![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
lorinsv60Here we go with the final entry for Week 4!
Welcome to my final household in Week 4 of Mesa Vista!
As promised, this is the Simself of my oldest son, Steve… er, Burns here (Montgomery anyone?), who I originally planned to use just for playtesting this windfarm for Little Nemo/twilightoutside as part of his moneymaking scheme for expediting another private university in a BaCC.
Then Steve here decided he wanted 50 First Dates. It’s a LTW I haven’t done before, and it just so happened that real Steve was between girlfriends at the time, so it sounded like fun. I asked him if he minded if I put him in my BaCC, and he readily agreed. (He is after all the one who introduced me to the Sims back in 2002 after he got out of the Army. Little did either of us know what a monster he created!)
Speaking of monsters, this is the aforementioned windfarm, an apartment lot with 234 wind turbines. After I don’t know how much trial and error, Nemo found this was the optimal number for yielding the greatest amount of green energy rebates, at a little over §16,000 twice a week. What can I say, except the guy is indefatigable when it comes to exploring different elements of the game!
The building consists of four studio apartments, each with its own kitchen, and bathrooms in the common area.
So, multiply §16,000 x twice per week = §32,000 per week per apartment for doing nothing but let the tenants collect the rebates!
And to be clear, this strategy is all Nemo's, including the green energy lots, so all credit to him!
The rent was cheap and the amenities rather sparse, but that didn’t really matter, since Steve wasn’t going to be hanging around his flat much anyway.
“Yo hey, Brittany Wendlund! First!”
First on the to-date list, but not the first one Steve actually dated. That honor went to Jill Fleig.
“Danielle Lillard. Sign me up.”
“I’ll call you later.”
“Hey, I didn’t sign up for this. I’m just supposed to get rich and go on dates!”
(That’s fire number three, which opens a position in Law Enforcement.)
“Get back, I’m on it!”
“It was just a bowl of Ramen, I think I could’ve handled it.”
“Tehe, forgive my enthusiasm. Do you have any idea how many years I’ve been waiting to get my first call?”
“Um, no? Just got here.”
“Too many, I’m telling you. Hi, I’m Aisha.”
“Steve Burns. Can I call you for a date some time, Aisha?”
“Yes you can, or I’ll call you!”
And did she ever. Aisha Snead became Steve’s official phone stalker.
They only have one bolt, but I like her!
He and Sandy Fairchild had two bolts of chemistry, and I liked them together too.
“Don’t ask, I have enough conflicts going on at the moment.”
"What's she talking about?"
“You are new here."
Yep, best not get involved with Faith Goodie.
Steve was obviously quite taken with Sandy.
When the walk-bys at the windfarm dwindled off, he went into town.
Shelby Barrett, what a surprise! (One bolt)
Steve and Tracy Messlot had two bolts of attraction, and she could use the aspiration fodder too.
In the back smiling at us was Amanda Carlson, who also lived in Steve’s apartment building and had also gone on a date with him.
Too bad it didn’t take long for the selection of women in town to dry up as well.
“Oh hi, Aisha. Sure, let’s meet for sushi.”
I still think they’re cute together.
“There’s no way I can find fifty different women to date on my own. Can you help?”
Don’t let her fool you, Steve! Her expensive ones aren’t worth anything either…
Svetlana Hyde was gorgeous, but they both agreed there wasn’t anything there. (One bolt)
The cheap blind dates were working out rather well, and at least cheap Professor Oates wasn’t a fossil. (Zero bolts)
And who better to explain the rest of his plan to Steve, than Nemo himself?
“The windfarm is just part of the equation… Study some Mechanical, cause you’re gonna need to know how to use a blowtorch, and then…”
So, Steve dutifully brushed up on his Mechanical skill…
And then went to his new store, The Droids You’re Looking For.
That makes the 20th community lot including two new NPC lots I’ll post at the end, which raised the Sim Multiplier to 21.
It was here that the real work started.
The idea was for Steve to sell the bots he crafted while working toward his gold robotics badge, because we were going to need Servos.
Lots of Servos.
"Booyah!"
Between crafting bots, he called over some of the women he had met to go on dates.
Lots of them.
He tried to show all the ladies a good time, but some just didn’t work out that way. (Kaylynn Spitzig: negative chemistry)
To raise his aspiration, he called over his favorites.
He had asked Marie Sims several times to go on a date, which she had refused I assume because she still had a thing for Prof Wilsonoff of the Wishing Well. It wasn’t a total loss, though, because they became good friends.
He didn’t need another date with Shelby, what he needed was her gold sales badge.
Shelby immediately launched into dazzling the customers, which didn’t go over too well.
“Leave me alone, can’t you see I’m under a lot of pressure right now?”
Steve closed the store for a while, and reassigned Shelby to restocking so he could get his gold robotics badge.
(Sorry, can’t find a pic of him with his first Servo.)
Steve’s first Servo, WF1 here came with a gold sales badge.
The customers were so dazzled by her, they didn’t mind being dazzled in return.
But WF1’s main duty was making more Servos.
More dating meant more Thinking Caps meant more Servos. We were going to need sixteen total to fully implement the plan.
WF1 had to earn her gold robotics badge from scratch, but she still managed to make nine Servos compared to Steve’s six.
What Steve really needed was a gold register badge.
“Why must I be so socially needy?” WF1 beeped. “This does not compute.”
Here’s a straight shot view – Steve’s workbench is in the break room, and WF1’s is in the main part of the store.
At the end of the session, the store was at Level 7 (just 3 stars away from Level 8), the inventory was spent, Steve was spent, the Servos were spent, and I was definitely spent!
After eight days at the store: "Home, sweet windfarm."
After all of WF1's hard work, I kind of felt sorry for her and wanted to do something nice for her.
So I sent her and her counterpart SP1 on a date.
Counterpart slash new boyfriend...
Rosemarie Jones the pizza delivery girl was Steve’s fifteenth first date.
Just one bolt, but I like her a lot too.
Is she gonna leave a pizza?
Good choice, Rosemarie.
Guess what the main attraction in the common area was?
WF1 was a cycling maniac! They match, too.
The week was almost up and it was time to prepare for the following one, so Steve became besties with four of the Servos, deemed the “collectors.”
And then twelve Servos moved out.
We ended up with four groups of four Servos settled into their own apartments on two solar panel (SP) farms, and two windfarms (WF), including the first one.
Starting in Week 5, the plan will go like this:
- Play each Servo's apartment (on Speed 3 with Servo deactivated, if desired).
- At the end of the week, buy expensive stuff with the §32,000 in rebates + the §20,000 “handout” the first week, and place in Servo’s inventory, leaving enough cash for next week’s rent. (I know lots of people choose to play with no §20k handouts, but 50,000 population is still so far out there, I’m choosing to use every advantage the game has to offer.)
- Servo gifts the loot in their inventory to the building’s collector Servo, who will be the last Servo played in the building.
And finally, Steve moved out of his apartment on the windfarm and into his own house on Seren Drive, so the last Servo could move into his old apartment. I could have placed him in another windfarm to keep getting rebates, but I’m going to let the Servos “run” them and let Steve reap the financial benefits, similar to his namesake. ;)
Next week should be much easier for him (and me), since all he’ll really need to focus on is dating. That, and Mesa Vista could really use a bowling alley... ;)
That’s all for Steve this week. Keep scrolling for more info and the final stats for Week 4.
Besides the Public Library and Cemetery that were shown in the Homeless and Goodie updates, I earned two more NPC community lots.
This is Mesa Vista's City Hall, which I built based on some Google images. I have to say I’m quite proud of it!
Now they have a place to get their building permits. ;)
Reception's view of the front door.
The second one is Mesa Vista Elementary-High School, which I modified from the “SC4 > TS2 Elementary School” by d_unit at MTS.
The original was solid brick, but I added stucco for some contrast and to make it fit better in a desert community. I also changed the schoolyard.
When the town gets bigger I'll add a separate high school, but for now I think it makes a perfect small-town school.
And lastly, a shot of the commercial side of town.
If you want to try Nemo's green energy farms yourself, here are the links to them:
(All EPs and SPs required):
http://www.mediafire.com/download/dl2zifkri4l35ct/Solar+Power+Plant+X.7z
http://www.mediafire.com/download/k606raq311c80b0/Wind+Farm+X.7z
Thanks for reading and Happy Simming!
Here we go with the final stats for Week 4:
Playable Sims: 62 (61 + 1 grave)
SM: 21
Population: 1302
Community lots: 20 (16 owned, 4 NPC) + military base
Residential lots: 23
Business Districts: 2 (Nikki Adams, Stephan Shin)
Universities: 1 (privately funded by Zach Adams)
Public Uni Taxes collected @ 10% of lot and business values: $283,050
Earned CAS: 35, Placed: 22, Available: 13
Burglaries: 2
Electrocutions: 2
Fires: 3
Graves: 1 (Neil Cameron)
Careers:
Athletic: unlocked, 1 taken (Brandon London)
Business: unlocked, 3 taken (Nikki Adams, Stephan Shin, Ciel Outside)
Medical: unlocked, 1 taken (Kerie Ng)
Military: unlocked, 1 taken (Pariah Korben)
Music: unlocked, 1 taken (Nora Gainsborough)
Politics: unlocked
Architecture: 7 openings, 2 taken (Nemo Outside, Tracy Messlot)
Criminal: 14 openings, 2 taken (Faith Goodie, Gavin Newson)
Culinary: 1 opening, 1 taken (Ryan Wheeler)
Education: 5 openings, 1 taken (Yvette Tan)
Entertainment: 2 openings
Gamer: 1 opening
Journalism: 1 opening
Law Enforcement: 3 openings
Science: 1 opening
Slacker: 1 opening
See you in Week 5!
Welcome to my final household in Week 4 of Mesa Vista!
As promised, this is the Simself of my oldest son, Steve… er, Burns here (Montgomery anyone?), who I originally planned to use just for playtesting this windfarm for Little Nemo/twilightoutside as part of his moneymaking scheme for expediting another private university in a BaCC.
Then Steve here decided he wanted 50 First Dates. It’s a LTW I haven’t done before, and it just so happened that real Steve was between girlfriends at the time, so it sounded like fun. I asked him if he minded if I put him in my BaCC, and he readily agreed. (He is after all the one who introduced me to the Sims back in 2002 after he got out of the Army. Little did either of us know what a monster he created!)
Speaking of monsters, this is the aforementioned windfarm, an apartment lot with 234 wind turbines. After I don’t know how much trial and error, Nemo found this was the optimal number for yielding the greatest amount of green energy rebates, at a little over §16,000 twice a week. What can I say, except the guy is indefatigable when it comes to exploring different elements of the game!
The building consists of four studio apartments, each with its own kitchen, and bathrooms in the common area.
So, multiply §16,000 x twice per week = §32,000 per week per apartment for doing nothing but let the tenants collect the rebates!
And to be clear, this strategy is all Nemo's, including the green energy lots, so all credit to him!
The rent was cheap and the amenities rather sparse, but that didn’t really matter, since Steve wasn’t going to be hanging around his flat much anyway.
“Yo hey, Brittany Wendlund! First!”
First on the to-date list, but not the first one Steve actually dated. That honor went to Jill Fleig.
“Danielle Lillard. Sign me up.”
“I’ll call you later.”
“Hey, I didn’t sign up for this. I’m just supposed to get rich and go on dates!”
(That’s fire number three, which opens a position in Law Enforcement.)
“Get back, I’m on it!”
“It was just a bowl of Ramen, I think I could’ve handled it.”
“Tehe, forgive my enthusiasm. Do you have any idea how many years I’ve been waiting to get my first call?”
“Um, no? Just got here.”
“Too many, I’m telling you. Hi, I’m Aisha.”
“Steve Burns. Can I call you for a date some time, Aisha?”
“Yes you can, or I’ll call you!”
And did she ever. Aisha Snead became Steve’s official phone stalker.
They only have one bolt, but I like her!
He and Sandy Fairchild had two bolts of chemistry, and I liked them together too.
“Don’t ask, I have enough conflicts going on at the moment.”
"What's she talking about?"
“You are new here."
Yep, best not get involved with Faith Goodie.
Steve was obviously quite taken with Sandy.
When the walk-bys at the windfarm dwindled off, he went into town.
Shelby Barrett, what a surprise! (One bolt)
Steve and Tracy Messlot had two bolts of attraction, and she could use the aspiration fodder too.
In the back smiling at us was Amanda Carlson, who also lived in Steve’s apartment building and had also gone on a date with him.
Too bad it didn’t take long for the selection of women in town to dry up as well.
“Oh hi, Aisha. Sure, let’s meet for sushi.”
I still think they’re cute together.
“There’s no way I can find fifty different women to date on my own. Can you help?”
Don’t let her fool you, Steve! Her expensive ones aren’t worth anything either…
Svetlana Hyde was gorgeous, but they both agreed there wasn’t anything there. (One bolt)
The cheap blind dates were working out rather well, and at least cheap Professor Oates wasn’t a fossil. (Zero bolts)
And who better to explain the rest of his plan to Steve, than Nemo himself?
“The windfarm is just part of the equation… Study some Mechanical, cause you’re gonna need to know how to use a blowtorch, and then…”
So, Steve dutifully brushed up on his Mechanical skill…
And then went to his new store, The Droids You’re Looking For.
That makes the 20th community lot including two new NPC lots I’ll post at the end, which raised the Sim Multiplier to 21.
It was here that the real work started.
The idea was for Steve to sell the bots he crafted while working toward his gold robotics badge, because we were going to need Servos.
Lots of Servos.
"Booyah!"
Between crafting bots, he called over some of the women he had met to go on dates.
Lots of them.
He tried to show all the ladies a good time, but some just didn’t work out that way. (Kaylynn Spitzig: negative chemistry)
To raise his aspiration, he called over his favorites.
He had asked Marie Sims several times to go on a date, which she had refused I assume because she still had a thing for Prof Wilsonoff of the Wishing Well. It wasn’t a total loss, though, because they became good friends.
He didn’t need another date with Shelby, what he needed was her gold sales badge.
Shelby immediately launched into dazzling the customers, which didn’t go over too well.
“Leave me alone, can’t you see I’m under a lot of pressure right now?”
Steve closed the store for a while, and reassigned Shelby to restocking so he could get his gold robotics badge.
(Sorry, can’t find a pic of him with his first Servo.)
Steve’s first Servo, WF1 here came with a gold sales badge.
The customers were so dazzled by her, they didn’t mind being dazzled in return.
But WF1’s main duty was making more Servos.
More dating meant more Thinking Caps meant more Servos. We were going to need sixteen total to fully implement the plan.
WF1 had to earn her gold robotics badge from scratch, but she still managed to make nine Servos compared to Steve’s six.
What Steve really needed was a gold register badge.
“Why must I be so socially needy?” WF1 beeped. “This does not compute.”
Here’s a straight shot view – Steve’s workbench is in the break room, and WF1’s is in the main part of the store.
At the end of the session, the store was at Level 7 (just 3 stars away from Level 8), the inventory was spent, Steve was spent, the Servos were spent, and I was definitely spent!
After eight days at the store: "Home, sweet windfarm."
After all of WF1's hard work, I kind of felt sorry for her and wanted to do something nice for her.
So I sent her and her counterpart SP1 on a date.
Counterpart slash new boyfriend...
Rosemarie Jones the pizza delivery girl was Steve’s fifteenth first date.
Just one bolt, but I like her a lot too.
Is she gonna leave a pizza?
Good choice, Rosemarie.
Guess what the main attraction in the common area was?
WF1 was a cycling maniac! They match, too.
The week was almost up and it was time to prepare for the following one, so Steve became besties with four of the Servos, deemed the “collectors.”
And then twelve Servos moved out.
We ended up with four groups of four Servos settled into their own apartments on two solar panel (SP) farms, and two windfarms (WF), including the first one.
Starting in Week 5, the plan will go like this:
- Play each Servo's apartment (on Speed 3 with Servo deactivated, if desired).
- At the end of the week, buy expensive stuff with the §32,000 in rebates + the §20,000 “handout” the first week, and place in Servo’s inventory, leaving enough cash for next week’s rent. (I know lots of people choose to play with no §20k handouts, but 50,000 population is still so far out there, I’m choosing to use every advantage the game has to offer.)
- Servo gifts the loot in their inventory to the building’s collector Servo, who will be the last Servo played in the building.
- At the end of the collector’s week, the collector calls Steve over and gifts him everything collected from that apartment building for the week.
- The first week using this method should yield §128,000 in rebates + §80,000 in “handouts” = §208,000 x 4 green energy farms = §832,000.
- Each week thereafter will yield §128,000 x 4 farms = §512,000.
- This basically means a new private University every other week. I could have gone for one Uni every week, but that would have meant making 32 Servos, and I couldn’t make myself do it!
One of the reasons I wanted to give this strategy a try, is that I think green energy farms are perfectly suited for a desert environment.And finally, Steve moved out of his apartment on the windfarm and into his own house on Seren Drive, so the last Servo could move into his old apartment. I could have placed him in another windfarm to keep getting rebates, but I’m going to let the Servos “run” them and let Steve reap the financial benefits, similar to his namesake. ;)
Next week should be much easier for him (and me), since all he’ll really need to focus on is dating. That, and Mesa Vista could really use a bowling alley... ;)
That’s all for Steve this week. Keep scrolling for more info and the final stats for Week 4.
Besides the Public Library and Cemetery that were shown in the Homeless and Goodie updates, I earned two more NPC community lots.
This is Mesa Vista's City Hall, which I built based on some Google images. I have to say I’m quite proud of it!
Now they have a place to get their building permits. ;)
Reception's view of the front door.
The second one is Mesa Vista Elementary-High School, which I modified from the “SC4 > TS2 Elementary School” by d_unit at MTS.
The original was solid brick, but I added stucco for some contrast and to make it fit better in a desert community. I also changed the schoolyard.
When the town gets bigger I'll add a separate high school, but for now I think it makes a perfect small-town school.
And lastly, a shot of the commercial side of town.
If you want to try Nemo's green energy farms yourself, here are the links to them:
(All EPs and SPs required):
http://www.mediafire.com/download/dl2zifkri4l35ct/Solar+Power+Plant+X.7z
http://www.mediafire.com/download/k606raq311c80b0/Wind+Farm+X.7z
Thanks for reading and Happy Simming!
Here we go with the final stats for Week 4:
Playable Sims: 62 (61 + 1 grave)
SM: 21
Population: 1302
Community lots: 20 (16 owned, 4 NPC) + military base
Residential lots: 23
Business Districts: 2 (Nikki Adams, Stephan Shin)
Universities: 1 (privately funded by Zach Adams)
Public Uni Taxes collected @ 10% of lot and business values: $283,050
Earned CAS: 35, Placed: 22, Available: 13
Burglaries: 2
Electrocutions: 2
Fires: 3
Graves: 1 (Neil Cameron)
Careers:
Athletic: unlocked, 1 taken (Brandon London)
Business: unlocked, 3 taken (Nikki Adams, Stephan Shin, Ciel Outside)
Medical: unlocked, 1 taken (Kerie Ng)
Military: unlocked, 1 taken (Pariah Korben)
Music: unlocked, 1 taken (Nora Gainsborough)
Politics: unlocked
Architecture: 7 openings, 2 taken (Nemo Outside, Tracy Messlot)
Criminal: 14 openings, 2 taken (Faith Goodie, Gavin Newson)
Culinary: 1 opening, 1 taken (Ryan Wheeler)
Education: 5 openings, 1 taken (Yvette Tan)
Entertainment: 2 openings
Gamer: 1 opening
Journalism: 1 opening
Law Enforcement: 3 openings
Science: 1 opening
Slacker: 1 opening
See you in Week 5!
Tags:
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2014-02-01 08:13 pm (UTC)I'd hate to be the bird that decided to fly through that wind farm!!!
no subject
Date: 2014-02-01 11:06 pm (UTC)I too hope the birds stay away!
no subject
Date: 2014-02-02 02:40 am (UTC)I love the idea of the wind far, and it seems to work very well! Now the only question is which lucky lady will Steve end up with? (If any.)
I'm guessing we won't be seeing updates from the servos, right?
Fun update, as always! :)
no subject
Date: 2014-02-07 07:15 pm (UTC)I'll probably do one update for all the Servos just to show how the strategy is working, and just because I personally like reading that kind of thing as much as a story.
Thanks for the comment!
no subject
Date: 2014-02-02 05:04 am (UTC)Great idea having a lot devoted to making energy for the town. So he gets a check back just for having them there? How many does he have?
Your hood looks so nice.
Steve looks like he has more luck with the robots than the ladies. Some sims are just difficult to hook up. I'm trying to find someone for Malcolm Landgraab and he only likes married ladies, the letch.
no subject
Date: 2014-02-07 07:26 pm (UTC)Thank you! :) I'm learning more about what looks good for building placement, hopefully I can eventually make it look even better.
With this LTW, I'm actually pleased with Steve's dates so far. It would be harder to keep the dating casual in my mind if he had already found the "one".
Oh, that Malcolm, lol.
no subject
Date: 2014-02-02 12:44 pm (UTC)Steve's dating seems to be going well. For getting 50 firsts done, I think it's definitely enough to pay as little as possible. An expensive date may be worth it for a high-bolt match, but still you only get lucky so often with it.
And really nice new community lots! Mesa Vista seems to be growing quite nicely, and it's looking good. :)
no subject
Date: 2014-02-07 07:34 pm (UTC)Cheap dates are definitely the way to go if you just want quick one shots. So far I have been nothing but disappointed by the expensive ones and the Wishing Well.
Thanks! I'm please with how Mesa Vista is looking considering I'm not very good at that kind of stuff. I like building community lots more than houses now, because they can just be boxes with a little different deco to make them semi-interesting.
no subject
Date: 2014-02-11 10:34 am (UTC)Your lots are an inspiration, nice-looking and so realistic yet.
Do the energy farms create much lag? I play on an antique of a computer, and RAM is always a concern.
It's great to see such a BaCC played by the original rules, as a challenge, that I can understand and compare with mine.
I enjoyed the dating too, I just finished that LTW for the first time. It was funny seeing all the usual suspects^^ Jill Fleig won in mine (despite not having the best chemistry by far), I wonder who your sim will end up "keeping".
no subject
Date: 2014-02-13 05:40 am (UTC)I played the wind farm in Oct-Nov of last year on my old computer (now deceased) that was 6 years old, 4GB RAM and a mid-range video card, and it lagged just a little when I first opened the lot. After that I didn't notice any lag. Perhaps the solar panels would be a better choice since they have no moving parts.
I get a lot of inspiration watching other people's challenges too!
I hope to have Jill Fleig in my BaCC one of these days.
no subject
Date: 2014-02-13 09:33 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2014-02-15 05:23 pm (UTC)The lots don't lag on his 3-4 year-old laptop either, and to quote: "As for the lag at the beginning - this might be because I used Mootildas lot compressor to reduce the size of the package. It requires the lot to 'regenerate' some data first before it can be played again, so this might have been the reason."
no subject
Date: 2014-02-16 09:53 pm (UTC)