Well, I was a closed Beta tester for The Sims, and thought I'd write down a list of tips, tricks, help and information. I don't want to duplicate the FAQ or online tutorial, etc, and have glossed over those areas. And .. if anyone wants to write something more detailed, feel free to use this information.
Note that this is relevant to the last version of the closed beta, and it may have changed, so if its wrong, don't blame me!
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The facebook version of The Sims is basically a game where you build your house by purchasing rooms & indoor/outdoor decorations for your property. Your Sim has basic needs that must be kept up or your Sim will not obey you. Your Sim has various challenges that s/he can complete as well – missions, building furniture, and raising up skills (Cooking, Painting, etc). And of course there is the friendship/romance from The Sims as well – this time with your friends.
Your Sim can have 1 of 7 different types of personalities. You can change it during the game, but it will cost you simcash. Each Personality has its own special action, which will work depending on the personality of the other sim. The sim also has its own special action that it will often do when idle. The starting equipment in your house is also dependent on your personality choice (i.e get a basic computer instead of a typewriter, but both cost similar, so no real difference). Certain chat actions are more effective against different personalities too. Apart from all that, there is no real difference for choosing a certain personality over another – there are no jobs in this game, so my guess is to pick which you prefer.
Primarily, your aim is to become inspired so you can get bonus cash from raising skills. To achieve this, you will need to raise your Sim’s needs (Social, Fun, Hunger, Hygiene, Bladder, Sleep), until they are all in the green.
***IMPORTANT TIP***
Look carefully at the bottom of your posts, especially when inviting friends. There is a checkbox there which is automatically ticked, and states ‘Don’t ask before sending The Sims Social requests to XXXXX.’ This means that you won’t be seeing facebook messages pop up when sending requests, so don’t think that it isn’t working because you don’t see a popup box.
TIP: You will not become inspired until the last reward icon dropped has been collected. E.g. Say you only need to raise sleep to become inspired. So, take a nap. However, your sim will not enter the Inspired status until you click on the green smiley face generated from sleeping (or the game automatically collects it). The coins and experience dropped do not need to be collected immediately.
Traits:
As you play, your sim can have up to six different Traits. Traits are bought using Lifetime points, which are acquired when mastering skill levels of skill objects. E.g. Paint on the Easel until you finish a line. A golden icon of a paintbrush will appear when you finish the last portion of the line.
TIP: As with the tip above, the game will not register you having completed a line until the golden paintbrush icon is collected. So if you want to unlock a new line, you need to collect the icon first.
Once you have enough Lifetime points, you can purchase traits. If you wish to, you can also swap out a trait, and purchase a new trait (you don’t lose the level of the original trait, but it does cost you Lifetime Points to swap traits).
Traits and their usefulness:
TIP: If your toilet is broken and you don’t want to spend energy to repair it, simply visit a friend and use theirs.
Slob - Mainly useful for amusement purposes. Yes, they don't care about personal hygiene, but ... that doesn't help the sim become inspired. The amusements are at lvl 3 when the Sim uses the shower / bath as a hygiene AND a toilet booster (you really don’t want to know!), or lvl 5 where the sim can eat from a trashcan.
Steel Bladder - Who cares? Spend a free action at your house, or at a friend's if yours is broken. If you dislike having to raise your bladder need then buy it.
Neat – Average. Bonuses include your sim automatically washing it's hands after using the toilet (save a click). Raises fun as well when cleaning. I'm not sure, but at Lvl 4, polishing may lengthen the time between objects getting dirty.
SuperMechanic - Useless. So what if you repair faster? It doesn't affect anything in the game at present.
Insane - Useless normally, but decent if you only have or want a few friends. Reduces the need for social. You can also use the telephone to raise social.
Ogre - Useful & Amusing. You get 'burp' (and possibly 'fart') negative actions with other sims. The bonus is that you don't need to bother to spend energy to clean items.
Ninja - Useful trait. You walk faster, run or teleport about the place. Very useful if your house is large.
Great Kisser - Useful trait. Means you can kiss earlier in the relationship without negative repercussions.
Night Owl - Useless. Like Steel Bladder.
Special Ingredients:
Here are a few special ingredients and tips on how to obtain them (other than requesting friends).
Fury: You need to give rude chat lines to friends and insult them for a chance to obtain this. You might find that certain actions work better against differing personalities. The slobs ‘burp’ action tends to work fairly well to generate fury. Yes, your relationship level will drop, but you can soon raise it again.
TIP: I have found that it is useful to make enemies out of certain friends simply to generate fury. You also get a large range of amusing pranks that you can play on them.
TIP: Since Bella is a NPC, you cannot send her requests to raise or lower relationships, so you might as well abuse her as much as you want.
Goodwill – The opposite of fury, this is obtained by giving nice chat lines to a friend. Same rules apply.
Love: You don’t need to be in a relationship to obtain this – you simply need to do an action together with a friend – e.g. watch tv together.
Bling – Once you have finished building an object, post a message on your wall, and your friends can collect Bling from the post.
Other Tips:
An item with a hammer sign in the top right corner is a buildable item – you will need to gather parts or ingredients before you can finish the item and use it. If need be, simply put the unfinished item in storage until you have all the parts needed to avoid wasting space.
To cook at a stove, the sim will need an empty counter top to prepare the food on.
Your sim will always use the newest item unless broken or dirty. E.g. You install a sink in the kitchen. Then, when your sim has wants to wash it’s hands, it will use the sink in the kitchen. This means that if your sim is in the bathroom, it will walk across the entire house to reach the kitchen, which takes a lot of time, so not a good idea. You can prevent this by clicking on the ‘use’ of the sink in the bathroom, say, instead of just clicking on the need icon down below.
Once you reach a skill level and unlock a new skill item, it’s a good idea to purchase that new item and start finishing lines on that new item. This gives you a larger choice of skill options to raise, and prevents getting stuck if you don’t have a certain ingredient needed to unlock a skill line.
In certain missions (e.g. Joining the IQ club), you are required to perform an action several times, but once you perform it once at your house, it is greyed out. Well, rather than having to buy it with cash, or ask from friends, you just need to visit a friend and perform the same action there. E.g. Daydream – the action can only be done once in each house (or maybe in each chair??) In any case, you get the idea.
You can place outdoor items indoors if you wish, and indoor items outside. There is no need to buy rooms, however you obviously cannot hang pictures up outside.
In the top right corner of your screen are 6 little icons. With these you can zoom in and out, and choose to display the walls of your house or not. This is useful if a wall is in the way of something.
As one objective of the game is to raise the value of your property, remember that you can also wallpaper and decorate the outside of your home. Simply show all the walls, and separate rooms from each other, decorate, and put back together.
When you level up, you gain max energy, so watch your experience. When you get close, and you are low on energy, try to use freebie energy packs (coffee cup, choc bar, etc from your backpack (under craft)) one by one and using them until you level up.
Talking about that ... sending free energy to friends and back is very useful for extra energy. Also posting is good (though spammy), you get about 30 rewards per day that you can pick up from posts, which if all simoleons adds up. And remember that you have a limit of 15 (I think) of each, so keep using them if you have a lot of friends.
Note that this is relevant to the last version of the closed beta, and it may have changed, so if its wrong, don't blame me!
*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*
The facebook version of The Sims is basically a game where you build your house by purchasing rooms & indoor/outdoor decorations for your property. Your Sim has basic needs that must be kept up or your Sim will not obey you. Your Sim has various challenges that s/he can complete as well – missions, building furniture, and raising up skills (Cooking, Painting, etc). And of course there is the friendship/romance from The Sims as well – this time with your friends.
Your Sim can have 1 of 7 different types of personalities. You can change it during the game, but it will cost you simcash. Each Personality has its own special action, which will work depending on the personality of the other sim. The sim also has its own special action that it will often do when idle. The starting equipment in your house is also dependent on your personality choice (i.e get a basic computer instead of a typewriter, but both cost similar, so no real difference). Certain chat actions are more effective against different personalities too. Apart from all that, there is no real difference for choosing a certain personality over another – there are no jobs in this game, so my guess is to pick which you prefer.
Primarily, your aim is to become inspired so you can get bonus cash from raising skills. To achieve this, you will need to raise your Sim’s needs (Social, Fun, Hunger, Hygiene, Bladder, Sleep), until they are all in the green.
***IMPORTANT TIP***Look carefully at the bottom of your posts, especially when inviting friends. There is a checkbox there which is automatically ticked, and states ‘Don’t ask before sending The Sims Social requests to XXXXX.’ This means that you won’t be seeing facebook messages pop up when sending requests, so don’t think that it isn’t working because you don’t see a popup box.
TIP: You will not become inspired until the last reward icon dropped has been collected. E.g. Say you only need to raise sleep to become inspired. So, take a nap. However, your sim will not enter the Inspired status until you click on the green smiley face generated from sleeping (or the game automatically collects it). The coins and experience dropped do not need to be collected immediately.Traits:
As you play, your sim can have up to six different Traits. Traits are bought using Lifetime points, which are acquired when mastering skill levels of skill objects. E.g. Paint on the Easel until you finish a line. A golden icon of a paintbrush will appear when you finish the last portion of the line.
TIP: As with the tip above, the game will not register you having completed a line until the golden paintbrush icon is collected. So if you want to unlock a new line, you need to collect the icon first.Once you have enough Lifetime points, you can purchase traits. If you wish to, you can also swap out a trait, and purchase a new trait (you don’t lose the level of the original trait, but it does cost you Lifetime Points to swap traits).
Traits and their usefulness:
TIP: If your toilet is broken and you don’t want to spend energy to repair it, simply visit a friend and use theirs.Slob - Mainly useful for amusement purposes. Yes, they don't care about personal hygiene, but ... that doesn't help the sim become inspired. The amusements are at lvl 3 when the Sim uses the shower / bath as a hygiene AND a toilet booster (you really don’t want to know!), or lvl 5 where the sim can eat from a trashcan.
Steel Bladder - Who cares? Spend a free action at your house, or at a friend's if yours is broken. If you dislike having to raise your bladder need then buy it.
Neat – Average. Bonuses include your sim automatically washing it's hands after using the toilet (save a click). Raises fun as well when cleaning. I'm not sure, but at Lvl 4, polishing may lengthen the time between objects getting dirty.
SuperMechanic - Useless. So what if you repair faster? It doesn't affect anything in the game at present.
Insane - Useless normally, but decent if you only have or want a few friends. Reduces the need for social. You can also use the telephone to raise social.
Ogre - Useful & Amusing. You get 'burp' (and possibly 'fart') negative actions with other sims. The bonus is that you don't need to bother to spend energy to clean items.
Ninja - Useful trait. You walk faster, run or teleport about the place. Very useful if your house is large.
Great Kisser - Useful trait. Means you can kiss earlier in the relationship without negative repercussions.
Night Owl - Useless. Like Steel Bladder.
Special Ingredients:
Here are a few special ingredients and tips on how to obtain them (other than requesting friends).
Fury: You need to give rude chat lines to friends and insult them for a chance to obtain this. You might find that certain actions work better against differing personalities. The slobs ‘burp’ action tends to work fairly well to generate fury. Yes, your relationship level will drop, but you can soon raise it again.
TIP: I have found that it is useful to make enemies out of certain friends simply to generate fury. You also get a large range of amusing pranks that you can play on them. TIP: Since Bella is a NPC, you cannot send her requests to raise or lower relationships, so you might as well abuse her as much as you want.Goodwill – The opposite of fury, this is obtained by giving nice chat lines to a friend. Same rules apply.
Love: You don’t need to be in a relationship to obtain this – you simply need to do an action together with a friend – e.g. watch tv together.
Bling – Once you have finished building an object, post a message on your wall, and your friends can collect Bling from the post.
Other Tips:
An item with a hammer sign in the top right corner is a buildable item – you will need to gather parts or ingredients before you can finish the item and use it. If need be, simply put the unfinished item in storage until you have all the parts needed to avoid wasting space. To cook at a stove, the sim will need an empty counter top to prepare the food on. Your sim will always use the newest item unless broken or dirty. E.g. You install a sink in the kitchen. Then, when your sim has wants to wash it’s hands, it will use the sink in the kitchen. This means that if your sim is in the bathroom, it will walk across the entire house to reach the kitchen, which takes a lot of time, so not a good idea. You can prevent this by clicking on the ‘use’ of the sink in the bathroom, say, instead of just clicking on the need icon down below. Once you reach a skill level and unlock a new skill item, it’s a good idea to purchase that new item and start finishing lines on that new item. This gives you a larger choice of skill options to raise, and prevents getting stuck if you don’t have a certain ingredient needed to unlock a skill line. In certain missions (e.g. Joining the IQ club), you are required to perform an action several times, but once you perform it once at your house, it is greyed out. Well, rather than having to buy it with cash, or ask from friends, you just need to visit a friend and perform the same action there. E.g. Daydream – the action can only be done once in each house (or maybe in each chair??) In any case, you get the idea. You can place outdoor items indoors if you wish, and indoor items outside. There is no need to buy rooms, however you obviously cannot hang pictures up outside. In the top right corner of your screen are 6 little icons. With these you can zoom in and out, and choose to display the walls of your house or not. This is useful if a wall is in the way of something. As one objective of the game is to raise the value of your property, remember that you can also wallpaper and decorate the outside of your home. Simply show all the walls, and separate rooms from each other, decorate, and put back together. When you level up, you gain max energy, so watch your experience. When you get close, and you are low on energy, try to use freebie energy packs (coffee cup, choc bar, etc from your backpack (under craft)) one by one and using them until you level up. Talking about that ... sending free energy to friends and back is very useful for extra energy. Also posting is good (though spammy), you get about 30 rewards per day that you can pick up from posts, which if all simoleons adds up. And remember that you have a limit of 15 (I think) of each, so keep using them if you have a lot of friends.
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