size of your lots is gonna depend on you and how you play. Me, I like smaller lots and I don't mind cramming large families into small houses...which suits a "pioneer" sort of lifestyle, anyway. So, my individual lots are no bigger than 3x3, and the house itself (they're all the same, just different colors, different furnishings, and oriented differently on the lot), for a child-producing household, is a 9x9 square with a 3-tile deep front porch across the front. Floor plan here.
7) Unlike a BACC where CAS Sims are “earned” by certain events, any new, non-born-in-game Sims have to be met via hiking. (It’s one of the possible outcomes of hiking.) It’s a substitute for being out “exploring” or “looking for wandering domesticate livestock to capture” or whatever. If a non-pet “someone” is met, that person gets added to the communal lot, joining the “queue” for an individual lot. (I just use the Sim Blender to teleport them into the communal lot and add them to the household.) I prefer to age up any children to teen and age down any elders to adults, but that’s up to you, of course.
Annnnnnd that's about it, really. I have yet to figure out exactly how the "economy" is going to run. At the moment, the individual lots are still producing stuff with not enough to distribute yet and I don't have any full supply chains yet...but I need to figure it all out soon. I'm leaning toward just equally distributing end-products in truly communist style, but I'm not sure yet. I could list some more miscellaneous rules...but I think that's enough for now. *laugh*
I love your idea of doing things with a RNG. But, how do you remember the probability while playing? Do you keep a notebook by your side? Do you have a masterlist somewhere? Can you share it?
I do like to have as many things as possible decided randomly. That way, I don’t do the same things over and over again. Basically, when it comes to what my Sims do, I follow their wants. If they have no wants I can actively fill, they free-will and do whatever they want. ACR handles romance and baby-making for me, but otherwise, when there’s a decision to make, I roll a “virtual die.” :)
I babbled, I cut...
For every neighborhood I play, I make a multi-tabbed spreadsheet to keep track of different things about it. Some of them are really complex (like for “integrated” neighborhoods, where I have to keep track of supply chains and “inventories,” for instance), and some of them are fairly simple, just tracking statistics and which lot I’m currently playing. I keep the neighborhood’s spreadsheet open side-by-side with the game (which is why I play in windowed mode) so that I can easily reference it and update it. And I do it on spreadsheets rather than notebooks because we tend to move around a lot between three houses, so the fewer things I have to remember to pack up and take when we migrate, the better. So, spreadsheets that are kept on the computer rather than notebooks.)
One of the tabs on each spreadsheet is the neighborhood’s rules. I use different rules for different ones. And I often make a new neighborhood just for the purpose of testing out and refining a new way to play, like the pseudo-Amish, so it’s not really easily shareable. Basically, it’s just a lot of text about a lot of different things. But that’s where I list the possible outcomes for things I decide randomly and/or the “algorithms” I use to calculate things. I can give you some examples, but really, you can decide pretty much anything randomly if you want to. Like, I have a mod that makes all chance card outcomes equally likely, and I generate a number to “decide” which option a Sim will “choose” when one comes up. (Otherwise, I’m likely to be tempted to always pick the “good” option because after a decade of playing I know which those are for pretty much all the career chance cards.)
Anyway, there are many things that I decide randomly, many of which happen when I create a Sim in CAS or, for born-in-game Sims, when they turn teen. For example (but this is not a complete list):
Their primary and secondary aspirations. I just assign numbers to each aspiration, a roll to decide which they get.
Their sexual preference. Which is a percentage chance. Generally, I like a 20%/60%/20% gay/straight/bi distribution (but I will use different ones for different neighborhoods, too), so I’ll randomly generate a number between 1 and 100 inclusive to decide what they’ll be. 1-20 = gay, 21-80 = straight, and 81-100 = bi)
What they’ll do to earn a living, if they don’t have a career-related LTW or if they have a career-related LTW but the career isn’t yet open/has no openings. They have many different options. Do a trade (and I use a further numbered list to decide what they’ll do), get an NPC job, get a different regular job than their LTW, open a business, operate a farm/ranch, become a person who fishes for a living, become an “escort,” etc.
The type of relationship they’ll have, for which there are a lot of options. Marriage, either only if they roll wants or whether they like it or not and, if that’s what they get, whether the marriage will be 2-career or 1-career and, if the latter, whether or not they’ll be the stay-at-home parent or their partner will be. Then there’s never marrying regardless of wants. There’s romantic partners living together but not marrying. There’s platonic co-habitation (i.e. just sharing a house/apartment with one or more “roomies,” although if that develops into romance, so be it.) Or polyamory (and I use another roll to determine how many partners), which can be either intermarried or not. Or communal. Or they can go religious, which has a whole other set of rules. Or they can enter a religious order (i.e., a convent), if the neighborhood has one. Etc. etc. I like to have lots of options so that not all households are doing the same thing.
For CAS Sims, virtually everything about them aside from their appearance -- which I let the game do, because I townify everything and just stick with what the game gives me -- is decided by random number generation. Whether or not they’ll be fat, their aspiration, astrological sign, turns on-off, etc. The only thing I don’t do by number generation is their clothing.
Other things:
Whether or not they’ll go to class each day in Uni (and I use the same “algorithm” to decide if they’ll do homework as teens, since my teens never roll wants to do so).
If they’re a same-sex couple, if/when and by what method they’ll have kids (adoption, surrogacy/sperm donation, “genetic engineering” so that they can have a kid that’s genetically both of theirs, if that’s available in the neighborhood).
Where they’ll go on a vacation, if they don’t roll a specific location want.
What kind of pet they’ll get if they roll a non-specific or either/or want.
Oh, and here’s a big one: If a Sim is one whose “destiny” is marriage whether they roll a want or not, and if they haven’t developed a romantic relationship with anyone by the time they start their own household, they get a random spouse. I keep two numbered lists (one for each gender) of all the townies/downtownies/dormies/NPCs, etc., in the neighborhood. That’s two of a neighborhood spreadsheet’s tabs. The random number generator then decides who they’ll marry, and I use a hacked wedding arch to marry them, sight unseen. I think of it as a “mail-order spouse” sort of thing, and my favorite thing ever is negative-chemistry couples. :) Which is probably way weird to some people, but I enjoy it. :)
Basically, pretty much any time a Sim has to make a “decision” about something, I generate a number to decide what that “something” will be. For me, it reduces boredom. I know it’s probably too random for many players, who like to plan things out or make choices based on a Sim’s personality or interests or what-have-you, but this is what I enjoy, so...yeah. And even “planners” might enjoy a little random sometimes, maybe especially for households they’re bored with.
Hi! Now that you have ironed out all the issues in your Amish neighborhood, will you consider sharing your ruleset? It's the one with the religion mod, right? Do you have a tag for posts where you discuss gameplay rules? I love reading them and wouldn't mind a quick way to reference them :)
I did share an “in progress” ruleset for the pseudo-Amish. It’s here. And I DO have a “rulesets” tag...but apparently that post is the only one that uses it. :) (And I’m gonna tag this post with it, too. HAH!)
The “new” rules are the same in the basics. It’s just details that are different, plus an added “economy.” The main difference now is that I split up farming and crafting/trades, so that some households do one and some do the other. (Which is randomly decided.) Before, each farm also did a trade, but in the end, once the family was big, I found that there just wasn’t time for farming AND crafting. So, now they’re split, with some households dedicated to farming and some to crafting. (Which also varies gameplay; it can be a little boring to have every household in what becomes a large neighborhood be farmers.) Those in crafts/trades own community lot businesses (which were disallowed in the original rules) to sell their wares, even to “outsiders” (So those community lots are the only ones where non-playables are not banned with the Visitor Controller.) This actually echoes real Amish people better (although I’m not really trying to do that), in that especially those whose communities have become tourist destinations (Like Lancaster County in Pennsylvania) will often have shops and roadside stands where they sell the fruits of their labors to the English as well as to each other. :)
Also, some (but not all) of the crafts/trades are dependent upon having a certain kind of farm in the neighborhood to supply them with their raw materials. Those mostly involve Sun & Moon’s crafting stations. For instance, their wine-making set: In order to be a vintner in this neighborhood, there has to first be a grape-growing farm in the neighborhood from which to purchase grapes. (Yes, I know that in the real world, most vintners develop and grow their own grape cultivars -- that’s kind of the whole point, even :) -- but I wanted to split it up for this neighborhood’s purposes.) But even just with the regular Maxis crafting stations, some now have raw materials “requirements.” For instance, there’s no flower-arranging without flowers being mass-grown somewhere. (In this case, I’m using Sun & Moon’s herbs as “stand-ins” for flowers since, as far as I know, there are no growable/harvestable tulips and snapdragons and whatnot. :) )
I still haven’t quite figured out a few things regarding the new “integrated” stuff -- like how to handle the money end, or if it will be more of a barter thing or...? -- but when I have it all hammered out and tested, I will likely revamp that original post with new details and delete the stuff out of it that ultimately didn’t work well for me, etc.
Ironically, the religion mod doesn’t figure into all this very much, at least not in the “having a religion” sense. In the end, it just regulates behavior so that I don’t have to constantly monitor what Sims are doing. Mostly, I want that for community lots -- which are used a lot in this way of playing -- because obviously you can’t control the behavior of lot visitors unless you temporarily make them playable. With the religion mod in place and configured as I want it, the visitors won’t do naughty things, either. Globally disabling cheating with ACR is helpful for this, too.
As I’ve mentioned here before, I have been playing tabletop roleplaying games for a very, very long time now. Almost 50 years, actually. And there’s one thing I’ve been thinking about lately regarding the hobby, which I’d like to discuss today. Specifically…
The particular game system you choose to play doesn’t matter. I mean, not at all.
What do I mean by that? Well, in the simplest terms, all…
So sad about the deaths 😢 Why don't you use Comfort soup? What are your rules relating to death and diseases? Now, I am wondering how you deal with fires and electric shocks...
Yeah, deaths are always kinda sad, especially when it’s not an old age situation. I could say things about realism and that sometimes kids die and blah blah, but for me it’s not really about that. It’s just playable population control. I installed the “Real Sickness” mod for a reason, after all. :) I let my Sims breed as they want, so there needs to be some control on them as well. In fact, in neighborhoods that just have too many Sims/households to make playing all of them in a timely manner impossible, I will deliberately create a “plague” and randomly kill off/infect a percentage of the child-and-older population. That way, I don’t “play favorites” when I cull. I’m not sentimentally attached to my pixel people, so I don’t mind killing them/letting them die when needed.
I can’t say I really have too many rules about death. I don’t allow pleading with the reaper or resurrections. If a Sim gets sick, I don’t coddle them in an attempt to make them survive. (Otherwise, there’d be no point to having RealSickness in my game. :) ) I still follow their wants as usual, even if their wants aren’t smart for sick people, like going on hikes. :) They still go to school (if school exists in the neighborhood) or to work if they have a job, although I’ll let them take ONE sick day. (School-age kids get one automatically, and job-holders get one if they have a vacation day available.) If a Sim survives their sickness on their own -- meaning, without comfort soup intervention -- they are then immune for life, kinda like how it is with chicken pox. (I use the health adjuster that’s part of Insim to apply sickness immunity, or it can be done via the debug cheat.) That means I can’t cull them in a “plague,” either. I’ll let them use comfort soup if there’s a Family Sim in the household and if they have enough fresh food in the fridge to make it. If there’s a fire, it gets put out either by a member of the household or by the firefighter, if they get summoned (I don’t use smoke alarms all the time), but if someone catches on fire and dies, so be it. Same with electrocutions: If they die, they die and/or any fires that happen get put out one way or another, but casualties during that may occur.
I guess I’m fairly ruthless about death in the game but my neighborhoods tend to get pretty populated pretty quickly, and, like I said, I don’t get emotionally attached to pixel people. (I get more attached to the animals, actually, so I’m glad they’re not affected by illness. :) ) So, overall I welcome the population control.
Because an anon wanted to know, and because others were interested as well, I wrote up the following. It’s really long. I’m sorry.
Having been born and raised in northeastern Indiana, where there is a large concentration of Amish families, and because my parents employed Amish men and women to maintain and run the house and dairy farm they owned (but didn’t operate and didn’t always live on themselves) and that I grew up on, I had a lot of Amish influence in my formative years. Though I’m really not much for organized religion in any form these days, I have always admired the simplicity (and general happiness) of Amish peoples’ lives, their absolutely amazing close-knit families, and the remarkable collective community spirit they have. So, I always had it in the back of my mind that I wanted to try to build such a community – autonomous and self-sufficient simple living free from outside influences, with close-knit individual families and a close-knit community as a whole -- in my game. Almighty Hat’s religion mod finally kicked me into gear…although this way of playing doesn’t strictly require that mod; it just makes things run a little more effortlessly because a lot of the “undesirable” interactions are disabled by the mod according to how you set up the tenets of a religion, so I don’t have to watch the pixels as much to make sure they don’t do anything they aren’t allowed to do.
I don’t really mean this to be a “challenge” at all..although it is a bit challenging in some respects to play. I also did not wish to try to exactly replicate an actual Amish community at all – I didn’t want to find or download Amish/Mennonite-style clothing, for instance, even if such exists – but I did borrow some ideas from how and why the Amish live the way they do, and my goal is to try to create the sort of close-knit and interdependent farm-based community they traditionally have, hopefully without ever having to bring in anyone from “outside.” (Although I’m willing to do that if absolutely necessary.) So, that said…
Restrictions
No attached subhoods. No universities, no downtowns, no shopping districts, and no vacations to “exotic destinations” allowed. No using hobby lots. Everything that these folks do and use has to be contained in the one main neighborhood. So, use a big-enough terrain, you know? :)
No supernatural life states. (I use “organic farming” to avoid Plantsims; no pesticide allowed.) If a supernatural life state should somehow manage to occur (can’t imagine how), the individual will have to leave the community. (Haven’t decided about alien pregnancies/babies yet, but I’m not using the hacked telescope I use elsewhere, so abduction isn’t likely to happen, anyway.)
No vehicles. My pixels walk everywhere, though I suppose you could download horse-drawn vehicles if you wanted to. I would allow the pixels to ride in regular vehicles but not to own them, like the real Amish, but so far there hasn’t really been a need for them to ride anywhere. Even if there was, they can’t call taxis, anyway, because…
No phones, either cell phones or landlines. (The phone booths on community lots are OK. Amongst the real Amish, individuals aren’t allowed to own phones, but there is usually a shed or two with public phones in them that community members are allowed to use if needed. Unfortunately, the game’s community-lot phones don’t function as actual phones, but…Well, there’s the appearance, anyway.)
No gadgets like MP3 players and handheld games.
No jobs outside of the home, for anyone. Generally speaking, I’m not playing this to be a “money challenge” sort of thing at all. It’s more of an experiment in interbreeding than anything else. I started off each of my six starting couples with a furnished house large enough for a large family and a good amount of money (and subsequent new households will get the same), and since they don’t even pay bills (because mail delivery is banned via the Visitor Controller), they don’t need a lot of money.
No owned businesses, either home businesses or community-lot ones. This might change, eventually, but right now I don’t want them.
No electricity generated from a public power grid. Real Amish don’t believe that electricity (or technology, for that matter) is “evil” or anything. They just wish to be autonomous and separated from “the world” (so no relying on public utilities) in order to avoid distraction from what they consider to be their priorities: God, their family, and their community. So, for my purposes in this neighborhood, they can generate electricity for their own households’ use via solar panels and/or an animated CC farm windmill that I have. In my imagination, this generates only enough power to run necessary large appliances. (Real Amish use appliances that are gas-powered rather than electric, but…) There isn’t enough left over for stuff like electric indoor lighting. (Outdoor lighting is OK, because that could be solar.) Also no TVs, no swimming pools (In the real world, they have filtration machines, which run on electricity), no computers, no electric guitars or basses (Pianos, violins, and drum kits are OK), no food processors, no microwave ovens, and no other small electrical devices like that. I do let them have a juicer; I just imagine that it’s manually-operated or maybe battery-operated. (The Amish will use batteries for things like flashlights and stuff.) So far, I haven’t let them have radios, either. Technically, they could be battery-powered, but I’m thinking it’s a bit too much “outside influence” for the spirit of this place.
No buying groceries, and no pizza or Chinese takeout. Even if they could call to get such things (which they can’t do), each household must be self-sufficient. They can use the food the fridge initially comes with, but after that only food they grow themselves can be used.
No school! At this point, I simply have children “homeschool” by using Inge’s “school changer” to change them to “FlexiSchool” on the same page as the changer. Their “school” consists of studying a randomly-chosen skill from 7AM until noon each day except for church days. (It keeps them out of my their mother’s hair for a while. :) ) Eventually, I might start up a school using the Simlogical school mods, as that would be more authentic, but maybe not. Teens are not schooled at all. Girls help their mothers with cooking, maintaining the house, and looking after their younger siblings; boys help with farm chores and engage in the household’s assigned trade. (More on that in a bit.)
No dating. This applies to already-married couples as well as to unmarried individuals. (So it sucks to be a Pleasure or Romance Sim. :) ) When the born-in-games are of marriageable age and if they decide to stay with the community (still working on what will factor into that “decision”), they’ll get an “arranged” spouse from amongst the other unrelated born-in-games of marriageable age, based on a list of criteria that I’m also still working on because no one is of marriageable age yet…although they soon will be, so I need to get working on that. :)
No cheating on spouses. These folks mate for life. No cheating, no breaking up. I have ACR and set cheating to be globally disallowed, so this is actually really easy for me. It might not be so easy if you don’t have ACR. (Which is kind of ironic, actually, given that a lot people seem to think that ACR’s only purpose is to turn Sims into little horndogs. ;) )
No interacting with anyone outside the community. I did not create the neighborhood as an “empty” one (although I currently have in an empty Pleasantview template so that townies aren’t generated), but I use the Visitor Controller on all lots to ban everyone but playables and, on residential lots, newspaper delivery. Real Amish folks do subscribe to newspapers, after all, and in the game reading the paper and doing crosswords and making paper airplanes and such is a way they can get some fun (which is sometimes hard to come by when playing this way, I’m afraid.) But more importantly…compost! :D But they aren’t allowed to interact with the newspaper deliverer.
No being nasty to each other, in general. No fighting. No slapping/shoving each other. (Arguing is OK, but nothing beyond that.) No doing anything violent. (This includes things like playing Red Hands, so there goes another good source of fun. :) ) No dirty joking. No pranking. No gossiping. No stealing each other’s newspapers. No kicking over the trash. (Although I deleted the regular trash cans and replaced them with compost bins, anyway.) Etc. For me, the religion mod mostly handles this; some of it might be hard to do manually and would require closer monitoring without the religion mod that bans most of these interactions so long as an individual’s faith is high.
No ostentatious decorating. Meaning, only a limited amount of deco that doesn’t serve any perceivable practical purpose. Like, statuary of a deity has a purpose. Purely decorative coat racks and closets have a purpose. Racks of towels have a purpose. Cookware hanging on the wall or sitting on a shelf or hanging from the ceiling has a purpose. Candles have a purpose. “Sculptures” of condiments or food storage canisters or cooking utensils and shelves to house them have a purpose. Decorative china cabinets and sideboards have a purpose. But pretty and purely decorative wall hangings and flower arrangements and such have no purpose other than being pretty and should be limited. Also, no fancy/patterned wallpaper. No photographs or portraits of anyone. No wall-to-wall carpet. (Area rugs are OK.)
General way of playing:
The neighborhood must run Spring/Summer/Fall/Winter, in that order.
Each household gets a 3x3 lot, no bigger, no smaller. On it, they need a house large enough to accommodate a large family but with appropriate space left over. That extra space is needed because each household engages in some kind of agricultural pursuit for profit. For me, since I use Rebecah’s animals and a CC beehive that generates honey that can be sold, plus the game’s standard veggie-growing, orchard trees, and fishing, there are ten options:
Veggie-growing (Using the game’s stuff from Seasons only because the CC growables, IMO, grow too quickly and can be harvested too often and are therefore too easy.)
Orchard (Again, using only the game’s trees from Seasons.)
Fishing
Beekeeping.
Beck’s animals: Chickens, horses, cattle, pigs, sheep, and goats. (Each household can only raise one kind of critter.)
The results of all of these – grown produce/fruit, caught fish, pots of honey, and extraneous animals (plus milk, eggs, etc.) -- are sold just “to the air” in order to avoid contact (and developing relationships) with anyone outside the community.
Each household also must maintain a food garden large enough to self-sufficiently feed the household. This can include the Seasons growables but also CC growables and harvestable fruit trees and such. There can also be a fishing pond, if there is space for one. I also built a community-lot fishing hole and a “hunting grounds” – using the hunting/trapping stuff at Plumbbob Keep – they can go to if needed or for just recreational purposes. Those households that raise livestock or fish for profit can also choose to keep some of their catch/slaughter and eat excess animals rather than sell them, if food is needed more than money. No sprinklers or greenhouses are allowed (just for a bit more of a challenge), and no crops can be sown in the autumn or winter, so enough must be grown during spring/summer to feed the household through the rest of the year.
Each household also has an assigned trade, which anyone who has time can engage in to develop skills and to generate some income. (Like with farm products, the results of the trade are just sold “to the air.” The allowed trades (given the other restrictions) are painting, writing novels (with Mog Hughson’s composition book or something similar, not a computer), flower arranging, toymaking, pottery, and sewing. (For novel writing, since the households don’t have phones, they don’t get the “royalties phone call.” So, I manually give them an amount based on the number of Creativity points the writer had when they started the novel, which is I think is partly how the game calculates the royalties awarded.)
I’m using traditional gender roles in this neighborhood, but that’s certainly not a requirement. But in my neighborhood, women and girls care for the kids and do all the cooking and cleaning. Men and boys do the farm chores, including planting, maintaining, and harvesting the food garden. This can be broken if a Sim autonomously chooses to do something outside of their usual duties, but I don’t command them to do so. When there is nothing that needs to be done, they engage in the household’s trade and/or I command them to fulfill any wants they have that are allowed and possible. If there are none of those, they free will and do whatever they want.
The eldest sons of a household will, along with their wife, take over running the farm of their birth once their parents are elders or dead (whichever comes first). The parents live in the house until their death. The other kids who decide to stay with the community will marry and move out to their own properties which in turn will be inherited by their eldest son, etc. (So it’s kind of like a bunch of Legacies.) Those who don’t stay with the community for whatever reason will get moved to an empty lot where they won’t be played any further, and they’ll be given prisoner tags so that they won’t appear on other lots within the community. I’ll go in to age them up and eventually kill them in sync with their cohort, but they won’t be played.
Breeding:
One of the points of this neighborhood is attempting to keep it going using only born-in-game Sims without having to bring in any outsiders. As such, in order to have a deep enough gene pool to avoid the game’s inbreeding limitations as well as to compensate for some pixels choosing to leave the community, as many unrelated-to-each-other babies as possible are needed. Because of that, as well as to sort of simulate the kind of “sex is for procreation, not pleasure” mindset that more orthodox religiously-minded people generally have, all woohoos are “try for baby.” I have ACR, so when an autonomous woohoo that isn’t a “try for baby” one happens, I use a die roll to decide if a pregnancy will happen, using the initiator’s ACR “try for baby” chance. If successful, I use the Sim Blender to impregnate. Beyond that, if anyone rolls a woohoo want, I use the game’s “Try For Baby” method, which has a higher chance of success that doesn’t use a “fertility curve” like ACR does. If someone rolls a “Have 10 children” want, I lock it and do my best to make it happen, using the game’s “Try For Baby” mechanism as often as possible.
Gatherings:
Since there are no phones and computers but one of the goals of this place is to have a strongly interconnected community, I use “church” and other community lots liberally to allow the community members to interact and “naturally” form relationships with each other, since only playables are allowed on those lots. They have “church” twice a week, and each time all possible members of the controllable household go there (leaving behind only babies/toddlers and one of the teen+ females to tend them). “Church” lasts from 8AM to 5PM on those days and there’s a buffet table and a restroom on the lot to entice walkbys to stay there and hang out. Other community lots are used often, as well. So far, there’s the fishing hole, a swimming hole (with a swimmable lake) for swimming wants, a playground for kids, a hunting grounds, a sports ground, and a lot to have cooking contests on. There will probably be more as I think of them. The purpose, aside from recreation, is to form and maintain relationships between community members to the extent possible. Personally, I hate having to “relive” time spent on community lots, so I use the Community Time mod, but that’s not strictly necessary.
And….I think that’s enough, yes? If anyone actually read all this and has any questions/suggestions…Fire away. :)
You are a member of a group of scientists creating an unstoppable robot for the military. However after your robot was completed it went into a berserk rampage and is heading for the city. The military is sending a group of tanks out to attempt to stop this metal behemoth.
You will have one tank for each player playing the game. This game is turn based and the robot will have his turn first, then the players.
The robot starts on one side of the board near the center and the tanks start on the opposite side.
The robot can essentially only see within a 1 block radius of himself (a three by three square). Take advantage of this with your range.
Robot's attacks
Fist - 1 dmg
Deals one damage with a massive steel punch to a tank. The area of effect is the space on the playing grid directly in front of the robot.
Atomic Mine - 2 dmg
The robot deals two damage using an atomic mine which he lays down on the space he is standing on. The mine will deal damage to any tank within a three by three square centered around the robot.
The robot has 10 total health.
Robot AI
The robot will attempt these moves in sequence. If it cannot move into said space due to a tank occupying it then it will skip said step. The robot will attempt this sequence within one turn.
1) If there is no tank in front of it, move forward one space
2) If there is a tank in front of it, use fist
3) coin flip:
If heads then turn 90 degrees right
If tails then turn 90 degrees left
4) If there is no tank in front of it, move forward one space
5) Turn towards the tanks 90 degrees
6) If there is no tank in front of it, move forward one space
7) If there is a tank within one block radius then use atomic mine
Separate) If the robot is at the board's border then rotate 180 degrees then move forward one after which it will end it's turn
8) End turn
Additionally, the robot cannot move back to any of the rows he has already been in. Throughout the game the robot can only move along the row he is currently in or down the columns towards the tanks and the city.
If the robot happens to be facing down the row he is currently in and the coin flip action comes up then he will be forced to simply turn in the direction of the city rather then in the direction he came from.
The player can make two actions per turn.
The players(tanks) can move up to two spaces per turn but only in a straight line.
The tank can also rotate 90 degrees.
Or the tank can shoot.
Each of these three things count as an action. For example: in one turn you could turn 90 degrees and shoot or you could move two spaces and turn 90 degrees etc.
Each tank has four health. If it has 3-4 health then the tank is in Normal State.
While the tank is in Normal State it can shoot with a range of three and the shot will deal two damage.
If the tank has 1-2 health then it is in Damaged State and its icon or piece will be replaced by its damaged counterpart.
While the tank is in Damaged State it can only shoot with a range of two spaces and its shots will only deal one damage.
The tank can only shoot from its front.
It will be difficult, but your job to destroy the robot before it destroys both you and the city.
