00000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000 The Sims 2 University Practical FAQ 00000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000 Creator Information: Author: TheSocialBunny (Zephos Amaranis) E-Mail: [email protected] Personal Website: http://www.xynthica.com FAQ Information: Version: 1.02 Date of Creation: April 10, 2006 Date of Last Update: January 28, 2006 ============================================================================= Update Comment: Wow, it sure has been a while since I updated this old wall of text! Honestly, when I went on to the Nightlife FAQ, I abandoned the though of ever updating this FAQ again, kinda' assuming that Nightlife was the current The Sims 2 frontier and eyes would be on there instead of here. Well, now due to the most excellent response - proving me quite wrong, I decided to pick it up and run with it for one more revision! Since this FAQ was written before The Sims 2: Nightlife was released, there is a great deal of information that did not get taken into account with the contributions that Nightlife would make, specifically the Pleasure Seeker aspiration, the new inventory system and the new Influence commands. For detailed information regarding these, please consult my Nightlife FAQ which covers the details in conjunction with The Sims 2: University retroactively. As a side note, this update is made simultaneously with my Nightlife FAQ, as I want to wipe my slate of old research and ideas clean before The Sims 2: Open for Business is released. The FAQ has been upgraded all around, but specifically, the Graduation section has been expanded into Graduation & Honors and now covers what different degrees of honors a sim can graduate with along with the job boosting bonuses that come with them and a few unconfirmed bits were cleared up in such matters as Lifetime wants. In regards to the popular Action Guide, please consult the Nightlife version if you have both expansion packs, as it has been significantly upgraded. Hopefully in the near future, I will be able to unite my FAQs so that they compliment each other better instead of repeat themselves so much. That or I just might make the Action Guide it's own FAQ, one of the two. Till then, thank you for your patience. ^_^ ============================================================================= Introduction: 00000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000 The Sims 2: University is the newest and first expansion pack added to The Sims 2, and offers a whole new perspective upon simulated life that reinforces the original game significantly, but enough of the one sentence review and onto the nitty gritty. This bad girl of a game draws up many different styles of game play, from the practical hardcore gamers, to the social experimentalists, to the fun filled cheaters, to the fine folks with a mean streak a mile wide and the tendency to "accidentally" kill off their sims, there really is no "right" way to play this game. That being said this is a FAQ dedicated to playing the game in a way that you're sims will probably not hate you for should they ever manifest themselves in reality with the opportunity to wring your neck, albeit I frequently do tend to refer to the reverse. There are three goals of this FAQ, as although I originally wrote it to be a small guide on the new expansion; it has accumulated into quite the perpetual ball of text on its own. The first goal is covering The Sims 2 University in detail with effective strategies that yield maximum payoff for minimal work (Like cheating, but less fun). The second is revealing obscure facets of the game to widen your enjoyment, like how to have a sim do the sexy walk or how the pool skill system really works. Finally, I'll tell you how to get a Level 99 Popularity Aspiration sim with enough output to live off of Enigmatic Energizers and defeat the last boss, the social bunny, in one hit. Well, unfortunately I still got some old school console RPG gamer in me, but seriously, making an ultimate sim with the most useful set of commands, optimized personality, the highest aspiration output, maximized skills, the most profitable job, not a single bad memory, lifetime platinum aspiration and enough children and grand children to make her own city happens to be my favorite way of playing this game and I will often step off to the side to describe just how to do that... in not so many words. This is The Sims 2: University Practical FAQ and focuses on strategy to play through university well, but is not designed to cover the entire scope of The Sims 2 like an encyclopedia to which many other FAQs hold the credit for. As such, I will leave what is not written is this document to rest on the highly capable shoulders of former and future FAQ writers with the humblest of gratitude. ============================================================================= Table of Contents: Chapter 1: Knowing What You've Gotten Yourself Into [1] What University Can Do For Your Sims [1.01] Why Send Your Sims to University? [1.02] What Is New In The Sims 2 University? [2] Reviewing the Play Mechanics for University [2.01] Motives [2.02] Personality [2.03] Aspiration [2.04] Skills [2.05] Interests [3] Off To University We Go [3.01] Before Going To University [3.02] Scholarships [3.03] Moving to University [3.04] Housing [3.05] About Young Adults Chapter 2: The Four Big University Goals [4] Graduate Summa Cum Laude: [4.01] Majors [4.02] Class Performance [4.03] Graduation & Honors [5] The Big Sim on Campus [5.01] Meeting New Sims [5.02] Invite Them Over [5.03] Three Hit Combo Routine [5.04] Becoming Best Friends and Beyond [6] The Ultimate Greek House Legacy [6.01] Planning A Legend [6.02] Reaching For A Level 6 Greek House [6.03] The Greek House Ladder [6.04] Getting Your Greek House Started [6.05] Greek House Features [6.06] Continuing the Legacy [7] The Secret Society [7.01] How to Get Into the Secret Society [7.02] Arriving At the Secret Society [7.03] The Secret Society and You [7.04] Different Types of Base Secret Society Buildings [7.05] Expanding the Secret Society [7.06] Must Have Items for the Secret Society [7.07] Ways to Make Money In the Secret Society [7.08] Secret Society Secrets [7.09] After Graduation Chapter 3: Making Money at University And Beyond [8] Making Money at University [8.01] Academic Grants [8.02] Odd Jobs and Other Sources of Income [9] The Top of The New Careers: [9.01] Show Business [9.02] Natural Scientist [9.03] Paranormal [9.04] Artist [9.05] Chance Cards [10] Career Rewards [10.01] Dr. Vu's Automated Cosmetic [10.02] Laganaphyllis Simnovorii [10.03] Resurrect-O-Nomitron [10.04] Luminous Pro Antique Camera Chapter 4: New Game Play Mechanics [11] Under the Influence [11.01] Influence Level [11.02] Influence Points [11.03] Being A Good Influence: [11.04] Being A Bad Influence: [12] Lifetime Wants [13] Household Merging: Chapter 5: Miscellaneous [14] NPCs [14.01] The House Crashers: [14.02] New Service Sims [14.03] Supernatural NPCs [14.05] Relying on Townies [15] Time Frames [16] How to Have a Roof Raiser of a Party [16.01] Party Types [16.02] Party Score [16.03] Rules of A Great Party: [17] Compulsive Clothing Compiling Chapter 6: The Quest for The Ultimate Sim [18] Studying Your Sim [18.01] The Sims 2 Endurance Trial [18.02]Skill Building: [18.03] Male Versus Female Sims: [18.04] Aspiration and Personality Optimization [18.05] The Fat and the Fit [19] Special Skills, Commands and Actions [19.01] Hidden Skills: [19.02] Age Based Interactions [19.03] Special Manual Commands: [19.04] Special Effects [19.05] Automatic Commands [19.06] Portable Devices [20]Fear, Anger, Hatred and Suffering: [20.01] Motive Desperation Actions [20.02] Aspiration Desperation: [20.03] When Disaster Strikes [20.04] Reactions to Sim Death [21]The Darker Side of the Sims [21.01] Evil Aspiration [21.02] Sim Fatality Chapter 7: Wrapping Up [21] Trivia: [22] Closure [23] Copyright [24] Legal Stuff [25] Special Thanks: ============================================================================= ***************************************************************************** Chapter 1: Knowing What You've Gotten Yourself Into ***************************************************************************** [1] What University Can Do For Your Sims ----------------------------------------------------------------------------- [1.01] Why Send Your Sims to University? Teen's are given the opportunity anytime during their growth stage to go and attend university, but much like in real life, going to university is quite optional and you can have them go straight to adulthood at the end of their growth stage, should you desire. Sure, higher education doesn't necessarily mean better jobs in real life as much as having a social network of friends wide enough to cover the Grand Canyon, but in The Sims 2, going to university and graduating clearly has advantages, and huge ones at that: 1. Four new careers are unlocked to graduates! These super careers take higher skills and more friends, but offer a lot more money, less work days, and better hours! Along with these new careers are four new fun career rewards. Here are the details: -Show Business: Career Reward: Dr. Vu's Automated Cosmetic (Level 6: Supporting Player) -Natural Scientist: Career Reward: Laganaphyllis Simnovorii (Level 6: Rogue Botanist) -Paranormal: Career Reward: Resurrect-O-Nomitron (Level 5: Medium) -Artist: Career Reward: Luminous Pro Antique Camera (Level 5: Wedding Photographer) 2. Sims get natural aspiration bonuses at the end of each year in University: -Freshmen: +1 Want Slot -Sophomore: Aspiration Change -Junior: +1 Lock Slot -Senior: +1 Want Slot At the end of graduation, you sim will be able to ultimately have 6 wants and the ability to use two locks, which becomes invaluable. In the scenario that you hate your sims, unlucky sims who have been forcibly expelled from college get an additional fear slot for you to exploit in the name of jolly good fun, and as a reminder, your sim will get a tiny red x across their young adult icon. You can avoid getting the extra fear slot by dropping out voluntarily using the phone to call college, and instead of the red x, your sim's young adult icon will have a white cross out on it. Other advantages to going to university include extending your sim's life naturally by almost thirty days without academic probation, the time to make new friends, and increase base skills so you can start off higher on the career ladder after you exit university. Sims who have traveled the full way to graduation also retain several young adult exclusive social interactions like the school cheer and those who graduate with honors get a good automatic career boost that allows them to leap positions. As proof of graduation, you also get a nifty looking diploma made out of faux sheep skin and the satisfaction of knowing that although you may have saved one sheep, that larger than normal sized cow plant of doom you're inevitably rooting for is going to eat dozens of people thanks to your new found education. All in all, not counting the penalty of academic probation, a sim will take 27 days to go through university with three days for eight semesters and three days of post graduation. ----------------------------------------------------------------------------- [1.02] What Is New In the Sims 2 University? The Sims 2 University is anything but a light add on to an already superior game and having more than a dozen commonly used social actions and multiple new objects, some like the pool table that you will be sure to enjoy, doesn't hurt either. You can also now throw sports parties and toga parties, and of course, there's the entire gigantic young adult phase and university that is the focus of the game bit. The Sims 2 University also adds three vital new game play mechanics, influence, lifetime wants and the ability to merge households. If you were ever ticked off about computer controlled sims always being overly expendable filler pawns, then influence wouldn't change a thing there, but if you wanted one of them to try and fix a garbage compactor unit far beyond their skill limit and light up like a Christmas Tree or have two best friends get into a slap fight then write your term paper, then you're going to love influence. Lifetime wants are also a smart add on to the game, and allow a sim who completes a difficult task in line with their aspiration to achieve platinum mood for the rest of their life, no more worries about the Noodle Soother killing your sim or the Enigmatic Energizer roasting them extra crispy. House merging is an appreciated new feature that allows players to combine two or more households together and avoid the hassle of having your sims move in or marry their way in manually. These three new underlying features effect the entire style and direction of game play you will take, and tacked on with several other new features revealed later in this document, and you can see why I'm quite enthusiastic about writing this FAQ. ============================================================================= [2] Reviewing the Play Mechanics for University Still at the core of The Sims 2 University are of course the sims themselves. Knowing how sims operate is vital to putting them through university. No two sims are exactly the same, even if you tried to create a sim exactly the same as another one without cheating, they're original set of interests and life time wants will most likely be different. Although based on the core game, this following basic segment covers the standard rules of The Sims 2 and how you can use them to your advantage in university. There is also a special section that further scrutinizes this information later on in "The Quest for the Ultimate Sim" section. ----------------------------------------------------------------------------- [2.01] Motives: Motives, sometimes called needs, are the things that prevent your sim from kicking the can before their time or going insane, so be sure they have them fulfilled so they can worry about bigger things. The main strategy involved in The Sims 2, much like the original, is the ability to multitask and know when and how to do things and what to expect as a reaction. Fortunately, this is a very user friendly game, and you usually have to be trying to get your sims to die prematurely by motive deprivation. ----------------------- Hunger: The most important motive, most likely because your sim will die if you ignore it for too long. Well before that though, your sim will start screaming, nagging, and start refusing to do anything beneficial until it is met, sometimes even interrupting his/her own cooking, resulting in a fiery finale. Hunger is one of the biggest pulls on a sim's mood, and as such, should always a priority above other motives. This bar should be at least above half unless you are in a desperate fight with time. The best way to fill Hunger is to have a sim with level 10 cook whip up something, anything. Even a Cup o' Ramen can refill almost half of a hunger bar if cooked by a master, but unfortunately, if your sim is fresh off the bus, he stands a higher chance of incinerating himself in the kitchen than anything else, so fortunately, that's where the university cafeterias come in handy. At university, cafeteria workers cook breakfast, lunch and dinner, but be sure to go for the fresh food they bring out, or else your sim might accidentally come down with food poisoning. ----------------------- Fun: An extremely important factor, especially in university, where almost anything academic sucks fun away like a proverbial sponge. Fortunately, there are many useful ways to increase fun that also double for skill building, such as playing chess, performing music and painting. The best ways to raise fun, depending on if your sim is lazy/active or serious/playful is to either watch The Yummy Channel on the most expensive wide screen television or playing pool. Both ways also can increase social if done in good company and increase skills, albeit the Pool ability is a hidden skill. They both also can ignore a sim's refusal in a bad mood, since both are unconventional skill building methods, as opposed to playing chess, which a sim will not do if their mood is in the red. Sims who also have an exceptionally neat or active personality can also derive fun from cleaning or exercising where other sims would rather get a root canal. When a sim is almost empty on fun, they become very difficult to handle, complaining every single chance they get and will also not be able to do most of the essential skill building activities due to a bad mood. ----------------------- Comfort: You typically don't need to worry about comfort unless your sim is sick, in which case it drains like a broken shower. Just having one good chair or couch around for their favorite activity and giving them a good night's sleep on time usually does the trick. The worst case scenario of comfort deprivation isn't too horrible either. They just do the usual complaining, but it's not too hard to handle. ----------------------- Social: Sims are social animals, and if they don't talk to anyone, they go a little bit crazy and summon their imaginary furry friend the social bunny! Fortunately, Social is easy to maintain in the Sims 2, and can be easily remedied by interacting with a good friend. As a matter of fact, having low social can actually be useful, as sims will usually talk on the phone all the way until their social meters are full, as opposed to the usual two or three topic exchanges that occur should you call on a full meter. A very low social meter can be a great opportunity to make a new friend out of a complete stranger when using the phone. ----------------------- Bladder: When a sim has gotta' go, a sim has got to go and there is only one solution. Well, actually, not really. Desperate male sims apparently can take a whiz on shrubs and bushes and there is always the Enigmatic Energizer, but for the most part, the good old toilet is your best friend. Bladder goes down fast, but fills up faster when a sim decides to relieve themselves. Ignoring low bladder causes your sim to wet themselves, resulting in zero hygiene and some cleaning up to do. ----------------------- Hygiene: You know you've ignored this too long when your sim starts venting noxious green gas as they run around the house like a superhero in the spring time. The best way to remedy low hygiene is a good hot shower. Although taking a bath or a bubble bath raises comfort as well, it's slower than a shower and usually remedied when you sim sits or sleeps. The new community showers at dorms are unfortunately, quite sub par, but when you barely have enough money to pay the bills, you don't really have a choice. Hygiene should be especially monitored when your sim exercises. For the most part, Yoga is the only exercise that doesn't melt away at hygiene. No really horrible effects come from low hygiene except fellow sims are repelled away and may be difficult to deal with when the number one thing on their mind is how to get away from the stench. ----------------------- Energy: Although it has almost no effect on mood, it's going to almost always be the bar that your eye will be most focused on, because it is also the motive with the longest recovery time and which a sim's time frame operates around. Even with the best of beds, Energy takes a few hours to recover unless you're keen about the idea of pumping your sim full of caffeine. Sims who run completely out of energy faint, which is never a good thing, so make sure your sims have enough energy going for them whenever they go to class or a community lot. If you have a sim with enough aspiration, relying completely on the Enigmatic Energizer is a very good idea at university, actually, relying on the Enigmatic Energizer for everyday of their life is an even better one, but in order to get a sim that well developed already, you must have already played them quite a bit before they became young adults. ----------------------- Environment: A surprisingly unpredictable motive that is based on the area that the sim is in at any given time, not just the room as a whole. Although difficult, it is possible to get perfect environment, all you need are expensive wall coverings and tiles, lots of light and for the room not to be a hive of scum and villainy filled with puddles, dirty dishes or other signs of filth. Usually, the most forgotten factor is light, sometimes, you have to double up lights or make sure that they are on during the day time if your house is lacking windows. Environment is rated on several different factors that have maximums and are generalized, so stuffing your room full of expensive art can only do so much to counter the smell of rotten meat and bad interior design. Outside, environment is a whole different ball game, but typically, the best ways to boost it are trees. Trees don't require maintenance while an overgrown shrub or rotten patch of flowers can damage environment more than help it. Environment is probably the least important factor in the game, but it is the only one that once you have established well, you can count on to be consistent, so getting the favorite room in your house perfect can be a lot of fun and help to make your sims happy and content while in it. In university, you'll be decorating your dorm room and building a legacy worthy Greek House, so keeping environment in mind is always the right idea. ----------------------------------------------------------------------------- [2.02] Personality: Sims with different personalities have different AI tendencies, learn certain skills faster or slower, but most importantly, they gain or lose new abilities. The following is a run down of the differences between the negative personalities and the positive ones. All custom sims start off the bat with 25 personality points allocated to chosen areas but it is very possible to make a sim with perfect negative or positive personality through parental encouragement, albeit, it takes quite the while and you must have made the parents with full personality in two areas each and made the child perfect in remaining one to cover all five categories. I've been able to do this three times, but in my opinion, the "Perfect" personality sim isn't one who has full blue on everything. Of important note is that the description of the skills and personalities in the game might leave you to believe that some of the negative personalities help build skills. This is only true in one case. ----------------------- Negative Personality: (What Makes Sims Interesting To Watch) Sloppy: Nothing particularly good comes from being sloppy, at its extreme, it causes havoc with unflushed toilets, flooded showers and increased hygiene deterioration to a very high degree. A perfectly neat sim can still be in the healthy green while a completely sloppy sim will be in the red in the same amount of time. It allows sims the ability to lick dishes clean, take sponge baths in the sink out of desperation automatically, and have the ability to salvage the trash for sub-minimal profit, but ultimately these abilities are virtually useless for a productive sims, granted, they make for excellent home videos. Sloppy sims are also hazardous to the dinner table, belching, farting, eating, and even cooking like pigs. On one hand, if you are a practical gamer, there is very little point in having a sloppy sim, but its loads of fun if you are playing solely for the sake of having fun. Sloppy sims, as you can guess, are absolutely horrible at gaining Neat skill points. On the positive side though, sloppy sims are more tolerant to other's messes or rude behavior and can actually improve relationships with sims who try the "Gross Out" action on them. ----------------------- Shy: One of the better negative personalities to have. Being shy decreases the speed at which the social motive deteriorates. In return, they become a little less open to other sims' social interactions, making them less prominent when controlled by the computer, but also makes them quite a bit safer. Naturally, they are slow to learn charisma, not being very open to the world and all. Shy sims make great Knowledge Aspiration sims though, and can switch later to a Fortune or Popularity type after the sophomore year at university and live a good life as a stay at home painter or writer. A completely shy sim will have a social need that decreases about half as fast as a perfectly outgoing sim. Shy sims seem to also be more enthusiastic about more subtle expressions of love, such as the all purpose peck. ----------------------- Lazy: Lazy is the absolute worst personality trait to have, not only does it disable a sim's ability to run long distances more so unless they're energy bar is almost full, but it also drains energy at an annoying rate that really gets on your nerves when you are at community lots. If that wasn't bad enough, Lazy sims also need more comfort than active sims and have a bar that decreases much faster to meet that aspect. Lazy sims also have the natural AI tendency to want to lounge and sit around while an active sim is up and about. In return for their disadvantages, they also consume less food as their hunger meters decrease slower. Unfortunately, this fact also makes them more prone to weight gain unless carefully monitored. If there was a negative personality trait to avoid, this would be it and body being one of the hardest skills to gain due to heavy hygiene drain doesn't help either. Oh, on the bright side though, if you were playing a game of "Who Can Stand Still the Longest and Not Die", a Lazy sim will beat an active one hands down because they consume less food and must be awake in order to die ironically enough. ----------------------- Serious: This is the best negative personality trait to have and is actually beneficial towards gaining logic skill points faster, making it the only negative personality trait to make gaining skill points faster instead of slower. Unfortunately, it constricts a few interactive abilities, but in return the fun meter decreases slower, as well as the ability to gain Creativity Skill points. Another bonus offered by serious to moderately playful sims is the ability to meditate. Meditation locks all of the motives of the selected sim and they can gain the ability to teleport if they have meditated long enough to train the skill. The ability to meditate disappears at eight points of playfulness. If you were to pick one factor of personality to have a big burning hole in, this should be it. An extremely serious sim will have a decrease in fun roughly half of that of a perfectly playful sim. ----------------------- Grouchy: Nothing particularly good comes from being grouchy. For one thing, grouchy sims love to cheat, tease and pull pranks on their own, which makes them difficult to get along with naturally. Make two grouchy sims play chess with each other, and watch them continuously try to cheat each other and get caught, it's actually quite funny. They're tendency to go sour during conversations might also ruin their potential, but it's not life crippling. However, grouchy sims can make Crank Calls, which do have uses as revealed in a later sections. Finally, they seem to gain an additional social boost by pulling pranks and negative social interactions like irritating or fighting more so than nice ones. Grouchy sims also get a little more satisfaction out of some of the more dirty romantic social interactions, like goosing their love interests. ----------------------- Positive Personality: (What Makes Sims That Don't Suck) Neat: There are only two bad things about having a neat personality. First of all is the tendency to want to make the bed every morning, it sometimes interrupts the best of plans as they do a full orbit around your house back to the bed and can't seem to be canceled. The second problem is that they occasionally gain a fear of using public washrooms. This aside, neat sims always put their dishes away, flush the toilet and take joy in the pleasure of cleaning. Yes, they actually gain fun out of cleaning crud off of the toilet. To top that off, they learn how to clean faster. Although the maid can also clean for you, she or he only comes once a day, and nobody's going to clean up after you between then, so having a sim with neat habits still is a great asset. There isn't much to be gained from being an extreme neat freak, but six points of neat saves a lot of headaches in the long run. Oh, but if you happen to want your sims to cleanse with a cleanliness super power closer to godliness, give them 9 to 10 points of Neat and they'll add sparkling bubbles to their cleaning routine when purifying toilets, showers, and other dirty objects. It should be noted that neat sims eat very elegantly. Watch how a neat sim eats a bag of chips compared to a sloppy one; it's actually kind of cute. You'd think that neat sims would be intolerant of sloppy sims like the proverbial evil OCD mother from hell, but it seems that having a nice personality or good relationship balances it out and appalled reactions are only apparent. It should be also noted that neat is the hardest personality for parents to encourage, as it has the longest animation and actually sends the encouraged sim out like a boomerang to go groom themselves or clean other messes before returning to the encourager. ----------------------- Outgoing: Outgoing sims are the firecrackers on the farm, they are more inclined to accept and perform more open social interactions. At maximum outgoing, it is very common for a sim to simply walk into your house, whether you greeted them or not. This can be really annoying if you happen to hate that sim, but since so few computer generated sims naturally have maximum outgoing, it's more of a blessing than a curse, albeit in university, various NPC mascots, cheerleaders and coaches do this as well as a part of their programming. Super Outgoing sims can also enter hot tubs nude and gain charisma with ease. Unfortunately, they also are a little bit overzealous when controlled by free will, especially if they are Romance Aspiration sims, as their strong actions can often cause social disasters since the computer doesn't always choose the best course of action on it's own in relation to a sim's friendship with another, resulting in occasional double negatives if they are around complete strangers or enemies. In general, outgoing sims get more pleasure out of performing more dramatic social interactions like making out and often let loose a cheer before doing so. ----------------------- Active: By far the best personality trait to have. Having six points of active allows a sim to run on command, this is the single most useful personality driven ability in the game. You have no idea how useful the ability to run on command is until you live in a house that takes an hour to walk through from entrance to bedroom, or when you are running for dear life to class or from one point to another on a community lot. All sims can autorun under circumstances, but that's only if they are either late, performing a crisis related action, or run long distances and have high energy like in the original The Sims. Active sims also gain body skills faster, and can stay awake longer, since their energy bars deplete slower. In return for these great bonuses, they eat more as their hunger bars deplete faster. This is a big problem early on where you sims can't cook anything but a big steamy ball of flame in their face, but when your sim is capable of cooking Lobster Thermador, you'll find that just a humble serving of salmon or porkchops is enough to satisfy them unless they happen to be on the verge of starvation. Active sims also have fun when exercising, particularly when swimming, doing yoga or working the treadmill, this becomes very useful even when you max out all of their skills, because even if you are careful, you're sim still can occasionally put on weight that needs to be burned. ----------------------- Playful: Probably the least beneficial of all of the positive personality traits. Playful sims gain entertaining mannerisms and interactions, some automatic such as the ability to play with a fridge's doors, others manual like the ability to play pirate in the bath tub and juggle on command. Unfortunately, extremely playful sims lose the ability to meditate and also have a leech in the fun department. They also have a tendency to frequently want to play their handheld game systems. When coupled with active personality, they seem to also gain a lot of fears and wants oriented to winning and losing games, particularly for Knowledge or Fortune aspiring sims. Playful sims gain creativity faster, however, since creativity is the easiest to gain skill because almost all creative activities have a productive side effect, it's not as useful as it might seem. Playful sims will however, suffer in the case of trying to build logic skill points. ----------------------- Nice: It's difficult to notice exactly what makes nice advantageous, since they don't gain any obvious abilities from their efforts. As such, being nice is one of the more subtle personality traits, but it does make conversations flow better and minimize negative interactions and maximize positive ones. In particular, nice sims are more perceptive to being hugged often getting two pluses while more grouchy sims only get one. They are also more enthusiastic about hugging and cheering up others and gain additional social boosts from doing so, often cheering before they do it, as opposed to grumbling like grouchy sims do. You can settle a nice sim down to a fun game of chess and know that they aren't going to piss anyone off by cheating unless you tell them to. Although the game hints that being nice helps boost charisma skill point learning, I have tested this and it would seem that being nice doesn't have a noticeable effect. Being nice really doesn't have any negative sides to it, and for the most part, The Sims 2 was created with a focus on being nice to other people, otherwise jobs would be based on people you beat up instead of friends. If you are a bit indecisive to where your personality points should go, feel free to dump them here. Of important note though is that being nice is the easiest and fastest positive personality trait for older family members to encourage, as it basically just consists of a hug as opposed to a long winding interaction. ----------------------------------------------------------------------------- [2.03] Aspiration: Depending on your sim's aspiration, their play style will be different in university; this is an in-depth look into the mechanics and strategies involved, to make the most of each type. It should be taken into account that aspiration type can be changed at the end of sophomore year. Doing so will also change their lifetime want. ----------------------- Fortune Aspiration Before becoming an adult, the Fortune Aspiration is the most difficult aspiration to fulfill, since your sims will be making miniscule amounts of money as a teen and through university, even when raking in 1200 simoleans per A+ university grant. Fortune sims completely rely on job performance, and since they can't hold a real job in university, it's fairly common for their aspiration to stagnate. For the most part, sims with the Fortune Aspiration suffer the most in university, and their desire to buy expensive items well beyond their living expenses tends to clutter their want slots. Other than this, Fortune sims borrow most of their other wants from sims with Knowledge Aspiration with academic wants to finish assignments, term papers, go to class, finish the year and reach dean's list, as well as the occasional desire to take on various odd jobs that it seems all of the aspirations have on occasion. The best strategy for Fortune sims in university is to focus on academic excellence, but I personally would not recommend having any sim with a Fortune Aspiration until they are giving the choice to switch at the end of Sophomore year. After university though, Fortune sims have it made. Not only do they get huge bonuses from job promotions and relatively easy lifetime wants, but they also can buy expensive art, particularly paintings to give their meters a huge boost, only to sell it the next day with little or no penalty since art has a very low depreciation value, and on some cases, actually an appreciation value. You can repeat this cycle over and over again every day to earn between 4,000 to 13,000 aspiration points a day, since you can cover multiple wants to buy art of varying values in a single blow. There is a chance that your sim wouldn't have these wants, but I have yet to encounter a rich fortune sim who hasn't. Oh, regarding the young adult stage, there is one exception to the aspiration shortage, and that's if your sim has full creativity and the sell a masterpiece or write a novel want, in which case, those two wants alone can save the day. Being rich enough to buy everything they want is also a good thing, but seeing how money is really tight in university, it is better saved for after graduation where the homes are a little more permanent. ----------------------- Knowledge Aspiration: Knowledge aspiring sims ironically aren't all that much of a force to contend with in university, since although their wants might be in line with getting good grades, their train of skill building desire does not follow the regular path that their adult and teen versions go through. Normally, Knowledge Aspiration sims want to build skills all the time, and once you make them build one skill, they become obsessed with it until it is perfected or they pick up another skill they want to build. This is normally the main form of aspiration income for knowledge seeking sims. However, as Young Adults, this drive goes away mostly unless the class performance bar is full and their skill in any given area is past four or five points. Instead, their wants tend to reflect on the requirements necessary to maximize their class performance bar. Unfortunately, there are more efficient ways to increase class performance than the ways a knowledge aspiring sim might want to, such as influencing someone else to write a term paper, licking professor boot, or hacking grades. Knowledge based sims also occasionally get food oriented wants and the desire to stargaze with a telescope, but those barely fill the bar. As an additional note though, Knowledge Aspiration is great to have as a teen, and switch at the end of the Sophomore year as a Young Adult, as you get all of the bonuses of boosting and maximizing skills and can switch to something more perpetual in university. It should also be noted that knowledge sims outside of university who have maximized all of their skills start obtaining wants similar to family aspiring sims, along with their usual paranormal seeking ones. Knowledge sims have the special ability to remember some events that other sims remember badly in a good light, such as raising a zombie, being raised as a zombie, being abducted by aliens or seeing a ghost, unfortunately, if you are trying to play the game responsibility, it is difficult to purposely kill off or torment a sim for these purposes alone, let alone any given time to satisfy the want. However, knowledge aspiring sims would seem to have a largely untapped potential should you put them in a chaotic supernatural environment full of ghosts, aliens, zombies and the grim reaper making regular house calls. ----------------------- Family Aspiration: You'd think that sims with a family aspiration wouldn't do well in university, seeing as how they just left their family, however Family Sims want to start new families, and what better place than university? Okay, that's a bad question, but seriously, sims with family aspiration are the best want chainers and combo makers in the game, once you get them on a roll of tickling, appreciating and telling jokes, it's hard to stop them and you can completely charge their aspiration and influence meters from small jabs like this in rapid succession. Family sims are great to pair up with any other sim in a household, family or not, and although they wouldn't have most of their big scorers around in university, since Young Adults can't "Try for Baby" or adopt, they're ability to chain social interaction wants from tickling to woohoo makes them easy to manage. On the down side, the Family Aspiration by far has the most difficult arsenal of lifetime wants to achieve, often at least spanning a generation and involving multiple offspring of that sim, as opposed to the simple top of the career aspirations that can be achieved in practically two weeks by other aspiration types. The family aspiration is one of the very best aspirations to have though if you managed to fulfill your lifetime want earlier in life under a different type of aspiration. As an additional note, a sim with a Family Aspiration and a sim with a Popularity Aspiration make an incredible team. ----------------------- Romance Aspiration: Romance aspiration is overall the most disastrous aspiration to pursue. It's not difficult, since for the most part, Romance is just the lover's version of the Popularity Aspiration, but it's the one that you have to always keep an eye out for or else chaos will strike. That being said it's also the most fun to play if you happen to be playing the game as a single sim as opposed to a whole community of sims you might actually not want to ruin the lives of. As a teenager, Romance Aspiration is basically suicidal, since you can't use the woohoo interaction or any of its variations, which is a major perpetual source of aspiration income for romance sims, and it's a bit difficult as an adult, since little things like commitment and a job tend to get in the way. In actuality, the Young Adult stage is the perfect time for Romance sims to level with their libido, especially with the campus directory at their finger tips which gives them the ability to meet anyone who is in the same university that might catch your eye. Young adults can also get woohoo wants, almost always right after a make out want or during a party, so as far as their love life is concerned, they are now complete, since Romance aspiring sims actually fear trivial things like commitment. When the player operates a romance sim, you can use your head and avoid being caught cheating, however, at parties or social gatherings where you cannot predict the actions of guests, all it takes is a single dippy little sim and loving intentions to ruin your perfect network of love and ruin negative daily relationships all over the board for you. Even a sim with a one way crush can get a bit loopy and open Pandora's box left, right and upside-down. Perhaps the worst combination is to have two romance sims married, it'd practically be a soup opera, but somehow, teaming one up with a Family Aspiration sim seems just too cruel and close to real life. Romance sims also have the ability to incite "Attraction" actions into other sims, which is a quick temporary sign of romantic interest. It starts off flattering at first, but eventually it gets tiring and actually starts causing stalls in actions. Oh yes, for romance sims, never forget the power of the peck. As far as I'm aware, it's the only intimate action that can trigger both love and a crush relationships without ticking every other love interest in the area off. Romance sims also get another nifty bonus at full platinum, and that is the sexy walk covered in the Special Skills and Abilities section. ----------------------- Popularity Aspiration: The ultimate aspiration, I kid you not. The Popularity Aspiration is the best aspiration in the game in terms of raking up aspiration and influence points and staying platinum without a lifetime want achieved and works equally well for all life stages. However, a great deal of it depends on how you play and configure your sim's personality. My main sim is an almost "perfect" personality sim (I only gave her 7 in playfulness so she could still meditate and teleport) with a Popularity Aspiration, and she's hit the 327,670 or so aspiration limit more times than I can count. She's hit the aspiration limit so many times in university alone that she bought enough Enigmatic Energizers to last her and her partner through their entire time in university; she never even touched a bed, or wrote a term paper for that matter. That's not all though, there's more, she bought so many Enigmatic Energizers in an attempt to keep from hitting the aspiration cap that she was able to supply three other sim successors for their times at university after she graduated and the supply is still not out yet, and that's not to mention the other items she purchased. Additionally, her fears are practically impossible to achieve, as they all involve making enemies out of her best friends which would take at least several days a piece of intentional conflict. Admittedly, I made very well sure that she was prepared for university and employed a special strategy, but a fully prepared Popularity sim is a scary thing in the hands of an attentive player. As you can see, I have a bit of a bias for the popularity aspiration, but it is not one without at least good evidence to support. The popularity aspiration is potentially the strongest aspiration type, but it takes quite a bit of warm up time to get into full bloom and to gain the knowledge and experience of how to work them to the hilt. A sim of this type focuses on five different areas to gain the majority of their points. The first is simply making friends and making best friends. This is simple enough, since most of the other aspirations have the same want. The second source is throwing parties, and making them Good Time or Roof Raisers to meet the Great Party want. Popularity sims naturally have to do this to maintain their friend base at around 30 friends and you can also combo both Toga/Sports party with the regular Throw Party want for extra points. The third arsenal for Popularity sims are small jab social interactions, similar to that of the Family Aspiration's that can be chained and lead up to the big guns of making out and woohoo. The fourth method for gaining aspiration and influence, and my favorite, is the ability to get large chunks of aspiration and influence by selling masterpieces. Since masterpieces, which are paintings worth more than 500 simoleans can be sold at any time; your sim basically has access to platinum aspiration on command if they have a spare completed painting lying around. This is also much more useful if you happen to have your popularity sim live with another sim with full creativity of any other aspiration, as "Sell Masterpiece" doesn't actually mean "Paint a Masterpiece", yup folks you can sell other people's paintings and get the points for it! Paintings also increase in value the more you paint them, so it's a skill that can grow. Unfortunately, it seems that not every popularity sim gets this want, and those who do can loose it if it's not carefully locked down after a period of time. Finally, the fifth method was introduced with the installation of The Sims 2 University and are the lifetime wants which are usually career based for popularity sims. This gives them a good reason to follow a broad category of careers, opposed to just the athletics and political ones, as when your sim has some mad skills, high jumping the career ladder when switching becomes easy. You can score some serious points by taking advantage of this. Another benefit of the popularity aspiration is that it's the best "off site" aspiration to have, just in case I haven't emphasized enough other points. This is to say that if you are playing multiple households and left your popularity sim in a tough spot with a low aspiration bar and a severe need of points, you can have another sim aid them on their own side by becoming friends with the popularity sim. Shortly after meeting any new sim and getting a daily relationship of above 10, a popularity sim starts to want to make him or her become their friend which leads to best friends and viable social interactions which you can often do on another sim's side to boost the wants of the original sim. Other aspiration types can do this, but the popularity aspiration is the one that is the easiest to work this way, although romance is a close second. This technique is a bit tricky, but you can rely on it in a pinch You can even switch between the sims in two households and have them invite each other over and interact on each side accordingly to the others wants, it becomes rather metaphysical really, but make sure you exercise your ability to lock wants, or else you might find old favorites slip away, like the want to sell as masterpiece. The popularity aspiration has it's downside though, friends eat up valuable time and there is a certain point where the numbers just wouldn't add up unless you get playable friends of that one sim to maintain their relationship on their own side or throw parties everyday, although that might very well be when your sim has 100 friends. At that point though, your sim has probably chugged enough Elixir of Life to have had your sim live for more than a dozen generations and might be time to call it quits, and as it stands, I'm not even sure if there are that many people in the default neighborhood. ----------------------------------------------------------------------------- [2.04] Skills: Skills are what prevent your sims from lighting up like a Christmas tree when repairing things, increase their class performance bar in university and help get jobs later in life. A sim with maxed out skills is far more capable than a sim with no skills, and building them will be a huge focus in the game. ----------------------- Cooking: The ability to cook, cook well, and survive. Thanks to the cafeterias at the dormitories and community lots, cooking ability isn't as vital as it potentially could have been at university. On the other hand, if your sim happens to be living in a house or a Greek House, at least having one good cook in the household is essential. Cooking skill points allow a sim to prepare increasingly more fulfilling dishes, as well as increase the effect of anything they cook in general. Cooking points can be gained from reading books or watching television normally while at university, since there are no cooking oriented career rewards at the secret societies. Cooking is a skill unaffected by personality. ----------------------- Mechanical: Mechanical skill is the ability to work machinery and repair equipment without unpleasant consequences. Mechanical skill increases the chance rate of repairing objects without incident. Regarding electronic related equipment, especially the garbage compactor and dishwasher, I personally recommend from experience to just hiring a repairman, since even at maximum skill, there is still a possibility to be electrocuted and break your favorite grandfather clock. Mechanical is difficult to build at university, as books and repairing objects are pretty much the only source available to you. Like cooking, Mechanical skill has no personality advantage or disadvantage. ----------------------- Charisma: Being charismatic gives a sim the ability to successfully communicate and establish trust through speech and body language. Charisma doesn't have many actual applications outside of meeting requirements for majors and jobs in this game. Apparently it affects the ability for sims to tell a good joke or free style. Charisma is one of the harder skills to increase; since the only normal way to do so is use a mirror which doesn't do anything good for any of the motives, however, Secret Society 2 has the Execuputter mini golf course that increases fun. Outgoing sims are great at becoming charismatic. ----------------------- Body: The physical strength, agility and coordination one has with their physical manifestation for a lack of a metaphysical description. Body is an important skill to have and is fairly easy to increase in university with working out, swimming, yoga and exercise machines. Although body skill alone doesn't have many practical applications outside of beating the crap out of someone in a fight, it does effect various animations from Kicky Bag, to diving, to yoga, to their performance on exercise machines and working out. There aren't any secret society career rewards to boost it at university, but the new treadmill in university works great. Active sims will sky rocket at mastering this skill, and will get more fun out of doing as well. ----------------------- Logic: The ability to reason, analyze and present realistic solutions. Logic is one of the most useful skills in university, and many of the majors emphasize it. It is also the skill necessary when hacking grades using the computers. Logic is easy to increase, because many of things that increase it are fun to do, like chess, using the telescope, doing the crossword, and you can also raise it by using the biotech station at secret society 3. Lazy sims who bide their time well are more suited to master logic. ----------------------- Creativity: The ability to visualize, conceptualize and innovate what has yet to exist. I'd say the most useful skill at university, as it affects everything from how much you can sell a painting for to how much money you get for tips when performing music on instruments. Fortunately, creativity is very easy to increase, as most everything that can increase it is fun, save for writing a novel. Painting, writing, playing music and using the Senso-Twitch Lie Detector at Secret Societies 1 and 2 can all help you out in increasing it, as well as the Aquagreen Hydroponic Garden in Secret Society 3. Playful sims love to express their inner child and complete lack of a solid grasp on reality, and as such, master creativity faster. ----------------------- Cleaning: The ability to clean means knowing a mess when you see one, and how to fix it without going insane. Cleaning is a relatively useful skill, but isn't particularly important in university. If your sim happens to live in a dorm, they can get some good practice by cleaning the kitchen and washrooms while being constructive at the same time, seeing as how your fellow roommates are exponentially more inconsiderate and will live in their own filth if you don't fix it. You will also be quite the penny pincher in university and unable to higher a maid, in which case manual labor is the only option. Cleaning skill can be increased by mopping up puddles, cleaning up dirty stoves, counters, toilets, sinks and showers, among other objects, and can also be increased by studying from books. Secret Societies 2 and 3 also have access to the Prints Charming Fingerprinting Scanner which is a fun way to boost up cleaning skill. Neat sims got the concept of cleaning in the bag. ----------------------------------------------------------------------------- [2.05] Interests: Interests are what your sims like to talk about as indicated by the thought bubbles that hover over their heads. By carefully monitoring what your sims talk about the most or looking at their interest levels, you can have other sims increase relationship with them easier through chatting by clicking on the talking sims and choosing the sub-action "Change Topic". It is also quite possible that interests effect a sim's chance of getting particular wants, although it seems to be a very subtle or unnoticeable effect and hard to test. These are the interests: Animals Crime Culture Entertainment Environment Fashion Food Health Money Paranormal Politics Sci-Fi School Sports Toys Travel Weather Work There are actually two ways to change interest, but either way, as you gain points of interest in one subject, you lose about an equal amount of points in another. Read Magazines: Magazines can be purchased off the shelf on community lots. There are six different types of magazines, each one capable of increasing three categories of interest. It would seem that although you can select the category of increase, the decreased category is random. Share Interests: Sims on good terms can share interests (Located under the talk command) with each other, although this seems to be quite a bit more unpredictable as the topic chosen is random. A sim also can only increase another sim's interest level as far as to equal their own. This also has a decreasing effect, but it seems quite a bit harder to predict. Sharing interests is also quite a bit slower than reading magazines, but you can exceed the 90+ point limit much easier whereas a sim has a tendency to cancel out of reading magazines past that point. As I later would write in my Nightlife FAQ to counter my original theory, it is impossible without cheating to have a sim with perfect scores in every interest category. At the 101 - 110 point range, an increase in one interest results in a rebounding decrease in another. Fortunately though, any sim in the game can up their original interest range to the 100 without fear of penalty, so it's worth it for a sim to at least juice up to the 90 limit with magazines, then reach the 101-110 limit by having interests shared with them. ============================================================================= [3.00] Off To University We Go ----------------------------------------------------------------------------- [3.01] Before University: There are many advantages to start your sim off as a teen or earlier, as opposed to just jumping the gun at a Young Adult, specifically the extra time to gain skills, friends and scholarships can save a great deal of time in university, where the previously perpetual Elixir of Life has no effect. Also of note should be that Young Adults freshly created have already had their first kiss and a mystery sim memory, so if you are looking forward to the story of an innocent girl and her first kiss, its pass that time. The convenience of creating a young adult instead of a teen however is that you don't have to create their parental units in order for them to exist, so you can make them much easier without having to fill in extra space. ----------------------------------------------------------------------------- [3.02] Scholarships: Scholarships are the only material thing a sim can bring with them to university. Yup, even that favorite teddy bear has to stay at home. Every sim starts off with a puny 500 simoleans, that's not even enough to buy the smallest lot, let alone a house. That is where the dorms come in, but seriously, why would you want to live in one of those hellholes when you can live in your own residence? Since homes are rented in university instead of bought, money initially goes a much longer way. The prices for rentals at university are only a fourth of the ordinary purchasing price that you would have to pay with their neighborhood counterparts, so 20,000 simoleans can buy you quite a luxurious one story mansion on a 5x5 lot and great furnishings. Unfortunately, once you move in, prices become normal again, so scholarships are an exponential lever to setting your sims off to a bright future. ----------------------- The following is a list of the scholarships. Hogan Award for Athletics: 8 or higher body skill, 750 awarded Bain-Gordon Communications Fellowship: 8 or higher charisma skill, 750 awarded Kim Metro Prize for Hygienics: 8 or higher cleaning skill, 750 awarded London Culinary Arts Scholarship: 8 or higher cooking skill, 750 awarded Will Wright Genius Grant: 8 or higher logic skill, 750 awarded Bui Engineering Award: 8 or higher mechanical skill, 750 awarded Quigley Visual Arts Grant: 8 or higher creative skill, 750 awarded SimCity Scholar's Grant: A- or better in high school, 1,000 awarded Extraterrestrial Reparation Grant: Abducted by aliens, 1,500 awarded Young Entrepreneurs Award: Level 3 in Teen career, 750 awarded Undead Educational Scholarship: Teen Zombie/Vampire, 1,500 awarded Phelps-Wilsonoff Billiards Prize: High Pool skill, 1,000 awarded Tsang Footwork Award: High Dancing skill, 1,000 awarded Orphaned Sims Assistance Fund: Sim has no living parents, 1,500 awarded Of these scholarships, I particularly recommend aiming for the Phelps- Wilsonoff Billards Prize, as hustling people in university is a good way to make money, and a surprisingly better way to make friends. The Undead Educational Scholarship and the Orphaned Sims Assistance Fund pay the most, but unfortunately, they both involve killing off your sims which is generally not a good thing to do unless you are trying to write a good sim story. ----------------------------------------------------------------------------- [3.03] Moving To University: A teenager has the option of going to college at any given time during their life stage. There are two ways to send your sims to university, through the phone/computer, or the "Move Sims To University" button on the neighborhood menu. They both have their advantages and disadvantages. The phone and computer is best used to send a single teenage sim to university to pursue their great adventure of learning or lack there of. If you decide to send them this way, you get to see them leave after a casual goodbye to their family and get a "Move Out" memory. The "Move Sims to University" button on the neighborhood or college town screen, on the other hand, offers more control, the chance to pick multiple sims and the name of their household. This allows multiple sims to pool their funds together, which is incredibly useful should you have two or more sims with tons of scholarships under their belt that simply must have a large house to live in on the biggest sized lot. You only get to see the opening growing up cinema for one of them, but who wants to have a big grass field in the background of the cinema when you can have a modestly well put together house? A neighborhood can have multiple universities for its sims to attend. This is particularly handy if you want to experiment with all three different secret society based buildings as you can normally only pick one per a college town. For the most part though, you will only need one, as it makes it easier for multiple young adults sims in your neighborhood to cluster together in a single community instead of be divided into several universities, allowing them to better develop and establish Greek Houses and the Secret Society to which future sims might be visiting and who could benefit greatly from. ----------------------------------------------------------------------------- [3.04] Housing Okay, now that is covered, onto the three types of houses on campus! ----------------------- Dorms: The place where nightmares are born, dorms in the sims universe aren't too far from their real life counterpart. When the equipment is crap, when the showers and toilets are always taken, when someone snatches that tasty stack of pancakes in the cafeteria you had your eye on, you know that your sim is living in a dorm. Dormitories are the collective residential units for the financially impaired student in The Sims 2 University; I'm not even going to get into what they are in real life, hahahaha. Within each dorm is a set number of rooms and equipment to use to build skills. Generally speaking, the furnishings are bottom of line and of especially mediocre nature to mention are the beds which seem to take forever to recharge a sim's energy when you've seen what the best beds can do. Within dorms, multiple sims live, but you only keep track of a few of them at a time, since the others are in their rooms or at class and are hidden from sight. This is the games way of saving processing time and for the most part, you can find out what a sim is doing from the bubbles emerging from their door. Good thing the game designers did this, because if your computer is the type that only allows two guests to be invited at a party, you might be facing more than a few frustrating issues. The dorms are almost always full of active people during the day who seem to always conveniently get in your way. So much that you often wonder what might happen if you... oh, set the stove on fire and incinerate everyone. Unfortunately, unlike the normal neighborhood, it seems that the supply of sims at university is indeed infinite, so as soon as you kill one, another pops up to take it's place. Man, what I wouldn't give to put a cow plant at a dorm without having to cheat, oh wait, you can if you have The Sims 2: Nightlife and stuff one down a sim's inventory before they go college - good eating. Oh yeah, just incase you thought you could beat the system and furnish the dorm with the best wall paper and tile before you move in, think again as you'll be tagged in the mail with gigantic ready to explode bills before you can even complete your first year, once I was tagged with a 600 simolean one and decided to evacuate my three sims to their own house rather than making the repoman their new best friend. Typically, if your sims are doing well in university and getting A+ grants worth 1,200 simoleans, you should move them out as soon as you get at least 4,000 simoleans which should be enough to rent a small house on a small lot with good equipment to meet their needs. For those who aren't doing so well financially however, there are ways to make the most of your time at the dorms, or the least for that matter. For those who have The Sims 2: Nightlife, you can also purchase smaller lots for a more affordable price, so even a single sim with barely any money can rent a minute strip of land right off the bat. If you don't mind a little traveling, there are fortunately many good alternatives to getting the heck out of the dorms as soon as possible without actually moving. In university, your sims can gain skills in community lots. I absolutely love this feature, as you can cram your community lots with all the best goodies and take advantage of them, short of a bed. Of special recommendation are instruments, exercise machines, wide screen televisions, chess boards with fancy chairs and of course your friend and my friend, the bookshelf. While you are at it, be sure to chuck in a pool table and a hot tub in for good measures and escape that rat infested cellar that you came from. A great strategy is to send your sim there when they are full of energy and take them home when they are almost empty. They can even still go to class and final exams while at a university lot, as well as write term papers and study. The only thing you can't do is get any sleep pretty much, although the good old brown bean brewing baristas do wonders in a pinch. You can even move your sim to a big field of grass with a bed and have them live there as long as you take advantage of the community lots. Community lots also drag out time, as although time for your sim's final exam passes, time back at home doesn't. You can greatly extend the amount of time in between bills by going to community lots. The second way is through the Secret Society which has similar purposes to community lots but with a twist, but more on that later. ----------------------- Normal Houses: Just like houses in the neighborhood, there is nothing particularly unusual about them. After you build them, a sim can move into them at a rented price and continue to live as they would normally back at home. Why live in a normal house though when you can live in a Greek House? Well here's one big reason, anyone can move into a normal house. Once a house becomes a Greek House, it can only be moved into by members, and must be done so manually, not via the neighborhood screen. Normal houses are great if you want to recycle another sim's hard work so that following sims' futures might look a little brighter than they would have been drudging in dorm doldrums, as they can move in virtually free of charge right before the previous sim moves out and graduates, it's a great way to start a legacy. Still, for a little work, anyone can move into a Greek House, and wouldn't that legacy be worth so much more when written in huge untranslatable sim Greek letters? ----------------------- Greek Houses: Greek Houses are very similar to regular houses and refer to a system that the houses operate on rather than whether they are actually Greek in design or not. They have some great perks, such as the ability to throw toga parties and have other sims pledge. It is a wonderful way to leave a legacy for any sims you will have go through the university and you can develop it over the generations. There are six levels of Greek House, each one holding progressively more members. Aside from this, Greek Houses still have to pay the bills like everyone else and unlike regular houses, new sims have to either turn their own house into a Greek House with a charter or go through a trial in order to join, as you simply cannot drag and drop them to combine households like with normal houses. There is much more information on Greek Houses to come later on in this document in its own section under chapter 2: The Four Big Goals. ----------------------------------------------------------------------------- [3.05] About Young Adults: Appearance wise, young adults look almost exactly like adults but have the voice set of teenagers. They can wear special university exclusive clothing and features but can also wear some clothing that adults would normally wear as well. Essentially, young adults can only be played within a university campus. If a sim outside of the neighborhood tries to ask one to move in with them, they will automatically grow up and either graduate or drop out automatically. Ability wise, Young Adults are very different from regular sims with a focus on college activities and the inability to adopt or try for a baby. They also can't get married while in college, but they can still get engaged. Also while in college, a young adult cannot hold a regular job where a car pool comes to pick them up, however, there are various odd jobs that students can take up in university. ***************************************************************************** Chapter 2: The Four Big University Goals: ***************************************************************************** Okay! Now that the ground work is covered, time to get into the specifics of milking The Sims 2 University cow plant dry. There are four ultimate goals to achieve in university, in order to do all four, you're going to have to micromanage your sims, but after you learn the process for getting one sim through the grill, it'll become quite easy and sims in university that you control can vastly help each other and those who follow in their footsteps. The focus of this FAQ is how to achieve these four goals: 1. Graduate Summa Cum Laude: 2. Become the Big Sim on Campus: 3. The Ultimate Greek House Legacy: 4. The Secret Society. ----------------------------------------------------------------------------- [4.00] Graduate Summa Cum Laude: In case you were wondering, Summa Cum Laude basically means "With highest honors" in Latin and is bestowed onto sims with 4.0 GPA, followed by Magna Cum Laude and Cum Laude, based of course on their real life academic counterparts. Although the years of schooling and grading in real life might have traumatized you into fearing the dreaded virtual parallel of getting perfect 4.0, worry not! Getting 4.0 in The Sims 2: University is surprisingly easy! The Young Adult life at university is divided into semesters, which in case you didn't know, are half of a year. At the end of each semester is a final exam, as long as your Class Performance Meter is at the top, you have obtained the necessary skills to boost it to maximum and your sim attends the final exam, you can guarantee a 4.0. The sim will do all the stressful test taking for you with no variation depending on their mood, unlike job promotion or school. On the flip side, if you pretty much do the opposite of the previously mentioned, you'll end up on academic probation. On one hand this gives you more time at university to repeat the semester, on the bad side, it's down right disgraceful and if you screw up a second time, you get the universal boot back to common society. First of all, it is important to discuss the majors. ----------------------------------------------------------------------------- [4.01] Majors: A Major Pain, But Not Really All sims start off going to university with an undeclared major, basically, they're aimless in life. Unfortunately, sooner or later, they have to pick something or the game does it for them at the end of the sophomore year, and at the end of the junior year, a sim's major is set permanently. Until then, you can change your major whenever convenient to suit your strong skills and preferred class times. There are eleven majors: ----------------------- Art Related Careers: Artist, Culinary, Slacker Total Skills Required: Creativity: 5 Cooking: 4 Charisma: 4 Mechanical:4 Body: 1 Cleaning: 1 Logic: 1 Biology Related Careers: Law Enforcement, Medicine, Natural Scientist Total Skills Required: Logic: 5 Body: 4 Cleaning: 4 Mechanical: 4 Creativity: 1 Cooking: 1 Charisma: 1 Drama Related Careers: Athletic, Politics, Show Business Total Skills Needed: Charisma: 5 Body: 4 Logic: 4 Creativity: 4 Cleaning: 1 Mechanical: 1 Cooking: 1 Economics Related Careers: Business, Politics, Show Business Total Skills Required Charisma: 5 Creativity: 4 Logic: 4 Mechanical: 4 Body: 1 Cooking: 1 Cleaning: 1 History Related Careers: Artist, Military, Politics Total Skills Required: Logic: 5 Creativity: 4 Mechanical: 4 Charisma: 4 Cooking: 1 Body: 1 Cleaning: 1 Mathematics Related Careers: Criminal, Natural Science, Science Total Skills Required Logic: 5 Creativity: 4 Mechanical: 4 Cleaning: 4 Body: 1 Charisma: 1 Cooking: 1 Philosophy Related Careers: Culinary, Slacker, Paranormal Logic: 5 Cooking: 4 Charisma: 4 Creativity: 4 Body: 1 Cleaning: 1 Mechanical: 1 Physics Related Careers: Medicine, Science, Paranormal Total Skills Required: Mechanical: 5 Creativity: 4 Logic: 4 Cleaning: 4 Body: 1 Cooking: 1 Charisma: 1 Political Science Related Careers: Politics, Military, Show Business Total Required Skills: Charisma: 5 Body: 4 Creativity: 4 Cleaning: 4 Cooking: 1 Logic: 1 Mechanical: 1 Psychology Related Careers: Business, Paranormal, Law Enforcement Total Required Skills: Logic: 5 Creativity: 4 Charisma: 4 Cleaning: 4 Body: 1 Cooking: 1 Mechanical: 1 Literature: Related Careers: Criminal, Slacker, Show Business Total Skills Required: Creativity: 5 Body: 4 Charisma: 4 Mechanical: 4 Cleaning: 1 Logic: 1 Cooking: 1 ----------------------- Majors don't particularly effect much but are rather guidelines to setting your sims on the right path, along with that, the times for the classes are different for each class and each semester, coupled with a well written description by the literary scientists at Maxis that are sure to make you smile should you be particularly familiar with that field of study. If your sim doesn't have a specific field they want to major in, it is best to do the math in your head to where you want them to go in life in accordance to their personality, although it should be noted that natural scientist is the new career least aligned with the majors, only related to biology and mathematics. So if you are a cow plant fan, you'll definitely want to get your own sim eating shrub as soon as possible through the power of natural science. Keep in mind though that after graduating from university, you might accidentally overshoot the point where you get desired career rewards when you pick up a job. Sims that have the same major have the social interaction of being able to talk about their majors as well as have different professors who they can ask to tutor them and to suck up to, two for each major. Having the ability to talk about the same major and sharing the same professors are good advantages to having all of your sims spend the first year undeclared, but then again, variety is it's own reward and it's better that you pick your sim's major than the game doing so automatically at the start of the junior year. The most commonly focused skills of the majors in general are logic and creativity, so above all, make sure your sims have healthy levels of those two if you are still undecided, although the early semesters make sure that you at least have one point in all skill areas, so fleshing your sim out ahead. ----------------------------------------------------------------------------- [4.02]Class Performance: Raising the Bar to Almost Human Standards There are six main ways to increase class performance. Although I haven't fully tested it yet, it would seem that you get more bang for your buck should your sim be in a good mood while performing these tasks, although you can still apparently swashbuckle the final exams in a crappy mood and get away with it should the meter be maxed out already. Depending on the type of aspiration your sim has, the method you primarily use might differ: ----------------------- 1. Go to Class Going to class is the most basic way to increase your grade and is good for all aspiration types. Depending on your sim's major, the time of class can vary from any waking hour of the day and can range from two to three hours. It increases the Class Performance Meter a small, but sturdy amount. Keep in mind that class is not mandatory. If your Class Performance bar is filled to the brim, going to class will just waste time. You can also attend just part of a class, like in the case of dashing in at the last hour. Classes are determined by time of day, not how many hours your sim has till their final exam, as such, you can double attend a class should you leave the home lot right before it, attend it at a community lot, then come back and attend it again. Going to the final exam is almost exactly like going to class, except it occurs when the semester is over independent of clock time, and you lose grades if you don't attend. I also haven't specifically tested it yet, but it seems that the final exam itself might increase the sim's class performance for that semester by a class worth, so you might be able to go to the final exam with an almost full bar and still get 4.0 from that last push. As an additional note, your sim normally walks to class, but will run if they are late instead of that old fashioned car pool you might have become used to. ----------------------- 2. Research and Group Research: Group Research is one of the best ways to raise Class Performance, despite how slow it may seem at first. Your sims grab books, sit down on the nearest couch or chair, and start reading till the fun is completely sucked out of them or their action is canceled, whatever comes first. Group research is also a great way to increase social and relationships, albeit it does the later quite poorly. If you are playing an entire community worth of sims in university instead of just a single household, doing group research is like giving free time to your other sims that aren't being played, as you can invite them over for group research, and like magic, when you return to play their house, their class performance meter will have increased! Group research shows up naturally as a want for Fortune and Knowledge sims often, but is also useful for Popularity aspiring sims who are almost always surrounded by people. Going to a community lot and inviting all of the young adults to come in to study is a good way to group study, According to the game, the more people you have to group research, the more effective it will be, so in theory, you can also go to the Secret Society and have the entire household of about eight people study along with you, although I haven't been able to test if this really significantly increases the speed of your studying, as for the most part, members of the Secret Society are talentless hacks that apparently don't have majors, even an undeclared one, and speaking of hacks... ----------------------- 3. Hacking Grades: You gain the ability to hack grades once you join the secret society, and can proceed from that point to do so on any computer. It sounds tempting and illegal, but seriously, hacking grades in the game is surprisingly boring and not as effective as you might think. It basically works like a faster research tool on a computer with security triggers and a risk level. In order to hack grades, you need to be a part of the secret society and also have at least a descent amount of logic if you don't want the cops to bust your chops. The higher your logic, the longer you can stay on, but basically, the higher the number of security triggers and the risk level, the better you are off logging out. If you have a sim with maximized logic, feel free for them to log out when the risk level has reached " Considerable", for others who are not so skilled, I recommend jumping off at the "Moderate" level and just signing back on and continuing where you left off. Hacking grades should only really be used as an emergency when it is the last night before the exam, you have already wrote your term paper and have no more classes to go. Hacking grades doesn't apparently have a corresponding want, so it's not particularly useful to any aspiration, but it can help you out in a pickle when you are out of options and time. ----------------------- 4. Do Assignment: Having a sim complete an assignment is not a very useful way of boosting up class performance on its own. Although assignments can be done roughly within only an hour of game time, they also don't increase very much class performance, roughly about half a class's worth. However, under certain circumstances, a sim can ask for help from another sim or to be tutored. The reverse is also true, as a sim can offer to be paid for their hard earned tutoring if you click on another sim's homework and choose to tutor. A special requirement must be met by a sim who wants to ask another sim to help them with their assignment as well as to tutor them, and that is that there must be a difference in their GPA. Surprisingly, class year, class performance, major and overall skills are irrelevant so long as there is a difference in GPA, with the sim with a higher GPA being able to help out sims with lower GPA. Additionally, if your sim was created straight up as a young adult, they can learn how to study from another sim, similar to how teenage sims can learn from their parents. It usually seems to take two sessions of either tutoring or ordinary help with an assignment to achieve this memory and ability, although if your teens already learned it, it's exactly the same thing and they wouldn't learn it a second time at university. Unfortunately, students who already have a perfect 4.0 wouldn't be able to find anybody with a higher score than that, so they will no longer be able to ask for tutoring, but instead will be able to offer it to other students with lesser GPA. If you want your young adult to have the increased study ability and still get 4.0, make sure that they ask for enough help before the end of the first semester, as 4.0 is a perfect grade, and one slightly off semester is all you need to upset the entire average so trying to dip your grades for this reason will theoretically not work. Busy sims can also leave their assignments around to be worked on by other sims who might not be as busy. You can also influence another sim to do it for you for 2,000 Influence points or get another controlled sim in the household to take it off your hands in the name of academic generosity. I highly do not recommend influencing another sim to do an assignment, for the price of 500 Influence points more, you can have them write your term paper, which is much more powerful. Fortune and Knowledge sims commonly have a want to do the assignment themselves for 1,000 aspiration points, which can provide a nice boost. Also of note is young adult sims love to bring their assignments over when you invite them and it is another good way for them to increase their performance without using time on their side up. ----------------------- 5. Writing a Term Paper: Writing the term paper of the very best ways to increase your grade that I recommend to do every semester, minus the doing part of course. Instead, get someone, anyone to do it for you! Doesn't matter of it's the evil cow mascot, the annoying cheer leader or even your very own professors! For the price of 2,500 Influence points, you can take this headache off of your mind and pat yourself on the back knowing that you've got the best deal influence can buy. Writing a term paper is a fun sponge more so than anything else in the game, it also takes several hours. In return, it boosts up the Class Performance bar by a variable 1/3. Starting young adults in university wouldn't have the influence power to get others to write their term paper early on, but if you have a well raised sim with lots of influence, take advantage of this every chance you get, you'll never find a better practical use for influence in the game as far as The Sims 2 University expansion. On the flip side, Knowledge and Fortune oriented sims often have a want to write it themselves for 3,000 aspiration points and not surprisingly, no influence, in which case writing it manually isn't a horrible option. ----------------------- 6. Sucking Up: There is no such thing as an unbiased decision, the concept itself is a paradox, so following that train of axiomatic logic, it's time to master the art of licking boot, kissing butt and sucking up to your professors with the grace of a Siberian wonder swan in the spring time. For every major, there is one male professor and one female professor and they can be either adults or elders, so keep in mind who the professors of your sim's particular major are and befriend them, because for every positive interaction you have with them, you get a small boost to your Class Performance bar. What's more is that it seems that the increase is equal regardless of how strong the social action is. There is one social interaction that stands far above the rest for the purpose of raising grades, Kicky Bag! Yes the fun phenomenon that's a hit with today's youth and has far too many names for its own good is one of the very best ways to do well in university, who would have guessed? Aside the fact that body skill helps keep the bag in the air; Kicky Bag is the fastest exchange of reaction social interaction in the game. The result is a steady increase in class performance, comparably as fast or even faster then hacking grades for raising class performance! Of course, you can also ask for straight up tutoring from the professor, or in some cases talk about your major with other sims, or even be a little more "realistic" and woohoo your teacher on a regular basis, but for all practical reasons, stick to the kicky bag. Unfortunately, you can only lick so much before a professor will actually consider your sim as their bestest best friend and stop increasing their class performance bar with every positive interaction. Basically, the class performance bar increase you get from interacting with professors is based on how high their own daily and lifetime scores are in regards to your sim, so your sim will obtain the bulk of the benefits when they are first befriending them, as opposed to when they have maxed out and the game limits further relationship increase. Of course, you could always dispose of them once they have served their purpose and suck up to the new professor that replaces them, but that would be slightly unethical for a lack of a more sarcastic understatement. Try to remember who your sim's professors are, as professors of other subjects will not have the same grade enhancing effect and they do all dress pretty much the same. If you are unsure who a sim's professor is, you can find out by looking at their interaction menu, because a sim can only ask for tutoring from one of the two professors teaching their major. Naturally though, Popularity, Romance and Family sims are the best and rubbing shoulders with the professors. As an additional note, it might just be me, but it seems that the professors reflect the personalities of the subject they are teaching. My main sim's drama teachers were bloody insane, apparently both having one sided crushes with my main sim without me even knowing it and everybody else they met, trying to spontaneously leap into their arms or whack them in the face with pillows, this is also annoying because they get slappy happy whenever my happy couple decides to get lovey dovey. Oh yeah, it should also be noted that you can also lose class performance if you piss your professors off, so be careful if final exam time is approaching. ----------------------- Strategy: By getting an A+ and a GPA of 4.0, you get a grant of 1,200 simoleans and make the Dean's List. It is fairly easy to do consistently if you work your time right, as the game is very forgiving. First of all, make sure your skills are at the right levels to fulfill the Class Performance Meter or you'll be spinning your wheels in mud by going overboard unnecessarily. Try to fill the meter up as early as possible, this way; you can also save time by cutting classes. Also be careful when changing majors, as if you do not have the skill requirements for the new choice, your otherwise full class performance meter might get cut down to size and your hard work along with it. Typically though, your class performance bar should be at the same level as your time progression bar till final exam. Even if your sim is fresh off of the assembly line, they shouldn't find it too difficult to reach 4.0 all while chasing the other three goals in university. All of the semesters are pretty much the same once you get used to them, aside from the junior year forcing a major onto you, the senior year locking your major and the extra aspiration ability bonuses you get after each year. Just use your sim's time wisely and you'll be okay. As a final note, whatever you do, don't miss the final exam, it has the power to cleave an A+ grade straight down to a C+. You could have your sim invite both professors over and beat them into a bloody pulp - multiple times, and it still wouldn't do as much damage as missing the final exam for a semester. Heck, you could forego writing a term paper, doing any assignments, and skip half of the classes, and it still wouldn't do as much damage as missing the final exam. On the flip side, having your sim go to a final exam adds a strong positive boost to your class performance meter at the very last second, and makes it often possible to get an A+ without having full class performance bar going in, so long as the necessary skills are met to expand the capacity of the bar to maximum. It should also be interesting to note that similar to classes but even less realistic, a sim can drop in for the last literal minute of the final exam and whip it off like they had all the time in the world, you can actually bite into the timing quite a bit. In case you were wondering how long an exam takes, it takes two hours not counting the hour your sim takes to go to it ahead of time. ----------------------------------------------------------------------------- [4.03] Graduation & Honors: The Better Idea Way to Leave University After passing the final exam at the end of your senior year, you will have officially graduated and obtained all the new aspiration oriented abilities that university has to offer, but for those sims who put that little extra amount of effort into reaching for academic glory, honorable diplomas all around! Depending on your sim's final GPA at graduation, they will receive an honorable mention that will be written on their diploma, a nifty job position boost bonus that they will get when applying for jobs both through the newspaper and on computers and finally, they will get a pretty little star next to their young adult icon when they return back home. There are also related wants to graduate and graduate with honors with excellent payoffs. The following are the different honors you can get and their bonuses: Summa Cum Laude: 4.0 GPA (+3 Job Boost) Magna Cum Laude: 3.9 GPA (+2 Job Boost) Cum Laude: 3.7 - 3.8 GPA (+1 Job Boost) Along with the honor boost to the starting job position, the major in which your sim took has three related jobs that will also receive a +1 bonus when starting off, however, it should be noted that the base value when finding a job in a newspaper starts at 0 (Sims with no honors or post secondary education automatically get boosted to 1, since it can't get lower). On the other hand, if you use the computer for your job hunt and already have a sim with many family friends and high skills to correspond with the position, they can start as high as 5. From my tests, the highest position possible to be hired straight off at is at level 9. This can be done by having a sim graduate Summa Cum Laude, maximize related skills, have optimally a dozen or more friends and finally, get a job in a field in which their major was related to. My main sim Xyni debuted as a Block Buster Director right off the bat, and was that ever anti-climatic. So much for this "paying your dues" thing I've heard so much about. Originally, in the core game, it was possible to skip career rewards when using the computer to find a job that was at too high a position, so many players opted to travel the long path starting from the bottom rung of the job later by picking up a job from the newspaper. However, as of my recent tests, t seems that somewhere in between the patches and expansions leading up the date of The Sims 2: Nightlife, sims now gain Career Rewards retroactively should they hit or overshoot the reward position. This makes it easier on the player, but makes it quite easy to take advantage of the game in a very big way. Martin Ostera has sent me an awesome trick to exploit this system to the hilt and back and it will be covered in the cheats and tricks section at the end of the FAQ. Okay then! Now that your sim has completed the long hard journey to higher education, it's time to go back home, but not before your sim gets 72 hours of quality time to spend saying goodbye and your non-dead sheep made diploma that comes with the ability to be repacked and take out to wherever your sim may go. This is a brilliant feature; it would be great if you could do this with the other career rewards, oh wait, they did. For anybody who has played The Sims 2: Nightlife, they have now included an awesome inventory system that practically allows you to stuff a black hole's worth of items and objects including career and aspirations rewards. If you have Nightlife installed, then the diploma will appear in the inventory, however, if you only have University, it will be in the career reward section. In anycase, before you leave the sacred campus grounds forever and ever, don't forget to take your diploma with you or else just write that your diploma is in a parallel dimension on job applications, as you wouldn't be seeing it ever again when you move. Within the final stretch after passing your final exam, you can throw a Graduation Party complete with proper attire and the opportunity to maximize your friendship with other sims who you know for sure are never going to graduate, being static NPCs, all stuck in an eternal digital loop and everything. When you finally run out of time, you'll be gently booted back to common society, lose all the money you got at university (Or it will stay with the household members still around) and gain the default 20,000. So buy yourself a nice little cottage and get yourself a really big cow plant in natural science to greet your neighbors with cake and a mouth full doom. From here on, the new careers that pay more, demand more, and have the Chance Cards from hell; heaven and Christmas Past will be open to your sim. ============================================================================= [5.00] The Big Sim on Campus: It's what the game advertises; it's what you know your sim wants, so how the heck do you do it? All you need to do is get your sim 12 friends in order to raise their influence level to Master Manipulator, the highest level. This number counts friends who live outside of university as well. It's not really a status more so than just a tag in their memory list, and there is a related want to do so as well with good payoff, but something this good sounding you most likely do want your sims to remember. Unfortunately, if you happened to have brought in your teen super star with more than 30 friends from the neighborhood like I did, they wouldn't be able to get the Big Sim on Campus memory, unless they theoretically lose enough friends to fall back down to Powerful Persuader and make it back up again to Master Manipulator which is an inconvenience of titanic proportions. At Master Manipulator level, your sim gains the ability to hold 10,000 Influence Points which is best spent on making other sims slave over your term papers, but in order to get there, you need to make some friends seriously fast, and wouldn't you know it, I have a system for that too. The best advice in general is to focus relationship building on two or three sims unless you know how the system works well and have planned ahead. Focusing on multiple sims has the advantage of multiple lifetime relationship growth, but can cause a lot of extra twisty headaches if you are trying to befriend more than six sims at a time, especially for a freshly created sims with no prior friend or skill building to their credit. Also be sure to saturate their daily relationship to 100 every chance you get, the higher your relationship with them is, the easier it is to maintain and repair and the better the lifetime relationship growth will be. Oh, if you are wondering, the icon for the Became Big Man/Woman on Campus is the university's jersey. To start things off, the best way to make friends is to have the ability to control them. Ideally, having custom made sims inhabit your university is the first best step, and they can all benefit from being friends with each other, as you can burn the candle of strangerhood on two ends instead of one. Unlike the regular neighborhood where it is difficult to meet people, Maxis created a Campus Directory option when you phone the college that is nothing short of genius, with this, you can phone all your own controlled sims right off the bat and start making connections right away. You'll wonder why in the hell the normal neighborhood doesn't have this. Unfortunately, playing multiple sims at the same time is serious work and takes a lot of time to do, so although this technique is effective, it's not particularly practical, and that's why I'm going to talk about powering your way into friendship like a well tuned fighting game, roughly. The key to becoming the big sim on campus is to make friends, with that simple logic in mind, let's boil the process down to a sterilized, orthodox, cold hearted science void of any human soul. Relationship levels are frequently not perfectly equal on both sides of a friendship, there is an element of randomness involved, but the rule of thumb is that the nicer the sim you are dealing with is and the nicer your sim is, the higher the chance that their relationship is about the same. The following is a requirement for friendship states: Friends: 50 Daily Relationship on both sides Best Friends: 50 Lifetime relationship on both sides Crush: 20 Lifetime relationship on either or both sides, triggered by a romantic action. Love: 70 Lifetime relationship on either or both sides, triggered by romantic action. Enemy: -50 Lifetime relationship on both sides. It is possible to have a one sided crush, but one sided love is a difficult to do normally. In the Young Adult stage, sims can have mature relationships with adults and elders. ----------------------------------------------------------------------------- [5.01]Meeting New Sims: And Forcing Yourself into Their Lives From 0 to 25 Daily Relationship In order to make friends, you have to meet people, and university offers many ways to do just that. First of all, people will randomly walk past your residence, second would be if you live in a dorm with many other people, third is to go to a community lot, and finally, you can use the campus directory of which I highly recommend doing if you are the kind of person who likes to choose their sim's friends. The first 25 points of daily relationship are harder to gain than the other 75, as such, ripping open the lid off the can of friendship takes precision so that it wouldn't blow up in your face. After all, you can't let something small in life like a sim's difference in opinion get in the way of campus conquest can you? In general, the best way to open up a relationship is through automated chatting. Automated chatting can be done on the phone, while playing chess, during a game of pool, sitting on the couch, watching television, during meals, practically at anytime, anywhere, if your sims have thought bubbles and green pluses over their heads, it's probably automated chat. You can also just manually choose the chat interaction option, but why do it alone when you can be doing something else at the same time? Having an automated chat while doing an activity also has the advantage of keeping the conversation flowing, as when you chat normally and the reactions start to go really south, it can end abruptly on negative terms. A lot of people assume that chatting is a bad way to start, because you have the chance to get negative reactions. The fact is, negative reactions are minimal, compared to the charisma driven jokes that barely increase relationship and can hurt it more so when they bomb badly, which is really the only other opener that is considered using on a complete stranger to work. Within the time it takes to play a game of pool or a game of chess, you can easily increase a sim's relationship from 0 to thirty, if not more. However, if you happen to control the sim that you are befriending, you can check out their interests beforehand, and make your sim change the topic appropriately when they are talking to further speed up the process. A well received discussion topic that the other sim is interested in often results in the addition of 5 relationship points and you only need 25. A sim can also share interests to make another sim become interested in what they like, however, by the time this option is available there are already well into a solid relationship and such chit chat becomes mostly unnecessary. Other good ways to gain relationship points with multiple people at once is to do group research or freestyle, but it's a bit unfocused, so it's more of a wide net technique. A useful way to make friends later on when you join the secret society is to use their secret handshake with other members, as it will always have a positive effect for meeting the first time for a handy small boost. If you are trying to have two of your sims who have yet to meet befriend each other, you will most likely be using the phone and the campus directory and might have to call each other multiple times via stalk talk unless your sim is low on social motive, in which case, they will talk until their bar is full again. Using the campus directory is especially handy once you start to know who Greek House or secret society members are, as you can target them directly and make friends that will do more for you than just boost up your friend counter. Unfortunately, the phone is a relatively slow way to exchange positive reactions, so after a while, it's time to call them up and invite them in person. ----------------------------------------------------------------------------- [5.02] Invite Them Over: Or Hunt Them Down From 25 to 35 Daily Relationship 25 Relationship points on both sides is the safe range to invite a sim over to your residence and start forcing your good will upon them, any lower and you'll be risking a fair chance of them giving a quippy sarcastic remark often involving broken phones, Baked Alaska, and llamas. If you have a grouchy sim however, you can Crank Call them to tick them off into coming down to your lot regardless, although the 25 daily relationship points are needed for the next step anyway. At 25, you can start uncorking the bottle if your sim is socially adept, but more precisely if they are able to perform the ultimate unromantic social action: Bust A' Move! Yup, this bad girl of a social action is fast, it frequently increases 2 lifetime relationship points and 8 daily relationship points and it works even when your sim's new relationship is shaky! You'll be using bust a' move a lot in making friends and I label it the number one most useful unromantic social action in the game! The only downside to this skill is that there are some requirements for it. You might be scratching your head all over wondering why some sims have it and others don't but the answer is very simple! In order to gain the ability to use Bust A' Move, you must first be skilled at dancing! It might seem to all make sense now in retrospect, but personally, I was smacking my head against the wall trying to figure out if this move was personality or ordinarily skill based. Unfortunately, that being said, a newly created sim will have to settle for either more chitchat, joke telling, or admiration, as any double plus social interaction stands a high chance of backfiring, although dancing together is your safest bet should there be music playing outside of busting a move, and will also help you towards your goal of obtaining the ability. In any case, you should be at least 30 to 35 points for the next step. ----------------------------------------------------------------------------- [5.03]Three Hit Combo Routine: Proving That Sims Have Infinitely Longer Attention Span From 35 to 100 Daily Relationship Now this is the easy part, just pick any three double plus social interactions and repeat. As long as both daily relationships are equal and both sims are in a good mood, they should work with minimal risk. At the first stage of the step, I highly recommend bust a' move, gossip and dancing together, the later two which you can speed up if you cancel just as the animation is starting and repeat them over and over again. Sims have a two interaction memory, so as long as your routine consists of three parts, it wouldn't get old. Later on after becoming friends, an early canceled red hands, dirty joke and hugging become useful too. When you are simply trying to maintain a friendly relationship instead of make one, the best attack to open up with is a hug chained into a bust a move and ended with a roman cancel... oops, wrong game, I mean red hands cancel. Punch Me Punch U is also good, but unfortunately has the side effect of one sim punching the other too hard resulting in a double negative surprisingly often. If you have a Popularity, Family or Romance sim, they might even get into the spirit of things and form their own chain of appreciation, tickle, and entertain/joke/dirty joke. Knowledge and fortune sims can also develop this chain, but it is rarer. This chain can also lead to the high rollers of making out and woohoo should the two sims be romantically involved. ----------------------------------------------------------------------------- [5.04]Becoming Best Friends and Beyond: And Why You Should Ignore Them After Full 100 in Daily and Lifetime Relationship Daily relationship slowly rises or falls with the passing of time to match your daily relationship. If you left them off with a 100 daily relationship points, you can proceed to ignore them for several days until they eventually become your best friend. Unfortunately, this can take a long time and burn a hole in your wants list if you are a Popularity, Romance or Family sim, as they frequently want to make any normal friends best friends, so there are ways to force the hand of time and accelerate good will to all sims. On a very effective note should be the socially enhancing Cool Shades aspiration item. For the love of all things holy, never underestimate the importance of this tool should you have the aspiration to use it, heck, you could have used it in one of the earlier stages and it would have given you a tremendous head start. Using the shades with a strong interaction like bust a' move does wonders on both daily and life time relationships should it succeed; it can also save a dying relationship and prevent a "Lost Best Friend" memory in the case that you let a relation stagnate for too long. As much of a great effect the Cool Shades have on a positive relationship, they also have a dramatic effect on negative interactions. I've seen a sim chop down 45 points clean on both sides of both daily and lifetime aspiration by attacking a sim while wearing the glasses. As to how I got them to fight despite such high relationships, look in the Under the Influence section. Even worst though is if you have a sim wear it and catch another sim cheating. Cool Shades also have a multiplying effect if both parties interacting wear them. Unfortunately, not every sim has enough aspiration to so freely afford socially unawkward fashion, and that's where the following information comes in. You might not notice it, since you're usually eying the big green pluses, but each interaction has a different daily and lifetime relationship increaser. While talk is a great opener, it doesn't offer much in the way of directly adding points to your lifetime relationship, nor does red hands, which is an excellent daily relationship increaser. Backrub on the other hand, frequently adds two points of lifetime relationship which it only gets a single plus for daily. As stated before, bust a' move adds two points of lifetime relationship as well. As such, a cycle of hug, backrub and bust a' move is ideal for increasing relationships without intimate actions. Hug only increases by lifetime relationship by one point usually, but it's fast, leaving more time for the two other moves. As a whole, romantic social actions are the best for raising lifetime relationships and daily ones as one by a mile, particularly making out and woohoo, but turning to the evils of truth and love has the disadvantages of lover's paranoia, as I'm sure plenty of romance aspiration sim fans can attest to. In a single invitation, you can usually boost up a lifetime relationship about 20 points without going too much out of your way, but for the most part, you should let time do it's work unless your sim is a romance sim and wants to chase proverbial skirt (Or pants) at a record speed. For those who own The Sims 2: Nightlife, you can also take advantage of the love potions, chemistry attraction, dating and outing systems to help you on your road to friend making and give you some bonus goodies and large aspiration boosts while you are at it. ============================================================================= [6.00] The Ultimate Greek House Legacy When you first start playing The Sims 2 University and send your first poverty stricken sim to university for the first time, you will quickly learn just how painful the road to education can be. It wouldn't be the stress of performing well in class or the frustration of the final exam that breaks you, but rather the dens of damnation known as the dorms and the financial black hole that will perpetually hover beneath your sim's feet. That is why if you want to help those who will follow in your path setting sim's footsteps with greater strides and a sense of a greater purpose, it is time to start your legacy of an ultimate Greek House, an establishment of such behemoth proportions that your sim's children's children and their inbred nieces and nephew's children will be a part of it so that they may never have to suffer dormitory life the way your first sim did. As a side note that pretty much completely diffuses the aura of desperation presented in this section, if you happen to also have The Sims 2: Nightlife installed, you can pretty much shove a house's worth of objects down your sim's pants before he goes to university. When he is there, you can have him unload all the items and sell them to buy an gi-normous mansion with little or no additional effort and be completely free from financial burden, as well as haul some awesome career and aspiration rewards in, thus, rendering this section significantly less... errr, useful. It makes sense though, such is the power of money. ----------------------------------------------------------------------------- [6.01] Planning A Legend: Because Any Other Plan is Stupid In order to start a Greek House, it kinda' goes without saying that you first need a house. The very strange thing in university to consider is that when you first move a sim into a rented house, the price will roughly be only 25% of what it would cost in an ordinary neighborhood. However, after moving in, all building and buying options return to their full price. In order to get a tremendous head start when building a Greek House, it is absolutely vital that you get a large sum of money, plan ahead and take off running... well, that or you can cheat. There are two best times to start a Greek House, either when a teen sim with tons of scholarships under their belt first moves to university with any other welcome wealth worthy buddies to pool their money together, or at the end of a young adult's time in university after saving up their money and living at makeshift homes for the financially challenged. Generally, recommended is to start off your young adults with lots of scholarship money, which will usually also mean that they will have been developed in skills and background to become strong leaders for those who follow in their footsteps. Unfortunately, raising a superior teen takes time, so for a quick fix, you can just work your young adult's butt to the hilt in college and use any remaining funds they have left at the end to build and buy a the house to become your Greek House, seeing as they can't seem to take the money with them back to the neighborhood. Ideally, you should have at least 8,000 simoleans to get a 5X5 plot of land and start up a descent one story house equipped with items to meet every motive, unless you like to take your baths at the secret society. The more money you throw into the house now, the less you'll have to worry about later. The reason why there is no turning back is that the rate of depreciation for bought objects starts to quickly settle in, and unlike for adults who can get careers to offset the depreciation quite easily, young adults barely make any money, and in a house full of expensive objects, with the exception of art, it becomes very difficult to abandon all those expensive goodies when you only get a fraction of the full value, even if you did technically get them all 25% off. The good news however is that the price of the bills goes down with them, since the overall worth of the house decreases. The price of art also can increase, including paintings made by your sims, so if you have an artist with mad skills and you are planning for a very long haul, get them to paint the memories of the Greek House and watch them grow in value over the generations. ----------------------------------------------------------------------------- [6.02] Reaching For A Level 6 Greek House: Because Anything Else Would Be Uncivilized Level 6 is the highest stage of a Greek House, and can be achieved by having 15 family friends. The number of members is irrelevant to this, as you can have an entire Level 6 Greek run by a single person, however, it does seem that more members makes it easy to have other sims pledge, or else they might reject it At the highest level, a Greek House can have 32,000 members. If any human on Earth ever manages to fill that up, the Apocalypse couldn't be that far off. Fortunately, reaching the goal of a Level 6 Greek House is almost directly in the same path as being the Big Sim on Campus and employs many of the same techniques in friend making with the addition of having joined a Greek House, either by starting or tacking on. Seriously though, how many Greek Houses does your university need though? Mine has three and it already seems like too many. One strong one is really all you need unless you are trying to tell a story about war and strife among students, albeit it's a very fun story to play out with the closest thing to gang wars you can get in The Sims 2 so far, and the entire house gang beating any member of the rival house that walks by. Speaking of which, you can also lower a Greek House's status by killing off or destroying the relationships of family friends, but who would want to do that, other than me of course. As an important note, either as a bug or a miswrite, it would also seem that there are rather frequent reports of cases where level 6 Greek Houses cannot get another sim to pledge. I have experienced this problem on numerous cases, and it has me in a knot as well, but since I'm extremely selective about who is a member of my Greek Houses and who isn't (Only custom made sims allowed), it doesn't bother me much since I just work the other side of the fence to get more members. ----------------------------------------------------------------------------- [6.03] The Greek House Ladder: For When Hostile Takeover Isn't An Option Level 1: Requires: 0 Friends Max Members: 8 Level 2: Requires: 3 Friends Level 3: Requires 5 Friends Max Members: 10 Level 4: Requires: 7 Friends Max Members: 20 Level 5: Requires: 10 Friends Max Members: 30 (The game might falsely report that the limit is 10) Level 6: Requires: 15 Friends Max Members: 32,000 ----------------------------------------------------------------------------- [6.04] Getting Your Greek House Started: Despite the Fact That It Isn't Really Greek If it weren't for its real life counter parts the fraternities and sororities, there wouldn't be anything Greek about the Greek houses, well except for the whole concept at least. For the price of a puny 20 simoleans to buy a charter over the phone, any house can become a Greek House. You don't necessarily have to build your way up with a Greek House to level 6. A popular teen from the neighborhood can start one upon moving to university if they have enough friends. You can check the status of a Greek House by having a sim click on the Sim Greek letters. If you didn't buy one of those, then don't worry, your sim will go to campus and borrow one from who knows where and plunk it on the wall of your house. ----------------------------------------------------------------------------- [6.05] Greek House Features: And Other Questionably Tasteful Things Greek Houses aren't really the party magnet that the game leads you to believe, nor will you really start feeling their influence as a towering monument of campus culture as much as you would like to, but they do come with some excellent perks that make your sim's stay at university fun, and they also can visit the campus time to time to gather merchandise that may or may not have fallen off the back of a truck. Sims that live in Greek Houses have the ability to visit campus to pick up items, many of which are great to sell or use. The following is the list of items that I have personally seen: Wornable Easy Chair Really Depressed Loveseat By Club Distress Trottco 27" Multivid IV Television Fun-Kadelic Frequency Stereo System from Kauker Inc. VroomMaster 4000 Simply Spindle Coffee Table Retratech "Office Pal" Economy Desk Juniper Bonsai Tree Brand Name MettleKettle Maxis Game Simulator Along with these items, a sim can also simply go out to get a nice hot steamy pizza, which can be quite handy for when your household is full of sims with the munchies. Sims that are members of Greek Houses also have the ability to make other sims pledge. Pledges are a lot of fun; they basically put other sims through a trial period in which you can influence them to do anything for the incredible price of zero influence! Yup, you can make them your slaves and ruin their lives until they become full fledge members! Of course, you can also somewhat influence them to kill themselves or at least incur serious trauma before then through the power of really bad cooking in the form of foot high flames or repairing one too many broken dishwashers for a shocking surprise, but more on that later on "Under the Influence". There are times however when a pledge might be rejected due to lack of members or friends in the house or an undeveloped relationship, in which case, you have to work the other side of the fence a bit to thicken the numbers. A sim outside of the Greek House can join by calling on the phone or talking to a member in person, either way, they'll summon a small handful of crazy sims to prance around your lot like ponies in the spring time, and it's up to you to raise their relationship to a certain level, usually between 15 to 35 within a short time frame of six hours, that or try to assassinate them should you get this game mixed up with Grand Theft Auto by accident. Fortunately, if your sim is already good buddies with the members of a Greek House, the initiation process will be close to instant. Just because a person has become the member of a Greek House doesn't mean that they have to move in though, they are given the option of moving in at their convenience, which is very handy for those who absolutely hate controlling too many sims in a household. Greek House members can also hold Toga Parties, although it seems that certain sims come in random underwear instead. This seems to happen with sims who are especially outgoing. My main sim who established the main Greek House at my university always wore skimpy black lingerie instead of a toga like everybody else, and I wondered why for the longest time. The underwear they will wear is also different from what their default underwear that they can normally wear and doesn't necessarily have to be in their wardrobe It would also seem that only young adults can wear togas, as ordinary adults will just come in regular attire. Other than the wardrobe change, there is nothing different from regular parties. ----------------------------------------------------------------------------- [6.06] Continuing the Legacy: (Or How to End It Abruptly For Maximum Humiliation) A Greek House will continue to thrive as long as there are household members in it. Apparently, if the last standing sim in the house graduates, drops out, or meets a hot steamy death, it doesn't matter if you have members living in other houses or resting on the side lines, the Greek House will turn back into a regular house and has to be bought all over again and all of the outside members will lose membership status with the house, since it no longer exists. As such, the most important thing to do with a Greek House is make sure that someone is always living in it. Ideally, it is most fun if you have a member for every year of college, but working by generations is a more realistic approach. So before the graduating members use up the last of their time and head back to the neighborhood, be sure to move in some new blood to continue the legacy. Detouring off the side, I'm a bit of an anime fan, so my Greek House method and structure was based on a little known in North America anime called Maria-sama ga Miteru that basically has a council of three rose color based upper to lower classman relationships and... ahhh... let's just say that it's like the Star War's relationship between Master and Apprentice except with Catholic school girls that speak Japanese with no apparent special powers, so close enough. Ignoring the fact that I tend to tag the words "sempai" and "kohei" around story mode with vigorous regularity it is easier and much more interesting, not to mention more rewarding to carry a legacy through university, strengthening and reinforcing the work of the previous generation as they each pass through the same house, rather than just sending your sims off to dorms filled with expendables or housing with no concern for the next generation. Besides, sims you control are going to meet up again in the neighborhood eventually (Some exceptions may apply if you are evil), so you might as well make them acquainted with each other before hand, it's a great way to make friends for job hunting and fulfilling wants. ============================================================================= [7.00] The Secret Society: That is Full of Talentless Hacks When you are on the outside, the sim secret society is wrapped in a veil of secrecy so thick that only the entrails of the imagination can pierce it. When you are in it, you realize that it is run by clueless idiots, just like in real life, hahaha, just kidding, I wouldn't know anything about that... Anyhoo, fortunately, getting into the secret society also lies in the wake of the previous two goals, so you can easily aim for all three of them in the same blow. ----------------------------------------------------------------------------- [7.01] How to Get Into the Secret Society: And How To Master The Mighty Chicken Handshake Players new to The Sims 2 University often get Greek Houses and the secret society confused; they are quite different in many respects. The secret society is a lot type completely different from Greek Houses, and is best thought of as a community lot where you have the ability to build and buy as well as allow several commands that community lots restrict. It is also constantly filled with other secret society members. Getting into the secret society is easy if your sims get to know the right people. As a matter of fact, that pretty much describes the entire process of getting into the secret society, but first of all, make sure that if you are playing a custom university that you placed a secret society building out of the specialty lot selection in your university, or else consider yourself wasting time in the hunt. The secret society doesn't actually exist in the university neighborhood; it's a hidden building that you can be driven to via limo any time of the day that you can call with the phone. In order to initially get into the secret society, you must become friends with three of its members, not best friends, just plain old ordinary friends and you can dump them after they have served their purpose should you choose to do so. There are two ways to identify members of the secret society, the first is that they often, but not always wear black blazers with the llama emblem on them when out in public (But tend not to appear in them as often on residential lots until a member of that household joins). The second is that they are completely talentless bastards. Honestly, if you see someone performing music that completely sucks, chances are, they're a member of the secret society. Seriously, even the evil cow mascot, the cheer leaders and especially the drama professors are better at playing than any given member of the secret society. You'd be surprised what skill level some NPCs have, but not the secret society members; they practically zero on everything and have enough talent to fill a toothpaste cap. I generally recommend relying on the first method as it's a sure kill hint, but since members of the secret society seem to not always reveal themselves so easily to outsiders, their sheer lack of talent may pose a handy additional hint, at least in custom made neighborhoods. Secret society members seem to be randomly generated, so other than by coincidence, each university seems to have a different roster of them, and should one of them get into a slight accident with the cow plant, another will quickly come to take his or her place. After befriending three of the members of the secret society, prepare yourself that night at 11:00 a clock for a little visit from them in their big black limousine and watch as they proceed to harass your sim with their stupid chicken handshake and their kinky handcuffs as they promptly arrest your sim and haul him or her back to their hive collective. On an obscure note, the supposed secret society members who arrest and take you to the secret society are ironically adult police NPCs from the neighborhood, which is why you seem to never meet them at the actual secret society. In truth, they aren't actually secret society members, but then again, if you know that already, you'll probably also ignore the fact that they aren't really cops either, as they are really unemployed. ----------------------------------------------------------------------------- [7.02] Arriving At the Secret Society Now that your sim is smack dab in the middle of the secret society and finding that it is indeed run by aimless idiots with nary a talent to spare, it's time to enjoy the riches of the elite. First off, your sim gains new abilities. Of particular note are the secret handshake and the ability to hack grades. Your sim also gets to suit up in one of those nifty black llama blazers and can enjoy the awesome items now available to you. There are some fundamental differences at the secret society from normal and community lots. First off, upon getting into the secret society, you get your own funds of roughly 40,000 simoleans to spend upgrading the secret society and the ability to build and buy objects; yes even a bed. A sim can literally live in a secret society, but be warned that all money they receive from good grades goes to them should you pass final exams while being there. Every one of the three different base secret societies come with multiple career rewards, including the famous cow plant and a Resurrect-O-Nomitron, just in case any genius members of the secret society gets the munchies for cake, and trust me, if you take that thing out of it's pen, they most definitely will. You can also save your game anytime at the secret society, but it will return you back home upon reloading. The secret society also doesn't get any bills thankfully, and it would also seem that like community lots, it is virtually impossible to die by any way other than cow plant, as fires just don't seem to erupt and people fall of the brink of starvation and still apparently stay alive. ----------------------------------------------------------------------------- [7.03] The Secret Society and You Well, it's time to face the church bells, your sim is the only competent one of the black clad bunch and it's time to do some heavy duty skill building. Case in point, the original set of career items that you have been looking forward to so longingly is virtually useless since all of the sims in the secret society have no talent whatsoever to teach you. You can still derive fun from them where normally building tough skills like charisma and cleaning are painfully boring tasks, but the key benefit they offer are gone with the lack of a coach, unless you happen to use a little trick I discovered that I will mention later that is a bit of indirect glitching. Only a single controllable sim can normally be at the secret society at any given time, but there are some ways to get around that, albeit rather inconveniencing. Now that the secret society is part of your sim's life, all other sims that happen to know him or her will count him in as a friend on their way to getting abducted by the fine men and women in black. Essentially, joining the secret society has the domino effect should you have a multiple sims in university that are friends. If you had a protagonist sim who is friends with everybody in the neighborhood, this can become a great asset to everyone else trying to join the secret society. Unfortunately, it seems that no custom made or controlled sim ever can be found at the secret society normally, maybe it's because of the dreaded cow plant taking a portion of their upper torso as an appetizer, but I have over twelve sims in the secret society, and without a special trick, I have yet to see two of my own sims at the secret society at the same time. It would have been great if they did appear time to time so my lower classmen sims could learn skills faster, but it simply seems never to happen. They can shower handy aspiration rewards like Smart Caps around however, which is always a plus, but that's about the size of it for contact. This might be another glitch more so than a solid play mechanic, but the first time a sim goes to the secret society, they get a fresh set of motives to use. You're given an independent and fresh new boost of motives that you can use to build skills and grades until your energy runs out in roughly half a day, then travel back home and pick up where you left off with your level of previous motives. This is a great way for some early skill building with little consequence, just don't do something stupid like... oh, eat rotten food and come down with food poisoning, get electrocuted or die via the back incisors of the cow plant, that's never a good thing. Another note is that you have no access to any phone commands in the secret society outside of calling to go home. Ironically, little children can call to spam you, but you can't call to oh... refill the refrigerator, call a repairman, hire a maid, and invite friends or anything else that could have been extremely useful. Guess being a secret has its disadvantages, huh? You also can't seem to bring any new video games or magazines to the secret society, either. ----------------------------------------------------------------------------- [7.04] Different Types of Base Secret Society Buildings The talentless bastards aside, you can't help but feel as part of a community when your first sim joins the crew. Whether it's official or not, you are now in charge of the entire secret society and whether it stagnates into static mediocrity or reigns with a mallet of innovative judgment is up to you, and this is where the following information comes in. First of all, and this should be planned well in advance, is to know the difference between the three base secret societies that you can pick for your university and what they have to offer. A college town can only hold one secret society, so you must choose wisely. If you happen to be playing one of the ready made universities, Sim State University has Secret Society 2, La Fiesta Tech has Secret Society 3 and Academie Le Tour has Secret Society 1. ----------------------- Secret Society 1: A castle like formation surrounded by a moat filled with water. Pros: Lot's of space, aesthetically pleasing design and the four university exclusive career rewards. The materials used to make the building and environment in general are also more expensive. Cons: The fewest ordinary career rewards and an undeveloped kitchen. Career Rewards: Laganaphyllis Simnovorii, Resurrect-O-Nomitron, Dr. Vu's Automated Cosmetic, Luminous Pro Antique Camera, Senso-Twitch Lie Detector. Aspiration Rewards: Genuine Buck's Famous Counterfeiting Machine ----------------------- Secret Society 2: A dark manor furnished with an old fashion feel, and unfortunately cheap carpeting. Pros: The most useful ordinary career rewards for hard to build skills and three of the four special career rewards. The easiest to expand of the three secret societies and comes with great aspiration reward freebies and quite good furniture and objects. Cons: The original design is a bit cramp and narrow, so expansion becomes important. Career Rewards: Cow Plant, Resurrect-O-Nomitron, Luminous Pro Antique Camera, Execuputter, Senso-Twitch Lie Detector, and Prints Charming Fingerprinting Scanner. Aspiration Rewards: The Eclectic and Enigmatic Energizer, Money Tree, Genuine Buck's Famous Counterfeiting Machine x 2 ----------------------- Secret Society 3: An apparently small cottage in the middle of the desert Pros: A good selection of career rewards, particularly the hydroponic garden and biotech station which are good for useful for raising money. Cons: The awkward design and basement makes it hard to maneuver, it is also without a doubt the most difficult secret society to expand since it is not on leveled ground and has a basement. Unfortunately, it also only has two of the new career rewards. Career Rewards: Cow plant, Resurrect-O-Nomitron, Prints Charming Fingerprinting Scanner, Aquagreen Hydroponic Garden, Simsanto Inc. Biotech Station. Aspiration Rewards: Genuine Buck's Famous Counterfeiting Machine ----------------------------------------------------------------------------- [7.05] Expanding the Secret Society: Okay, now that you have your secret society and have gotten into it the old fashion way, that or cheated, the later of which makes infinitely more sense, it's time to upgrade this bad boy. When you first enter your sim into the secret society, there are four things you should take into the consideration of doing, and trust me from experience that I regret not doing them the first time around. 1. Sell everything you don't like, it's still technically new, and so the price should be the same as its original value. Doing this on later visits means that the price will deflate like Enron stockholder party balloons, and the rough 40,000 simoleans in the secret society are surprisingly limited. Remember, just because they're secret doesn't mean that they have good taste. Upgrade any inferior basic items like stoves or computers and settle for quality, not quantity. Remember, your average NPC secret society is highly expendable, so pay them little attention unless they are already good friends. 2. Unless you happen to want to kill someone, keep the accursed cow plant in an enclosed room or fence. When I was doing construction, I took the cow plant out of its pen for two minutes and it made lunch meat sandwiches out of the nearest cake craving sim. I don't think your own sim's AI naturally tries to grab the cake, but having a bunch of ghosts floating around tends to be inconveniencing unless your sim is an knowledge aspiring sim that loves seeing things like that. Since young adults operate on time spent in college instead of age, the cow plant's milk will essentially not give them any benefits and is only useful for killing sims in the secret society. Fortunately, it does make for some amusing memories. I'll cover more fun with the cow plant in a section of its own. 3. Keep in mind that you can make everyone in the secret society leave on command. Your sim becomes the boss in the secret society, and when you do construction, nothing gets more annoying than stupid sims sitting in the way of you making a wall. So before you do any extreme renovations, ask everyone to leave. 4. Remodeling is expensive work and the undo button can only do so much. Unlike in free build mode on an empty lot where you move you sims in after creation, you must be very careful in where you make your modifications or else it will cost you extra to correct them, as you do not get the full price back from the fundamental building tools should you delete them, particularly walls. Needless to say, have a plan before you start to make your modifications. ----------------------------------------------------------------------------- [7.06] Must Have Items For The Secret Society: Not all of the secret societies start with these, but they become very useful very quickly: 1. A Double Bed: A secret society without a bed is like Voltron without a head, except less important... just by a bit. Unlike community lots, sims can sleep in beds at the Secret Society to restore energy, and is the only thing you need to for a sim to practically live at the Secret Society. Additionally, beds are the fundamental cornerstone of woohooing should your sim have an intimate relationship with one of the other members. Of note however, is that woohooing can be dangerous if your sim is lovey dovey with more than one member of the secret society, as apparently the act of woohoo sends out radio waves that pisses off any other love interests in the house and makes them slap happy. 2. Pool Table: It quickly becomes the magnet of the secret society members and you can use it to build relationships and hustle money, also one of the best ways to restore fun 3. Musical Instruments: Okay, secret society members might be talentless hacks, but they have deep pockets. Place the musical instruments in large populated area and collect tips. You can also freestyle for tips, but the instruments also have the effect of making the secret society members perform as well. Unfortunately, since they suck, you'll only be getting like 15 simoleans after a hard day of them playing, but it's better than nothing, and they do it on their own. It seems that in many cases with The Sims 2: University, the money that other sims make goes to you, this should be one of those cases. Also, if a sim tips once, it's a good sign that they will tip again for a player of another instrument, and it's a good time to jump aboard and start playing with an actually talented sim for some descent money. A very creative sim can make 100 simoleans per a tip, and you can increase the chances of getting more money if you play in a populated area. 4. Microwave: A Cup o' Ramen will save your life and is quick to make with low potential for disaster, or at the worst in the kid gloved secret society, burnt food. When cooked by a master, a Cup o' Ramen can refill about half a hunger bar at record speed. 5. A Stereo: Dancing is an important social action and a little music never hurt when working out. 6. Exercise Machine: You can earn money by being a personal trainer, and since there are no body skill building career rewards at the secret societies, you're going to need to compensate with one anyway to complete the roster of skill building equipment that will go a long way to helping new members. ----------------------------------------------------------------------------- [7.07] Ways to Make Money In the Secret Society The secret society doesn't believe in bake sales, so there will eventually be a time when you will run out of money, and start looking for creative ways to make it. Some good methods involve performing music or free styling for tips or hustling other sims at pool, however, the best way is to use the Luminous Camera in Secret Societies 1 and 2 to take pictures and sell them for 100 simoleans each. It still takes time, but it's better than relying on the mercy of tippers or the slow burn of painting a masterpiece unless your sim can sell them off for above 1000 simoleans with extreme practice. On a note of caution, regarding painting at the secret society, it seems that leaving a painting in mid progress and leaving the secret society with intent to continue it another time is a bad idea, as it would seem that if a sim from another household enters, progress on the painting by the original artist cannot be continued. Other methods of making money at the secret society also include selling flowers from the hydroponic garden in Secret Society 3, the counterfeit machine, money tree and selling medicine, but in terms of speed, the camera is the fastest. Of course, your sim can also have their grant go to the secret society by passing a final exam while at the secret society lot instead of to their personal bank account, but there is really not much reason for that unless you house is sprawling mansion with everything you could have ever wanted and you are giving to the secret society for charity. ----------------------------------------------------------------------------- [7.09] After Graduation: Your sims seem to lose access to the secret society when they graduate, and return back to the neighborhood but they will always be able to take that fun little chicken dance of a Secret Handshake with them should they meet any of their fellow members to bring back good memories of a time when the cow plants didn't eat people... oh wait, too late for that. ***************************************************************************** Chapter 3: Making Money at University and Beyond ***************************************************************************** ** [8.00] Making Money at University ----------------------------------------------------------------------------- [8.01]Academic Grants: When Money Meets Motivation Academic grants are your main source of income at university, so try to get good grades and with it good money, so that you too can enjoy the pleasures of life outside of dormitory damnation. Fortunately or unfortunately, you can't take your fortune with you out of university. Upon graduation or dropping out, all money either disappears or goes to the remaining members of the household, I believe. Each sim gets 20,000 simoleans when they arrive back at the neighborhood. A+: 1,200 simoleans A: 1,100 simoleans A-: 1,000 simoleans B+: 800 simoleans B: 700 simoleans B-: 600 simoleans C+: 500 simoleans C: 400 simoleans C-:300 simoleans D+ and below: 0 simoleans ----------------------------------------------------------------------------- [8.02] Odd Jobs and Other Sources of Income: When Mediocrity Meets Manual Labor Without a real job to supply a steady source of income, your sims have to take up odd jobs to pay the bills if their monetary academic grants don't cut it. The following is a list of ways to make money in university. ----------------------- Barista: You can work the coffee stand on community lots for a small but consistent paycheck after every given interval of time. The pay is about 16 simoleans per 12 minutes of game time. As an additional design note, the barista stand is designed to combine with one of the store counters seamlessly. ----------------------- Cafeteria: Similar to the above except that cafeterias exist in dorms as well, so it can be done at home where the heart is, not to mention fire, as every so often the elderly cooks make a slight mistake. The price for working at the cafeteria is less than that of a barista, paying 10 simoleans per about 12 seconds of game time. ----------------------- Bar Tender: Similar to the above two but with tending a bar for the same pay as being a barista, which is 16 simoleans for about 12 minutes game time. ----------------------- Personal Trainer: If you see another sim on an exercise machine and you have a higher body skill, you can become a personal trainer. Other sims who have higher body skill on the other hand can offer to train you, should you click on them while on an exercise machine and choose the command. Being a personal trainer pays about 70 simoleans an hour and raises the body skill of both trainer and trainee as they alternate turns on the machine. It would also make sense that the speed of building body skill is accelerated between the two involved somewhat. You can also be a personal trainer at home if you have the appropriate machinery. ----------------------- Tutor: By clicking on another sim's homework when they are not doing it and having a higher GPA, you can offer to become their tutor and be paid in return. The reverse is apparently also true in regards to asking other sims to tutor your sim should their GPA be higher than yours. In order to get a computer controlled sim to leave their homework alone, you usually have to interrupt them with any given social action then click on the homework when they are distracted. Tutoring a sim for one full assignment pays around 54 simoleans. ----------------------- Playing Music: Unfortunately, to the disappointment of many, your sims can't officially form a band and go touring, but you can play on any stray music instruments you find lying about and get tips by performing on them. There are four musical instruments, a piano, a guitar, a bass and finally a drum kit. They can be played together in either Rock, Jazz or Country styles or practiced with independently, although you will only get paid for performing not practicing, although some sims have a fear of getting booed at, so practicing isn't always a lost cause. Creativity is absolutely necessary, and you can get 100 simoleans per tip if it is high enough. As a little know fact, the guitar object actually consists of two parts and you can indeed change color of the guitar after buying it using the design tool, although the option will not be available right off the bat when you see it in the catalogue. ----------------------- Free Styling for Tips: To free style for tips, click on your sim and have them select free style for tips under entertain. Free Styling, unlike playing instruments, seems to rely on charisma according to the game. It is rather fun to watch your sims bustin' rhymes in the sim language and it's especially interesting to see teenage Caucasian female sims doing it, as it completely defies the real life demographic in North America, although having them as elders might throw the demographic for an even bigger loop. ----------------------- Genuine Buck's Famous Counterfeiting Machine: You can purchase the counterfeiting machine with the long ironic name in the aspiration reward catalogue for 27,750 points, but unfortunately, it's not as useful as you might think and has the chance of igniting in flames or summoning the cops, the former far more likely than the later, even with platinum aspiration. It is a good idea to put a sprinkler over it in case of a fire, and if you crank it long enough, it will most likely burst into flames. As for getting busted, it doesn't seem to happen often, but if it does, a cop car will pull up and you will be fined 1000 simoleans and your counterfeit machine confiscated. However, if you happen to have strung along a sim slave that you really don't care about, you can make them crank the sucker for every waking moment of their lives and live off of their misery. This ideal seems especially keen if your sim is surrounded by zombie slaves of former secret society members. The Genuine Buck's Famous Counterfeiting Machine makes about 150 simoleans an hour and works differently than you might originally think, as after you pump the sack with fake simoleans, you must retrieve it manually afterwards, if the counterfeit machine bursts into flames and gets burned down to the ground or confiscated by the cops, you'll also lose the money that was stored in the machine's sack. ----------------------- Money Tree: It'll take a small farm of these to make a difference, but for the financially impaired, maintaining about four of them might be worth their wild ultimately. If you don't water them after a long period of time, they will die and you will have to dispose of them. Also, if your aspiration is below platinum, you stand a chance of only getting a puny 1 simolean per harvest as opposed to the usual 40. ----------------------- Writing a Novel: If you don't have high creativity, then this is pretty much just a waste if them, but writing a novel can net you anywhere from 2000 to 3500 or so simoleans from what I have seen, that's quite the useful chunk of change. Unfortunately, writing novels aren't as rewarding as painting and seem to take forever. It takes about 27 hours to write a novel, and it seems that prices do not grow with additional practice past maximum creativity, unlike paintings. ----------------------- Selling A Masterpiece: Paintings continuously increase in price the more you have a sim paint, and in university, the money from them can go a surprisingly long way if you sim happens to have been specifically trained well past when their creativity skill capped Additionally, paintings will also go up in value with time, so if you intend to have your sim house continue a fine legacy of tradition, painting is a great way to go, but personally, I wouldn't recommend selling masterpieces as a primary form of income unless you sim has trained enough to sell them for over 1000 simoleans a piece, which is quite the feat as it is for a sim only at young adult stage. ============================================================================= [9.00] The Top of The New Careers: It's Lonely and You'll like It That Way Upon graduating from university, your now adult sim will have four whole new careers open to them. I mentioned these new careers at the beginning of the FAQ, but what you really want to know is what they will be like when you reach the top of the career and which one will pay the most, have the most impressive outfits and carpools, right? Have no fear, for here I cover the wonderful world of higher education based occupation at their pinnacle! ----------------------------------------------------------------------------- [9.01] Show Business: Top Position: Icon Daily Wage: 5022 simoleans Weekly Wage: 15066 simoleans Work Days: Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday Work Hours: 4:00pm to 9:00pm Requirements: 10 Charisma 10 Body 6 Logic 10 Creativity 14 Friends For fans of the original The Sim's Superstar expansion, or people who live on planet Earth, it should be no surprise that Show Business is the best paying job in the game per week. In return for the high wage and great hours, it also requires the highest friend count and three skills at 10 instead of only 2. The carpool for this job is a fairly standard helicopter, and the outfit is a surprisingly similar to workout cloths from what I have seen. Of special note is the job position in the same line of work called Commercial Actor, which has a hilarious outfit that is like something out of Ronald McDonald's worst nightmare. ----------------------------------------------------------------------------- [9.02] Natural Scientist: Top Position: Ecological Guru: Daily Wage: 10,497 Weekly Wage: 10,497 Workdays: Wednesday Work Hours: 12 pm to 9am Requirements: 10 Mechanical 8 Body 10 Logic 8 Cleaning 12 Friends This job is excellent for sims who want to spend most of their time at home, since it has a record breaking daily wage and your sim only has to work one day out of the entire week! If you are planning to get your sim guy or gal to a comfortable point in their lives to raise a family, than Ecological Guru is a good job to have, however, it also holds the record for the absolute longest single work day out of any job, apparently 21 hours not counting the car pool! Fortunately, it doesn't kill mood and has a work outfit that has to be seen to believe. It might just be worth getting this job for the outfit alone! Also worth noting is that the Ecological Guru takes off for the sky to work in a similar fashion to Captain Hero, but their rather interesting attire makes it quite hilarious. ----------------------------------------------------------------------------- [9.03] Paranormal: Top Position: Cult Leader Daily Wage: 4725 Weekly Wage: 9450 Workdays: Tuesday and Saturday Work Hours: 6pm to 3am Requirements: 7 Cooking 10 Charisma 10 Creativity 9 Cleaning 13 Friends Statistically the least beneficial of the four new jobs with longer work hours for two days and less pay, you do get the satisfaction of knowing that people believe in your sim quite religiously. Honestly, I don't know why anyone would aim for the top of the paranormal career aside from the Resurrect o' Nomitron that can be snagged on the way, since even the job promotions leading up to it don't particularly have an initial higher wage punch to offset the final job's lesser profit margin, but eh, when you are respected and feared as being a super natural force to be reckoned with, it sure does feel good to be alive. The Paranormal field might also have some good Chance Cards going for it. Cult leaders take off for work in a surprisingly normal white turtleneck outfit and go via helicopter, although it should be noted that the Exorcist outfit in the same career one level down is quite unique and collection worthy, looking like something a shaman would wear. ----------------------------------------------------------------------------- [9.04] Artist: Top Position: Visionary Daily Wage: 4549 Weekly Wage: 13647 Work Days: Tuesday, Thursday, and Saturday Work Hours: 1pm to 6pm Requirements: 6 Cooking 10 Mechanical 7 Charisma 10 Creative 13 Friends The Visionary is almost as much of a powerhouse as the Icon, with good hours and wages on a different schedule. Your artist will be taken in style to work in a sports car similar to the carpool for the Celebrity Chef and Hall of Famer careers. The outfits of choice for a Visionary are black turtleneck slacks, but to tell the truth, I was expecting something a little more eccentric. ----------------------------------------------------------------------------- [9.05] Chance Cards: Actually More Horrifying Than the Cow Plant Chance cards are random events that offer you the choice to select one of two outcomes that appear randomly when your sim is off to work. They have the potential to make or break your sim's career and financial future. For the record, there is no right or wrong answer for chance cards. Each outcome you select has the potential to be either right or oh so very wrong and has prewritten dialogue to match accordingly, although it would seem from experience that some answers are more often right than others. In The Sims 2 University, the new careers also have chance cards, but it seems that they don't appear for every single job position on the way up the ladder. Unless you are playing the game straight up with no reloads, you should always take a chance with Chance Cards instead of ignore them, because in the worst case scenario, you'll just read a humiliating wrong answer before you reload, and at it's best you'll gain some great bonuses. The bonuses typically include a promotion, skill bonuses, money or a combination, but the results of picking a wrong answer are usually in the area of skill loss, a hefty fine, losing your job or a demotion. In the new careers, the chance cards are multiple times more powerful in effect, that or several times weaker. To tell the truth, originally I was debug testing chance card results with the new careers and was shocked by some of the outrageous sums of money that were displayed, but on later testing there seems to be a rather odd phenomenon where the number of zeroes after a number changes. For example, the first time I tested it, the Natural Scientist position, Rogue Botanist had a chance card with a result of getting 15,000,000 simoleans for picking the right answer or an instant promotion to the top of the career (That's pretty much jumping four promotions in one leap) should the other answer be right! In later testing however, three zeroes mysteriously disappeared, leaving only a puny 15,000 when the answer was right and getting as little as only $50 simoleans from some other answers that should have clearly paid more. Chance cards for the original careers can yield nice large bonuses of 50,000 to 80,000 or so simoleans, so it would seem awkward that the new careers would pay less than this. As it stands, I'm not sure what the actual sums of money should be for succeeding with these cards but seeing as how 15,000,000 simoleans is enough to make a house big enough to crash your computer twice and give your fingers a work out with even the motherlode cheat, it doesn't hurt to try and take a dive at least once. Unfortunately, testing chance cards without cheating is difficult, as your computer will implode from reloading as well as the patience of any mortal man, so any solid facts on my side are quite uncertain. Number shifting aside, the Natural Scientist career seems to have the most powerful chance cards of the new four careers. ============================================================================= [10.00] The New Career Rewards: How They Can Ruin Other People's Lives ----------------------------------------------------------------------------- [10.01] Dr. Vu's Automated Cosmetic: When Botox Just Doesn't Cut It Anymore Obtained At: Show Business Level 6 Ignoring the fact that every sim in the game pretty much has enough botox injected into them to paralyze an African rain elephant, it is still important for sims to look their best. Of course, that's what you'd think everyone would use it for, but we all knew when we first heard about this fun facial factory what most people would use it for and that's giving random assorted playable sims that you don't care about the face of a pretzel. The purpose of this career reward is strictly cosmetic, but it's great to know that it exists so you can give your sim a complete makeover without gene scrambling. Couple this item with the mirror and pretty much the only thing you can't change is skin tone and eye color. Say, wasn't Dr. Vu the guy mentioned in the write up of the goldfish tank? Would you really trust someone who's famous for having no treasure in their sunken treasure refrigerator to make a product to rearrange your face? Well, that's a good question, because Dr. Vu's Automated Cosmetic can indeed go postal, grappling onto your sim's face like a proverbial Alien face hugger and give your sim a face of traumatically random proportions. This seems to happen to sims with low skill points, specifically mechanical, but might also be a side effect of low aspiration, it is difficult to tell since it is mostly random. The moral of the story is, as history has taught us frequently on the news and in the tabloids, cosmetic surgery is great and trendy, but when things go wrong, they tend to go very wrong. ----------------------------------------------------------------------------- [10.02] Laganaphyllis Simnovorii: What Laganaphyllis Simnovorii Means To You and Your Sim: Obtained At: Natural Scientist Level 6 Short answer would be death... oh and the benefits of other's to you. The mighty Laganaphyllis Simnovorii, affectionately known as the cow plant, is single handedly the most dangerous known force in The Sims 2 universe, more so than zombies, aliens, and the reaper, and has only been matched in terms of sheer horror to the social bunny and the now extinct jump bug. Never before has there been a closer way in the sims universe to actually murder another sim until the cow plant. Sure, you could always use the ladderless swimming pool or the towering inferno love child of bad cooking, but that could have all been attributed to the work of a greater power, in other words, you. So what makes the cow plant so udderly horrific, well, to start the ball rolling, it eats your neighbors whole by luring them with it's cake like tongue, then coverts them into digestible form in which your sims can drink and has a similar effect to the Elixir of Life. The animators did an outstanding of bringing the cow plant to life and how it eats sims, it makes you questionably lunch touchy feely whenever sims you actually like wander even close to that abomination. You can also feed it normally for a small price needed to buy assorted giant animal parts, which is 35 simoleans, but where's the fun in that? Feeding the cow plant normal meat doesn't yield any milk, unfortunately. It is simply a way to satisfy its hunger temporarily so it doesn't chomp down on anyone. Fortunately, it seems that your own sim's AI will never be dumb enough to go for the sim eating plant's cake tongue, but your neighbors will be attracted to it like flies to a lamp. It takes approximately eleven to twelve hours for the cow plant to become hungry, and this time is taken to account even after it has eaten a sim and is milk ready, so if you milk it after a twelve hour wait, it will instantly be hungry and have the hunch to munch again. An interesting fact about the cow plant is that it apparently refuses to eat sims with low hygiene and this includes freshly made zombies, so make sure you give your new zombies a shower before you recycle them into life juice yet again. After milking and drinking a sim, your sim gets the memory of having drunk previously mentioned sim, and it definitely doesn't sound like they are very remorseful about the source for their new found beverage. Another factor about death via cow plant is that it is instant; the reaper doesn't stop by to even claim the sim's soul. Additionally, sims don't have bad memories about sims dying this way, guess the cow plant is just a natural part of life and death in the sim world. In case you are wondering, sims that get the chomp by the cow plant come back as light green ghosts, easily confused with their death by disease neighbors. Cow plant ghosts spend the glamorous night away in constant torment of provoking the cow plant that ate them with a leg of ghostly meat, only never to be eaten or to be allowed to give up until the night passes. The cow plant can be found first at any of the secret societies, too bad it doesn't do a thing for young adults since their path through university is based on academic semesters, not Elixir of Life effecting age. In case you were wondering, a sim can drink themselves if they are eaten by the cow plant, resurrected, then drink from the cow plant that killed them, it's quite disturbing really. After you graduate, the cow plant can be obtained as a career reward from being in the Natural Science field when you reach Rogue Botanist. Unlike one drink from the Elixir of Life that sets back time for three days, the Cow Plant restores five days worth of your sims life. A commonly unknown fact is that you can actually drink either of the two when your sim is at the very beginning of a life stage, and it will have a buffer effect for the same amount of days as it usually restores. For example, an adult at 29 days to elder who drinks cow plant milk will not age for the next five days. Although it doesn't make sense, I've tested it enough times for it to be reliable and consistent, so I believe it to be universally true. ----------------------------------------------------------------------------- [10.03] Resurrect-O-Nomitron: Fun with Raising The Dead... Again Obtained At: Paranormal Level 5 The Resurrect-O-Nomitron is a much needed addition to The Sims 2 where life is already very fleeting, especially if you happen to be a player that oh... tries to kill their sims for a the lack of an euphemism. Basically, the Resurrect-O-Nomitron is a phone with a direct line to the grim reaper who you can bargain with to bring a dearly departed sim back, had you somehow missed the boat to plead when the grim reaper came to visit the first time around to claim souls. Apparently, even death needs money, and so in order to revive the dearly departed, you have to part with your hard earned money. If you really love your sim, then you'll probably pay enough to get them back on their feet as they were, however, if you really could care less, then there are a couple of extra defects that might be included in the revival package, better known as zombies. Funniest thing you'll ever see in The Sims 2 so far; a zombie streaking. Seriously, you have to see this to believe just how funny it is. Zombie making is a facet of The Sims 2 University that you should go into at least once. So how do you get a zombie you may ask? It's simple! All you have to do is be a cheap bastard when reviving a sim with the Resurrect-O-Nomitron! For best results with the Resurrect-O-Nomitron, you should spend at least 8500 simoleans, but that's just too much to spend for the priceless gift of life, so if you want a zombie, just spend roughly 1000 simoleans and your previously resting in peace sim will come back horribly wrong, even if they died at platinum aspiration after a glorious long life. Now most sims dread this, but not knowledge aspiring sims, they love to animate the dead, and some even want to be resurrected as zombies, to why in heaven they would want this is beyond me, but as mentioned earlier, knowledge aspiring sims tend to remember very bad super natural things in a rather good light. On the flip side, family aspiring sims are very easily traumatized by bringing back the dead incomplete, quite understandably, so if you are going to have a zombie maker in the family, make them a knowledge sim. Zombies are different from ordinary sims in many ways. First of all, they can't run or skip. The options to run and skip are available if they regain the right personality, but all they can do in actual execution is the mighty funky zombie shamble. Second of all, they can't normally reproduce, so raising biological children is out of the question (Although male zombies might be able to get pregnant via alien abduction), third is that they don't age, although this doesn't stop a zombie teen from going to university and becoming an adult. The fourth is that their personalities come back twisted and sucky, generally consisting of only four points of outgoing, two points of active and one point of playful, and if you didn't notice, they don't particularly look happy to be back in their portrait image either. Once you raise a zombie they will always be a zombie, even if you killed them yet again and brought them back via a perfect resurrection -- twice. Essentially, after you get a zombie sim, you really have to resist the urge to off him or her a second or third time using the cow plant. Zombies also frequently think about brains, whether to eat them or to play soccer with them is unclear at this point in time. There are four different results from paying the reaper various prices with the Resurrect-O-Nomitron: 1. 987: No resurrection and all the money spent is wasted 2. 988 - 4127: Resurrected as a zombie with horrible motive levels and steaming mad at the sadistic cheapskate who brought them back from the great beyond. Also of note is that they have lost most of their personality and lose six skill points in every area. 4128 - 8512: Sim is resurrected normally, but with reverse personality and a loss of four skill points in every area. In case you are getting ideas similar to the reverse to perfect personality yellow potion trick in the original The Sims, it wouldn't work, since all custom sims must allocate all 25 points somewhere so you have to have a sim that was massively discouraged or encouraged either way. However, if you kill a zombie a second time and bring them back this way, you can convert their crappy personality to a rather positive one. 8513 - 10000: Sim is resurrected perfectly with healthy motives and the relationship between the previously departed and the reviver gets a healthy boost. The reason the prices are a bit wavy, is because the adjustment bar works on a slightly insensitive price bar, similar to when you buy food. It's generally easier to remember by rounding off. Oh! One last thing, the grim reaper is actually a great guy and loves children! You can perfectly revive a child for 1000 simoleans and above which is basically the price of bringing back a zombie. Fortunately or unfortunately, depending on if you are Satan or not, (Hey, even death loves children, apparently) Maxis made it impossible to make a child zombie so instead you get a super discount on bringing back children, although paying under 1000 will net you the usual nothing. ----------------------------------------------------------------------------- [10.04] Luminous Pro Antique Camera: Photographing Other Sim's Deaths for Profit And Fun Obtained At: Artist Level 5 If a picture could tell a thousand words, then there wouldn't be a need for books, that's why picture books were invented, but that's completely beside the point when you get this nifty camera in the art career that comes in two different styles. It can take portraits or landcape pictures with different effects ranging from light burst to vignettes. So what do you do with this new found power? Abuse it of course, take pictures of a blank wall and sell them for 100 simoleans each in the name of modern art and watch as those highbrow chin stroking bastards try to figure out the meaning of life. Well, that and you can hang them up on walls and put them on desks, quite handy I must say. Pictures look different from paintings and are smaller and have frames, however, the process to make one is incomparably faster, taking only a few I in game minutes as opposed to hours, and other sims can join and pose for the camera for fun in an attempt to meet all your quality composition control needs. Well, that and you can take pictures of sim's mystical journey to meet their maker, but eh, it's really hard to get the timing just right for that. ***************************************************************************** Chapter 4: New Game Play Mechanics ***************************************************************************** [11] Under the Influence: ----------------------------------------------------------------------------- -- Sure, you could be a model of society and use your influence only for good, but where the heck is the fun in that? The whole point of making sims do things against their free will is to make them do things that are, well, pretty much against their free will. Before diving into the evils of the wrong kind of influence, I will give a run down on influence levels and how to get points. ----------------------------------------------------------------------------- [11.01] Influence Level Influence ability is divided into five levels and determines the maximum amount of influence a sim can hold at any given time. Naturally, influence level can be increased by making friends. Level 1: Puny Pleader Influence Capacity: 2000 0 Friends Level 2: Common Cajoler Influence Capacity: 4000 1 Friend Level 3: Suave String Puller Influence Capacity: 6000 3 Friends Level 4: Powerful Persuader Influence Capacity: 8000 6 Friends Level 5: Master Manipulator Influence Capacity: 10000 12 Friends ----------------------------------------------------------------------------- [11.02] Influence Points Influence points can be received by fulfilling wants with blue brackets around them, these usually, but not always are around wants with a theme of becoming more powerful or more popular instead of more small scaled wants like eating food or going to class. Influence is easy to come by for socially aspiring sims like Popularity, Romance and Family, but proves more difficult for Fortune and Knowledge aspiring ones to obtain and use regularly and perpetually. As an important note, in Greek Houses, sims who have pledge can be influenced with zero cost until their trial is up and they become full members, in which time you can completely ruin their lives. Here is a following list of things that can be done with influence: The Sims 2: University Base Influence Actions Talk: 500 Entertain: 500 Appreciate: 500 Flirt: 1000 Play: 1000 Pull Prank with Sprinklers: 1000 Put Soap in Fountain: 1000 Prank: 1000 Fight: 1500 Hug: 1500 Kiss: 1500 Do My Assignment: 2000 Garden: 2000 Repair: 2000 Clean: 2500 Cook: 2500 Write My Term Paper: 2500 The Sims 2: University + Nightlife Influence Actions Bite Neck: 1000 Drink Vamprocillin-D: 1000 Serve Grill Cheese Sandwiches: 2500 Sing Karaoke: 1000 Sing With: 1000 ----------------------------------------------------------------------------- [11.03] Being A Good Influence: Influence is limited in the constructive area, typically, writing a term paper, gardening and cleaning are the best bets but cost quite a bit. Since serving food and repairing depends on skill, don't be surprised if the sim in question does a crappy job of what is asked of them and ends up making a slight miscalculation on their life expectancy in the process. During parties, the sim being the host will also often have wants to influence another sim to play, talk, entertain, appreciate and prank another sim, although on rare occasions they may want them to put soap a fountain, which is always fun to watch. Unfortunately, regarding social interaction influences, the sim being influenced will randomly pick an interaction out of the chosen category, and it may very well backfire in their face. Oh well, their fault, not yours. Of all of the influence abilities, writing up a term paper is by far the most useful one available and is well worth the steep 2,500 price. It may seem obvious, but it is almost completely pointless to have a sim influence another sim that you already control unless it is an ability out of their social range, such as fighting or kissing. Influence works on complete strangers to best friends, but if you are trying to influence a sim who clearly hates the sim asking, then there is a good chance the request will be rejected regardless, although no points will be spent. ----------------------------------------------------------------------------- [11.04] Being A Bad Influence: Wow, there is so much fun to be had from having your sim control other weak puny minded sims around that it is metaphorically a bucket of worms waiting to be tossed at an art critic. In this segment, I will discuss what advanced fun can be had from abusing influence. ----------------------- 1. How to Light Up another Sim's Life Do you have a broken dishwasher or garbage compactor around just begging to be fixed? Those who are no strangers to the modern world of technology in The Sims 2 know that even the best of mechanics can get a shock or two from trying to repair the potentially most hazardous electronic objects in the game. So what is the reason that you should put your beloved sims at risk when you can just chuck an expendable stranger into the electronic fray and celebrate a well lit Christmas without a Christmas tree? The answer is that there isn't one, and by influencing a talentless sim to repair your broken electronic equipment, you aren't just sharing your time and energy, you're literally giving it away in big hair raising doses of potentially fatal electrifying excitement. Long story in short, have a sim with no skill in mechanics repair a dishwasher or garbage compactor, and there's a good chance they'll get deep fried. Unfortunately or fortunately, it seems never to get them to the point of actually dying, as sims not in play seem to have a natural resistance against dying that involves walking away whenever their needs are too low and are just generally more difficult to kill via need depravation. ----------------------- 2. Grill and Kill A sim in the kitchen who doesn't know how to cook is a dangerous weapon to him or herself. With that in mind, influencing any sim to cook who can't cook is a recipe for hot smokey suicide. There's a fair chance that they wouldn't screw up though, and that's where you can help, by simply misplacing the stove or oven when the food is cooking so they wouldn't be able to reach it to take the food out. Of course, this can be done with any sim that you control, but who wants a bad fire related memory when someone else can pay the piper? This is handy incase you have a sim who wants to beat the grim reaper, although it typically is better if your sim had a high relationship to the victim. Fire is a tricky thing in the sims, you never know for sure if it'll kill a sim but you can be sure that it'll at least traumatize them well into their golden years if they happen to burst into flames before bursting into song and dance. On a more practical note, service sims are the only NPC sims worth influencing to cook for you, as quite often they will have the necessary skill levels to make a good meal. Regular townies, on the other hand, are frequently incompetent in the kitchen and will take out a pitiful Instant Meal for that hard earned 2,500 influence you invested in their sloth. ----------------------- 3. Romantic Havoc: Because polygamy is an alien concept to the sims, lovey dovey sims can often be very clingy when it comes to their potential love interests, so why not incite a little Armageddon of affection by having any random sim kiss another sim who is already in a relationship with him or her? The irony is that a sim under influence in this respect can piss off their influencer by kissing, hugging or flirting with their potential love interests, giving a perfect scapegoat of an excuse to break up without being at fault, so if you are the kind of person who loves messy, overly complicated soap opera plot arcs, this might be quite the good idea. ----------------------- 4. What Violence Means To Your Sim Getting ticked off enough to beat the bloody pulp out of another sim is not an easy task in this game, especially between good friends. So how do you make best friends fight when their relationship is souring on wings of love? Why you have a third sim influence one of them of course, and if you are lucky, you'll get one sim to attack another sim instead of just poke, shove or slap them. This is actually an excellent way to break off those annoying one sided love relationships, and further more, it is the only practical way for Popularity sims to meet the "Win A Fight" want without having to act like a complete villain, albeit the "Win A Fight" want is very rare it would seem. You can also have two sims influence two other sims to fight among themselves and have a fun game of "puppet fighter". ============================================================================= [12.00] Lifetime Wants: I love this new feature in The Sims 2: University! Now sims have ultimate desires that are randomly selected depending on their aspiration type, and upon completion of them, they will receive platinum aspiration for life! No more worrying about dips in the meter and crappy work days, full platinum aspiration will let you soar through the rest of that sims life like a dove out of a rocket launcher and guarantee they end their life on a good note (Well, unless "death from above" says otherwise). There are a small handful of lifetime wants that can be completed as a teenager, such as maximizing all skills or making 20 simultaneous best friends, but for the most part, the rest of the aspirations that are career and family oriented have to wait till your sim has graduated from university. Children also do not have Lifetime Wants until they mature into teenagers and solidify their aspiration type from their default "Grow Up" aspiration. So what happens when your sim completes one Lifetime want? Well, they ironically spring another one. The easiest selection of wants belong to the Fortune and Popularity and are usually career oriented, but the most difficult belong to the family aspiring sim, as they can encompass a generation and offspring. From information on Tostada's part on the www.gamefaqs.com forums, you can randomly receive a new lifetime want by removing the occupied lot with the sim on it to the Houses and Lots bin. Unfortunately, this effectively also cuts off all relationships in the neighborhood in the process. It's a drastic measure for a well established sim, but it may quite a useful tactic when you want to customize that newly created sim just a bit more. If you happen to have The Sims 2: Nightlife, then there is a much easier way to change Lifetime Wants, and that is to use the ReNuYu Senso Orb. Just pick another aspiration and you'll get a new Lifetime Want to go with it, and if you liked your previous aspiration more, you can always switch back, since the career reward is so affordable. Originally, I had some conflicting reports on which lifetime wants do and do not actually exist, however, after thoroughly testing sims who have witness aliens and who have graduated from university on different levels of success, I have eliminated the ones that I personally have never seen. Since The Sims 2: Nightlife introduced the ReNuYu Senso Orb which I used extensively in shifting Lifetime Wants, I can now say with little doubt that the following lifetime wants do exist: Fortune: Earn 100,000 Become Hall of Famer (Athletic Career) Become Chief of Staff (Medical Career) Become Criminal Mastermind (Criminal Career) Become Business Tycoon (Business Career) Knowledge: Maximize 7 Skills Become Chief of Staff (Medical Career) Become Criminal Mastermind (Criminal Career) Become Mad Scientist (Science Career) Family: Graduate 3 Children from College Marry off 6 Children Have 6 Grand Children Reach Golden Anniversary Become Captain Hero (Law Enforcement Career) Romance: Woohoo with 20 Different Sims Have 20 Simultaneous Lovers Become Professional Party Guest (Slacker Career) Become Celebrity Chef (Culinary Career) Become Hall of Famer (Athletic Career) Popularity: Have 20 Simultaneous Best Friends Become Mayor (Politics Career) Become General (Military Career) Become Celebrity Chef (Culinary Career) Become Captain Hero (Law Enforcement Career) Pleasure Seeker: (Only with The Sims 2: Nightlife) Become a Professional Party Guest Have 50 First Dates Have 50 Dream Dates Apparently, the Lifetime Wants regarding having children be abducted by aliens and ones that involve university graduates either don't exist, or are impractically rare to obtain, as such, I have removed them from the list having concluded after going nuts trying to obtain them. ============================================================================= [13] Household Merging: Household merging is an excellent and much desired new feature to The Sims 2. Now instead of families, the residents of a house are grouped into households, and the ability to merge two different households together is possible at both university and in ordinary neighborhoods. This allows more freedom in choosing which sims live together as you will no longer have to worry about marrying your way into a family as your only course of action. Even arch enemies now can live together and allow hilarity to ensue, but a more practical strategy for both university and the ordinary neighborhoods is to have a single powerful and skilled master household with a huge house and a full arsenal of career and aspiration items take in new or underdeveloped members of the neighborhood and train them with career rewards and smart caps without worry of financial failure. After my main sim left for college, her parents have been doing this ever since and it has been a tremendous help, since their gigantic house and 700,000 simoleans weren't really going anywhere. As such, my main sim's parents have in effect, trained every custom sim in the neighborhood and have made them into skilled successful individuals in much less time. Having one sim household take in another one can be a tremendous help, and Greek and ordinary houses in University can also employ a similar technique, although career rewards will not be available to young adults, save for the diploma. ***************************************************************************** Chapter 5: Miscellaneous ***************************************************************************** [14] NPCS: This section covers the new NPCs but also reviews some of the classic supernatural ones, as there are many unique things about them that some players might have missed on. ----------------------------------------------------------------------------- -- [14.01] The House Crashers: There are five main NPCs that crash your home randomly at university. NPC, of course, stands for Non-Player Character, but I use the term in particular to service or sims with special roles in society outside of merely existing, otherwise I'd just call then Townies, hahahaha. You can befriend any NPC, but they will act normally if you invite them, rather than if they spontaneously come crash your house. 1. Mascot: Wearing the fabled favorite animal of Maxis tradition as his spirit embodied, this enthusiastic Llama suit wearing academic zealot has very few gripes about running into your house to school cheer each and every single person, multiple times in fact. He will also protect your sims from the evils of the cow mascot. Somehow though, he just seems to ask for a water balloon in the face. 2. Evil Mascot: Dressed like a cow with a mean streak a mile wide, the Evil Mascot is the Mascot's nasty counterpart, and comes to your house with the sole intent of belching, pranking, teasing and generally ruining your sim's day, even if you happened to make your sims best friends with him. The evil mascot is particularly annoying to have during parties as he or she decreases party scores with his almost full focus on negative social interactions. Fortunately, the cheer leader and the mascot are all too happy to beat the seven shades of gray out of this cow suit toting pest and make him run away. In theory, having one of your sims attack the cow mascot should have the same effect. 3. Cheer Leader: Crashing into your house with enthusiasm only rivaled by the Mascot, the cheer leader is all too happy to join in the parade of endless chanting of the school cheer, whether you want to hear it or not. The cheer leader is also another arch enemy of the evil mascot, and believe it or not, she's usually a vicious fighter with maximum body skill that can whoop the butts of the vast majority of people who challenge her. She makes a great personal trainer if she could just get her to settle down. Unlike virtually every NPC in the game, the cheer leader is the only NPC that always seems to be female, which does kind of make sense if you think about it. 4. Coach: An old man or woman who comes to your house to yell at your sim and make them work out. Really serves very little function, since if you ever really wanted to work out, you should go to a community lot with exercise equipment, but eh, how often is it in real life that your coach domestically harasses you?' 5. Streaker: Like the people we all know and love, streakers have nary an inhibition when it comes to better things like modesty, and come dashing into your house as naked as the day they were born, only to dash straight out again, in which time you can always torment them by having one of your sims prank them. It would seem that every house gets one of each to appear and that specific NPC will haunt the house for the rest of it's existence, while you might encounter a different cast of the same characters with different names while playing other houses, so it's not always such a horrible idea to say, befriend the evil mascot. ----------------------------------------------------------------------------- [14.02] New Service Sims The Cafeteria Worker: 1. Cafeterias close late at night and open early in the morning, and fortunately for you, this old guy or gal is there to help keep your sims from the brink of starvation. They also have a good sense of humor and often laugh at the more involuntary functions of the sim anatomy. Unfortunately, just like any other sim, they have the occasional kitchen fire in which you better home to high heaven hope that there is a sprinkler system nearby or they and anybody else in the room will be doing the potty dance to the warmth of a roaring fire. If you are interested in building a cafeteria of your own on community lots or in dorms with the cheat, there are two items that you need. The first is the Shinytop Stove (Should be the shiny second most expensive one) and the second are kitchen islands. For those unfamiliar with domestic dining definitions, a kitchen island is a self standing counter top that is meant to be put in the middle of the room as opposed to against a wall. In The Sims 2: University, you can also tack on a bar stool to a kitchen island and double it as a dining table, as well as a place to serve and prepare food. It seems that cafeteria workers simply just materialize the ingredients out of thin air without the need of a fridge. 2. Bartender: To tell the truth, this NPC just seemed so natural that I couldn't remember if he/she was a part of the core game or not, but I'm listing them anyway. Unlike cafeteria workers, bartenders can be hired for parties to come over to your house, tend your bar and make drinks. At community lots, unlike cafeteria workers, bartenders can work 24 hours a day, and although drinks don't do much to increase motives, the new groovy juice bar looks very neat and really adds to the atmosphere of community lots. Your sim can also work as a bartender if you click on the current bartender and choose the appropriate command. Bartenders tend to go and shoot pool or play other games if they get board. 3. Barista: A very handy NPC that you can find at community lots for when your sim starts running out of steam. With baristas around, your sim can essentially last on community lots forever without having to worry about fainting when you get home. Normally, sims can't faint in community lots, but since you have infinite time in neighborhood community lots to drink up on coffee and refill the rest of your needs, you can actually go to a community lot to restore all your motives now, and thanks to the baristas, that includes energy, although you should make sure that there is a washroom nearby, because you are definitely going to need it. Unfortunately, since at university time still ticks down when you are at community lots, this method is not highly recommended. ----------------------------------------------------------------------------- [14.03] Supernatural NPCs Although part of the core game, I still often hear questions about these fun loving demons, and so, I decided to do an additional write up on them. 1. Social Bunny: A great deal of questions are often asked about the social bunny, our imaginary furry friend that comes down to earth when one's social needs make them coocoo in the coconut. Social bunnies are arguably cute, and slightly worn out. Originally, I thought that the Social Bunny was a reference to the cult film Donny Darko's evil semi-imaginary bunny rabbit Frank, however, Chris Biberstein informed me recently after this FAQ was written that Frank was actually inspired by a much earlier movie called Harvey which had a rabbit much closer in purpose to the Social Bunny than Frank. There are of course debates on the chain of inspiration, but for the most part, this is what I have come to accept as fact. More information on the movie Harvey can be found at: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0042546/ Social Bunnies can be interacted with in many different ways, including beating them up, however, what you might not know is that if you get two or more sims imagining Social Bunnies, they will start interacting with each other. Social bunnies come in a lovely variety of colors and I've seen pink, yellow and blue ones all together at once, it's rather entertaining. Depending on the color of the Social Bunny, their social interactions with each other will be different. Social Bunnies of the same color will hate each other and will poke, shove, irritate and attack other Social Bunnies of that one color, but will be friendly and even a bit intimate with Social Bunnies of a different color. In case you are wondering, the Social Bunny is normally immortal and can stand over a tower of smoldering flames without even flinching. I do find it ironic though that a lot of players have tried to kill the social bunny by setting him on fire, only to kill their own sim, as it seems to state the nature of the universe. As an entertaining note though, you can use the Sim Vac to suck aspiration from the Social Bunny, although not skill, as he or she doesn't have any. 2. The Psychiatrist: The psychiatrist appears when your sim's aspiration reaches an all time low, its time for their imaginary doctor friend to bring them back to gripes with reality, but not before they get some quality time to humiliate themselves. Like the Social Bunny, the psychiatrist is an imaginary friend, so other sims when selected other than the one going crazy will not be able to see him. One of the most effective ways to suck a sim's will to live is to use the Sim Vac on absorb aspiration setting, it's fun to watch post vacuum trauma in action, the second would be to specifically exploit there fears. 3. The Grim Reaper: The Grim Reaper, or just Death for short, comes to your lot every time a sim shuffles off their mortal coil, and if you have seen him as frequently as I have, you start to like him. Death can be pleaded with by a fellow sim to spare the soul of the fallen, however, the better their relationship with sim in question, the more likely he or she will be spared. Upon being saved from death, the previously departed sim will gain a nice memory of their experience and have a nice positive boost of relationship to their savior. On the other hand, if there relationship isn't all that good, then Death is more likely to win and leave only a tombstone behind of the dearly departed. It should also be noted that if a sim dies of old age at platinum mood, hula girls will appear with Death and he will offer the sim who is past his or her time a nice tropical cocktail as they take their ghostly suitcase and leave for the afterlife. Speaking of which, I think "The Sims 2 Afterlife" would be a great expansion pack. If you accidentally off your entire household, you will get a nice little message regarding the reaper and the fine literary scientists behind the game scolding you for your lack of virtual responsibility. Let's see now... there are about three or four of these. One is like a personal's ad for the Grim Reaper, saying that he's a Taurus and all that fun (Even though he's actually a Cancer), another is Maxis enlightening you that The Sims 2 is in fact, not a murder simulator (Who knew?), the third basically tells you that the great equalizer has taken it's toll and to recycle the house and move a new batch of victims... errr... I mean residents in. In case you were wondering, and you probably were not, the game itself says that the Grim Reaper graduated from the University of Hawaii and his favorite band is naturally Styx. Now with the ability actually talk to the grim reaper with the paranormal career reward item, the Resurrect-O-Nomitron, you can have meaningful bargaining conversations with death himself and ask the proverbial question of exactly what life is worth, although he has a thing for children. Oh, on a fun note, the Grim Reaper makes himself quite at home after he does his job, sometimes eating leftovers, taking a shower, sitting down to relax, watching television, or even using the toilet. He also owns a cute purple cell phone with a skull image on its screen, although it would seem that when a sim dies by cow plant, it saves the reaper the trouble of visiting and having to use it. ----------------------------------------------------------------------------- [14.04] Relying on NPCs: How You Can Benefit From Their Hard Work And Misery: The otherwise highly expendable Townies are more valuable than you might think. Well, not so much at university, unless you happen to like sucking the life out of them with the Sim Vac, but you'll be surprised at how much they have to offer back in the ordinary neighborhood. The service NPCs, more than any, are surprisingly loaded with valuable skills, we're talking about high and maximized skills around the board here! Of particular note is the maid Kaylynn Lagerak and the papergirl Amy Jones. You wouldn't know from the appearance of ordinary NPCs, since you never play them (You can play as Amy and other townie teens in university), but they have some seriously mad skills. Kaylynn and typically other maids have maximized scores in cooking and cleaning and Amy has surprisingly high skills all around, it's a wonder why she works as a papergirl when she has enough skill to practically be a Hall of Famer. You can benefit from these two and other NPC sims that are available by befriending them and getting career rewards for skills that they specialize in. Service NPCs almost always seem to have maximized cooking and cleaning skills, but you might be lucky to find other service sims who are maxed out in other areas as well. Exterminators in particular are very talented; although you don't see them very much as you'd normally only call them if you had a problem with roaches. After finding a service sim who you think you could learn from, just invite them over and ask them to teach you. They are NPCs, so they don't have anything better to do with their time and some even have a good deal of creative talent that can help you get some good money should they come over to your house to play music and get tips, which will actually go into your pocket. Also in regard to service sims, with the exception of the paper girl or boy, they will offer to stay at your house after work is done if your relationship with them is high enough. On the evil side, every so often there is an annoying sim like Kennedy Cox that you will want to ruinate just for being such a prick, and that's where the Sim Vac comes in handy. Under most circumstances, teenage sim NPCs have very little talent, usually just a single point or two, so forgot about exploiting their youth and ignorance and aim for already successful adult sim NPCs who have much more to offer as you absorb their skill. Skill absorbing is very handy, as it is quick, and the points add up regardless of how high your skill level is in comparison to theirs or vice versa. Be warned though that if you get your final point of skill from sucking the skill of another sim, you wouldn't get a maximized skill memory for it. The Sim Vac also has a more hostile implication. The Sim Vac is a very powerful negative interaction. It doesn't always kill a love relationship instantly in one shot like some FAQs might tell you, but it is a great step in the wrong direction, since you can't normally beat a sim you are friendly with into a bloody pulp unless you use influence. You will probably be wondering why you might want to end a crush or a loving relationship, but when you get lover's paranoia of slap happy potential love interests, you'll realize that tormenting another sim to end a love or crush is a far cheaper price to pay than the plummet of relationship that comes with getting caught cheating. Oh yeah, the Sim Vac can also be used with the Cool Shades for extra aggression added. It seems that although the sims at university are random, or at least have an almost bottomless reserve (I would know, I killed about fifty of them and they still kept on coming, where as I will admit that I have successfully killed the entire adult and teen population of a custom neighborhood at least twice, minus service sims), the population in custom neighborhoods are fairly standard and predictable. So the same Townie sims should exist in each neighborhood, like the fan favorite Meadow Thayer, albeit sometimes other characters randomly get that name. This is good and I feel that they should have did the same with university, as it makes you actually think twice before offing them as some randomly generated abomination. It will also seem that only adults and teenagers randomly walk by your neighborhood house. Apparently, old people and children don't get out much. You will only see the NPC old folks and children of the neighborhood at community lots. In The Sims 2 University, Maxis has solved the otherwise perpetual problem of Townie teenage sims not being able to grow up. Now you can send them to university and help them carry onto their adult lives as and as an added bonus, not all of them are completely talentless. ============================================================================= [15] Time Frames: It helps to know how time in the sims universe changes society at each hour of the day, so here are some quick notes on what standard events might occur at certain times: -Day time lasts for 7:00 am to 7:00 pm At night time, there are far less people on community lots, but it seems like secret society members like to wander the night. -Alarm clocks set to ring at morning, ring at 7:00 am -Breakfast time is from 2:00am to 10:30am -Lunch time is from 10:30am to 4:30pm -Dinner time is from 4:30pm to 2:00am -You can call normally call sims between 7:00 am to 12:00 pm and vise versa. -Sims can stargaze either with a telescope or on the ground outside between 7:00pm to 6:00 am. During the day time, the telescope stargaze option becomes "Look Through" and the ground watching stargaze becomes "Watch Clouds". -You can throw parties at 8:00 am to 11:59 pm. You can try to invite them over at 11:30, but if it passes 12:00 at night when they were suppose to come, they will not. Same is true of inviting them over. If you live in a small house and have a party with many people, cops will come to bust it up at night, but most likely anytime past 12:00 at night -Secret Society members will come to abduct new members at 11:00pm -The secret society is inhabited 24 hours a day, so you can go there at anytime and expect good company. -Cafeteria workers will work between roughly between 4:00am to 12:00am, but may stay longer if they perform extra actions. -The papergirl comes at 7:00am -Head Master comes at 5:00pm when you call him. - Service sims like the maid, gardener, mail carrier, social worker and even the repoman arrive around 10:00am. -On call service sims like the repairman and exterminator can come to your house any time from 9:00am to 2:00pm, although you can call them ahead of time. -Grocery, pizza and Chinese Food delivery can be ordered at anytime 24 hours a day. Bartenders can also be ordered to come at any time during the day or night. -The relationship shift period occurs three times a day at 8:00am, 4:00pm, and 12:00pm. The relationship shift is when daily and lifetime relationship scores change automatically. -The age shift occurs at 6:00pm everyday. -Ghosts come out around 8:00pm to 6:00am -It takes about 6 hours and thirty minutes to make a painting -It takes about 28 hours to write a novel. -It takes about 12 hours for a cow plant to become hungry -It takes about 3 hours and 20 minutes to write a term paper. -It takes about 2 to 3 hours for balloon decorations to pop. -It takes about 2 hours to write a final exam, not counting going to it. - It takes 3 days for a baby to be born. - It takes 3 days for a baby to become a toddler. - It takes 5 days for a toddler to grow into a child. - It takes 8 days for a child to grow into a teen. - It takes 15 days for a teen to mature into an adult - It takes 27 days normally for a young adult to graduate from university - It takes 29 days for an adult to mature into an elder ============================================================================= [16[How to Have a Roof Raiser of a Party: Even When Your House Doesn't Have A Roof When I was inexperienced and new to the The Sims 2, my main sim (Different from my current one only in aspiration, she was of Knowledge Aspiration) finally reached her birthday and was ready to become an adult. I threw a party for her and bought all the fancy balloons and two buffet table. I was really excited about it, even though this is a video game we are talking about. First it started off okay, but then it quickly dove into disaster right when the cops came to bust it and it hit the 1:20 mark. Everybody left the party and my sim teen was all alone and blew the cake out all by herself. It was pretty much the most depressing sim story I could have accidentally gone through. It was only later that I learned with my revised popularity aspiring version of my main sim, who has successfully thrown at least forty Roof Raiser parties, that having a great party is actually very easy if you know how they work! Just to give you an idea of what power knowing how to party can give you, I've had a party where there wasn't a house, half of the guests didn't show up, I intentionally killed two of the guests, and then I ignored the rest of the guests for the remaining 3 hours, and I still got a Roof Raiser score. So how exactly do you get away with these outrageous deeds and still hold a Roof Raiser party instead of a Hell raiser? I'm about to tell you. ----------------------------------------------------------------------------- [16.01]Party Types: There are seven types of parties as of The Sims 2 University: House Party: The house party is your standard run of the mill party. With the introduction of sports, and toga parties in The Sims 2 University, it is rare that you will ever want to throw just an ordinary house party, since the sports and toga parties have specific corresponding wants to them that you can double up with the regular "Throw a Party" want. ----------------------- Sports Party: A party that requires a television where everyone sits around watching sweaty people whoop the crap out of each other at questionably valid competitively physical activities and eat chips, except with more grandiose connotation. The SimStation Sports channel has been added to The Sims 2 University compliments of my next door neighbors at EA Sports just for this little fun party type. ----------------------- Toga Party: Same as a regular house party, except everybody wears a toga or underwear, depending on how outgoing they are, and you must be a member of a Greek House in order to throw this type of party. ----------------------- Graduation Party: The Graduation Party can be thrown in the final hours after passing the final university year exam as a senior, pretty much the same as a normal party except with graduation gowns and caps. ----------------------- Birthday Party: On the day a person moves on to their next growth stage, you can throw a birthday party, but make sure the birthday person blows out cake before you have only two hours left to be safe, or else it will instantly become a disaster. ----------------------- Wedding Party: Similar to the birthday party, except your sims get married instead. Be sure to use the wedding arch so that you can get a good look at the bride's wedding dress as well, and it doesn't hurt to be snap happy if you happen to have gotten the camera career reward, seeing as how you got it at the Wedding Photographer artist position. Naturally, disaster will also ensue should you slightly forget to have the couple marry. Of course, it goes without saying that the sims getting married have a very high relationship scores, otherwise one of the unlucky couple to be will left at the altar. ----------------------- Golden Anniversary: In real life, a golden anniversary is basically a 50 year anniversary, but it seems that in the sim world that this event is based on becoming an elder as opposed to how many days your sims have been married for. Golden Anniversary parties can be thrown when a couple married as adults reach elder stage, but I have heard that you only actually need one member of the union to be an elder to throw it. Golden Anniversaries are pretty much exactly the same as ordinary parties it would seem, but since they only happen once in a lifetime, you might as well spare no expenses. ----------------------------------------------------------------------------- [16.02] Party Score: The party score is how good your party is doing. 0. Disaster 1. Real Dull 2. Snoozer 3. Not Bad 4. Good Time 5. Roof Raiser Your goal of course, is to reach the pinnacle of all party bliss at the Roof Raiser level. However, to accomplish the Great Party want, you can have either Good Time or Roof Raiser. I've also heard that you can crawl by meeting the want with just a party that is Not Bad, but why settle for just average? You can consistently have Roof Raiser parties with very little chance for failure and be a complete tight wad if you know how, and that's what I'm going to teach you here. ----------------------------------------------------------------------------- [16.03] Rules of A Great Party: And How You Can Screw Over Your Guests and Get Away With It ----------------------- Party Rule 1: Bring Only People Who Your Sim Likes and Who Like Your Sim Fortunately or unfortunately, the game already has the natural tendency to make sims who don't have high relationships with your sim get lost in the mail if you invite them for a party, however, any sims that you have invited manually, or who are already in your house by way of either greeting or intrusion will become a guest of the party. So for example, if the Evil Mascot should happen to be in your house when you call a party, then you are only one step away from witnessing the antics of the "Tragic Clown" incarnate. Having bad guests who can't get along well with anyone are a thorn in the side of your party and will only drag you down. Either way, all guests will leave when the countdown reaches zero, and you'll be left to dwell on whatever score you received. Before you throw a party, make sure you kick out anyone that your sim doesn't like. Ideally, it'd be great if your guests like each other too. You can virtually guarantee an effortless Roof Raiser if they all do. However, if there are any rotten branches on the tree, make sure to prune them by asking them to leave. Also of important note is that parties completely disregard if invited sims are away or at work. Unlike inviting them manually, parties can bring sims over even if they are in the middle of performing... oh, open heart surgery. ----------------------- Party Rule 2: Double Plus or Bust Party Score actually isn't based on how well your guest's needs are being met, I've had plenty of study parties in the past that turned out just great all the while when my guests were being sapped of their will to live, only had chips to eat, and left prematurely leaving a lovely Roof Raiser score in their absence. The secret to throwing great parties is to wrack up as many positive reactions as you possibly can on as many people as you can, in as little time as possible, and the best way to do that is with tried and true double plus interactions like gossip, bust a' move, red hands, hug, dirty joke and any romantic interactions, as long as there aren't any rival hearts in the house. It doesn't matter if your sim is dirt poor and lives in a cardboard box of house a or has the personality of oatmeal, if you are able to score those double pluses with all your guests and they aren't trying to kill each other, then party greatness is yours. This is even easier if you are playing multiple sims who have good relations with each other and the guests, albeit it becomes difficult to multitask above three controllable sims. In this game, although having different household friends adds to the family friend counter and makes it easier to get jobs, having many of the same overlapping friends makes it easier to throw a good party. If you manage to reach Roof Raiser and there aren't any negative reactions going around, then there's a pretty good chance that it'll stay a Roof Raiser, even if you had to take off for your final exam in the middle of it or some of the guests should get into some unfortunate "accidents". ----------------------- Party Rule 3: Big or Small? Depending on your computer's power, you can invite from 2 to 8 guests without using the cheat. The fewer the guests there are, the easier it is to get a high party score, because you will not have to divide your attention as much. As a matter of fact, you can pretty much have a party of two and have a real easy sure win Roof Raiser, although a party of one is pretty much social suicide and can happen if you throw your party too close to the rim of 12:00 at night where no one will come. When you have eight guests invited though, you best have a large house on a large lot and do it during the day, as cops who like to bust chops might break it up in mid swing, although I do distinctively remember having parties that lasted till three in the morning quite often. When you get used to it, a full eight guest party is fairly manageable, but of course, by that time, you should have well more than eight friends. ----------------------- Party Rule 4: When Every Day Is a Party All aspiration types have the occasional want to throw a party, then there's the popularity aspiration and their complete utter lack of belief in social isolation. When your sim has built a vast network of friends, you practically start to depend on parties to maintain friendship and you might even start depending on them every day, sometimes even twice a day. After a while, they wouldn't be such a big deal anymore and you can continue your ordinary life all while a party is going on to paint, feed your cow plant, raise the dead, you know, the usual stuff. Unfortunately, there are some hazards that having a house full of crazy people everyday presents that just can't be ignored. First of all is the washroom. If you have the money, build a separate washroom and slap a Myne Door or two on it so that only members of your household can use it. Unfortunately, guest sim's biochemistry works like clock work, and after one or two hours of having fun, they'll all want to eat and after that, they'll all want to use the washroom at the same time before continuing to have more fun. There is nothing more annoying than having your washroom filled with four people all yelling at each other to get out and none of them budging, and you don't want to be in that mess, so a private washroom is a pretty good idea. You also start learning early that you really don't want to feed your guests because it costs money and time, and money and time costs time and money and vice versa. If you don't, they'll start to ransack your fridge for chips and instant meals, but at least they do it on their own. Stuff also gets broken frequently if you have parties everyday, of considerable note is the toilet, which if not fixed quickly will turn your washroom into a swimming pool of puddles. Another important note should you decide to feed your guests is that food poisoning can be contracted from eating rotten food and even applies to guests who you might control in other households which will appear on their side when you play them. For this reason, get rid of rotten food like the bubonic plague during a party, or else you might just accidentally poison all of your best friends in an otherwise Machiavellian stroke of genius had it not been accidental. This can also happen at community lots in university so be wary of old cafeteria food. ============================================================================= [17] Compulsive Clothing Compiling: It was only recent that I learned that this feature was a part of the The Sims 2 University, and what an ingenious idea it is! In The Sims 2 University, sims can collect outfits that they have worn throughout their careers! As your sim ascends up the corporate ladder, the outfits they wear are added to every wardrobe on the lot they live on, so now your sims can play super hero, villain or do the space walk in their astronaut gear any time they want after winning the outfits! It would also seem that other sims in the household of the same age and gender (Although it seems some clothing is shared between adults and teens) can use them as well, so you can have an excellent custom party any time you choose now, and trust me, having the mother in the family dressed as a criminal mastermind and the father in the family dressed as captain hero and prank each other is surprisingly entertaining! It's great to finally see all that hard work the clothing designer went through for the career outfits going for more bangs per every buck, and fattening your costume collection can be an incredibly fun side game Oh, for those of you who are a bit fussy about your sim's thumbnail portrait as I was, having your sim randomly change clothing when growing up and all, all you need to do in order to refresh the thumbnail is to have a mirror and chose "Change Appearance", make one small adjustment, then select confirmation. After this, if your sim's appearance hasn't changed yet, just quickly go into build and buy mode then back and it should be updated. The cosmetic surgery career reward can also do this, but the mirror is just much more convenient. The household snapshot that appears every time you load your household should automatically change with any modifications, so you don't have to worry about it. Raising a sim as a zombie will also update the portrait, but do you really want to do it just for that? ***************************************************************************** Chapter 6: Quest for the Ultimate Sim: ***************************************************************************** [18] Studying Your Sim As I mentioned at the beginning in this FAQ, there are many ways to play the sims. Since I came from an obsessive compulsive perfectionist complex in my old school RPG and fighting game days, I have developed the slight habit of constantly analyzing how to push characters to their maximum efficiency and potential without cheating. The following is not for the faint of heart, the casual gamer or anybody who plays video games to actually have fun. Well, it is still pretty fun, just in a soul sucking, will to live depleting sort of way. This part of the FAQ isn't yet about how to give your sim perfect careers, gigantic families or maximum skill points, any player with enough spare time on their hands could do that. This section of the FAQ is much rather, a breakdown of the how a sim operates and how to maximize their productivity and efficiency. Most every person who plays The Sims 2 has a different goal and style of play that would seem to also reflect their priorities in real life (Or the exact opposite), as such, I will give you information to evaluate and let you proceed according to your own style, but will also include my own particular preference as well. Thankfully, unlike my old favorite Monster Rancher games where your monsters could easily die of old age well before maximizing their status, The Sims 2 essentially gives your sims unlimited time to work things out in their life due to the Elixir of Life, which is quite easy to buy regularly with any sim who is played well to their wants. There is also a great deal of excitement in the process of focusing all of your efforts on a single sim, because at the time of writing this, not all of The Sims 2 expansions have been created yet, so you never know how your sims and their descendants will turn out at the very end with new features and aspiration types being introduced, like Pleasure Seeker in The Sims 2 Nightlife. Well, let's get to it shall we? ----------------------------------------------------------------------------- [18.01]The Sims 2 Endurance Trial I always wondered how people figured out exactly how long a human could survive without drinking water, breathing air or eating food. Now I can kinda' get the idea and it most definitely isn't a pretty picture. The following information was obtained by locking individual young adult and adult sims in a room and having them suffer accordingly to see how long they could survive before meeting their doom from full motives to completely empty. Since most motives drain differently depending on their possessor's personality, I have specifically tested sims with extreme personality to properly evaluate the times on both ends. It should be also noted that there may be a very small differences between even young adult and adult motive drain, although it seems unnoticeable. The numbers are not perfectly exact, but should be well within an hour's margin of error. Although similar to the section earlier, this review of motives adds on extra information about what causes motive drain as opposed to how to remedy it. ----------------------- Hunger: Lazy sims will survive longer should you lock them in a completely empty room and let them die, as they consume less food. Hunger has a heavy threshold on its last 1/8 of the meter, rapidly dampening the speed of the decrease. This makes it so that although sims naturally have to eat regularly, it takes a especially negligent player to actually let them die unintentionally from starvation. Initially, the difference between active and lazy sims on the bar is quite dramatic, but when they reach the last threshold mark, they start to closer synchronize with each other. Full to Empty: Hunger of Active: 50 Hours Hunger of Lazy: 54 Hours ----------------------- Fun: The fun motive decreases consistently at the same rate under static environments; however fun takes a particularly large hit when doing homework, assignments, writing term papers or other academic duties. Additionally, sims with certain personality types, such as being extremely neat and active have fun doing respectively related activities where other sims might lose fun. Oh yeah, just incase you are wondering, fat sims and fit sims are not effected by a hunger increase or decrease. Full to Empty: Fun of Playful: 22 Hours Fun of Serious: 40 Hours ----------------------- Comfort: Comfort is not particularly important motive and one that you almost never have to worry about unless you have an extremely lazy sim who has come down with sickness which rapidly causes it to accelerate in decrease. Comfort decreases quite steadily, but can be rapidly accelerated by performing particular activities, such as sleeping on the floor or counterfeiting simoleans. Along with hygiene, the difference between a lazy sim's tolerance for lack of comfort and an active one is dramatic. An active sim can go for three times as long as a lazy one without any comfort. Full to Empty: Comfort of Active: 48 Hours Comfort of Lazy: 16 hours ----------------------- Social: A fairly manageable motive, it decreases consistently and there are very few activities, if anything that accelerates its decrease. Generally, since you'll be talking and interacting with other people all the time, it's not a particularly strong motive to worry about, unlike in the original The Sims. Full to Empty: Social of Outgoing: 22 Hours: Social of Shy: 40 Hours Bladder: A consistent factor regardless of personality naturally, bladder is the fastest draining and the easiest to restore motive. In the original The Sims, bladder drained faster when your sim was eating, but it seems that in the sequel, eating has an unnoticeable effect. The only thing that really seems to increase the rate of decrease for bladder is drinking coffee and espresso and it does so quite prominently Full to Empty: Bladder: 16 hours ----------------------- Hygiene: Neat sims are far better at maintaining hygiene than sloppy sims, more so than any other difference in personality driven motive drain aside from comfort. A neat sim practically runs out of hygiene just before running out of hunger and dying. Hygiene decrease can be accelerated in many ways, particularly while cleaning dirty objects, working out, or dancing in the presence of a wild ranging inferno that can kill your sims, although not in front of the bonfire object oddly enough. Full to Empty: Hygiene of Neat: 48 Hours Hygiene of Sloppy: 16 Hours ----------------------- Energy: Energy is generally the motive that you'll be working your sims around, since it has the longest recovery time. Although the time between fainting of active and lazy sims isn't too far off, this is because there is a final threshold in energy similar to the final threshold before kicking the mortal can with being hungry. Sims will start complaining, whining, and interrupting actions well before their bar runs dry, but you can juice them out for quite a while before they faint. There doesn't seem to be too many activities short of being electrocuted or set on fire that adds to the decreases in energy. Full to Empty: Energy of Active: 24 Hours Energy of Lazy: 19 Hours ----------------------- Environment: Environment is not counted here, since for the most part, it is a meter independent of a sim's biochemistry. ----------------------- Aspiration: Aspiration is by far the slowest draining meter in the game, but then again, it's not really a motive. Generally, the aspiration meter decreases steadily for each hour by a small increment, but despite the appearance of the bar, it takes exponentially longer for the shorter segments to decrease than the large platinum column at the top. Here's a list of the approximate time it takes aspiration to decrease from one level to another, starting at full platinum: Platinum to Gold: 8 - 10 hours Gold to Green: 14 - 16 Hours Green Two to Green One: 28 - 30 Hours Green One to Neutral: 28 - 30 Neutral to Red One: 35 Hours After reaching one segment of red, the aspiration meter will cease to decrease on time alone and you need to fulfill one of your sim's fears in order to push it down further. In order for a full platinum bar to decrease to Red One, you roughly need to spend five days doing absolutely nothing, which is a trial all in itself. However, until your sim reaches a lifetime want, you'll want to keep them at platinum as much as possible, so your sim should have a well though out aspiration output system according to their aspiration type. ----------------------- When Asleep Sims slow down the decrease in their motives when asleep. In particular, fun and social do not decrease at all, hunger, bladder and hygiene are heavily slowed down, and comfort increases unless your sim is sleeping on the floor. As for energy, the whole point of sleeping is to restore it and environment is pretty much not affected by a sim's behavior. ----------------------------------------------------------------------------- [18.02]Skill Building: Skill building is an important part of the The Sims 2, and it's good to know how many hours you have to invest in order to prioritize your sim's time efficiently. The following is an approximate list of the amount of time it takes to build a skill depending on if your sim has a perfect personality advantage or disadvantage in favor of the skill being learned, such as Outgoing being in favor of Charisma. The third list is a measurement of an ideal skill building system, involving a career reward and a coach who has full skill teaching a sim with a full bar of the advantageous skill, and both of them wearing Smart Caps. This list is not completely accurate but is more of a makeshift approximation to give you a rough idea and is based on the adult age group. The column to the right is the amount of time it takes to get from one level to the next. I hope that I made the list as accurate as possible, but it seems that on some of the cases, the multiplication of each time at the levels takes a bit of twist instead of a gradual increase, so don't take these numbers as literally exact, as math isn't my strong suit. I used the game's clock as measurement, so these numbers go by intervals on the clock as opposed to full normal numbers. Personality Advantage Level 1: 0.45 Level 2: 1.10 Level 3: 1.30 Level 4: 2:15 Level 5: 2:35 Level 6 3:50 Level 7: 4:10 Level 8 5:15 Level 9 7:00 Level 10: 8:45 Approximate Total: 36 Hours Personality Disadvantage: Level 1: 1.10 Level 2: 1:50 Level 3: 2:25 Level 4: 2:55 Level 5: 3:55 Level 6 4:55 Level 7: 5:25 Level 8: 8:10 Level 9: 10:15 Level 10: 13:20 Approximate Total: 55:30 Hours Maximum Skill Building Optimization Level 1: 0:10 Level 2: 0:20 Level 3: 0:25 Level 4: 0:30 Level 5: 0:35 Level 6: 0:50 Level 7: 1:10 Level 8: 1:20 Level 9: 1:50 Level 10: 2:20 Approximate Total: 9:30 Hours ----------------------------------------------------------------------------- [18.03] Male Versus Female Sims: Hahhaa, I just had to put this stupid pointless debate in somewhere to parallel it's slightly more serious real life counterpart. ----------------------- Argument 1: Using the Toilet: Men: Can take a leak standing up and use bushes should the going get tough, but leaves a watery mess. Women: Can take out a newspaper and read it while doing their business and sit down on the toilet, which on a good toilet restores comfort. Winner: Men ----------------------- Argument 2: Pregnancy Men: Can be irresponsible pricks without any "souvenirs", unless they are abducted by aliens, of course. Women: Can get pregnant normally and go through the hell that is well, pregnancy, but enjoy the blessings of motherhood without aliens. Winner: Women ----------------------- Argument 3: The Sexy Walk Men: A stupid looking jerk like strut Women: A rather cute wobble of the hips Winner: Women ----------------------- Argument 4: Fanbase Men: Huh? Women: No competition, female sims are way more popular than male ones. Winner: Men (In real life I mean) Final Victor: Draw (Seriously, as if I'd risk pissing off either half of the world's population) In case you haven't guessed, the difference between genders in this game is negligible, it's not like Morrowind where the women are better at casting magic and the men are better at beating things into submission with sticks. I just thought it to be hilarious to compare the difference in a critical analysis that I normally use when writing FAQs on games. Realistically though, the winner to these arguments can swing both ways, depending on who you ask. ----------------------------------------------------------------------------- [18.04] Aspiration and Personality Optimization: I already discussed which aspiration I recommend at quite great lengths earlier in this FAQ and although every player operates differently, I stand by my conviction that Popularity Aspiration has the highest sustainable output, the best mix of short and long term wants and some of the easiest lifetime wants to achieve, making it a perfect choice for a power house sim easily capable of living off of the Enigmatic Energizer, staying young with the Elixir of Life and buying any aspiration items they could want as long as you are meeting their wants. Although I heavily recommend the popularity aspiration, it'd be awfully boring and painful if all of your sims were popularity types, as it requires quite a bit of micromanagement to maintain many relationships. A sim can always use supporting players in their household, in which case Family and Fortune aspirations are both excellent choices, both highly capable of large aspiration output as adults. The best solo aspiration is reserved for Romance aspiring sims who are at their prime at the young adult stage. When they live alone, they can selectively invite love interests over without fear of getting caught cheating. Knowledge aspiration is great to have for teens to start off with, and to switch later after the sophomore year in university is complete. This is because the vast majority of the knowledge sim's aspiration output comes from meeting skill building wants outside of the young adult stage. When a knowledge sim meets all of their skill building wishes, their arsenal is replaced with wants closer to the family aspiration, as such, they might as well convert to a Family aspiring sim unless you want them to chase ghosts, zombies and aliens for their main source of aspiration point gain, which can be quite fun, but rather unreliable unless you especially make a ghost house for them to live in and kill off fellow sims with surprising regularity. Essentially, although there is no perfect personality, there are personalities more suited for a sim's lifestyle than another. The following are my recommendations for each aspiration type. These personality types cannot be merely created straight off the bat. A sim must be usually encouraged by their parents or older members of the family in order to meet these levels. Fortunately, unlike an RPG like Neverwinter Nights where extreme attention to the growth process is vital, the effect of engineering the right personality isn't exactly dramatic, any sim can do anything they want pretty much, but it doesn't hurt to know what you are doing in the process. ----------------------- Fortune Aspiration Build: Neat: 10 Outgoing: 8 Active: 10 Playful: 5 Nice: 10 Since Fortune Aspiring sims get most of their wants from going to their jobs and making money, other than the initial friend making to climb the job ladder, they wouldn't be needing to socialize very much. The two original careers that fortune aspiring want are athletic and business oriented, so having high scores in Outgoing and Active to accelerate charisma and body skill also help to get bumped up their chosen career ladder faster. ----------------------- Knowledge Aspiration Build: Neat: 10 Outgoing: 0 Active: 6 Playful: 0 Nice: 10 The knowledge aspiring build is the most different from the other aspiration builds, since it emphasizes alone time to reserve social motive and to focus on being serious to quickly build logic skill. This build has also been designed to spend long hours at the telescope to fulfill alien related wants and accelerate logic skill for their usually preferred occupations. ----------------------- Family Aspiration: Neat: 10 Outgoing: 8 Active: 10 Playful: 7 Nice: 10 The Family aspiration is the most versatile aspiration type and just about any personality will work, since many of their wants are dependant on other people in the family. The configuration can basically be anything you want it to, but this is what I'd recommend. I personally have a Family aspiring sim who has full perfect personality who operates very well, but you can't really go wrong with a family aspiration to personality mismatch, so don't worry. ----------------------- Romance Sim: Neat: 10 Outgoing: 10 Active: 10 Playful: 5 Nice: 10 Romance sims will be doing a lot of hugging and kissing before screwing their love interests over, so whether you like it or not, being nice and outgoing goes to their advantage, although there are some romantic interactions that grouchy sims take more delight in, such as goosing. The romance and popularity aspiration basically operate the same way, but since romantic sims will usually be intimately interacting with another sim one on one instead of playing games, I used a lower playfulness score low enough to allow them to still use the skip command. ----------------------- Popularity Sim: Neat: 10 Outgoing: 10 Active: 10 Playful: 7 Nice: 10 This is the build I use for my main sim, and the only reason I didn't give her a perfect personality is that the ability to meditate and teleport disappears past 7 points of personality and I thought that it might come in handy sometime down the road, as you never know what the new expansions will be, like "The Sims 2 Maximum Security Prison". So having a little supernatural power is a lot better than oh...juggling balls I'd say. I personally consider this to be the best build in the game and is easily capable of offsetting the enhanced motive deceases. Besides, when your sim has enough aspiration point output to live off of the Enigmatic Energizer, you don't have to worry too much about enhanced motive decrease anymore, but that doesn't apply so well to sims with a perfectly negative personality, as their energy duration is much shorter, and they will have to use the Enigmatic Energizer more often, since energy has the longest and most restricting recovery time normally as opposed to just stuffing your face. This personality type will also bring up many people related wants that are easy to fulfill and often overlap over each other adding to increased aspiration output. Popularity sims can benefit from going all out in all of the personality areas if you can encourage them to that level, since most of their wants are derived from interacting and befriending other people as well as painting and being successful in their careers. Since popularity aspiring sims are often surrounded by friends and love to throw parties, they will also be playing games and group activities like blowing bubbles, pool, kicky bag and even red hands, so they can get a good boost in fun if they are more playful than their romantic counterparts. ----------------------- If you noticed, the three safest personalities to invest points in are Neat, Nice and Active as they all have great benefits, and although active sims eat more, they also have much slower decreases in energy and comfort. Playfulness and Outgoing are the two positive traits that are not clearly as beneficial as the previously mentioned three, so they were often the only variation I put into the builds. These points aside, there are certain special skills and abilities that only sims with a certain personality can perform. ----------------------- [18.05] The Fat and the Fit It would seem that the fitness and shape of a sim is purely only for cosmetic reasons in this game, but then again, seeing as how North American society is going completely postal on weight loss and staying fit, you can't really say that it's not more aesthetically pleasing to have a fit sim as opposed to an overweight one as viewed by society, although political correctness says otherwise. As an additional note to, sims with romance aspiration have a tendency so develop wants of becoming thin and fears of becoming fat. Staying fit in The Sims 2 is very easy, which is more than I can say about real life. There are only two things you need to really know in order to keep them healthy and happy. Rule 1: Don't Overeat A sim can maintain their weight indefinitely so long as you make sure that when they are eating, that the hunger bar does not go over the full capacity. For every additional point of hunger being satisfied over the bar, the weight meter also increases. The trick is to cancel their eating actions right before the hunger bar is filled up during every meal. Rule 2: Exercise Exercise is the only way to get your sims fit, fortunately, almost anything that raises body skill also raises a sim's fitness bar, so often, you can get a fit sim simply by building the initial two or three points of body skill. The active and laziness factors of a sim are not related directly to the rate at which a sim gets fit, however, an active sim gets more fun out of exercising than a lazy one. Of important note however, is that exercise machines definitely modify a sim's ability to lose weight and get in shape. Here are some statistics: ----------------------- Exercise on a Good Exercise Machine (Treadmill, Multipress Exercise Machine and Exerto Punching Bag) Default to fit: 5 Hours Fat to fit: 10 Hours By far the most effective way to get fit is to use a tried and true exercise machine of quality. ----------------------- Doing Yoga Default to fit: 10 Hours Fat to fit: 20 Hours Yoga is a good way to get in shape if there doesn't happen to be a exercise machine in your budget or only have a very short way to go to get into perfect shape, as it can be performed anywhere, so long as your sim has 3 or more points of body skill. ----------------------- Swimming In A Pool Default to fit: 12 Hours Fat to fit: 24 Hours Swimming is not particularly very effective way to get fit, and the price of a pool is fairly costly. Don't rely on sims swimming to get fit very fast. ----------------------- Exerto Selfflog Obstacle Course Default to fit: 26 Hours Fat to fit: 52 Hours The obstacle course is surprisingly horrible for getting a sim into shape. You'd think that getting the humanity kicked out of them with military humiliation would be a great way to shed some pounds, but it's so absolutely vile in this field that you'd be wondering if the fitness bar is progressing at all. The obstacle course however is the absolute best way to gain body points, as a matter of fact; you can expect a sim to go from 0 to 10 in body skill far before they get fit, especially if they have a coach. ============================================================================= [19] Special Skills, Commands and Actions Although The Sims 2 is a life simulator, I can't help but feel that good old school RPG and fighting game blood rushing through me from my solid background as a console gamer for many good years, as such, I have tried to discover how to make a sim with just the right personality and set of skills to have the best arsenal of abilities in the game, you know, just in case an evil unfathomable being becomes unsealed after two thousand years and reigns chaos on the world yet again. As a note, this list does not cover new dishes that come with cooking skill nor abilities presented by different stages in life that all sims can eventually go through, but is more dedicated to obscure abilities that you might miss or want a sim to have when you plan their creation. The popularity build mentioned above has the best selection of skills so far, but on the other hand, there is a build that has a larger arsenal of abilities, albeit not all of them useful: Neatness: 0 Outgoing: 10 Active: 10 Playful: 10 Nice: 0 This build should give the largest selection of abilities in the game so far, but you must question how useful digging through trash, playing with lawn gnomes and juggling will ultimately be. ----------------------------------------------------------------------------- [19.01]Hidden Skills: Hidden skills are abilities that a sim can improve in that are not a part of the regular skill set necessary for getting jobs and optimizing for majors. Hidden skill levels also cannot normally be revealed to the player. ----------------------- Dancing: Requirements: A stereo and practice Dancing is a hidden skill, but it is best practiced by dancing together with another sim as opposed to dancing solo. A character with high dance skill moves their bodies in more flexible ways, and in particular has the ability to do a quick flipback maneuver. It doesn't really contribute to the game so much in practical essence as visual, but it's good to know that your sim can shake down the dance floor. As a note, despite common belief, dancing does not operate on the ten step level similar to ordinary skill. There are three levels of dancing, low, medium and high. Also of important note is that high dancing skill allows a sim to be able to perform "Bust a' Move". ----------------------- Pool: Requirements: A pool table and practice Pool skill is new in The Sims 2 University and a very useful skill, since sims will occasionally have the desire to hustle another on their want list, and losing sucks. There is also a great scholarship to go with it and it's a great way to make friends, even after you beat their pants off. Speaking of a related subject, the hustle want description says that the option might not appear if the relationship isn't good, but to my experience, I've had sims that were on straight -100 scores for both daily and lifetime relationships that were able to hustle each other without a problem. If you watch sims play pool enough, you'll get to recognize the critical shot where if they screw up, the other sim wins. To avoid humiliation before your sim masters their pool skills, get to know what this shot is and be prepared to cancel if they do screw up to avoid unintentionally hitting a Lose Game fear or losing money. The maximum amount of money you can hustle is 150 simoleans, but if you have less than that in your funds, you will not be able to wager that much. Additionally, make sure the pool table is a nice wide open space, as frequently, long pool games can be ended abruptly by playing sims bumping into each other. 150 simoleans is not very much in common society, but it is actually quite the chunk of change when you live in university. The best way to judge a sim's Pool ability is by having them perform trick shots. There are two types of trick shots, cup and xylophone. The former basically has the sim trying to get the ball into a cup, and later has them trying to play a little tune on a toy xylophone and is mighty impressive if they succeed. The game calculates a winner ahead of time by running up the ability of both sims playing. Even master pool players can lose on occasion to novices, but it is fairly rare. Pool, like dancing doesn't operate on the ordinary skill level either, instead, it operates normally on a 0 to 100 score, with trick shots giving two points and full games giving around one to eleven, depending on how long they play and how many other sims they are playing with. In general though, the more time they are actually at the table shooting, the better. The game allows having a pretty much bottom negative score as well, but under normal play, it seems that skill will only go up, win or lose. For this reason, if you are trying to hustle people, make sure to keep your opponents fresh, as I remember the family maid who came over every day to shoot some pool got to become quite the formidable enemy on the table, which I found odd, since normal skills don't seem to improve for computer controlled sims under ordinary circumstances. ----------------------- Painting: Requirements: An Independent Expression Easel Although painting originally relies on creativity, the painting ability has it's own independent parameter that increases with each successful painting completed and it has yet to be determined if there is a limit to how high it can go. Originally, paintings will sell anywhere from 400 to 600 simoleans when a sim first maxes out their creativity skill, however, it will gradually increase the more a sim paints but always randomly varies between a range of 200 simoleans. Training this skill is ideal for Fortune and Popularity aspiring sims, as they specifically have a very generous want to sell a masterpiece that gives a 2500 influence point bonus and 6000 aspiration points, so painting frequently becomes a great way to hyper charge their aspiration meters. To meet this want specifically, a sim must sell a painting worth over 500 simoleans fresh off the easel, although it doesn't necessarily mean that it has to be their painting, as you can sell someone else's artwork and get away with it. Paintings also tend to gradually increase in price with time. Painting seems to be a bottomless skill to build, so if you have a sim who has done it all, this is a great place for them to focus their time until another fun expansion pack comes out. Oh, for the record, it takes about six and a half hours to paint a complete picture from start to finish, and final price is determined upon completion, so you can essentially reload your way to a higher price if you interrupt the painting process, continue it and see if you get a higher price. If your painting didn't turn out as valuable as you would have hoped for, you can always just hang it on a wall. ----------------------------------------------------------------------------- [19.02]Special Manual Commands: Not all sims are able to perform the same repertoire of commands. There are actions that are personality driven, and then there are skill driven commands, then there are unique abilities that require both or have another requirement thrown in for good measures. This section covers some of the lesser known commands that require tricky prerequisites. ----------------------- Meditate, Levitate and Teleportation: Requirements: 3 points of logic skill and roughly 31 hours of meditation. Meditation is a useful technique as it is. After obtaining the requirements, putting a sim in a meditative state allows them to lock their motives so that they cease to plummet. There however, is an additional bonus that comes with the ability to meditate. In the original The Sims's expansion Makin' Magic there was a purple magic growth crystal that gave your sims the ability to teleport at will. This ability was incredible and was probably the single biggest improvement a sim could go through and it was incredibly fun to boot, even though you could get busted for using it in public. In The Sims 2, any sim with a playfulness 7* and under can teleport. In order to levitate, a sim must first have at least three points of logic to be able to use the meditate command. After meditating for about 19 hours, they will start to levitate in a burst of blue aura. Keep up the good work for 22 more hours and they gain the ability to teleport while in levitation. After going through this initial trial and being able to teleport for the first time, it will then take roughly one hour of mediation to reach levitating state again on sequential executions and at which point, the sub command teleportation will be available for your sim to warp right past any walls, multiple stories up high and basically anywhere on the map you want to go, even if there is no normal way for other sims to get there. Your sim will be able to continue to teleport as many times as they want until meditation is canceled out of. Meditation as it is locks all motives and prevents them from decreasing, but important factors, such as age, aspiration level and relationships will still gradually fall, so its usefulness is very limited in university where time is limited. In normal neighborhoods however, teleportation can become very handy outside of university, particularly in community lots, where time is essentially unlimited and where there is an area actually large enough worth teleporting. Teleportation has also become more useful in The Sims 2 University, as when you reach a lifetime want, you aspiration stays fixed at platinum, so that takes one of the big disadvantages of meditation out. Levitating zombies also don't have to worry about wasting their precious days away and could actually really use it because their zombie shamble is so ridiculously slow, so if you can get your zombie to teleport, feel free to call him a lich king or something fun and mighty sounding. ----------------------- Yoga: Requirements: 3 points of body skill. Yoga takes three points of body skill, but despite what some say, it is not a hidden skill. The ability to perform Yoga is directly proportional to body skill, and at maximum body skill, a sim can stand on their finger on their first time performing yoga. I personally enjoy watching some of the lesser skilled sims screw up though, it is rather entertaining. I personally find Yoga to be one of the very best ways to lose weight, as it doesn't kill hygiene like other forms of exercise, can be performed anywhere, and is surprisingly effective, as active sims derive fun out of it and can invite other sims for a social boost. Oh, as a fun little note for that extra cool factor in your yoga oriented sim, you can have them perform yoga while standing on a coffee table, simply by selecting a coffee table and choosing Yoga. Who would have thought that coffee tables in this game weren't completely useless? ----------------------- Juggle: Requirements: 9 to 10 points of playful personality. Available at a whopping 9 to 10 points of playfulness, I am sad to say that juggling seems to be a useless skill, especially with the introduction of the handheld game system which is far more effective at increasing fun. Juggle however does allow a playful sim to invite other sims, playful or not to join. I think it would have been a lot better if it was a hidden skill and when improved, sims could start juggling chainsaws or something, but oh well. It is impossible for a single sim to be able to both juggle and meditate at the same personality state. It should also be noted that while this particular juggle command requires a high playfulness, any sim can juggle bottles out of the fridge or cups out of the espresso machine. ----------------------- Run: Requirements: 6 to 10 points of active personality. The single most useful special ability in The Sims 2 and an extremely welcomed feature they put it in, since the original The Sims was practically crying out for it with both arms. Any sim can run normally if it's over a long distance when they have enough energy or are late, but it takes an active sim to get the ability to run on command. Simply select an empty space and command them to run to it. Running is about three or four times faster than walking, and can save a great deal of time. You especially feel the difference when your sim lives in a huge house or goes to a community lot, and what's better is that they can go up stairs as well. Active sims also seem to have a glitch where they might get into a hyper mode. In this state, they run everywhere automatically they would normally walk and do so hilariously fast, even when doing chores or talking on the phone. I've been trying to find a way to glitch this on command, since it's quite useful, but I yet to figure out exactly how. Under normal circumstances though, running is slightly inconvenient, because you must manually make your sim do it. It is still very handy for shaving time off the clock though, and you get used to it. ----------------------- Skip: Requirements: 5 to 10 of playful personality Run's slow and stupid looking little brother. Skipping is faster than walking by about twice, but unfortunately, the command disappears if your sim is doing certain activities so you can't always have him or her do it in queue. Skipping is also disabled on stairs so they have to walk up normally. If you are trying to create a lazy sim, skip is the best thing you can give them to compensate for the lack of the ability to run, but for really long foot journeys, teleportation and its one hour warm up might actually be faster. ----------------------- Bust A' Move: Requirements: High Dancing Skill Aside from the fact that it shares the name with one of my favorite video games, Bust A' Move, introduced in The Sims 2 University is the ultimate social interaction outside of romantic actions. It's very fast, has a low chance for rejection if the target's relationship is above 25, increases 2 points of lifetime relationship and around 8 of daily relationship. All sims can perform bust a move, fortunately, it ties into one of the hidden skills! In order to be able to use bust a move, you must be first skilled at dancing! It doesn't take long at all either. Just a few hours of dancing together should slap this awesome little jig in your sim's arsenal. If I remember correctly though, it would seem that bust a' move can only be preformed by sims to other sims of equal or greater age, although in university, generally only young adults exist unless invited. ----------------------- Play (With Lawn Gnome): Requires: A Lawn Gnome and 9 to 10 Playfulness Your playful sim takes the lawn gnome for a magical spin through the air and back down to earth and gets a very small boost of fun in return. Seeing as how a sim in the original The Sims could live off building and selling gnomes, along with that fact that they could come to life, water your lawn and kick your sim in the shins, there will always be a special place in my heart for gnomes in the sims universe. Don't kick them. ----------------------- Play (With Bathtub) Requires: Bathtub and 8 to 10 Playfulness Sail the high seas as your sim takes a cue from Spongebob and plays pirate solely by sailing on the wings of their own deluded imagination. Come to think about it, I can't really remember Spongebob playing pirate per say, but he's already done pretty much everything else, so why not? In any case, this can be done with any bath tub, and your sim will get minimal fun in return, it makes for some great pictures, especially if you have two bathtubs facing each other and sims playing in each one. ----------------------- Crank Call: Requirements: 0 to 1 points of Nice. Crank calling is a surprisingly useful skill and pretty much the only thing good that comes from being grouchy. You might think crank calls useless at first, but they have a very useful purpose. They can provoke a sim, regardless of their relationship to come visit your household regardless of time of day. You can have anyone your sim knows basically pay you a visit at ohhh... four o' clock in the morning, although they might quickly leave saying that it is too late, but they don't particularly seem to be angry about being dragged out of bed in the middle of the morning, so it all balances out. For this reason, having at least one grouchy sim in your household might not be such a bad idea after all when making friends. ----------------------- Join LAN Party: Requirements Two or more computers on the same lot and an equal number of people to play them You can have two or more sims play computer games together if you have one sim start playing a game and have another sim click on another available computer and choose this command. LAN parties increase fun and social at a good rate. This should also be possible to do on community lots. ----------------------- Salvage: Requirements: 0 to 1 Neatness and a full outside trashcan It is time to dig in the thrash like your favorite childhood friend Oscar the Grouch. Salvaging is the most useful skill a sloppy sim can have, but is quite limited. In order for them to do so, have them put some junk in the main trashcan next to the mailbox and soon the salvage option will be available if they are very sloppy sims. When a sim salvages, they find various interesting pieces of trash like cups, dolls and alarm clocks and get small amounts of money for them. Unfortunately, hygiene goes down, way down. Even children can salvage though, which is rather amusing. ----------------------- Lick Clean (Plate): Requirements: 0 to 3 Neatness. Licking plates clean is a surprisingly useful skill in a bind if it doesn't happen to churn your stomach into butter watching. It is rather a quick way to make dirty dishes with no more food on them disappear without having to visit the sink or use the dishwasher. There seems to be a bit of trick regarding selection though, you must click on the outer rim of the plate, as for some reason, clicking on the center just brings up the usual clean up command ----------------------- Use (Shrub): Requirements: Male and have a low bladder. Introducing the only thing male sims have over female sims in this game... well, that and being able to get impregnated by aliens. If you have a bush or a shrub and your sim has got to take a leak, then feel free to give Mother Nature's toilet a whiz. Predictably, your sims aim wouldn't always be tried and true, and puddles will form, resulting in weeds. Apparently, even very neat sims can do this, but sloppy ones do it automatically. ----------------------- Kick (Tombstone): Requires: A tombstone of a dead sim who is an enemy For when death to the infidels isn't enough, you can always add disrespect to death by kicking old enemies grave a couple of times to infuriate the spirit. Oh yeah, kicking tombstones many times is a surprisingly quick and effective way to increase fun. If you choose to mourn over an enemy's grave however, your sim would more likely prefer to laugh and cheer rather than sigh or cry. ----------------------- Smash (Urn): Requires: An urn of a dead sim who was an enemy. As bad as kicking the tombstone was, what you can do to an urn is exponentially worst. A sim can effectively finish off a dead sim and their spirit for good by smashing an urn and sweeping up the remains. Tombstones and urns are interchangeable, depending on whether the object is inside or outside, on a table or not. ----------------------- Sleep On Floor: Requirements: Member of a Greek House in University. Essentially having the exact effect as fainting, members of Greek House that require sleep can do so on the floor where things like fluffy pillows and warm blankets wouldn't get in the way. This option will only be available if your sim requires sleep, similar to how sleep options don't appear when you click on beds if your sim is already well rested. Not many good things can come out of sleeping on the floor, as it drains comfort and is the slowest way for a sim to recover energy by sleep possible, well, aside from being cheap or watching your sims suffer. ------------------------ Open Rear Door: Requirements: A criminal who has just been arrested. You can actually free burglars who have just been caught by the police right after robbing your house blind. Talk about being benevolent, huh? Doing this however is a bit tricky and the timeframe of opportunity is extremely small. Shortly after the cop arrests the burglar and puts him or her in the police car, he or she will walk back into your house to inform your family of the news. It would seem that the time in which the option on the police car "Open Rear Door" appears only for a brief while if the cop takes long enough to go into the house and talk to one of your sims. From my tests, it usually happens exactly at the time when the cop hands over the compensation or reward money that this elusive command appears. After first seeing the "Open Rear Door" command, you can select it to send a sim running to open the door on the cop car and free the prisoner, getting a large double plus relationship bonus. However, you'll also get a large negative towards the cop who arrested the criminal and who will be completely pissed off in the process when they get back to the car and find no one to be in it. From that point on, the sim who freed the burglar should be able to call up either the cop or the burglar and treat them as you would any other sim. Just for the sake of hilarity, try to invite both of them over for a party and see how they react. ------------------------ Nag Requirements: Be part of a family and in a really bad mood The bane of all marriages that causes almost as much strife and chaos as leaving the toilet seat up, nagging is now an equal opportunity action in The Sims 2 universe and can be done by either women or men in an intimate relationship under a crappy mood. Even teenagers can nag their parents for a nice touch. Nagging, which is located under the Irritate category, has a strong negative impact for a social interaction, but it goes a long way to make the game more realistic. ------------------------ Groom Requirements: Available between family members who are Young Adults or Adults Although a relatively common command that any sim who is part of a family can do, the ability to groom a fellow family sim deserves special note because it actually restores hygiene, making it special among other social interactions. Grooming can be performed by young adults and adults on younger sims in their family as well, and is a effective way to restore hygiene in a pinch. In order for this command, which is located under "Appreciate" to become available, the target sim's hygiene must not be completely filled. ------------------------ Cheer Up Requirements: A friend of a sim in a horrible mood If a sim is in a really bad mood, another sim who is in a good relationship with that sim can select the "Cheer Up" command under "Appreciate". Cheering a sim up doesn't seem to have any special effects added to it, but it's guaranteed to work, whereas trying many other social interactions might face rejection. ------------------------ Apologize Requirements: A negative relationship If two sims have gotten off to the wrong start, one of them can apologize to help pave the way back from bitter hatred to tolerable indifference. ----------------------------------------------------------------------------- [19.03] Age Based Interactions While the other sections of this ability and command list apply generally to adults and young adults where the majority of a sim's life will be spent, there are some special abilities that sims of other ages can perform that you might miss since they grow so fast. ------------------------ Noogie Requirements: Teenage siblings Although not a particularly secret command, it's one that you could play the game for a long time without ever seeing, since they seem to lose it when they grow up. Teenage siblings can give each other noogies, but unlike other social interactions, noogies have a very strange effect. The person giving the noogie gets a large boost to their relationship, but the person receiving gets a large hit to their relationship. ------------------------- Tell Secret Requirements: Child to child Telling a secret is the children's equivalent of gossip, watch as the little kiddies out there share evil and spiteful rumors about their next door neighbors. ------------------------- Mary Mack Requirements: Child to a child Until playing this game, I had no idea what the heck this game was. Located under the play command, you can have two young children play this fun little patty cake like game. ----------------------------------------------------------------------------- Cops and Robbers: Requirements: Child to a child Not to be confused with its politically incorrect cousin "Cowboys and Indians", children can practice enforcing the law with imaginary guns in preparation for the real thing, more less. ------------------------ Tag Requirements: Child to a child The fundamental game that has resulted in millions of children being ridiculed and which summarizes everything that is wrong with our society can be played at any time when two children get together. ------------------------ Nyah Nyah Requirements: Child to a child If the children aren't on the best of terms, they can tease each other in good old fashion traumatic manner. ------------------------ Splash Requirments: Children/toddlers and a puddle Children and toddlers can splash in puddles of water, or urine for that matter if you really start to think about it. Toddlers in particular have a tendency to like to play with the toilet and flood the washroom for a quick shallow pool. ----------------------------------------------------------------------------- [19.04]Special Effects: Certain sims who have met particular requirements do the same action differently on from other sims, as such, they essentially add a special effect to a rather ordinary routine. ----------------------- Super Sparkling Cleaning Bubbles: Requirements: 9 to 10 Neat If you want your sim to cleanse the tyranny of filth from their stoves, toilets and showers with a little more oomph, make sure that they are extremely neat and they will be able to clean with bubbles and sparkles everywhere they go as well as have fun while doing it. Cleaning that almost sentient moss off the toilet isn't so bad now anymore, isn't it? ----------------------- Sexy Walk Requirement: Romance Sim with platinum mood Ah, the legendary sexy walk full of mystery. It'll save the mystery and tell you exactly how to do it. In order to do the Sexy Walk, a sim must have Romance aspiration and be in platinum mood. At that point, command them to perform a romantic or intimate action with another sim, such as flirting or kissing and they will walk quite provocatively to their target. The men will strut there stuff predictably, but it's quite amusing to watch how the women walk with an almost serpent like wobble of the hips, even more so than the regular walk. ----------------------- Super Ultra Happy Back From Work Cheer: Requirement: Unknown Of all the actions I've seen so far, it's one that I have seen surprisingly often that I can't figure out. Normally a sim just comes home, walks to the front of the house, and that's it. However, it would seem that certain sims that meet unknown requirements will do an extremely confident little cheer that kinda' says "I'm back! Hug me!" in body language. The mother of my main sim did this cheer many times after coming home from work, but I could never figure out nor reproduce the result. For reference, she is a perfectly outgoing and neat mother with a family aspiration and low scores in everything else and frequently comes back home in platinum mood. My guess is maybe that you need a complete happy loving family to get this cheer from a family aspiring sim, but I have yet to be able to get another sim to do it. ----------------------- Jitters: Requirements: Coffee or Espresso To give your sim that nervous wreck look that all of us are so familiar with, have them drink a solid amount of coffee or Espresso and watch as they start to shake and jitter in everything they do This is particularly more fun to watch when they have low aspiration and look even more burned out with just a hint of crazy. In case you were tempted to try, your sims can't overdose on coffee and die, although it would be rather amusing. ----------------------- Enter Hot Tub Nude: Requirements: About 10 Points of Outgoing If your sim is a perfectly outgoing young adult or above, don't be surprised to see them take it all off while going into the hot tub. This of course, can be rather fun to watch and other sims will freak out accordingly, but it would seem that it is actually somewhat counter productive, as when there is a nude sim in a hot tub, teen sims can't join, although it makes pretty good sense in retrospect. ----------------------- Go To Toga Party in Underwear Requirements: 9-10 Points of Outgoing Some sims just seem to rather go closer to commando than go Greek, and if an extremely outgoing sim throws or is invited to a toga party, they might wear just their underwear instead of a full on toga. ----------------------- Popularity Factor: Requirements: A popularity sim It seems that popularity aspiring sims naturally just seem to simply get other sims thinking about them much more frequently than other aspiration types, as indicated with thought balloons with their face in them. It's difficult to evaluate whether this is a factor of platinum mood or not, since the effect is quite subtle, but it's at least worth taking a note of. ------------------------ Bash Alarm Clock Requirements: An alarm clock and a sim in a really bad mood In recognition of potentially the most evil invention created by man, sims show their respect by bashing it a couple of times with their fists to try and get them to shut up, should they be in quite a horrible mood, as opposed to simply switching them off. As a bit of a note, I highly recommend against relying on alarm clocks in this game, as if you ever really wanted your sims to wake up, doing it yourself is always a more direct approach. Oh yeah, ringing alarm clocks actually also lower environment, so if you want to go ahead and reenact my student film, fill a room full of alarm clocks and laugh as your sims are awoken from their only natural state of happiness and forced to turn off more alarm clocks than they can count before going crazy. ------------------------ Friendly Gesture: Requirements: An outgoing sim Instead of a humble wave, an outgoing sim will point and smile as they pass by other sims that they are friendly with or give a thumbs up. ----------------------- Shadow Boxing: Requirements: A playful sim If you leave a playful sim alone with no commands or freewill long enough, they will shadow box for a waiting animation. ----------------------- Cross Arms Requirements: A serious sim If you leave a serious sim long enough without commands or freewill, they will cross their arms and wave side to side in anticipation of your next command. ----------------------- Lazy Posture: Requirments: A lazy sim Lazy sims tend to revert to a slouched over posture should you leave them on standby, whereas an active sim will stand upright and ready for action. ------------------------ Clean Self: Requirments: A neat or sloppy sim Neat sims on standby animation have a tendency to brush themselves off. This doesn't actually increase hygiene or anything, but it's interesting to watch. Sloppy sims on the other hand clean themselves in a more barbaric manner, blowing their nose or checking under their armpits. ------------------------ ----------------------------------------------------------------------------- -- [19.05]Automatic Commands: Automatic commands occur naturally when a sim's free will is on and are normally inaccessible to the player to use on demand. These actions are often preformed by guests and NPCs. Due to the semi-random nature of these events; many of the requirements listed are not exact. And this list is far from complete. ----------------------- Sponge Bath: Requirements: A kitchen sink and a very sloppy sim with low hygienic One of the most hilarious and shocking actions a sim can perform. When a sloppy sim's hygiene dips well below toleration and they happen to be near by a sink and no shower or bath tub in sight, they will sometimes take it all off and clean themselves in a more manually intensive way. As to be guessed, this automatic action is far from effective compared to ordinary ways to raise hygiene. ----------------------- Belch At: Requirements: A sloppy sim with a bad relationship Normally, sloppy sims belch and fart on their own, but under circumstances, they will use it as a manifestation of their hatred for another sim's existence. The Evil Mascot is particularly fond of doing this. ----------------------- Watch Prank Requirements: A sim to prank and people to watch A fairly standard action, when a sim pulls a prank on another sim, some on lookers will get a nice big laugh out of watching the ensuing humiliation. ----------------------- Tease: Requirements: A bad relationship Although it should belong under the irritate category, this little display of belittling public affection is quite routine among grouchy sims with a bone to pick and helps to further throw fuel into a bad relationship's fire. I've seem nice sims do it as well however, so it doesn't seem to be particularly personality driven. ----------------------- Congratulate: Requirements: Unknown (It might only apply to nice sims or it might apply to all) A rare action of questionable importance and frequently a wonder as to what they are congratulating. Rarely, computer sims will give a gentle pat on the back to congratulate something or other for a minimal positive reaction. ----------------------- Attraction: Requirements: A romance sim and other sims to be around. Induced by romance aspiring sims on other sims, an attraction is quick gesture of potentially or romantic interest, albeit it might as very well be the caked tongue of the cow plant if you are familiar with the sole purpose in life of a romance sim. Unfortunately, it gets a little annoying after a while, since it happens quite often if your sim has healthy aspiration and is in a good mood and can occasionally stall actions. ----------------------- Play With Fridge: Requirements: A very playful sim Having your sim spontaneously decide to dance with the fridge is a surprisingly entertaining action to watch. On rare occasions, a fun loving sim will open the doors of a fridge and start swinging on them all while opening and closing them with vigorous passion. Doesn't do much in the way of meeting motives, but it is very fun to watch. ----------------------- Visit Campus: Requires: Be in a Greek House at university Your sim will leave the lot and come back with a box of pizza or a random low quality object from bonsai trees to television sets. ----------------------- Get Gnome Back: Requires: Lawn Gnome I have only heard about this frequently, but have never been lucky enough to see it for myself, unfortunately. Apparently, guests can sometimes steal your lawn gnome, and at a random point in the day, your sim will leave the lot to depart on a magical journey to get it back. ----------------------- Kick Trash Can Over: Requirements: A wandering sim who passes your lot with an attitude problem. The sim kicks over the big trash can, leaving a huge mess. This would be a good time to get a little revenge with the Sim Vac or influence ----------------------- Lecture: Requirements: Several This happens occasionally when one sim breaks an object while in another sim's presence. Typically, this will happen when a child sim smashes their doll house, but I've seen it happen among adult couples as well in regards to a broken bathtub. Lectures also occur if your child is doing horribly in school, as can be expected. ----------------------- Chastise: Requirements: When a teen gets caught sneaking out If a parent catches a teen trying to sneak out, they will properly catch them and lecture them about the rules of the house. You can cancel this however, and it seems that in families with good relationships, a teen can surprisingly sneak out without anybody throwing a hissy fit. ----------------------- Be Embarrassed: Requirements: When sims in love goose each other If two sims in love perform the goose flirt, which is basically a brisk grab of the behind for the uninformed, other sims in the room stand a chance of becoming embarrassed in the "go get a room!" sort of way. Surprisingly, this effect only seems to occur from using the goose, as opposed to something a little more obvious like making out. ----------------------- Disapprove/Approve: Requirements: Unknown Every so often when a sim is caught cheating with another, you might get one of these two somewhere in the queue of slaps. It's really just a quick nod or shake of the head, but to what exactly they are approving or disapproving of is a bit beyond me. After all, if they just slapped your sim silly, what left is there to approve of? ----------------------- Cold Shower: Requirements: A cheap shower and a toilet When a sim is taking a shower, have another sim flush the toilet. Now, we all know from general experience what this does. In reaction to the sudden shift in convenience, the sim in the shower will come out exceptionally angry and start poking and yelling at the sim who flushed the toilet ----------------------- Wash (Window): Requirements: Unknown Normally there are no manual actions regarding windows, but occasionally, a sim will go ahead and wash one, even though they are apparently incapable of getting dirty. This might be a factor of a neat personality, but it rarely happens, so it is hard to tell. ----------------------- Look Out (Window) Requirements: Unknown On rare occasions, a sim will automatically look out the window. ----------------------- Miss Object: Requirements: A debt hungry repo man or a penny pinching you If run into debt and the repo man comes over with his magical ray gun to zap some merchandise, your sim may go through a missing animation. Similarly, if a sim had a want to buy a certain object and you fulfilled it, only to take it away again and sell it within the same day, they will come over to the place where the object used to be and sigh. ----------------------- Be Shocked: Requires: Nudity This is a hilarious reaction, specifically because of the delay time of which sims usually have it. Your young adult could be playing pool with a naked streaker for hours, then when the match is finally over, finally notice that the guy is naked and freak. Likewise, sims react this way to very outgoing sims who go into the hot tub without anything they weren't born with. You'll also see this happen quite often in your washrooms between sims who aren't romantically in love. ----------------------- What's This? Requires: Any object on your lot When a sim has nothing better to do, they often wander to a random object and start to wonder about the great meaning of the universe behind it. Usually, this occurs when you first buy an object and there are sims around to see it. ----------------------- Witness Abduction: Requirements: A sim that is abducted through the telescope and another to watch. When a sim is abducted and there is another sim around to witness it, they will have this reaction. After witnessing an abduction, a sim will start to have wants and fears related to aliens without having to be abducted themselves. ----------------------- Return Home Requirements: A sim who is abducted When a sim is abducted, this is the name of the action that they are doing while off the lot. ----------------------- Welcome Home! Requirements: An abducted sim returning and others to watch When a sim returns from their magical adventure to outer space and being probed by semi-hostile aliens, other sims watching will cheer and welcome them home. If you also happen to have cut scenes off, this command will also appear if you click on the alien ship, albeit it doesn't seem to do anything. ----------------------- Be Shoved (By a random sim who comes running onto your lot): Requirements: A telescope to look through in the daytime. If you use a telescope during the daytime, there is a possibility that an angry sim from the neighborhood will come running in and attack your sim, most likely in the form of a shove. Feel free to do this every day to satisfy the stalker in you and follow up with a few crank calls to bring them over to beat up. ----------------------- Crack Knuckles: Requirements: A sim ready to fight If a sim is about to execute an action under the "Fight" category, on occasions they will crack their knuckles in preparation for the assault while the other sim is stalling time doing something like crying. ------------------------ Hide Diary Requirements: A sim writing a diary and another sim in close proximaty It's rare to have a sim write in a diary, because it seems to be a slow useless action with barely any increase in motive, however, it is fun to watch sims try and hide their diaries should another sim walk by, this includes babies, service NPCs and even the Grim Reaper. ----------------------------------------------------------------------------- [19.06] Portable Devices: And How They Can Ruin Your Sims Life, Just Like They Did Yours Excellent additions to The Sims 2 University are these excellent portable items that you can buy at the automated electronic blue kiosks at community lots! They are the among the very first things your sims should buy, because once you get them, they stay with your sim for life, no matter where they move... oh, that and the fact that they are all slightly defective and have the potential to ruin your sim's lives. ----------------------- Handheld: A fun handheld game system that your playful sims will love to whip out anywhere, everywhere with anyone, and that would be excellent if it didn't have a few defective side effects, that or Maxis is trying to explain the meaning of the universe through gaming, again. For one thing, this innocent looking system has the apparent ability to make sims meet themselves. Yeah, when you see those pluses coming out after each independent gaming session, those points are towards themselves (It shows up in their memory), and you can even develop a crush with yourself. Strangely enough, the handheld system is also the gateway to love; as two sims with high relationships can develop a crush with each other should they play together. Whether Maxis has discovered the meaning to life or simply made a mistake is far beyond my human like understanding at this point. Personally, the thing looks like a PSP to me, but eh, there are people out there who would swear on their life that it looks more like an n-gage. The handheld is a slow, but consistent and portable way to have fun when you are trying to kill time waiting for things like taxis to arrive, but it does have the previously mentioned side effects, so handle with caution. Handhelds can be given away by your sim to another sim, but why would you want to get rid of an extension of your personal essence? Well, other than the above mentioned reasons. ----------------------- MP3 Player: Ah, the MP3 Player, now a staple of civilized society and almost tone deaf people everywhere. Unfortunately, using the MP3 Player is an isolated action. I would have loved it if sims could wear it around anywhere and do anything with them on, but apparently, wearing the MP3 Player gives your sim the compulsive urge to sing and dance, disabling the ability to do anything else till canceled, but it's still a great way to have fun and makes for good close to home pictures. ----------------------- Cell Phone: This incredibly convenient marvel of modern technology allows any sim, any where at any time of day to make contact with the outside world, chat the night away, and stalk any previous love interests who might have turned them down with rabid enthusiasm. Unfortunately, the cell phone happens to also be evil, as it's missing the one basic feature that all cell phones and even Thomas Edison's very first light bulb had, the ability to turn it off. Other than the fact that Maxis pretty much left out the bottom brick to a house made of bricks by either sadistic intention or forgetfulness, the inability to turn off the cell phone will haunt your sim's life until the day they die, that or Maxis corrects the problem. As such, you can expect semi- random sims to call you at any waking hour of the day, even if you happen to be asleep, and wake everybody in the room up. It always also seems that even if your relationships with all your friends are at perfect 100, there will be one annoying stalker who calls you at least once everyday to make sure that you aren't sleeping, and if you are, they will coincidentally have corrected the problem. Not so coincidentally, the supposedly patented ring tone of the cell phone might start pissing you the player off as well. The cell phone is a double edged sword, it can be extremely useful to sims with lots of friends and particularly fully developed popularity aspiring sims. My main sim, a blue haired female biped with now fifty friends uses her cell phone all the time for everything from ordering groceries, to throwing parties to touching up with straying friends, and I wouldn't ever have her without it, but then again, she never sleeps since she uses the Enigmatic Energizer every day. However, if your sim is a lazy hermit with a knowledge aspiration who values rest, then you might want to think twice about having others steal your slumber, especially if they happen to work the night shift. As an additional note, when you complete writing a novel, you still get a call through the regular phone, so make sure you have one of those, or you might miss out on your hard earned work's reward. An additional use for the cell phone is that only the person who the call is for will have a ringing cell phone, as opposed to the land phone that rings around the house regardless. In other words, you wouldn't have to worry about passing the phone off like a hockey puck when the person calling is asking for someone else, as the cell phone line is direct to the sim who the caller wants to talk to. When you have a cell phone, you will almost never use the regular phone again, and in addition. You can even use cell phones at community lots to invite sims over just like at home, or call a taxi to go somewhere like normally. Unfortunately, at the secret society, the cell phone only has the ability to call to ask to go home, but then again, the secret society pretty much is highly phone unfriendly to begin with, restricting all normal actions save going home. ============================================================================= [20] Fear, Anger, Hatred and Suffering: Every so often we get tired of playing the game right and like to see just how wrong things can possibly get. The previous list contained some minor negative reactions that could happen to any trying player, but the following events are things you actually have to go out of your way for to make sims suffer to see. Although many of the actions featured in this section don't have an official name or command queue, I felt it important to list, so you too can traumatize your sim's lives like I know you've already done at least once. ----------------------------------------------------------------------------- [20.01]Motive Desperation Actions: When a sim has extremely low motives in one area, they will start yelling at the player and this is called a desperation action. All motives have one, but they are basically the same in effect. It is usually what follows immediately after that is interesting to watch. ----------------------- Die of Starvation: Requirements: Absolute redline on hunger Your sim reaches out for one final breathe before crumbling into a fetal position and kicking the can. Wearing the accursed Noodle Soother gone terribly wrong with a side effect is a great way to see this effect early. ----------------------- Have An "Accident": Requirements: A sim that has completely redlined the bladder meter You sim will form a surprisingly clean puddle of water when they had their chance to go but didn't. As an additional note, surrounding sims might laugh at the overloaded bladder victim or try to comfort them, depending on their personality and relationship ----------------------- The Green Stench: Requirements: No hygiene left When your sim runs low on hygiene, they start to vent a green fume that repels other sims away. This is actually fairly common should your sims exercise a lot. ------------------------ Smells Bad: Requirement: A sim with low hygiene or burnt food This reaction is a self explanatory reaction to an invasion of nasal nausea. When your sim has low hygiene or has learned how to cook a hot steamy plate of charcoal, any other sims in the area will react with this. ----------------------- Be Disgusted: Requirements: A bad dirty joke If a sim bombs on a dirty joke, the person who they are telling it to will through a motion similar to vomiting. This automatic action also appears under other cases, such as when a sim is sick. ----------------------- Vomit: Requirements: Morning sickness or food poisoning Should your sim come down with food poisoning or morning sickness, you can expect them to run to the local toilet several times to vomit before they recover. After vomiting blue fluid, the toilet will become severely dirty, although if there isn't a toilet around, the floor will have to suffice. ----------------------- Cough and Sneeze: Requirements: Flu, Cold or Pneumonia IF you sim comes down with the above mentioned sicknesses, they will be prone to interrupt their actions with long coughing or sneezing spells. ------------------------ Summon the Social Bunny: Requirements: Extremely low social motive When a sim's social is very low, the social bunny will fall from the heavens ready for a nice big hug... that or you can beat him up. The social bunny is an imaginary being, so when you select other sims, they will not be able to see it. ----------------------- Faint: Requires: A sim that has run out of energy A sim, depending on how much space is around them will collapse on the floor or fall asleep standing up looking like they've been hanged, in which case other sims around them will come over to laugh, even if they are just one step away from dying. ----------------------------------------------------------------------------- [20.02] Aspiration Desperation: Similar to when your sim's motives hit red rock bottom, your sims will also go a little loopy should you deprive them of their hard earned ambition in life. Certain aspirations have particular weaknesses, such as knowledge sims frequently fearing fire, fortune sims fearing the repoman or family sims understandably dreading the return of a zombie sim from the dead. Exploit these fears well, and you will be rewarded with entertainment at the expense the little digital people who put all their faith in you. Oh yeah, just for the record, although Maxis strongly insists that The Sims 2 is a life simulator and encourages players to play the game properly, you will notice by watching the intro sequence that they show almost all of the aspiration desperation animations in sequence. I'm quite sure the animators had a good laugh making them as many of us do watching them. The following occur randomly when your sim almost has full negative aspiration. ----------------------- Fortune Aspiration Desperation: The financially challenged sim will take out a sign and a mug and start panhandling, most often on the side of the road. ----------------------- Knowledge Aspiration Desperation: Taking a cue from the movie Cast Away, a desperate knowledge Sim will take out a volley ball with a graduation cap named Prof. von Ball and start talking to him. ----------------------- Family Aspiration Desperation: Will start to play and love a little baby flour sack, cradling it back and fourth. This one is just depressing folks. ----------------------- Romance Aspiration Desperation: Romance sims will take out a sponge mop with a paper face and proceed to dance with it. That doesn't seem all that unusual to me to tell the truth. ----------------------- Popularity Aspiration Desperation: Takes out a cup with a face on it and hands named Cup-Stick Buddy to be their new best friend, seeing as how if you got them to this point, they probably don't have any. ----------------------- Ultimate Desperation: Occurs when the aspiration meter is at its absolute lowest bottom rung on the ladder, and occurs to all aspiration types. Your sim will simply go insane and summon an imaginary psychiatrist that will put them into a hypnotic trance to perform a humiliating impression of an animal before snapping them back to semi-functional normal. Other sims that happen to be around will gesture quite politely that this sim has gone nuts. ----------------------------------------------------------------------------- [20.03]When Disaster Strikes: And You Have Popcorn By now, you probably know all the ways a sim can die from other FAQs or by accidental exposure. You got your starvation, fire, drowning, electrocution, disease, death by flies, satellite, death by fright, old age and the mighty cow plant, but what you might like to know is how other sims may react to them and other crisis. ----------------------- Watch Fight: Requirements: Two sims to fight and others to watch Depending on a sim's personality between shy to outgoing, a sim will have two reactions to this. The first is that they will watch intently and the second is that they will run out of the room. Needless to say, everybody loves to watch a fight at other people's expense, and when you have multiple sims who all hate the same person, things can get pretty wild. Sims will also cheer and boo for the sims involved in the fight if they like or hate them and react accordingly to the victor. ----------------------- Run Away: Requirements: A teenager in a very unhappy family Teenage sims can run away should they have exceptionally horrible relationships with their parents and other household occupants. You can sic' the cops on them to bring them back though, although it might not always work, particularly after 24 hours. ----------------------- Fire: Requirements: Errr, fire Quite possibly the most annoying automatic action, or the most hilarious to watch, depending on how much you hate your sims. Fire makes idiots out of sims, and they basically start panicking like chopped head roosters only making the situation worst. Fire is a very persistent action and will cancel out any other action in queue, making it difficult to escape. Of course, needless to say, a sim reacts quite a bit more desperate when they actually catch on fire as opposed to just watching it. ----------------------- Burglar: Requirements: Self explanatory Should a burglar ever choose to pay your house a visit and there is a waking sim to witness them, they will proceed to run around like an idiot while the burglar plunders their precious property. ----------------------- See Ghost: Requirements: A well aged tombstone or urn on the lot to bring out a ghost When night settles in on a lot where the dead wander, occasionally a ghost will pop out of nowhere and scare the daylights out of a sim with a rather amusing reaction. Most sims remember this badly, some even die if their motives are low, but ironically, knowledge sims love seeing ghosts. It would seem that if a sim is an arch enemy of another, he will start having wants to see that sim as a ghost. This is the kid friendly way of explaining that they want the other sim to die, but lack the programmed means to do so in order to keep the game on a level acceptable to violence condoning families everywhere. Since I'm already on this subject, it should be noted that sims that really hate each other can develop a want to drink their enemies via cow plant. ----------------------- Vermin: Requires: Roaches! Should your house happen to be a filthy mess of a domestic battlefield, there is a high chance that you will develop roaches. Sims who try to spray away roaches or stomp on them have a good chance of panicking in the process and might get a vermin memory as well. ----------------------- Watch In Distress: Requirements: A stupid sim, a broken appliance, and a lot of electricity. When a sim gets electrocuted, other sims in the nearby area come to watch in distress. Watch in distress can also occur in other instances where a sim is going through massive turmoil, like passing out. If a sim is in a bad relationship with a victim, they will laugh instead of be distressed. For the record, energy is the key factor of a sim who will die after being electrocuted, although it makes it hard to kill a sim this way, since they will usually interrupt themselves when their energy is low. ----------------------- Crying: Requirements: Recent bad memories: If a sim lost a fight, had a loved one die, lost their job, made a brand new enemy or have been put through some other tragedy, they might spontaneously cry throughout the day. Sims with even high aspiration can start crying from a bad memory, but sims with low aspiration or horrible mood in addition might get even more disturbing behaviors added to their roster, like stomping on flowers. ----------------------- Nightmare: Requirements: Recent bad memories and low aspiration If your sim has had an incredibly bad few days with people biting the dust and fighting left and right all while catching the flu and having dozens of other bad things happen to them, along with a red lined aspiration, they will start to have nightmares and wake up abruptly in the middle of the night in cold sweat. ----------------------------------------------------------------------------- [20.04]Reactions To Sim Death: And How To Make The Most of It. Depending on the relationship a sim has with a sim who has just died their reaction will be different. ----------------------- Cry Softly: Requirements: A good relationship with a sim who has just died. Fairly self explanatory when a good friend or close family member has died. ----------------------- Sigh Requirements: The death of a sim who has an indifferent relationship. Sighing is on a progressively lesser notch in the "I don't care" department when another sim has died. ----------------------- Laugh At: Requires: The death of a sim who is an enemy Sims are just like real people, except they tend to do things that all of us are thinking, but never in a lifetime will do. As such, having them laugh as their arch enemies take off on their journey to the great beyond is quite amusing. ============================================================================= [21] The Darker Side of the Sims: I had a nice long talk with a close friend of mine the other day about D&D, another strong passion of mine and just realized that The Sims 2 is missing a key component in the fabric of the universe - inherently chaotic evil sims. For the most part, The Sims 2 encourages good social behavior in making friends and many things like job promotions and throwing good parties depend on them, and we can't blame the makers, because we really do want our society to be a better place and teach children right from wrong (One gets you beaten with clubs, the other gets you beaten by sticks). The truth is however, that we know in real life that there are just some people who are not nice, not even grouchy, they're just plain evil psychopathic killers, and that's what this section is about - to make the resident unfriendly sim in your neighborhood to balance out all of the good and happiness that is abound. ----------------------------------------------------------------------------- [21.01] Evil Aspiration: The Next Best Thing to World Domination Fortune Aspiration: Fortune Aspiration sims are not particularly capable of evil deeds, despite the logic that love of money is the root of all evil. They have the want to marry a rich sim or inherit money, but that's about the sum of their evil ambition. However, as you have probably guessed, you can hasten the speed at which a sim "passes off" their in inheritance or money by... oh, setting them on fire or something of the like. ----------------------- Knowledge Aspiration: The ultimate in evil sims, the knowledge seeking sim doesn't just accept the concept of the afterlife, and trivial things like bringing back the dead, they practically welcome them with open arms and a bouquet of flowers. Knowledge sims can get good memories and satisfy several wants in ways that many other sims would dread, particularly ones involving ghosts, death, zombies and aliens. Although their wants are typically hard to achieve, they also have a great aspiration and influence payoff. As it stands, Knowledge sims have a great deal to benefit from offing and torturing other sims, either accidentally or intentionally. There is understandably no direct way for a sim to kill another sim, but a pool without a ladder can go a surprisingly long way in trying. When a knowledge aspiring sim is enemies with another sim, they will be the ones to most frequently have wants about seeing that sim as a ghost, well before they have died in fact. Additionally, I have seen knowledge sims with wants to drink another sim via cow plant. If the enemy sim should die, they will spit on their grave one more time with a want to make them a zombie. These kinds of wants actually encourage behavior in a way that can be interpreted as evil and a strong desire to kill off their enemies again to wrack up aspiration points yet again. As a matter of fact, knowledge aspiring sims actually do much better when there is a local ghost around to fulfill their rather sturdy want to see a ghost. It's only theoretical, but it's possible that a knowledge sim who lives with a bunch of expendable "test subject" sims in a haunted house might be able to even match the aspiration output of a perfectly positive popularity sim, albeit people around him or her will be falling like flies in the process, and you're probably going to have to make good use of that swimming pool. On the xenophobic side of things, a knowledge sim who has witnessed or been through an abduction by aliens will start to want other sims to be abducted, whether they want it or not. One final note about this rather interesting sim is that they are also semi-suicidal, as the "Be Saved From Death" want is a frequent order on their wants menu. ----------------------- Family Aspiration: Seriously, there is nothing all that evil that family aspiring sims have that other aspiration types don't. Family sims are pretty much just inherently good unless you start making them enemies with half of the neighborhood, in which case they wouldn't mind occasionally wanting to see a ghost of a still living sim. ----------------------- Romance Aspiration: Romance sims are the closest thing to being morally bankrupt as far as our general society is concerned, not to say that it isn't tolerable on some alien world where things like loyalty and commitment might not exist. The whole purpose of romantic sims is to basically woohoo with as many other sims as possible behind each other's backs, and in many ways, a romance sim can be interpreted as an evil version of the family sim. Ignoring the fact that the word "Romantic" is frequently a word that has been bended by inaccurate connotation, at least the Romantic sim doesn't have an inherent desire to kill their love interests after they are done with tnem, but oh, the pains of love. ----------------------- Popularity Aspiration: Since I have yet to figure out how to make a popularity sim's get the want to win a fight on command, the following information is mostly theoretical. I have only seen this specific want about twice in custom made sims, and it was in the rather odd scenario to beat up a quasi-friend. Anyhow, in theory, if you can get a popularity aspiring sim to draw up their want to win a fight, you can earn some pretty big aspiration points by building up their body skill, then finding a victim to become enemies with and attack whenever the want comes up. In effect, your popularity sim will become the resident bully. Fortunately, although the local police might come to bust a sim teen who snuck out at night, there apparently isn't a law against assault and battery, so you can beat the daylights out of this single poor sim whenever you feel like and get away with it. As mentioned earlier though, the want to win a fight seems to be far and few in between, and most likely requires making an enemy of another sim, but it would be interesting to have a sim who's majority of aspiration output comes from beating on people. ----------------------------------------------------------------------------- [21.02] Sim Fatality Seriously, this is a document that claims to answer frequently asked questions, that being said; you'd be surprised how many questions are oriented towards punishing and killing your sims. It's not morally correct, but you can't say that people don't ask these questions frequently, as such, I thought I'd just touch on them lightly. As a special note, NPCs have a particular motive drain resistance and can endure things like staying in the pool longer without drowng than your own sims. Death By: ----------------------- Fire: Fire is the most common disaster in the game and can come from many ways. Some of the ways a fire can erupt are putting furniture too close to a burning fireplace, really bad cooking, leaving an item in an oven too long, using the outdoor grill inside, using the counterfeit machine, and occasionally when a sim gets electrocuted. The easiest way to intentionally set a fire is to use an outdoors grill inside. Doing so instantly results in a fire on residential lots. A more controllable way is to put a TV dinner into an oven and forget to take it out. This can actually have a time bomb like effect, and you can place multiple stoves around the house before the first one erupts for maximum incineration. Unfortunately, fire is a very messy way to kill a sim, and it usually takes out some good furniture with them too. ----------------------- Electrocution: Electrocution: One of the hardest ways to get a sim to die, if only because it's hard to use an electronic device enough times for it to break in the first place. The hands down most dangerous item to repair in the game is the trash compactor or the dishwasher, these two things are hazardous even for the pros to handle. It's fairly easy to get a sim electrocuted, but having them die from it is actually quite hard, as they must have zero energy at the end of the shock to die. Usually, a sim will interrupt their own actions frequently when their energy is low, so you'd usually have to be trying to kill your sim via imitating a Christmas Tree. ----------------------- Pool without A Ladder: Perhaps the most famous way for a sim to die, if only because of the sheer lack of logic that could have saved their life had they known better. When a sim runs out of energy in a pool, they will drown; it's pretty much as simple as that. Of special note however, is that it seems that you can't bargain with the Grim Reaper over a sim who has died this way for some reason which would have otherwise made it an excellent way to satisfy the "Be Saved from Death" want. ----------------------- Fright: A sim can die from fright should their motives be low enough when a ghost scares them. It's a rather quick and painless way to die, but from what I heard, the recently added Scissors item can also make a sim running with them die in a similar manner to this. ----------------------- Starvation: Definitely scoring points in a very painful way to die area, a sim who hasn't eaten for quite sometime will simply complain one last time before collapsing onto the floor in a fetal position and going to the great beyond. It takes quite a while, but it's controllable ----------------------- Disease: A surprisingly hard way to die, Sims who die from disease must have been heavily neglected during their sickness enough to cause drastic motive drain and death. This is something that is even hard to do on purpose. The only real disease that can kill a sim out of the blue as opposed to letting their motives drop to levels that would have killed them anyway is the Mystery Disease that can be contracted randomly from using the Biostation career reward item. It would seem that if left untreated for a certain amount of time, it causes your sim to die. ----------------------- Satellite: One of the two legendarily rare ways for a sim to die is via satellite. On extremely rare occasions, a sim who is watching the clouds or stargazing will meet their untimely demise "Dead Like Me" style in the way of a petite satellite crashing into them and exploding. The satellite can be sold for 1999 simoleons and will depreciate with time, but it makes for a nice keepsake and perpetually seems to vent black fumes well after its target's demise. ----------------------- Flies: Death by flies is the rarest and most difficult way for a sim to die of them all. In order for a sim to die through flies, they must have completely littered the surrounding area with dirty dishes that have had enough time to stagnate and vent green fumes to attract flies. On a particular rare occasion while stepping on a plate, the sim will be attacked by a swarm of angry flies that will eat the sim and leave only what appears to be ashes behind. This death truly deserves to be classified as the most horrible way a sim can die. That is of course, until the cow plant was invented. ----------------------- Cow Plant: What is there to say about the cow plant that I haven't udderly gone into detail about before? In short, a stupid sim who goes for the cow plant's cake tongue will get eaten whole. The good news about the cow plant from an evil point of view is that it's a clean, reliable and highly beneficial way for a sim to die. The bad part about it is that the reaper doesn't cone along so you can't plead with him to fulfill any "Win against the Reaper" wants. ----------------------- Old Age: The only real way a sim should die is through old age. If they are at less than platinum aspiration, they'll try to snatch back the grim reaper's hour glass, but fail. If a sim does however die of old age naturally at platinum, everyone in the family will see them off and they'll be greeted by death and hula girls on their journey to the great beyond. They will also get an extra special platinum tombstone/urn with the symbol of their aspiration type on it. Death cannot be pleaded with in this case, but you can bring them back to life through the Resurrect-O-Nomitron, although I think that this is probably the best way to end a good story a sim can ask for. ***************************************************************************** Chapter 7: Wrapping Up ***************************************************************************** [21] Trivia: Llamas: You may have noticed the tendency for Maxis to frequently refer to Llamas in The Sims 2, as well as many other Maxis simulation games. It is commonly believed that this is attributed to creator Will Wright's love of the animal, although there have been other theories, as it seems for some phenomenally odd reason; llamas have become a thing of parallel game fixation on other gaming culture fronts. I remember hearing about a running joke on "Llama Pies" along time ago with some old Commodore 64 game called "Wheeling Wally' or something, but I was barely old enough to read back then, so it's just a faint memory. As far as I can remember, the earliest use of Llama references in a Maxis game was in SimCity 2000 with it being the name of one of the speed levels, a football team, frequently mentioned in the news and even the Braun Llama Dome reward, although if you got the Australian version, you'd get the Sydney Opera House instead. It would seem that Maxis has carried this well loved animal well into its recent games and beyond as a running joke, and thanks to their behalf, this otherwise unknown animal with a rather oddly spelled name has gained some majestic reverence in the gaming community. ----------------------- Captain Hero: Originally appearing in SimCity 2000, this super hero would occasionally come to save large cities from disasters such as tornados and alien invasions, and has also been referred to on occasions as Maxis Man, albeit wearing a very different outfit from the Captain Hero occupation at the top of the law enforcement career. If none of your sims have gotten this job yet, he or she will have a very unique way of getting to work that is fitting of a super hero. You can also watch a bunch of people dressed up as criminal masterminds torturing a person dressed up as Captain Hero on KidzTube television. ----------------------- Aliens: Maxis has come across many different designs for aliens when making the SimCity games, but it would seem that the type shown in The Sims 2 is a cute miniature version from the SimCity 4: Rush Hour expansion pack UFO, marked by its distinctive saucer shape and green color. You might be wondering why I said miniature when the one in The Sims 2 is as large as it is. The UFO mother ship that comes to attack as a disaster in SimCity 4: Rush Hour expansion happens to be quite noticeably larger and clearly more hostile, as it will blast a giant beam of energy straight into your city before releasing three smaller versions to randomly assault other areas. A preview of this event can also be seen on KidzTube television that your sims can watch, as well as the killer robot disaster that features a giant version of Servo from the original The Sims smiting his human oppressors. Just as a side note, the UFO that comes to abduct your sims even has a license plate that reads "ANM8R". I wonder what that could stand for? ----------------------- Will Wright: Quite the icon of gaming culture, he is often referenced within Maxis' games. In The Sims 2, there is a rock formation that looks like his head in the decorations that can be used in the neighborhood and there is also a supposed picture of him in the university young adult creation room. Will Wright's influence also doesn't escape the console world, as Dr. Wright, who is an arguable cartoon caricature of Will Wright used in the Super Nintendo version of SimCity is still remembered fondly by Nintendo lovers. Oh yes, it's arguable, but it seems that one of the painting a sim can make is an exaggerated caricature of Will Wright as well. ----------------------- The Yummy Channel: The most useful channel in the game, as it builds cooking skill, but if you watch it carefully, be prepared for a very good laugh, as the vast majority of the clips show exactly what your sim should not be doing in the kitchen - getting set on fire. ----------------------- SSX 3: SSX 3 can be played on by sims on computers or the console system in The Sims 2. SSX 3 is the most recent in a line up of snowboarding game from the EA Sports division of EA Games located in Canada, who Maxis is now affiliated with. They're practically my next door neighbors and some of my 3D CG instructors worked there, and so I can't help but wave a bit of a patriotic flag for them despite the fact that one of my friends right as I wrote the last sentence e-mailed me to tell me how they are an evil corporation -- again (And that he'll be applying there), hahahah. It should be also noted that the clips on the SimStation Sports Network are also from EA Sports games and it would seem that a little in game advertising can go a long way. I honestly have no idea what SSX stands for though. Other games available to play are The Sims Bustin' Out and SimCity 4: Rush Hour and can be bought at community lots in the The Sims 2, as well as real life! ============================================================================= [22] Bugs, Cheats and Glitches: And How to Exploit Them Dorm Ransacking: How to Sellout Your Roommates' Lifestyle Dorms are fundamentally different from other lot types and your building tools are restricted unless you cheat. Beats me why the fine folks at Maxis did this, because there is a gigantic loop hole in their logic that allows you to abuse the system so much that it's practically just a key stroke short from the motherlode cheat. All you have to do in order to exploit the dorm system is move a sim into a dorm, sell every single item that isn't nailed down, move to another one, sell everything there, repeat till your sim is rich enough to buy the entire university or desired results. Per one ransacking, you can expect to make about 30,000 a go. With the money made from ransacking expendable dorms trick, you might as well just be cheating. I've tried the previously mentioned trick extensively, and there seems to be nary a side effect, not even a memory of moving within university. You can apparently place down an infinite amount of dorms if you should run out of ransacking the previous ones, and it's not like you actually care about other sims that live in the same dorm as you, you can sell their beds in a heartbeat and cram the toilet, computer, canvas, shower, mirror, phone, chessboard, and even the kitchen sink if you still have room. With a big glaring loophole like that, you don't even have to go out of your way to cheat, but this is best reserved for custom college towns, as you wouldn't want to accidentally defile the premade atmosphere. Winning all of those scholarships and working long hard hours as a barista just seems to fade into regrettable futility with a trick like this, but eh, Maxis probably knows that anybody who wants to cheat, will cheat. ----------------------- Rent Low, Sell High Similar to the slight financial loophole with dorms, you too can exploit the generous cost of a rented home by promptly selling everything bought on the lot at its full value, moving out, buying everything all over again, moving in again for a reduced price, selling yet again, and then repeating the process till you build an architectural monument worthy of this economic anomaly. Finding irony that most of the bugs and loopholes in The Sims 2 University this time around are player beneficial, unlike when the original core game came out with it's jump bug from hell and one way carpools to infinity aside, you're still gonna' need a lot of simoleans. ----------------------- Profiting From the Death of the Expendable: Every newly created family in the ordinary neighborhood gets 20,000 simoleans to spend for getting started normally. However, you can have them also move into another sim's household and combine money. You can abuse this system by having a single one member household merge and contribute their 20,000 simoleans to the sim you actually care about, only to kill them off, steal their money and repeat till you are bloody rich, and if that isn't insult to injury, you can also sell their tombstones and pocket a tidy 150 simoleans. Remember kiddies, there is no such thing as evil sims, only evil players. Although it would seem that one of my recent updates completely defiles this logic. ----------------------- Your Secret Society and Myne: Time to get to that nifty little trick I have been talking about that lets you bring other sims in your household along with you to the Secret Society, albeit with a bit of a negative side effect. Normally, it seems that your own sims never show up in the secret society as NPCs, even if there are many of them and you tried to off default secret society members with the not so discreet cow plant to make room. There is however, indeed a way to bring your other secret society sims from home along with you and here it is. 1. Have the sim you want to come along go to the secret society first. 2. Buy a Myne Door, the type used in dorms, and have you sim claim it and lock it. 3. Have another sim of the same household be the next person to visit the secret society. 4. Both sims should be present and you should see both of their faces on the side bar, however, you will only be able to control your current one. Unfortunately, there are two side effects. The first is that your other sim's aspiration will decrease, the second is that it would seem that the university exam clock still keeps on ticking even when they are not being played, but on the bright side, you can take better pictures of them and have them help out with skill building. Having more than two sims from the same household may also be possible, but I haven't tested it as of yet. This is not a casual technique to be used, as its side effects can cause a lot of chaos if not carefully monitored when you return. Oh, as an additional note, replacing the front door of the secret society with a Myne Door and kicking everyone out is a good way to single-handedly take over the secret society. Unfortunately, if you bring in another sim from another household, the claim on the Myne Door will be lifted, but it's the hostile intent that counts. ----------------------- Raising the Dead into the Secret Society This trick is more of slightly underused features as opposed to a glitch. If you happen to want to recruit a zombie slave, the secret societies are the perfect place to do so. To add a secret society member to your normal household, zombie or otherwise, just kill them off via cow plant and bring them back with the Resurrect-O-Nomitron, good as new or slightly used. You will be able to control them temporarily at the secret society until you have to return home, and they will follow you and resume the rest of their lives, or lack there of. This should also work in regards to reviving other young adults in the college town that your sim knows that have died, even if they aren't members of the secret society. It seems though that you can't revive adults such as the cafeteria workers or the professors though at university should they "accidentally" die. Also to be noted are that the counterfeit machines in the secret society are more reliable, as it seems fire cannot erupt there, which occurs frequently at home should you try to counterfeit, even with platinum aspiration. ----------------------- Multi-Term Paper! This is an awesome trick contributed by Jason Newman after I wrote my The Sims 2 University FAQ. I originally attached this trick to my Nightlife FAQ, because in my mind, I had no intention of updating the University FAQ, but since here I am doing it anyway, I thought this to be where the trick really should be engraved down! With this trick, it is possible to get double or even triple term paper credits in a single semester! If you have your sim influence other sims to write term papers before the first term paper for the semester finishes, they will all start typing away on them, and when they finish, their compiled term papers will all be counted onto the score and send the Class Performance Meter soaring! As a bit of a note, three term papers in one semester is pretty much enough to send any class performance meter straight from the bottom to the top and costs 7500 influence points total. Of course, you have to have enough computers on the lot for the sims to write on, so this trick works especially well on dorms and university community lots where the resources are available, as well as the Secret Society. Of course, your sim can also jump into the frenzy to write his or her term paper themselves when other sims are being influenced to type away at it at the same time, for in the case that they are running low on influence or want to fulfill a term paper want. ----------------------- Easy Career Rewards: Here's a trick that I first learned from Martin Ostera who e-mailed me all the juicy details of one of the biggest in game exploits I've seen! As a matter of fact, this trick is so ridiculously useful; it's a mystery to me why I haven't found out about it until now! Take note though that I tested this trick on The Sims 2 with both University and Nightlife installed and it might not work if it's just University alone, as this trick revolves around a possible change that was made to the core game with the expansions. Have you ever wanted all the career rewards that you could ever possibly hope for, but too lazy to actually play the game and too honorable to actually consider using type in cheats? Well, this is just perfect for you! Originally, in the core game, when your sim applied for a job through the computer, they could overshoot the position that would normally give them the career reward if they were overqualified and go on for the rest of their career until they reach the top without ever getting it. This led to most career reward hunting players starting their climb up the job ladder from the bottom rung by finding a job in the newspaper instead of through a computer. Now, it seems that somewhere between all the current expansions and patches, Maxis has remedied this problem, and now, you can obtain career rewards retroactively, simply by reaching or overshooting the job position that would normally give the career reward. For better or worst though, Maxis didn't see how this feature could be massively exploited, and here's where Martin Ostera's trick comes into play. This trick works best with sims who have graduated from university with a Summa Cum Laude earning 4.0 GPA to grace their diplomas with high skill and a dozen or more friends, as it virtually guarantees them the highest position possible, usually a level 8-9 position optimally, however, even sims without post secondary education can do it to a lesser degree so long as they have enough friends and very high skills to offset. Okay then, let the career reward ripping begin! All you have to do is have your sim pick a job, any job using the computer, and so long as the position they start off with meets or surpasses the career reward position, they will obtain that career reward simply for being hired! Now, all you gotta' do is hop from one from one career path to the next and mop up the goodies, all in a few in game minutes for your sim from the comfort of their own computer! Even better, with Nightlife, you can share the love by distributing multiple career rewards to other members of the household to spread around the neighborhood, and presto, you have a full blown career reward manufacturing facility to share the wealth! With this trick, you can obtain the career rewards from every career path in the game, including the four university exclusive ones if you have a graduate doing the job hunting, and although you only get five career options available to your sims on their computer every day, that is barely a pothole in the light of the power this trick can give to your sims. Now everybody on the block can own their very own cow plant, and wouldn't that make the world a much better ============================================================================= [23]Closure: Well, that's it for this little FAQ, I hope that it answered any floating questions you may have had and is as accurate as possible. I wrote this FAQ out of fun and with the hopes that it could help other people explore many of the fun things the game has to offer, in between jobs of course. These days, I'm pretty busy with my anime style art and writings, available for display at my site www.xynthica.com, so I probably wouldn't be updating until the next expansion pack, but I'm always in the mood for new facts and information, so please drop me a line if you have any comments or criticism. I personally find it highly ironic that I've been a gamefaqs member for 6 years, and it was only when I lost my original account that I decided to finally write a FAQ, but I'm glad I did. Oh, just for the record though, although this is called "The Sims 2 University Practical FAQ", I apparently took way too many side roads to research the little things, but it's all good. ============================================================================= [24]Legal Stuff: Copyright 2005 Zephos Amaranis This guide may be freely distributed, digitally displayed, and or reproduced for personal and private use for non-profitable purposes, so long as it's content are unaltered and the original author is acknowledged. List of Authorized Hosts for This FAQ: http://www.gamefaqs.com (Master Copy) http://www.neoseeker.com http://www.cheatcc.com http://www.supercheats.com http://dlh.net http://www.gamerstemple.com http://groups.msn.com/TheSims2Database ============================================================================= [25]Special Thanks To: - First and foremost comes my gratitude to Maxis and EA Games for making this excellent interactive piece of software that is The Sims 2 and its expansion The Sims 2: University that myself and many others have enjoy to a very large extent. Needless to say, the official site http://thesims2.ea.com/ has also been an invaluable resource for information and fun rumors that I always liked to look into. - I would like to thank the great The Sims 2 fans at the boards of www.gamefaqs.com, of which I used to visit all the time under a different name which unfortunately got lost somewhere with the merger passport and I have never been able to claim again. - Whenever I got lost, I frequently found myself going to http://compsimgames.about.com/ for lists and in-depth information that I had troubling remembering when writing this FAQ, so I'd like to thank you guys there for supplying an excellent database of information on simulation games. - An especially large thank you goes to warfreak for writing the first FAQ on The Sims 2 University to appear on gamefaqs, and also because I haven't wrote a video game related FAQ in almost 6 years, so I was a bit rusty and needed a good example to follow. - Finally, I'd like to thank www.snootysims.com which I visited very often when I was new to The Sims 2 scene and had lots of questions, like about death by satellite, hahaha, and my personal favorite right after the cow plant. - Special thanks to Chris Biberstein for the correction on the original inspiration for the Social Bunny coming from an old movie from the 1950s called Harvey, which much later in turn inspired Donny Darko. - Special thanks to Pagasa and Tostada for additional information regarding lifetime wants, specifically regarding the four new lifetime wants. - Spiffy thanks to Matt Coold for telling me what is most likely the correct limit for members of a Level 5 Greek House, despite the game as I recall falsely saying otherwise. -Incredible thanks to Jason Newman for telling me personally through e-mail the information regarding the Multi-Term Paper trick! I use it all the time now and it's such a useful time saving way to exploit the game, and you all know how much I LOVE to exploit the game! Well, without cheat codes or mods anyway. -Super happy thanks to Martin Ostera for his trick about getting easy career rewards through simply getting hired at high positions! Surely one of the greatest in game exploits I have ever come across to date! ============================================================================= There are two things in any good game to avoid doing, losing, and unfortunately, winning... www.xynthica.com
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