brm50diboll 
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The Gold Badge in Flower Arrangement allowed Sims to make snapdragons. Snapdragons would emit a mist every few seconds. Most of the time, the mist emitted by the snapdragons would be pink, and any Sim within a certain distance of the snapdragons would have most of its "need meters" improved. In fact, by filling a Sim House with snapdragons and other special objects, I could keep all the Sims in that house completely maxed out on all their need meters 24 hours a day. They never had to eat, sleep, use the bathroom, and their moods were always perfect even if they worked very tedious and difficult tasks 24 hours a day with no rest. You could do that with cheat codes as well, but I preferred to avoid cheat codes and play the game "honestly".
But I noticed on rare occasions some snapdragons would emit a green mist, not a pink mist. The green mist did the exact opposite of what the pink mist did, it drained Sims' need meters. In fact, a few seconds of exposure to the green mist could drain their energy meter all the way to zero and kill them, but I never let that happen. I liked my Sims. I wanted them all to be happy. Snapdragons were either good (pink) or bad (green). They did not change back and forth. In a Sims inventory, there was no way of telling the good from the bad. They were all mixed together under the same icon. Only actually observing the particular snapdragons would allow you to tell if it was pink or green. The vast majority were pink. But I discovered through trial and error that a Sim was more likely to produce a bad (green) snapdragon if it was *unhappy* when it made the snapdragon. Now if the Sim was too unhappy, it would refuse to do any work. I found that Servos were a bit more tolerant of prolonged unhappiness than ordinary Sims. It turned out that it wasn't just snapdragons that had good and bad versions. A number of Sims-created products came in good and evil versions, and the evil versions were more likely (though not guaranteed) if the Sim that made it was unhappy. There was the good Jack-in-the-box that entertained child Sims, and the evil one that scared them. There was the good Octopus water sprinkler that Sims could play in outdoors in the Summer, and the evil Squid water sprinkler that terrified them, and so on. But the Inventory would not distinguish between the good and bad forms of any of these. I needed a reliable way to sort them out.
Since I wanted my Sims to be happy, but I saw some use for the "evil versions", I decided to limit the damage by creating one and only one Servo that I put on a lot by itself with lots of craft stations (this special Servo had Gold badges in everything) and intentionally put a number of bad snapdragons in one part of the lot and a few good snapdragons on the opposite side of the lot. I wanted my Special Servo to have a bad mood so that it would make mostly evil versions of the various items, but the mood had to be very carefully regulated with the use of the snapdragons. If it got too low, the Servo would "go crazy" and that was a difficult problem to fix (without cheat codes) involving calling a repairman and wasting a lot of game time. On the other hand, if the mood got too high, the Servo would make mostly good versions, which wasn't what I wanted because I had lots of good versions from all the other Sims on all the other lots. Everywhere else, if a Sim accidentally made a bad version, which was rare, I would transfer it to my special lot immediately rather than let it get mixed up in the inventories. But on my special lot, it was reversed. I saved all the evil versions in the inventory of my designated unhappy Servo, and when that Servo would occasionally produce a good version, I would destroy that good version and try again. Eventually I got enough evil versions of various items that I could sell a few of them off to my other Sims' to be placed in designated "evil rooms" on the other Sims lots. Normally I would keep my Sims out of the "evil rooms", but they were there in case I might want to use them for special purposes some day later. I'm a pretty big control freak when I play the Sims, so I rarely let them use "free will", but I could keep the "evil rooms" locked up to prevent access to them when I wanted to experiment with "free will" on my Sims. Those experiments generally went badly. Unattended Sims in "free will" mode did stupid things that caused problems like start fires. Even highly educated, highly trained, with "perfect personalities", and very, very comfortable Sims still did stupid things when in "free will" mode.
Overall, my Sims neighborhoods were extremely happy, skilled, and well-adjusted. I had bred out problems after 3 or 4 generations and now had almost nothing but "perfect" Sims in permanent Platinum moods who kept eternally young by periodically drinking the magic youth formula they could get from accumulating achievement points. It was a Sims Paradise. But I still had that one "special" unhappy Servo on the lot by himself making evil versions of things that had the utility of (in carefully controlled ways) "fine-tuning" needs and moods which I needed during the educational process of my younger, not fully trained Sims.
And what is my point of all this? Well, I was thinking (because thinking is what I do) that, for the most part, great achievements in art, science, literature, engineering and most human endeavors actually are not done by happy people. They are done by driven people with something to prove to themselves and/or others. So many famous authors and artists have been alcoholics, for example. Happy people tend to "rest on their laurels". So the cost of creating my Sims 2 Paradise was one very unhappy robot that I intentionally kept that way. I should probably give him a break every now and then, if I could only find where I put that disc I need to restart the old game. |
Reply #235. Sep 24 18, 9:58 PM
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