I'm not sure, but I think when toddlers are playing with the xylophone the musical note effect's color will correspond to the note they're playing. I just noticed a toddler hit the green key and green musical notes were flying up. (Or all the notes are green and I hadn't seen it before )

I'll quote myself because I am mistaken. Walking to community lots came with Bon Voyage. It took until Apartment Life for Maxis to think, hey doesn't it make sense for them to walk to school/work too?

I love that each expansion pack added little things like this that made gameplay so much better, I remember how frustrating it was to not be able to send your sim to work if they missed the carpool.

Angela Ramsay could actually have cycled to work if she'd really wanted to. She lives in one of the few houses in my game that actually has a driveway. (Many have been removed to extend the garden! A reversal of modern Real Life practice?) mickyss's CC bicycles start at §34, and Angela is paid §322 a day, so financially it would have made sense to buy one and go to work. But Angela, a rather nice Popularity Sim, isn't really very interested in her job as a lab assistant, except as a source of income. Having seen the carpool drive off without her, it just made sense to her to take a Vacation Day, and ask some friends round. In her situation, I think I'd have done the same!

Me too! But it can be annoying to miss a day if the sim is set up for a promotion, and they then have to wait until after the weekend to get the raise.

Indeed! I was quite happy when I first send a sim walking to work after I got AL. Bugger was lazy as hell and missed the car pool already right before that

@simsample - I have sims who tend to miss the carpool more often than not!

I hate it when they're in the bathroom and getting ready for work when the carpool shows up.

"Come on, get off the toilet or you'll miss the carpool and then have to walk!"

I keep hearing that people in America don't walk. You need a car for everything like buying groceries and someone funds yellow buses like we see in the Sims specifically for children. But buses for general population hardly exist. Do you actually get that bus right next to the house, or have to walk a few hundred meters to a bus stop?

It can happen that they have to make the bed and then change the clothes, and thus miss the carpool. I remember demolishing a wall segment in the bedroom to make them get out without changing the clothes and reach a school bus in time.

Definitely true and buses are a PAIN. But I like to think my sims live in a better world than I do.

We walk. Public transit just sucks here and you can't walk to everywhere you need to go. It would also be insane if everyone was carrying their groceries home on the bus. If it's more than two or maybe three bags that you can carry by hand, are you going to take a handcart on the bus and take up all the aisle space and block the wheelchair areas? That'd be pretty inconsiderate.

Where I live in Southern Arizona public transit suck majorly. Bus stops are not very close to where I live or want to go and have to walk a long way to get to one. Bus routes are not very convenient. Uber costs alot and can take awhile to show up. So when I was without my car for a month to get the damage fixed after someone tried and failed to steal my car it really sucked. I had to rely on my dad to go to appointments and get groceries around his work schedule.

As for what I discovered in game, I didn't know that a playable in a different dorm than the one I was currently playing could show up at a college community lot and do homework.

No, it's not insane. I would either have a small amount daily or around 10-15 kg every week or 10 days, as much as would fit on my lap if the bag is clean. Most purchases can be done within 1 kilometer range in a city without transport. At any given time only some people would carry groceries, not everyone.

So how close to the home does the yellow school bus bring children?

Going grocery shopping every single day is also kind of insane, unless it's for some kind of holiday or special occasion, and you can't sustain a family for a week on an amount of groceries that will fit in your lap on the bus, lmao.

Oh flippin' heck here we go again.

I found out today that my outgoing kid shouts and whoops when he finishes a drawing, but his shyer brother just finishes and walks off quietly to do something else.

Some people live in food deserts -- there is no place to get food within convenient walking distance. Yes, this is wrong and stupid. That's capitalism for you.

The yellow schoolbus varies with the school district and the circumstances. When I was a kid (in the 60s), only country kids rode the school bus because everyone in town in my school districts lived within walking distance or had parents in position to drop them off -- some daycare centers picked kids up after school. In-town school buses were for larger towns, where there'd be a designated area judged "too far to walk" and the registered kids outside that area would be picked up. In the city I live in now, which has multiple districts, school buses in some school districts go to the doors of kids whose parents signed them up for it, in others they go to a series of central locations that the kids gather to, and some (the school districts of mini-towns surrounded by the city, which originated as bedroom communities laying claim to city amenities without city taxes, and you know how sustainable that is!) won't pay up for bus service at all and those schools are nightmares to drive past when school lets out, because very few parents who live in a place like that will let their kids walk anywhere, there's creeping lines of cars constantly coming for them.

Country kids are picked up generally at their mailbox or, in the case of new subdivisions, at a designated location, such as the subdivision entrance. The mailbox of a farm may be a mile or more from the front door, so they'll either walk down there or get dropped off.

Angela is looking for a promotion soon too, but friendship is more important to her. Working in one of the original Maxis base game careers, there are a lot of other Veronavillians in the same career. That means that work is a good place for making friends, and she frequently brings work colleagues home from work with her. One of her work colleagues is Edward Mellon, an original Maxis townie, and a lab assistant like herself. As she spent time with him recently, they both began to realise that what they felt for each other was more than friendship. So late last night Angela surprised herself by falling in love with him, and, like a couple of teenagers, they had their first kiss in the street in front of her house. So, for the moment at least, thoughts of promotion will be taking a back seat. Up till now, Angela always thought that love was for other people. She can't get over how it feels, that it has happened to her and Edward.

They've both been lurking in the background of my game for the last twelve to thirteen years.

I'll try and post a picture soon.

@AndrewGloria - taking a vacation day is fine with me quite often - except when the sim in question had also missed the carpool the day before!

Good luck to Angela and Edward

Jealousy is disabled for maids. You can cheat on a maid and with a maid and nothing happens. I made sure to cheat with a regular sim to see if I accidentally changed ACR settings or something, but no, as soon as it's a normal sim, jealousy works as expected.

I mean, technically I live in a food desert. I don't consider it such because the population density is so low it makes no sense to put a store in, it'd go bankrupt. (It's also an actual desert, the cold kind.) I don't drive to the closest store because it's more expensive than a further one, so by planning my purchases like a reasonable person and shopping when I'm in town for other things, I save quite a lot. Even if there were a store in walking distance there'd be no reason to use it.

I live in farm country. There is no place within reasonable walking distance, we all agree over five miles is unreasonable, right? to buy anything. (And when it's -20F or 100F maybe not that far . . . American climate plays a large role in our love of enclosed, heated, and cooled vehicles.) Unless it's one of the neighbors' farmstands. Using neighbors for a value of roughly quarter-mile spacing. We're not super rural: I'm a music teacher by trade and drive into town and have a studio there to teach in. My husband's job is at a hardware store in town. But we keep chickens and sometimes other livestock, and so do the neighbors, and everyone gardens and has an orchard and . . . we're kind of a neighborhood of people with a farming hobby more than actual farmers, but you know, we produce some of what we need and we like it that way. Lots start at five acres and go up, so in this climate are not big enough to actually support a family. (Water and temps.)

Someone asked about buses. Public transit is an urban thing. School transit comes to the driveway. We home school, but next door does not (kids have an hour long bus ride each end of the school day, which takes about fifteen minutes in private car). Bus comes and stops at her driveway around six-thirty every morning. She walks the kids out, armed, because there is a cougar stalking our neighborhood. (Yes, cougars happily go in town and skulk around, but our area has plenty of wild space for them, and usually they aren't a worry out here, but this one . . . ) Lots of folks drive out from town to hike and bike in the hills up here where they can let their dogs run.

If you go dig into urban and rural in the USA you find that they play some really funky games with definitions there, and it kind of makes you look sideways at all the political rhetoric.

There's a fear for growing old and never marry. I don't know if it's exclusive for Family sims or if it's a general fear. Either way, I was surprised there was one!

OMG. That is hard to imagine lol.

There's no code in there that checks for anyone being a maid. There must have been some other difference in context between the two instances of cheating.

Edit: Now looking at your pictures, the sim who is getting cheated on is a different one in each scenario. Different sims respond to jealousy differently (or not at all) under ACR.

I use rebecah's toddler beds, so toddlers can get in and out by themselves to lessen my toddler annoyance.

I was not happy to learn that child age Sims can get in their younger sibling's toddler bed. Just use your own bed.

Do you know the buildable snowman in buy mode > decoration > misc.?
I always thought it was useless since sims could just build their own snowman when it's has snown.
Turns out that buy-mode-snowman can change appearance and they dance!