When zombies get bored

If your sim is in the middle of an action when the zombies appear, the zombies will usually wait around for your sim to finish the action before they launch their zombie attack.  My sim kept fishing long enough for the zombies to get bored, so one pulled out her umbrella to wait a little longer and another chose to fly around with his jetpack for a while.

I’ve also seen zombies reading, eating and going potty (unlike mummies).  What have you seen zombies do?

They’re still out there

So it looks like two generations into the future isn’t quite far enough for sims to have formed diplomatic relations with extra-terrestrial life. The aliens still come to Oasis Landing for abductions.

Maybe the sim government has allowed the aliens a maximum quota of abductions…

Ghost sims on the water

My sim was building up the free Hobart’s Hideaway resort on Isla Paradiso this month. The improvements were good enough that a family of ghosts arrived to spend some vacation time there. But when it was time to leave, each of them went a different direction, like this ghost who chose a personal watercraft to depart.

Maybe now that he’s warmed up at the resort, he won’t have the teeth chattering moodlet so much from his frozen death.

Strange things happen during a full moon

Sim behaviors change for the odd on nights when there is a full moon. Not only do zombies randomly emerge from the ground (sometimes in places where they can’t find an escape path), and sims will spontaneously kiss or slap other sims, but they will also choose completely inappropriate clothing for the task at hand.

I guess she just wants to be ready for the monthly zombie sim apocalypse.

An alien! On a scooter!

We know that aliens were introduced to The Sims 3 with the Seasons expansion pack.  We also know, from previous sightings, that aliens like to travel to the vacation worlds.  But I thought they used their own spaceships to get around town and not the default scooter in Champs Les Sims.

He probably didn’t have enough tea and not tea to power his infinite improbability drive.

Lightning strikes, sometimes hitting sims

If your sim goes outside during a heavy rain, she might stop what she’s doing for the action shown below.

The tooltip on that action queue icon in the upper left corner is “Get Struck By Lightning” which is exactly what’s about to happen…

Except for the flash from the lightning and the boom from the associated thunder, the effect is the same as if the sim were electrocuted, like when a sim with a very low handiness skill tries to repair something electrical (especially if there’s a puddle of water where the sim is repairing it).

Once the lightning has dissipated, the sim is singed.  Bathing will clean the sim up again, but don’t be surprised if she doesn’t want to go out in the rain again right away.

Lifeguarding in the snow

When sims work as a lifeguard, the game randomly picks the beach for them to patrol in the course of their duties.  In towns where winter is enabled, the lifeguards still have to go out in the snow and cold to rescue beachgoers.  Why they’re going out to the beach when it’s so cold out is a different question, but even with several inches of snow on the ground, the lifeguard still has CPR to administer to unlucky sims.

The lifeguard sim will get cold from being outside all day, so give him the immune to cold lifetime reward when he can afford it.  He’ll need it for days like this.

Misc tips – gardening like a boss

One of the lifetime aspirations is for sims to grow eight different types of plants to perfect quality.  There are the obvious steps to this, including leveling up the gardening skill, fertilizing the plants and starting plants from the higher-quality output of previously grown plants.  But there are a couple other steps that I have my sims take when they are building the perfect garden.

The first and most obvious tip is to leave some room between the plants as you place them in your garden.  Sims won’t walk through plants that are spaced directly next to each other, so plants that are in the middle of clumps like that might wilt and die from neglect.  It doesn’t seem to matter which plants are near each other, there just needs to be enough space for a sim to get in to tend the plants.

I always install sprinklers in my sims’ gardens, and I have the sim with the highest handiness skill upgrade them to auto-water sprinklers.  With the now automatic sprinklers, my gardening sim won’t have to water the plants when she goes out to tend the garden.  Place the sprinklers so that their 5x5 coverage area (which is shown when you’re placing it in buy mode) covers as much of the garden as possible.  The garden shown here is 10x10, so there are four sprinklers.  Besides watering the plants, the sprinklers can also provide some fun as sims play in the spaying water; don’t worry, though, they play carefully enough that they don’t stomp on any of the plants in the garden.

I also always build a fence around my garden and lock the gate to everyone but the sim’s family members.  This will keep the zombies out when they spawn next to the garden on the full moon.  Zombies like to eat harvestable plants whenever they can get to them, and the fence will block them.

Whichever sim is going on adventures should also take some time to harvest the plants that are specific to those locations and then give the produce to the gardener.  With a wider array of plant types, it’s easier to find eight different species to use for your sim’s target perfection count.  Also don’t forget to go to the Fall festival to get some pumpkin to add to your garden.

As your sim’s garden grows higher quality plants, put the surplus produce in the fridge so the chef in your family can use them to make higher quality meals that will keep your sims satisfied longer.

Finally, when your gardener isn’t actively tending the garden, have her learn the fishing skill.  Fish make excellent fertilizer.

Oh, and yes, the seed for the money tree also counts toward the eight different species of plants, so if you find that seed, use it.

Brrrr!!!!

NPC sims always seem to pick the most inappropriate clothing, like Holly Alto did for going out and making snow angels…

Well, at least she’s happy.

This ghost might slip

My sim went to the graveyard late one winter night recently.  After spending some time skating around on the pond then chatting with another visitor, this ghost appeared and walked out onto the ice.

He walked very carefully across the ice as if he would slip and fall.  Now, ghosts float around the sim world everywhere else, why don’t they float across frozen ponds?

Sims and their costumes

It seems like the most common costumes that sims choose for costume parties are either the tiger or the hot dog.  At my sim’s most recent costume party, she went in a white formal dress with some facial makeup (I’m guessing that this costume represents a good witch or something of the sort), while another guest showed up in a costume I hadn’t seen before.

He’s a cow plant!

There are strange things happening in Al Simhara

So last week, I wrote about the reintroduction of aliens from the Sims 3 Seasons (yes, I know I originally noted that it was the Supernatural expansion pack; whoops!).  I mentioned then that the abduction wasn’t the only way to meet an alien.  Sometimes, aliens will randomly visit your sim’s active town, and they’ll even visit towns where your sim is traveling, like this alien who ran past my sim in Al Simhara this week.

When aliens are out and about in the town, you can usually direct your sim to interact with them and even go so far as to befriend them and marry them into your sim family, but that’s a story for another day.

To the moon, Alice!

In The Sims 2, sims who used the telescope to explore the sky would sometimes find that they had summoned visitors.  In The Sims 3, we had to wait until the addition of the Supernatural Seasons expansion pack to get extraterrestrial visitors back into the game.  But the aliens that were added with this pack were much more interactive than those in The Sims 2.  For one thing, the aliens in Supernatural could become playable sims.

There are a few ways to meet and interact with aliens.  The first and most obvious is to wait for your sim to see mysterious lights in the sky just above her.  The sim will be so intrigued by the lights that she will cancel all interactions and go to investigate the mysterious lights.



This interaction will often occur at night, but I’ve seen it happen at all times of the sim day.  It also doesn’t seem to matter if sims are indoors or not.  When this interaction appears, the sim will go outside and stand under the lights looking up at them for a couple sim minutes.



If you let the interaction continue, the lights will eventually dissolve and you’ll see a spinning alien craft and its controller appear and the alien will use an antigravity beam to lift your sim off the ground and into the ship.



After about a sim half hour, the alien ship will return, land on the street near where the abduction occurred and your sim and the alien will both appear on the sidewalk.




When the sim is returned, there aren’t a whole lot of interactions that she can perform with the alien right then.  You might be able to have her heckle the alien if you’ve got the Showtime expansion pack installed, but the alien is almost immediately running back to the ship to return to space.  Female sims don’t get a whole lot out of alien abductions other than the negative Abducted moodlet.



If it was a male sim who was abducted, he will soon go through the stages of sim pregnancy and an alien baby will be added to your sim family (I don’t have screenshots of this right now, but I’ll post them as soon as I get them).

This isn’t the only way for a sim to encounter an alien, and there’s a lot more to tell about aliens once they join your family as playable sims, but if I told you everything about that now, I wouldn’t have anything to post about later.  So, watch this blog for more soon.  Besides, it’s time for the Doctor Who 50th anniversary special, and I’ve got other aliens to watch for a little bit.

Carven der punkin

Okay, so this image today isn’t really unexpected but rather just showing normal gameplay (therefore, I don’t really count this as a bonk image).  I have been a bit busy this week with finishing photo projects and meeting with clients so my sim play time has been a bit shorter than other weeks.  Anyway, because the real Spooky Day is two weeks from now, my sim is carving a pumpkin.

To make this a little more than just a “look at this” post, here are some quick tips regarding pumpkins:

• Send your sim to the Fall Festival to harvest pumpkins.  They are free from the pumpkin patch at the festival and your sim will usually harvest pumpkins from several plants if you just let her work at it.  You might find pumpkin seeds from random spawners around the town, but there are always pumpkin patches at the Fall Festival lots that were included in the standard sim towns (and during the other seasons, the grocery store sells pumpkins year-round).
• When your sim carves a pumpkin, she will retain the seeds which can then be planted by sims with gardening skills to grow and harvest more pumpkins.  This of course leads to increasing your sim’s gardening skills and higher quality fruit, which itself leads to higher quality seeds and if you keep planting and harvesting them, you’ll get perfect quality pumpkins in just a couple growing cycles.
• Watch out for troublemaking sims after you’ve put your carved pumpkins on your sim’s porch.  Sometimes you may find that your pumpkin has been smashed.
• As your sims carve more pumpkins, they will create higher quality carvings and unlock more types of carvings, in much the same way as making snowmen can unlock different types of snowmen that the sim can build.
• Finally, be sure to check out the cookbooks at the bookstore.  There are a couple recipes sims can learn that use pumpkins.  For sims whose favorite food is pumpkin pie, learning this recipe can be quite useful to get your sim’s hunger need satisfied quicker than with other food.

Another kind of snowman

So I knew that when sims practice making snowmen they can unlock new types of snowmen.  So far, my playable characters haven’t gotten beyond the traditional snowman because I’ve been having them practice other skills to reach their lifetime goals.  But when Ashley was in Shang Sim-la to help me make some tomb walkthrough videos, a townie built this type that I hadn’t seen yet…

Later in that same sim day, I had Ashley sleeping in her tent on the market lot and a meteorite fell on it (but I was able to wake her and get her out of danger before impact).  That leads me to wonder: did the reaper snowman cause the meteorite or was it just a coincidence?

After the meteorite impact, I sent Ashley back to base camp where she found a s-GNOME-man Bittertotter magic gnome next to the mailbox.  Bonus!

A zombie acrobat in the rain at university

It’s always interesting to see the ways that the many Sims 3 expansion packs combine to create unexpected situations.  In this case, there are elements of four different packs visible.

Earlier this summer I sent one of my sims to university.  Every full moon, the zombies spawn from underground all around my sim’s home.  Sometimes it’s raining on the evening of the full moon, and who spawns as a zombie for the night is a random selection of other NPC sims in the town.  In this case, the zombified sim was a fairly accomplished acrobat (judging by the higher-level career uniform).

Only two questions though… Why do zombies need to keep out of the rain?  and What happened to her right hand to get her fingers all bent backward like that?