Sims3 Pizzatron's Big Sims 3 Adventure

I'm lonely. Somebody else say something.


And now, Kileighney...gardening in her underwear.

Oh, don't act like you've never done that!


Among a few other things (like special social interactions), the Supernatural Fan trait gives your Sim a minor Mood bonus every time he or she encounters a supernatural Sim.

My town has lots of supernaturals in it. That's why Kileighney's always so merry!

(Too bad she herself doesn't fuel her own Moodlet, or she might never be glum!)


Not only do you get to pick each Sim's favorite food in TS3's CAS, they also show reactions when they sit down to their favorite food. They get a little pump-up to their Fun too.

Kileighney friggin' loves Autumn Salad!


So...there are no spellbooks this time around. Now, witches increase their powers over magic with practice, practice, and more practice, from playing with magic to casting spells to engaging other witches in spellcasting duels.

Kileighney's just playing with magic here. It doesn't burn her magic gauge down and she can do it by herself, but the experience gain isn't all that much. But it's better than nothing.


Uh oh. Here comes that Full Moon again.

The good news? Witches get to cast spells at halved costs to their magic power, and they recover lost power more quickly.

The bad news? Oh, ho ho ho ho....


Well, there's a little more good news: this Lunacy Moodlet which adds +40 to your mood.


Lunacy's downside is that your Sims flip out and go a little bit loopy here and there: freaking out at nothing, randomly hugging other Sims and randomly slapping other Sims. Keep your Sims on a short leash thenever Lunacy is in play.


As for more bad news, did I mention zombies? Here they come to put Kileighney's defenses to the test!

(Also, Kileighney found another vampire. More good vibes, please!)


Well, well, well! It seems that Kileighney has somehow learned from Carmilla's mistakes. Behold the mighty, mystic power of FENCE!

"Urgh! Me no find way to tasty garden plants! Why me no find way to tasty garden plants?"


"Oh, hello there, zombies! How does my garden look from all the way over there?"


And lo, the sun rose and Kileighney's garden was perfectly healthy and intact, without a single zombie bite to show for the night of horror before!

Witches 1, Zombies 0.

So when a Sim gets 40,000 Aspiration Points, one of your Aspiration Reward options is a Philosopher's Stone which can either make non-playable ghosts playable or change objects placed on the Stone into gold ingots. As the ingots are worth around 150 Simoleons each, using the Philosopher's Stone on anything worth more than that is a bad idea.

So I had Marigold emptying all of the Iron Ingots (worth around $10 each) which she had collected onto the Stone, which was a fairly profitable way of cleaning out her Inventory. Then she accidentally screwed up and accomplished her greatest transformation yet by turning herself into gold.

Oops.



Enter, the Grim Reaper and his catchy yet scary theme song.

It's very frustrating, but for whatever reason, none of my Sims thus far have been able to click on the Reaper and plead for a dying Sim's life, even though TS3's Wiki says that they can. Even though Marigold had two lovers with strong Relationships living in the same house, with both of them being readily available and at hand, neither one had the option to stop Grimmy from doing his job.

Like TS2, TS3 is not without its bugs and glitches.



It's nice being able to play Simmy ghosts this time around; they can't run, but they can pass through walls and solid objects. And they're still color-coded and outfitted with certain special effects to reflect the means through which they died. And a shiny, golden ghost sure is pretty!

(I'm still at a loss as to why ghosts still need to pee, poop, sleep and bathe, or how they can still WooHoo. Seeing as one of Marigold's lovers is a man, can a ghost successfully Try for Babies? Do I even want to find out? )



So I put Auricized Marigold into their spacious bathroom and gave the statue a fitting rename.



I love that little artist credit! "Artist: Marigold Traut." Subject: Marigold Traut. Media Used: Gold, Her Own Body and a Wonky Philosopher's Stone.

Her statue's worth $50,000, so I'm torn: Should I sell it, or should I keep it? Because the value of decorations in a room affects that room's rating and the Moodlets for any Sim in that room, which in this case is a "Beautifully Decorated" Moodlet with a +40 bonus to Mood.

What do you think? Sell Marigold, Cast in Gold or keep it?



Then I put Marigold right back to work, trying to turn iron into gold. What's the Grim Reaper going to do? Kill her again? You can't kill what's already dead, right?

(Which begs the question: Can a Philosopher's Stone turn a ghost into gold? Could this be an everlasting gold mine here? I was wrong about the "Evil Witch perpetually feeding zombies to a Cowplant for everlasting youth" scheme, admittedly, but this could be something big and profitable!)



And I spruced up their bathroom to make poor Marigold's auricized corpse the centerpiece of the room. But honestly, with a value of 50,000 Simoleons, I could stick her in the barest, dingiest, ugliest closet with the cheapest walls, floor and ceiling available and she would still give the room a Beautifully Decorated moodlet! Or so I suspect; I haven't actually tried sticking her statue into the ugliest room imaginable, you see.

But it's possible to resurrect a Sim by feeding Ambrosia to their ghost, and the only way to make Ambrosia is through a perfect 10 in Cooking (to learn the recipe for Ambrosia and to successfully cook it), a perfect 10 in Fishing (to catch a Deathfish), a 7 or higher in Gardening (to grow a Life Fruit plant), $12,000 to buy the recipe for Ambrosia from a bookstore and, of course, a successfully grown Life Fruit and a successfully caught Deathfish.

And it so happens that Marigold and Daisy both have the Green Thumb, Angler, Loves the Outdoors and Gatherer traits (so they're faster at learning both Gardening and Fishing, they can hang out in the wilderness longer and they're more likely to find Life Fruit seeds and Deathfish), Marigold also has the Natural Cook trait (so she learns Cooking faster, cooks better meals and burns the food less often), Daisy also has Handy (so she can learn Handiness faster and upgrade their stove to cook better meals — Ambrosia included, I hope — while keeping it and everything else in their home in good repair) and Karn has Flirty, Brave, Great Kisser, Charismatic and Athletic, which open up plenty of job promotions, pay raises, gains to Celebrity and chances to receive gifts of money and objects from his many lovers and admirers, while also giving him the option to fight burglars and greater chances of beating a burglar in a fight), so Karn is a big help with the household's income, making that $12,000 price tag less daunting to reach.

(All three of them are also Witches and they also have Alchemy skill, but I'm not sure whether or not those talents can help Sims overcome Death itself. Those talents do help fend off invading zombies while easily repairing their love triangle every time one of them gets jealous of the other two, but that's neither here nor there, especially since Relationships aren't any help in telling Grimmy to shove off in the first place!)

That has become my new quest: First, Marigold shall resurrect herself (with significant help from Karn and Daisy), and then the three of them shall resurrect every other ghost in the neighborhood. And then no one in Sunset Valley need ever fear the Grim Reaper's sting again!

Should I be laughing like a deranged mad scientist here? I'm not sure if that would be appropriate or not. But it feels appropriate.

HI, CATHERINE!


So Karn went to the cemetery's mausoleum and, after one use of the Manage the Dead option there, I had all of the unclaimed headstones/tombstones/gravestones/whatchamacallits on their home lot.

One nice thing about TS3 is how the headstones and urns have a little doodad denoting the nature of the Sim's death: drowning, starvation, fire and so on. And the more Aspiration Points earned (including any points spent on Aspiration Rewards) up until the Sim died, the bigger and fancier their headstone or urn is. These folks didn't accomplish much (because I hadn't played them up until this point), but Marigold's headstone is pretty big and fancy; I'd show it off, but since she's roaming around as a ghost, her headstone's in her ghosty Inventory, I can't pull it out of her Inventory and plunk it down somewhere while she's floating around as a ghost and I'm not willing to send her to the Underworld (thereby making Marigold unplayable) just for a screenshot. Lo siento. You'll have to take my word for it, I guess.

What's not so nice about TS3 is how the game is simultaneously playing every other household in the neighborhood while I'm busy controlling and playing one household. Sure, it's a nod to realism and it prevents TS2's quirky little potentials like grandchildren reaching Elder age before their own grandparents do, but it's annoying when I switch households and find that my Sims have done all sorts of unauthorized things without my say-so! Jazz Freefeet married this fat slob when I wanted her to marry this movie star, Agnes Crumplebottom abandoned her house and moved in with the Goths, Doctor Malevolence is now bitter enemies with Zenon Roboto (despite my efforts to get those two to fall in love), the Wolfe family moved out of town (yes, it's now possible for Sims to change neighborhoods without corrupting your entire game, but lamentably, they can also do that autonomously), Gaston and Claudette Gourmando adopted a dog, and despite being a Dog Person, Jolene Lupina bought a cat to go with her three dogs, which are now five dogs because Champ had a puppy with Princess and another puppy with Lightning while I wasn't looking.

I don't mind my neighborhood's autonomous little developments — except when I do — but things get a bit annoying when I don't get any announcements about what's happening among my Sims when they're left to their own devices. But at least I do get an in-game notification when a Sim in another household (that I'm not currently playing) dies. "Karn is in mourning because Michael Bachelor just died in a fire." "Daisy is in mourning because Holly Alto just drowned to death." "Jolene is in mourning because Bessie Clavel just died from old age." HEY! TS3! Nobody's allowed to kill off my Sims but me, dadgummit!

So I wasted no time in using the Philosopher's Stone to wrangle up the ghosts. Holly Alto is bugged (and I'll probably end up making a Help Request thread about that), but the Stone worked just fine on Hank Goddard, Michael Bachelor and Miraj Alvi. So their ghosts are part of the household and live undie afterlive exist in Karn and Daisy's (increasingly haunted) lakeside house now.



The Sims 3: "Hey, Miraj! Lookin' good! I see that you've lost weight!"
Miraj Alvi: "I literally starved to death."
The Sims 3: "Keep up the good work, buddy!"

Meanwhile, Daisy and Marigold's attempts to cultivate the perfect Life Fruit came into some interesting developments with some fringe benefits...for example, meat quite literally growing on trees. Well, okay, not quite "literally". They're more like bushes.



Steak plants.



Hamburger plants.

Yum yum! Delish!

Which begs the question: Are these vegetarian meats, or are they not? "Vegetarian" is a Trait in TS3, after all.



Death and ghostdom are hardly excuses for Sims to skip school, so Michael and Miraj still have to catch the bus to high school every weekday morning. Teen Sims also have Proms now. Both of them got some nice Prom photos, and Michael somehow made Prom King despite getting rejected for a dance or two! His crown is only worth 1 Simoleon, but it's the thought that counts. Not bad for a dead kid, eh?



I also bought and installed a copy of TS3: Generations. Among other things, Generations gives us a chemistry bench, sort of like what we had all the way back in TS1. Whether or not the chemistry bench still randomly turns Sims into rampaging Frankenstein Monsters remains to be seen, but it does raise Logic and using it can lead to the discoveries and concoctions of various potions. It's a nice alternative to telescopes and chessboards, at least.

The Sims 3: "Daisy has concocted a Radical Reparum Potion!"

That's great. What does it do?



No, seriously, TS3. What does a Radical Reparum Potion do? You're not telling me anything here, TS3!



On a random side note, Kileighney Hagg does not make an attractive zombie. But then, few Sims — if any — do.

Apparently there is a way to make permanent zombies in TS3, thanks to Alchemy. Whether or not those zombies can be made playable remains to be discovered, but perhaps I have enough incentive to try remaking my Zombies households from TS2 after all....

My Simmy witch rides a horse.

Does your Simmy witch ride a horse?



So getting a valiant steed is as simple as heading down to the local stables and buying one. As with dogs and cats, the price of a horse is based on the horse's age, traits and existing skills (ie. Running and Jumping); an old, rebellious, unskilled horse will cost you much less than a young, fast, genius horse who could win the Kentucky Derby right off the bat.

Starlight Sparkle was a good, dependable, middle-of-the-road horse, so her price was reasonable. Training would come soon enough. So away they went.


You also get a chance to customize your horse's appearance, along with your saddles, horse blankets, bits, bridles and reins.

This part may become a bit more pointless once your Sim's Riding skill is high enough and your Sim starts riding horses bareback, but it's something fancy to do for now.


Lookin' good, Starlight!


Horseys like to go fast!


So the simplest way to train a Sim's Riding skill and a Simmy horse's Running skill is to simply go for a ride; click on the Sim or Sim Horse (whichever is active) and pick "Go for Ride," then change your speed to Gallop for the fastest gains (if possible; otherwise, you may have to settle for Canter or even (blech) Trot). The two Skills will grow together, though not necessarily at the same rate, depending on the Sim's learning-based traits and likewise for the horse.

Jumping skill requires specialized objects and a good-sized lot to train on. More on that later.



So why go through all that trouble? Because of horse races, of course! With three different kinds of competitions (Racing, Jumping and Cross-Country, which is both racing and jumping) in three different leagues (Beginner, Advanced, International), you can find the right competition to match your horse's skills and your rider's skills. And the greater the challenge, the bigger the prize pot and the fancier the trophy you stand to win...if you can place Third or higher.


Ermina and Starlight Sparkle won, naturally.


And with that came Ermina's first racing trophy. It's time to set up some shelves back home for that trophy and the scores of trophies destined to come soonafter!

Horse racing's pretty neat and it's a good way to win home decorations that you won't find anywhere else, I'll say that!

(Oh, that's right. Riding 5 is when you start riding bareback. Which is good. Horses get cranky if you leave their saddles on for too long, so the easiest saddle to bear is none at all, right?)


Soon after Ermina took up her equestrian hobby, these little gnome-horses started popping up around her house.


Spontaneously spawning gnomes in TS3 don't cost your household anything, you can sell them for about $1,000 a pop and you can put them in a Sim's Inventory to be given away as very nice gifts to other Sims, which is probably what you should do with them because, like the Weeping Angels from Doctor Who, they like to move around, turn your appliances and electronics on or off and generally get into all kinds of mischief whenever you're not looking directly at them. Plus, they can block paths and make your Sims late for work and such.

Now get in Ermina's pocket, tiny horse!


Ah, well. Gnome-horses are one of the prices we pay for such a magnificent hobby as this!


Why, yes, indeed! My horse and I shall be best friends forever.

Now go place First in the International Cross-Country competition, Starlight! Do it for your best Simmy friend in the whole wide world!

Good to see you are still simming, pizza

If you ever get back to TS2 - and want some good conversation... you can find me (and a whole bunch of others!) on Discord mostly these days: https://discord.gg/4e53f7Ye

Yes! Beware, I live!

I probably should get back to fixing TS2 at some point. My new Periphio insists on making me run TS2 from my C: Drive (despite any and all symbolic links I make leading to my much larger E: Drive), which, though a speedy SSD, is only about 111 GB in size, which is simply too small for all of my CC for TS2, which forces me to run TS2 on my slower and older Dell Precision, which currently has a problem with TS2 crashing soon after loading up.

I'll figure it out, if only because TS2 is so much more cheat-code-friendly, including my beloved cheat codes for raising the maximum number of floors on a lot and raising the maximum number of Sims in a household.

So what has been going on with you and this gaggle of Simmers on Discord lately?

I probably could have peeked in on Discord a few more times tonight, but I gave in to temptation and cheated on my Sims games again.









Hey, the Subnautica games are very engrossing! Surely I can't take all the blame for my dalliances.

And to my credit, despite the game's name and theme, I've only died from hypothermia once. It's a pretty bleak way to die, but OMG, the whole "fade to white" effect as you keel over dead sure is pretty! I was kind of expecting it to be more like Real Life hypothermia, where you get all delirious and start doffing all your clothes and take a nap under a tree while it's Minus 10 degrees outside and whatnot. But the "death by white-out" works.

(On the other hand, I lost track of how many times I died from drowning in S:BZ. True to Real Life, cave-diving and shipwreck-diving — or spaceshipwreck-diving, in this case — are very dangerous; you lose your way, you can't find your way back out, you run out of air and glurk. I've learned how to make better use of the tool which leaves a trail of light-up "bread crumbs" to show me the way back out after one too many fatal "oopsies" like that. )

I'll get around to finishing the main quest soon enough. I now have a few great bases — one about 150 meters deep (but with ladder tubes connecting it to the surface and to another exit about 320 meters deep), one on an iceberg and one right next to a deep sea volcanic vent — so my same inner architect which relishes TS2 and TS3 so much is eating up S:BZ too.

The Sims 1: "I've seen the Tragic Clown!"
The Sims 2: "There is no Tragic Clown!"
The Sims 3: "I am the Tragic Clown!"




Tragic Clowns shower with their clothes on because they're...I dunno, tragic, or whatever.


Note to Self: Ease off the TARDIS LLAMA use!


So Ermina took her tragic, miserable clown butt home, got some dinner and washed it down with a Potent Cure potion.


Fixed! No more painted and colorful tragedy!


Then she called her clone over for dinner (and colored her hair red so I could tell the two apart).

The End for now.