I'm a simmer and I like to share...
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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!
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.
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?
