Misc tip – The fastest way to learn to drive

The Generations expansion pack adds some new interactions at various life stages.  When it’s time to teach teen sims to drive, there is one tip that I like to follow every time.  I can usually get my adult sims to fulfill their lifetime wishes before their children become teens, so I will almost always have one of them use their lifetime reward points to purchase the Motive Mobile van and then make it that sim’s default vehicle.  I direct my teen sims to ask that parent for help learning to drive and just let them go at it.

Normally when a teen sim is learning to drive, the fun bar tanks for both the teen and the adult instructor during the lesson.  Using the Motive Mobile, all the needs for both sims are constantly fulfilled so they can stay out longer.  I usually find that they will continue until the teen has reached level 2 before they stop the lesson, but then I direct them to start the lesson again and they complete level 3 and the teen learns to drive very soon, almost always within 12 sim hours of starting the first lesson.

Even better with this vehicle is that I can send them out after dinner and have them working on this skill overnight while the rest of the family sleeps, and they are also both ready for work and school in the morning with no extra effort.  And since the teen sim is out with parental supervision, she doesn’t get caught for curfew violations.

Don’t be too quick to age up your sim kids

With the exception of the baby (the “pupa” stage) of sims lifetimes, each life stage has objects and interactions that will help them build skills for later life.  Toddlers can play with the xylophone and peg box to learn creativity and logic skills.  Children can play with the building blocks table and the toy stove to learn handiness and cooking skills; children can also read books to increase any skill that has a book available for it.

All of the object interactions will get your toddler and child sims up to skill level three, while reading books will get your child sims up to as high as you’ve got books in your bookshelf, potentially to level ten.

So, after teaching your toddler sims how to walk, talk and use the potty, have them play with the xylophone and peg box to max out those skills before aging them up.  Likewise, have your child sims play with the blocks and read to maximize the skills that you want them to have before aging them up.  Unfortunately, even though the blocks table looks exactly like the same item that is available in The Sims 2, here in The Sims 3, toddler sims cannot play with blocks, and the draw interaction to make artworks (which also helped with the painting skill in The Sims 2) was removed for both age groups.

Once your sims become teens, they can ask adults to help them learn how to drive (if you’ve got the Generations expansion pack installed), but teens can cook on the stove and play musical instruments, so have them work on those skills while they have time.  Teens, of course, can also read to improve their skills.

All of this skill building while your sims are growing will help them once they become young adults because they’ll be farther along at all the skills you had them develop.  With the University Life expansion pack, the scholarships that are available to sims are based on their skill levels, so there is a bonus there too.

Pose with me

Magic gnomes tend to materialize near the things that they like most.  The Little Léon gnome likes nectar racks stocked with rare nectar.  The winter gnome likes snowmen.  And the sculpture gnome likes other sculptures.

If you have enough items that your gnomes like on your lot, your gnomes will be happier, and with Generations installed, you might get a bonus from your gnome family sooner.

Magic gnomes and electronics

Magic gnomes like to appear in front of expensive objects in your sim houses.  They love to look at them, and they love to listen to music and watch TV.  Your sim can turn off the radio or TV, but the next time a gnome moves around, it’s likely to be turned on again.

This is why I never put a radio or TV in my sims’ bedrooms.  When the gnome turns them on, the noise from them will wake the sims in that room.  As long as the bed is not in the same room, it won’t wake your sims, unlike the gem cutting machine…

Misc adventure tip – always go back to tombs

There’s a tip in the game that says you should have your sims save up their simoleons because adventures can be expensive.  I’ve found just the opposite – adventures are very profitable.

After your sims have gone through the various tombs in the three World Adventures destinations, always have your sims go back to walk through them again.  The treasure and relic spawners within the tombs respawn throughout each tomb when your sims return to their home worlds.  Since your sim already opened all the doors and disarmed the traps, she can just walk through the tomb collecting everything in a fraction of the time it took to explore the tomb in the first place.

This screenshot shows portions of five rooms in two different tombs under the Celtic ruins in Champs Les Sims.  There’s a relic on the table nearest the camera, just out of the frame to the right in the corner of the next room is a money bag (the spawner is under a rubble pile the first time through this tomb), there’s a pile of ancient coins on the table in the middle of the screen, just behind that table (the small room that has a secret door entrance) is a gem spawner that sometimes produces extremely rare gems, and in the far background corner we can see another money bag.  Treasure chests will also be refilled, so open them all again too.

The only places treasures don’t respawn are inside sarcophagi.

Misc tip – everyone watches at the wedding arch

If you want your sims to have a wedding at home with all the family watching but you don’t want to throw a wedding party, just use one of the wedding arches available in buy mode.  It’s just a step up from the “have private wedding” personal interaction; it gets the sims to exchange vows but involves the household too.  Use the “get married” interaction on the arch and the couple will, assuming their relationship score is high enough, use the arch as the location to exchange rings.  Plus everyone in the house at the time they do this will come over to the arch to watch it happen.

In my sim’s case, there was only the butler in the house besides the happy couple, but he stopped his butling (going so far as to drop a pile of garbage on the kitchen floor instead of putting it in the trash compactor) to watch the event too.

One more place for public woohoo

This game continues to amaze me with what the developers have added into it.  You’ve probably seen the videos that try to show all of the woohoo places in The Sims.  It’s likely that you’ve had your sims woohoo in bed (duh, who hasn’t?), in the shower, in the hot tub, in an igloo, in a haystack and now in the restorable car that comes with the newest town.

This week I had my young adult sim and her fiancé tour the Wilsonoff Community Theatre on a date.  I wanted to have them watch a movie or see a show together, but instead I found these options in the location action selection:

Yup, they can makeout, woohoo and even try for a baby in the backstage area.  The building stays firmly positioned on its lot, but a shower of hearts falls on the roof to indicate the activity that is occurring inside.

Now I wonder what other rabbitholes also support woohoo?

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.

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.

Most likely to…

Do you remember those “most likely to…” proclamations that were made in your high school yearbook?  Teen sims, with the Generations expansion pack, have a chance of earning one of those in award form when they attend graduation ceremonies from high school.

I had a teen sim graduate this week; she earned the award ribbon shown here as “most likely to rule the world.”  There is a Ruler of the Free World lifetime wish, but my sim wanted to grow the perfect garden instead.  Maybe I’ll have her drink a young again potion and try that wish later…

In the meantime, her award is mounted on her bedroom wall to help with the room décor.

A souvenir from prom

When you send your teen sims to prom, they will almost always come home with a photo from the event.  The photo shows the teen sims in the formalwear outfits that they wore to the dance, and if they went with a date, the date will also appear in the photo.

Prom photos are a little more interesting than other photos because of the poses that sims take when they are being photographed.  Once the sims get home with their souvenirs, the photo can be placed in the house like any other decorative object, helping to give your sims the decorated or nicely decorated moodlet, depending on how many décor objects (especially if they’re more valuable) are in the room

More stuff to buy

So have you ever wondered how to add special “hidden” objects to your sims’ lots?  Almost everything that you see in the game can be purchased and added to your lot, you just have to know how to enable them in buy mode.

Open the cheat window (Ctrl-Shift-C) and type

testingcheatsenabled true

Hit enter and then reopen the cheat window and type

buydebug on

Turning on these two cheats will add all of the special objects to buy mode where you can select and place them like any other object.  They’ll be accessible through the menu labeled with a big ? symbol, like this

The Sims team took some time to add punny names and complete descriptions to all of the objects as well, so take a look through the full inventory and have a chuckle or three.

Misc tip – instant metal smelting and a little more

So you want to send your raw metal ore away for smelting but you don’t want to wait until the next sim day to get the ingots back, right?  The simple solution is to deposit the ore in the mailbox just before the mail carrier is scheduled to arrive at 8:00 AM every sim day.

It doesn’t matter what town your sim is in when she sends the ore to be smelted.  In the screenie shown here, my sim just sent some iridium ore to be smelted in Champs Les Sims.  The mail carrier waiting for my sim to move away from the mailbox is there to deliver the iridium ingots already.

Also, send your metal ore to be smelted while your sim is still in the adventure world.  There is a chance that you’ll get back one of the magical gnomes from that world with or in place of the processed metal.

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.

Misc tip – get started with cooking

When sims are just starting out, one of the first skills that I usually have them work on is cooking.  Sims with no cooking skill are more likely to start a fire when they use the stove (unless they’re using a stove that has been upgraded to fireproof or someone in the family has the fireproof household lifetime reward), so it’s best to start sims either reading the beginning cooking skill book, or by practicing making foods that don’t require the stove.

Sims can usually prepare autumn salads or peanut butter and jelly sandwiches at lunch or dinner,  Since the sim won’t use the stove to prepare it, there is no chance of starting a fire while making these meals.  If you’ve got World Adventures installed, you might see the option to prepare sushi, another dish that doesn’t require use of the stove (the cooked rice they use must be leftover from previous meals).

Misc tip: turn on the radio

When you direct your sims to work on skill building, have them do it in a room that has a radio.  Then turn the radio on.

In the martial arts academy in Shang Simla, there’s a stereo in the upstairs workout room, so I’ll usually send my sims there to get started building this skill.



Sims that are in a room with music playing get a positive Enjoying Music moodlet to go along with whatever they are doing at the time.



Setting the radio to my sim’s favorite channel will usually increase the moodlet’s effect, and the sim’s preference will often dictate what channel the radio is set to when she turns on the radio autonomously.

A new kind of mystery machine

When I send my sims to adventure locations, I always try to ensure that they bring a car with them to get around more quickly than the bicycles or scooters that they get there by default.  But if my sim has earned enough lifetime happiness points for it, I will have them buy the Motive Mobile van and set that as their default car.  The advantage, of course, is that sitting in it will instantly fulfill all of a sim’s needs bars, so I don’t have to have them return to base camp to sleep and wash up between tomb explorations.

But there’s one spot in Shang Simla where driving the Motive Mobile is a little more difficult than I’ve seen at any other location.  When my sim drives this vehicle up the hill to the main residential area, she will sometimes pop out the side of the van.

Something just isn’t right with this mystery machine, and it’s not just that Casey Kasem isn’t doing Shaggy’s voice any more…

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.

Avoiding the Soaked moodlet at dive wells

There are times while exploring a tomb when you do want your sim to have the Soaked moodlet – for example, just before trying to cross a fire trap.  However, since this moodlet subtracts from your sim’s current happiness value, it is better to avoid it when you don’t need it.  So when you need to explore a dive well, a quick change of clothes is in order.

When your sim is dressed in swimwear, exploring a dive well will not give your sim the Soaked moodlet.  She will emerge from the dive well fully dried off.  Changing to swimwear before a dive is just one quick step, and if you forget, have your sim change clothes after emerging from the dive well and the Soaked moodlet will disappear after she puts on the dry clothes.  How those clothes in her exceedingly tiny pocket (while in swimwear) stay dry while she’s underwater in the dive well or where the invisible magic towel comes from and goes to after swimming remains a mystery.