I am going to be able to devote more time to my game now that I'm fully retired as of the 1st-I just put together a medieval neighborhood full of the Sims 1 families, and I hope it's going to develop more. The worst part about setting up a new hood is changing the clothing-and putting them into appropriate housing.

Something very awkward just happened. Marshall Cosgrove and Charlotte Calhoun's wedding was finally set. The day before, Marshall goes to sew his wild oats or whatever because he's had a romance on the side with Saskia Loche. I had them do a casual group outing to a motel in Pandora where one takes a clandestine love affair. Anyway, they do their thing, he gets in his little Shelby cobra and hightails it back to the Cosgrove estate for his wedding. Saskia does not join him, rightfully. Make note I DID NOT end his casual group, I thought it just automatically ended since she didn't go back with him.

He and Charlotte set up a honeymoon in Twikkii and depart right after the nuptials. They arrive and SASKIA is there with them, I suspect because the game still thinks she's in a casual group with him. I've had that happen before where an entire wedding party that was a casual group followed the couple to their honeymoon, but the difference was the group was there at the wedding right before.

Anyway, my reaction and Marshall's is thus attached.

Happy retirement! I hope your sims throw a party for you. The new hood sounds very interesting!

I've been playing a bit more in Strangetown. I'm putting in some community lots and making it look like the kind of off-the-highway, tourist trap town that I imagine it to become once the military funding dries up. Anyway, I went in to the Beakers' house and played them for a bit. I noticed that Nervous was farting hearts whenever he was around Loki, so out of curiosity, I made Loki bisexual, and they have three bolts together! Now Nervous is obsessively in love with Loki, but also furious at him for being married to Circe, and Loki is basically using poor Nervous while he spends all his free time on the telescope. Also, Circe picks on Nervous all the time but is feeling neglected in her marriage, also because of the telescope. She's highly attracted to Lazlo Curious. I'm not sure what to do with them now.

Over at the Curious house, Lazlo brought Loki home from work. Pascal hates Loki with a passion and went to go poke him, and I noticed he has two bolts with Loki. Of course, Pascal and Nervous have zero attraction toward each other, but that's all for the best because I'm not really interested in playing out that relationship again. All three Curious brothers have an alien child by now, and Vidcund has also become a werewolf and is pretty darned pleased with himself as a result.

I had Ajay buy the convenience store again, but I'm not playing him for the time being. All my Sims have to go to that store to buy groceries, and I like the idea of it being open 24-7 and Ajay always being there to ring them up, never aging, never changing. Is he some kind of manbot? I think so. It would explain a lot about him.

Update: Loki hatched a plan. He realized the aliens weren't coming for him, so he persuaded Nervous to go stargaze on the telescope in his place, and Nervous got abducted right away. He is expecting, and Loki couldn't be more delighted. I can't wait to see what this alien baby looks like.

I'm about to get back int my Pleasantview game and also be setting up my own nieghborhood for my game which means placing the two lots required to start and getting them set up.Pleasantview is all about the first colonial settler couple starting up the new colony and preparing it for the coming winter even though it's still spring in Pleasant Valley and they have monthes to get ready.

I have been using this site to generate ideas when I'm stuck with a household: https://writingexercises.co.uk/plotgenerator.php

For the Beakers, I got something like this: A long-lost relative turns up in the middle of the night. The story involves eternal life. The protagonist helps someone make an escape.

So Circe, fed up with Loki's antics and approaching elderhood, brought home the cowplant from the high-security medical lab where she works to try to obtain eternal youth, a pet project of her own. She managed to drink both a coworker and Abhijeet Cho. Then Loki's long-lost sister, Erin, who up till now has not been played, showed up in the middle of the night. She was down on her luck working as a golf caddy and had nowhere else to go. She pretty quickly befriended Nervous and realized things were very wrong here. She called the sheriff--a guy I made in CAS named Quinten McAuley, who I really like (he has a big hat). It wasn't long before Quinten spotted the graves and got in a fistfight with Loki. Loki tried to escape by setting the computer on fire, but it didn't work. Both he and Circe were arrested and committed to the institute for the criminally insane. The Beaker house was partially destroyed and made unlivable in the fire. Erin used the Beaker fortune to move Nervous and his alien twins (!) out to a more suitable environment where she can help him raise the babies, and she had enough cash left over to open a pet store in Strangetown, which was always her dream. Happy ending!

I've had a computer free Christmas and the session I played today was the first in a few weeks. I'm playing in the testhood that's no longer a real testhood, because Trial Tester and her family are old friends of mine by now. Trial, her husband Rufus, their two youngest children Robin and Garnet and the two bigfoot friends they have living with them, went on a holiday to Dawn Springs, the Far East neighbourhood. They have so far discovered that the luxury hotel I put in Dawn Springs is a bit of a nightmare logistically speaking and hasn't got the most comfortable beds. They are all a bit grumpy and tired as a consequence, and I have to keep a close eye on Buster and Abhishek Bigfoot, who have so far scared two fellow hotel guests. Garnet, the youngest of Trial's five children, aged to teen just before the vacation and wanted to flirt with a sim and have her first kiss. She met a tourist guy at the Shrine of the Wishing Cat, but he made it clear to everyone around him that he was positively repulsed by her. Rude! Garnet wasn't scared off by that, though, after autonomously charming him twice despite being rejected first time, she actually made friends with him and he flirted back. Hopefully she'll meet him again and get that first kiss! The family are still mid vacation and Buster Bigfoot has found a treasure map, so there are plenty of things left for them to do.

There was quite the twist in my Beaker/Nervous storyline, and I swear this all came from normal gameplay and following wants. I could not make this stuff up.

After Erin met Sheriff Quentin when she called him to have her brother committed, she got quite interested in him and started inviting him over. But Quentin did not get along at all with Nervous, and after one of their fights, Nervous was killed. The death was ruled an accident, and Erin and Quentin got engaged. Quentin left the insane asylum that he was running to move in with Erin, and on their first day together, they both died in a mysterious fire. Nervous's alien twins came home from school to discover their urns. The twins were then taken to a strange old house with a graveyard in front. There was an old woman living there, and a man who was somewhat familiar to them. Yes, it was Olive and Loki, who had bonded in the asylum over their mutual hatred of Circe and escaped when Quentin died. (Were they somehow responsible for the deaths? I'm sure they were.) Olive told the twins that this house and her fortune was their birthright and their name was Specter now. Olive then used her direct line to the Grim Reaper to bring Quentin back as a zombie, and what did Quentin have in his inventory? The cowplant he had confiscated from Circe, still full from her last victim. Loki drank the milk, and then Olive fed Quentin to the cowplant and drank his milk so they both could have enough days left to raise the twins to college age. Just to be nasty, Olive brought Quentin back as a zombie again, but this time he escaped into the desert. As far as I know, he is still sheriff. (By the way, the girl twin--Freya--is quite cute--but the boy twin--Fenrir--is the spitting image of Nervous, except green.)

Circe escaped from the asylum too, and I have plans for what she will do next, but those will have to wait a while.

I finished setting up the Punk House, using some more CC to make the abandoned warehouse look extra abandoned-y. The institution sign has been placed so that none of the kids go off to school and no carpools come. The downside is now I have to remember to send any employed sims off to work! YaBet wanted a car, so I got them a restorable one. I set both YaBet and Big V to working on it. Aaaand promptly forgot I had them doing it. At some point the engine must have exploded on YaBet, because she came walking into the main building later. But poor Big V got left on body duty. He finally gave up and came in to eat when called, only to fall asleep in his nuggets and fries. The schedule in the household is going to be wild since there is only one bed. Most of the residents sleep in tents or in the one hammock, which means they don't sleep all night.

I also decided to add the Ottomas family. I have one particular house I like to put them in, which I snagged from Riverblossom Hills ages ago for my lot bin. This time, however, I remembered to remodel it before I moved them in so I didn't have to use their limited funds. The family met a few members of the Hoss family in the Welcome Wagon, since they live right near each other. Dora also stopped Walter Winfield outside for a chat. Sharla brought P2 home from "school" the first day she went. (He's a Punk House kid, who doesn't actually go to school. I had already come up with the idea that if any of them are brought home, it's because they were hanging out around the school.) Samantha had two boys, Paul and James. The household has already upgraded from floor mattresses to actual beds and cribs so they seem to be starting off strong.

I'm playing my medieval fantasy hood again and the families are getting huge despite there just having been a war where there was a chance of men dying (unfortunately not as many died as I had hoped. Thanks random.org :D). The new King's bastards with his favourite mistress were just enobled last round and are now Counts and Countesses. The oldest is now a single father of six toddlers, after both his wives died in childbirth, one of them having twins and the other quads. I actually wanted to move his younger brother and his wife in with him but I guess their royal dad will have to buy them their own residence now. Thank God, he loves his mistress and their children very much and will spoil them. The island where the nobles live is slowly getting very crowded. I guess I will need another war and more birth control to stop it from getting overcrowded.

I played trouble-shooting whack-a-mole with the Bespoke build set late last night and then again this morning. It's a lovely set but danged fiddly. Vincent and Edith Belfast live in one of the Bespoke houses, but it was going to quickly become too small. This necessitated some extending in the back to accommodate some new rooms. In the process of doing so, I erroneously thought the edge pieces would be deleted as I deleted and replaced walls and such. Nope, they remained to later cause routing issues with my sims. I had to delete foundations, floors, and walls, then angle my camera just so to reach them with the hammer I think I got them all. I suppose I'll find out as their family grows from the current twins to other siblings and they start claiming rooms.

In other frustrating news, I moved in the Newsons but feel I made an error in choosing the house. I always gravitate towards one particular lot if I have it available. And I always seem to forget that it never leaves them enough money to properly decorate their rooms. Now I'm left to decide if I want to cheat them some money, or move them out to somewhere else. It always seemed to me they should have a well-established home inherited from their adopted mom. They've already met Bebe Belfast, who took a great interest in both Ginger and Gavin. She wanted to befriend both, which made it seem natural enough that she would help them learn to study. So, I'd hate to move them away from a new friend. On the other hand, they would end up closer to the Barrows. Eh....

I adopted cats for my Mikkelsen family and named them after Grindelwald and Dumbledore.

I just added this beautiful new modern desert villa by @SimsArch to my desert subhood and I'm already jealous of whatever sim is going to buy this real estate!

I spent some time this morning playing the Smith family in Strangetown. I love this family so much. Johnny and Ophelia are constantly having over friends and family for dinner parties and just to hang out in the hot tub. They have a pretty big house now and it always seems to be overrun with people. Since Johnny and Ripp have been living apart, they've both been worrying about falling out of love with each other, but they don't have any romantic wants for each other anymore. I think now that they are getting older, it's time for them both to slow down and enjoy a more relaxed life with their wives and children.

Since the premades in Strangetown are becoming elders, I have to focus on keeping this neighborhood going, as this is usually where I peter out, but I have really enjoyed building up the town and the stories that have emerged this time. I've also enjoyed a more relaxed approach to rotational play, where I don't worry so much about synching up ages. I especially want to see what becomes of Nervous's alien twins. It may be time to introduce some new characters, though, as the town is becoming overrun with Smiths and Curiouses, which is inevitable with Strangetown.

One of my Achilles’ tendons broke right before Thanksgiving. Theoretically the period of immobility and boredom that followed would have been a good time to play Sims, but in practice the configuration of the space under and around my gaming computer made it difficult to impossible a lot of the time and when I attempt it I tire and often have too much pain to do it long. I had reattachment surgery right before Christmas and in nine days - god willing and the creek don’t rise - I’ll get the splint off, but then I’ll be in a walking boot, which will be a great improvement in that I’ll be able to walk and take the thing off in bed, but it’s almost as bulky and I expect I’ll use up most of my limited energy walking around doing the things I have been itching to do for two months. None of this is ideal for my preferred style of simming.

All the same I got an itch in the last couple of days and made the effort to sit up at the computer a handful of hours. First I changed out my folders and opened my retro setup to create a couple from a book. They live in a classical Rome equivalent, where one is a legal clerk and the other owns a snack stand. The first thing I discovered was, that I didn’t have enough classical CC to dress them properly. Then I had to build an insula for them to rent rooms in. I didn’t have the right CC to reproduce the apartment as described and had to make a lot of compromises, and then I couldn’t get the cheat to work to turn it into apartments, not helped by the fact that one of my cats decided I had been up too long and started harassing me to go back to bed. (All the cats clearly understand that I am injured and they fuss over me a lot. ) When I finally got the apartments saved as apartments I quit for the night.

Next day I downloaded a bunch of relevant CC, installed it, and moved the couple in, but when I opened the lot I was stuck in buy/build mode and couldn’t play them. So I moved them back out and moved them to an empty lot and tried to put them into the togas I thought I’d unlocked, but no soap. So I quit.

Yesterday I downloaded an insula somebody else had made, bulldozed the cursed one, and put it down in the same place. I then discovered that though the creator had called it an insula and knew what one was, they had not set it up for easy conversion into a playable insula. Also, it was going to need a perfect plants mod or considerable alteration of landscaping. Oh, and there was an inaccessible staircase so that was fun. I wish people would play test their builds and allow for the fact that we don’t all have the same mods. But I finally got it converted, finally got the sims into togas, and finally got them moved in, though I forgot to rent furnished even though I had the testing cheats on for that purpose. At least I remembered to cheat them a few skills. I used Humble’s computer to buy a community lot and sold it immediately, then got them to the community lot and finally set up the snack stand. I hadn’t spent any time making stock and the only single plates the custom stove would let him make were toaster pastries, so he sold a few of those and we called it a night. Also the cat was nagging me again.

I hope your leg is better very soon @Peni Griffin ! Your couple from the book sound very interesting!

Nine days to walking. If there’s a delay I may combust.

Speaking of combustion, a little while ago, as Nikias, the cook of the couple, was making stock for the snack stand and Kallion, the lawyer, studied, lightning struck a tree on the lot. I had put a hearth barbecue in the common area and a fire alarm bell above it, so the fire truck came in plenty of time. But the fireman ran back and forth frantically complaining that he couldn’t reach the fire! So I went and looked at it, and noticed that it, like most of the plants on the lot had been entirely surrounded by edging, and I had missed it when rendering the landscaping accessible. So there was nothing to do but wait it out.

Suddenly another fire alarm went off and Nikias and Kallion were running out of the apartment while the fireman ran upstairs. Nikias had caught his stove on fire! So that was lucky. The fireman got to do his job, no one was hurt, and Nikias called it a day, took a bath, and invited Kallion on a date.

I have had very little computer time since Mr AnMal spilled coffee over his laptop and we have to share, and both my main neighbourhoods need vacation hoods which I don't want to give them until I've tested and built stuff I actually like. Building and testing stuff I actually like requires long playing sessions. Sigh! So, I decided to play a short challenge in Riverblossom Hills instead. I have built a shell for a manor house and moved in a bachelorette, Laurentina McDermott, and her dog Grizz. The plan is to play a bachelorette challenge with a twist - the bachelors will have to impress not only Laurentina but also her four legged companion. I created half of the bachelors and moved them in, but then disaster struck. I was sitting in my usual corner, which is a bit cramped for space, and I was just going to kick the blanket off my legs but managed to knock over something from the shelf, which fell on the computer cable and the old and probably quite worn cable broke! Poor Laurentina will have to wait for her challenge until I have a new computer cable. But I enjoyed the two short sessions I played building her manor shell and creating the characters involved anyway.

I just decided on a whim that I want a Uberhood, so a neighborhood with Pleasantview as a base and all the other Maxis neighborhoods as subhoods plus the ones recreated from the Stories spinoffs by the Neighborhood group. I already downloaded all the clean template hoods and added them to the folders, except the stories ones, which I'm about to do in a second. The Oldies have moved into a renovated little house, received a make-over and jobs (he's in the military, she will be a freelance writer). The Pleasants & Goths also already got their makeover. I might move out Lilith. Not sure if she will go to college immediately or maybe move in with her grandparents or the Goths. Kaylynn (?, the housemaid. My game is in German so her name is Katharina Landgraf) has been made playable and I don't think she will live in Pleasantview. Just haven't decided where to move her. Maybe Downton or Belladonna Cove (due to the apartments). I also moved in and remarried Bella to Mortimer, as well as change Bella's age to 7 days from aging up (I want them to have a late third child, or else I would have made her an elder). I will probably break up all the teen relationships in Pleasantview. I usually play a medieval hood and I would like to keep a kinda social class system, so the "elite" will try to intermarry to strengthen their power if possible. Not sure what this means for Cassandra and Don yet. Maybe they will be the exception to the rule. Angela will definitely not stay with Dustin, and I also think that Lilith might end up with Alexander Goth instead.
I will finished the make-overs of the Pleasantview neighbors first before adding the first subhood. May give me more structure and overwhelm me less if I do it one neighborhood after another. So for now I'm less playing and more designing the hoods to my liking.

Macchiato Neighbour and his newborn son Socrates moved in with his parents Nextdoor and Melody (Tinker) and Melody's youngest adopted sisters. Macchiato had known since he first got abducted by aliens that he wanted to meet them again, so now that he wasn't alone with the baby he got on his balcony and called for them. Irma Tinker woke up in the middle of the night and was awake to greet him as he came home.



The next day, Macchiato invited over his uncle Cappuchino, uncle and best friend Andreas and sister Temperance to meet Socrates. I thought playing a full hosehold in which two are small children would be stressful, but it's really chill. Between the family members, people the teenagers bring home from school and potential additional guests, there are always a lot of people hanging around and I really like that.


Not to mention Macchiato now has a bunch of people ready to autonomously look after his kids: grandparents, teenage aunts, a family oriented sister, visiting teen... Houdini Neighbour's younger sister just recently grew up to a child, maybe that's why he felt inclined to look after this baby. Though he was quick to hand him over to his grandpa when the diaper needed changing.


Macchiato eventually gave birth to a second son, Turing Neighbour. The relatives were called over once again, first to meet the new kid, and then to celebrate Socrates growing up to a toddler.

I played Nikias and Kallion just shy of a week before a glitch caused me to lose patience and go play some of the other households in the alien zoo. Mrs. Celia Hudson and her two lodgers, Sherrinford Holmes and James Watson, are adjusting well to captivity. James half-killed himself getting three promotions in three days in the medical profession, and Sherrinford has achieved his proper rank of private detective, but neither will be able to advance further in until the household gains some friends. This is Mrs Hudson’s bailiwick and she’s trying, getting out of the house daily to explore the new environment. She won two cooking contests at the Enrichment Center and has met a variety of people but made no friends yet. Sherrinford and James have separate rooms upstairs but they are closer than they fear their landlady will find quite respectable and usually wind up in the same bed at night.

That zoo management is very concerned about the welfare of their exhibits is demonstrated by the rapidity with which they took Oliver and Dodger Foggins from their household in Fingers Foggins’s single room tenement. Although he stopped at Nikias’s snack stand to be sure they’d have something to eat while he and the older boys, Art and Charlie, were out robbing banks and picking pockets, leaving them unsupervised seemed irresponsible to the keepers and when Oliver started jumping rope in the street a keeper was sent to remove them both. (I’ve never seen a social worker come so fast. ) Fingers was distraught. Art and Charlie, adapting to new conditions, went to the Corner Store and bought cell phones and met girls. They rejoiced, on returning home, that Fingers had bought a chamber pot so they had an alternative to the outhouse used by the entire tenement, but no one slept well because Bill Sakes and Nancy next door got into one of their rows.

@Peni Griffin -I've had that issue of not being able to advance my sims at jobs before in the past before adding Mods and that friend requirement was one of the first thing Modded out of my game though the UI still shows it as if it was still active though the game just ignores that now.

I tried to load my game and ended up loading my Pleasantview town up by mistake and got to build another wall on the service center.I had fun working on a few changes in the service center.

If I wanted to mod out the friends requirement I’d’ve done it long ago. My play style tends to accumulate friends fairly effortlessly and in any case my retro setup uses Almighty Hat’s proportional aging mod so there’s plenty of time.

The November girls - Meg, Jo, Beth, and Amy - started their education in the zoo’s special classrooms while Plato tended the garden and the elderly dog that folllowed Meg home. Marmee went to work as a dishwasher and came home a drive through clerk. Jo scribbled away at a novel in the attic till Meg called her to lunch. Plato managed to teach all the girls except Meg to study. Katherine Bunnet next door is shocked by Marmee’s plan to educate her girls above their station and showed her low opinion by stealing the newspaper before they could read anything indelicate in it.

Back at the tenements, Nancy Sakes thinks she’s pregnant and hopes Bill brings enough money home to buy a crib and changing table before it gets here.

I only Modded the friend requirement because it made advacement at jobs impossible in newly started towns and I just pretend it's still there if I don't want to Mod it out even though the game still ignores it.I'll just stop letting them get promoted if they don't meet the friend requrement and wanted that to be active as I might still have a town in my folder where I still need to block that out.I wouldn't have Modded it out if I didn't actually find I needed to though the Mod could easily be removed if I didn't want it installed though it wou;d just be set aside safely though that could be a problem with having to keep taking it in and out.I find it much easlier to just ignore the Mod and act like the friend requirement is still active when I really want it to be active.

I only Modded the friend requirement because it made advacement at jobs impossible in newly started towns and I just pretend it's still there if I don't want to Mod it out even though the game still ignores it.I'll just stop letting them get promoted if they don't meet the friend requrement and wanted that to be active as I might still have a town in my folder where I still need to block that out.I wouldn't have Modded it out if I didn't actually find I needed to though the Mod could easily be removed if I didn't want it installed though it wou;d just be set aside safely though that could be a problem with having to keep taking it in and out.I find it much easlier to just ignore the Mod and act like the friend requirement is still active when I really want it