Butlers do more than just butling

Butlers clean, cook meals and repair broken items around the house.  But they also help to keep the kids company when the parents are asleep or away from the house (so you don’t need a babysitter if you’ve got a butler).  With my sims this week, the child sim sat down to play with the xylophone toy.  Pretty soon, this happened.

The butler sat down in front of Katharine and played with her playing with the xylophone.  Katharine was now not only satisfying her fun need while learning music skills, she was also now getting her social need filled too.

Baby rocks!

The Sims 3 Generations expansion pack added a bunch of new interactions and some new content for different life stages.  One object that I will almost always add to my sim houses from this pack is the rocking chair.  Teens and older sims can rock and nap in the chair, as you might expect, but there’s another interaction that I really like, “rock with baby.”

This interaction helps fulfill social needs for the two sims that are rocking together, but if the baby being rocked is very low on energy, the baby might fall asleep in the older sim’s embrace and replenish some of that energy too.

I have one last tip with the rocking chair, at least for now…  Wait until the parent sims have the want to buy a rocking chair pop up in their wants list, then buy the chair to get a few more lifetime happiness points for your sims.  In the families that I’ve played, this usually occurs somewhere near the baby’s birth, so you won’t have to wait very long.

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.