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?

Fishing prevents zombie attacks

My sim likes to fish and is working on his lifetime wish to have the perfect home aquarium with 13 perfect specimens of different species.  On one trip to the future, he landed just before a full moon, and you know that means that the stupid zombies will soon appear near my sim.  The thing is, if my sim is busy doing something, the zombie attack action can’t be performed because the zombie patiently waits for my sim to finish his action first.

Eventually the zombies will get bored and leave on their own or 6:00 am rolls around and they recover back to regular NPC sims and go home.

Braaaiiiinnnns!!!!!!

So as the legend goes, zombies eat brains. But in Oasis Landing, they’ve found a new way to satisfy that need with the food replicator. It may be a plate full of brains, but that’s no reason not to be civil about the meal, even if it is a zombie’s meal.

Misc tip – finding mushrooms

Mixing elixirs sometimes requires various kinds of mushrooms that can be found throughout the world (as well as occasionally for purchase at Aleister’s Elixirs and Sundries).  Your first thought might be to try using the Collection Helper lifetime reward object to find them, but there isn’t a selection to find mushrooms with it.

Fear not, the mushrooms light up on the map along with the seeds selection in the collection helper.

Sims with enough gardening skill can plant and cultivate more of any mushroom that they find, but any sim can pick mushrooms in the wild like this one.

Cycl0n3 Sw0rd, the fairy

NPC sims get up to a lot of hijinks of their own when you’re not looking.  Apparently Cycl0n3 Sw0rd, the NPC sim with the most ridiculous name in this version (I’m waiting for Goopy Gilscarbo to return with some future update), got pretty friendly with a fairy recently.

What if old Mrs. Crumplebottom decided to get romantic with a vampire?

The gem cutter is just too loud

I’ve mentioned before that the gem cutter shouldn’t be used in a household where sims are trying to sleep because it will wake them up.  I’ve also noted that zombies think it’s too loud.  Well, this week I found that imaginary friends also think that the machine is too loud.

I don’t think there’s any type of character in the game that can tolerate the noise from the gem cutter, except for the sim who is using it.

Well, it’s not cooking bacon…

Malissa is pregnant with her first child, but it seems to be going to her head.  When she showered recently, she chose not to put anything on before moving on with the rest of her day.

I guess this way she won’t get any stains on her clothes when her elixir ingredients splatter.

Preserving the bunny

It seems that the freezer bunny pops up in the most unusual places these days…

Earlier today I found two of them in a jar on the counter at Aleister’s.

Gem jumble

Whenever I have my sim cut more than one gem at a time with the gem cutting machine, the pile that she drops into the hopper just doesn’t quite look right.

It doesn’t matter what kind of gem it is or what cut she chooses, the gem pile always looks like this jumbled mess.  The only time that the gem looks right when she’s adding it to the hopper is when she’s only cutting one gem.  So this bonk is definitely a bug, but unfortunately it isn’t a bug that I can sell at the science lab for extra cash.

Bonehilda isn’t for every sim

So if you’ve been reading this blog for any length of time, you should know by now that I like to get a Bonehilda coffin for my sims whenever possible.  Bonehilda originally appeared in the Sims 2 Makin’ Magic expansion pack, and she was brought to the Sims 3 with the Supernatural expansion pack.

She is an almost do-everything maid that doesn’t need to be fed or paid and she doesn’t try to steal anything from your sims if you don’t pay her.  Bonehilda cleans up dishes, rakes leaves (if you’ve got the Seasons expansion pack installed), changes diapers, puts away leftovers, puts away books, repairs broken items around the house and will even try to put out fires.  One thing I’ve noticed that she won’t do is laundry (which was added with the Ambitions expansion pack and again with University Life).

Bonehilda can be a bit of a troublemaker, kicking over gnomes or even brushing her teeth when she doesn’t have any cleaning or repairing to do.  But with all the good that she does for just the one-time purchase price of her coffin, Bonehilda is not always the best fit for a sim household.



Sims who are easily frightened will freak out when they see her.  During these freakouts, sims cancel all other actions and run away screaming.  If they don’t run far enough and can still see Bonehilda, they will again cancel all actions and run screaming.

There are a few solutions to the freakout problem, including the Midlife Crisis lifetime reward which will let you pick new traits for your sim.  If you don’t want to change your sim’s traits, it can be tricky, but your sims can time Bonehilda’s awakenings and dismissals to those parts of the day when the troubled sims are away from the house.  However, the simplest solution for sims who are too afraid of Bonehilda is to replace her with an executive butler.  The butler can do everything Bonehilda does and he has his own needs, but that’s a discussion for another time.

Zombies – they need to go too…

So I was following my adventuring sim in Al Simhara this week.  The moon turned full while she was there and, sure enough, a zombie appeared right next to my sim as she was getting into her tent for the night.  Since my sim was not available for a zombie attack, the zombie, a townie named Na’im Tut who was apparently an acrobat (thank you, Sims 3 Showtime expansion pack!), shambled around the building at the base camp and did this:

So even though mummies don’t have to go, I guess that becoming a zombie doesn’t remove the bladder need.

Do ghosts ever get allergies?

My sim was at Aleister’s Elixirs and Sundries recently to use the gem cutting machine to avoid having to pay for getting the gems cut (see my previous post about this tool for more information).  While Stacy was working the gem cutter, a couple other sims were making some noise around the corner.

It’s one thing when two normal sims are performing romantic interactions, it’s an entirely different thing when one of them is a ghost.  Both of the sims here are NPCs; the gentleman just wanted to give the ghost some flowers.  Hmmm…  I know that the gold ghost with floating stars is created from death by transmutation, but what do the pink flowers mean again?

Zombies are stupid

Sometimes when zombies appear, they emerge in places where they trap themselves.  It seems that they are programmed to appear on the spot outside the building that is closest to the active sim.  When my sims are in Shang Simla and a full moon occurs while my sims are at the base camp, zombies will often appear on the patch of ground just behind the kitchen.

The trouble is that the zombie can only move between a few squares of land and will get frustrated quickly with a route fail like this.  The only way to fix it, short of editing the lot to provide an escape route from this location, is to reset the zombie sim which teleports him back to his home lot.

A little (black) light reading

What does a zombie do when there isn’t a gnome to kick over and all the player controlled sims are asleep?  He pulls a book out of his pocket and starts reading it, of course!

Zombies are troublemakers too

A while ago I put up a bonk showing Bonehilda kicking a magic gnome.  Well, zombies are just as mischievous…

Magic gnomes move around only once per day, so they leave themselves open to getting kicked over a lot.  This zombie really wanted to give it to my sim’s Master Manchu Magic Gnome on a recent full moon night.  I should have guessed this zombie’s intentions when he showed up with that shirt.

If it’s that loud…

I always wonder about the gem cutter and its noise level.  The noise never seems to bother the sim that is using the gem cutter, but everyone else on the lot complains (as I noted in a previous post); even the zombies complain.  It’s a good thing there isn’t an OSHA rep in the game or he’d make everyone wear ear protection.

So if you want your sim to use the gem cutter late at night but you don’t want to wake everyone on your home lot, load the uncut gems into your sim’s inventory and send your sim to Aleister's Elixirs and Sundries to use the gem cutter there.  Don’t worry, the shop is always open and Aleister won’t charge any usage fees.

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?

Got a lonely sim? Have her call someone

The social need is probably the one that I pay the least attention to in The Sims 3.  It’s not that I don’t want my sims to find mates and build families, it’s just that I keep my sims busy with other activities.  So it’s only natural that my sims will eventually feel lonely and sometimes they won’t want to do anything until they interact with other sims to bring up their social need.

I will often run into a social crash with my sims when I am starting a new game or when I’ve got sims going on extended adventures without any social interactions.  Thankfully, this tip helps in all situations.  By the time my sim has depleted all of her social currency, she has almost always met at least one other sim in her universe.  I will normally, at this point, open up my sim’s relationships panel and look for one of two types of sims for her to call: either a sim from another town or a vampire.

For the foreign sims, I look for those whose portraits are greyed out, which means that they aren’t in the same town as my sim at that moment.  In the example shown here, the sim I’ll have my sim call is from China (note the little sim-China icon on his shoulder), and my sim will “chat long distance” with him.  This interaction completely ignores the game clock and allows my sim to chat with this acquaintance at any time of day to bring her social score up.  You don’t need World Adventures to be able to make long distance calls because there was a base game update that enabled travel to any other town that you have installed, so you could have a sim in Sunset Valley call another sim in Riverview.  Since your sims can travel to other towns, sims from other towns can and do travel to your sim’s town, so it is quite possible to have traveling sims in your relationship panel.  There also does not appear to be any standardized time zones in the game, so any sims in other towns will always answer the phone and be willing to talk.

I also look for vampires (which will be shown with a red outline in the relationship panel), because my sims usually crash their social needs long after bedtime, and vampires (added with the Supernatural expansion pack) tend to stay up at night so they are also good candidates for night calls.

Sims 3 Supernatural tip – gem cutting machine

The Supernatural expansion pack added a machine that would let sims cut gems at no cost – the gem cutting machine.  While it did take the sim through the progression of different cuts from the most basic emerald cut through the moon cut (even the expensive heart cut is there, but it seems to be available right from the beginning of a sim’s use of the machine), the gem cutting machine did not impose any simoleon charge to cut the gems, unlike sending gems away to the gem cutter via the mailbox.

If your sim can’t afford to purchase one outright, head over to the elixir consignment store.  There’s a gem cutting machine there that your sim can use for free.  The machine is quite loud and will wake other sims in the house, even if they are separated from the machine by several floors.  Sims with the heavy sleeper trait may be able to sleep through the noise, but everyone else, including Bonehilda, will be awakened by its noise, and you may see one or more of your sim’s family members come down to complain about the noise.

One other thing I noticed with the machine has to do with a sim’s want list.  When you see this want appear in a sim’s list:

Your first thought might be that as long as you get a gem cut with the machine, it should satisfy this want, right?  Well, it isn’t quite that simple.  You see, in order to satisfy this want, you have to click on the gem cutting machine and select “Cut a stack of gems…” then follow the dialogs to select a gem type and cut.  If you click on a gem in your sim’s inventory and select “Cut [all] with machine…”, your sim will still use the machine and cut the gems, but it won’t satisfy this want.  Starting the interaction from the gem cutting machine is the only way that I’ve seen so far to satisfy the want.

But if this want does appear, it’s an especially quick and simple way to add 200 lifetime happiness points to your sim’s balance.  It’s not a lot, but it adds points faster than just letting your sim be happy.