Rotation 5: Mortis

I'm taking a shot at something new and writing this update on my blogger rather than through my tumblr queue, mostly because I've made nothing but Paraneighbours posts over there for a month straight and I feel like my followers need a break, haha.

Liv and Cole's garden balcony is really gorgeous in the right lighting, and I'm going to miss it when Liv eventually moves out next rotation.

Hopefully her new yard will be just as gorgeous, but landscaping's really not my forte so we'll have to see, haha.

I sent them off camping this rotation, with the season set to summer to see what kind of plants and bugs Liv could find. I switched them back to spring once they returned home, but I figured the OR stuff would work best then since the game only had summer when the pack was released.

It's nice to see the cloudgazing interaction return, I just wish you could have two sims cuddle while doing it, like in ts2.

Also the bear. I mean, on one hand it's hilarious that you can encounter a 'bear' in the woods and said 'bear' is just a costume, but on the other... I also miss bigfoot from ts2, and kinda wish they'd gone for a less cartoony creature that your sims could encounter?

I just want more supernaturals in ts4, please.

Those two things aside, I love how much more immersive camping in ts4 feels than the Three Lakes vacation in ts2. The world itself, for example, feels a lot more like a campground than having a bunch of roads and taking a taxi/shuttle to the different activities.

I do miss having community lots like a restaurant and a gift shop, but I may just sacrifice one of the cabins to make a restaurant, assuming the game allows it.

I haven't played a ton with the fishing in 4 yet - I'm still kind of used to ts2 gameplay, where the only collection you had was the bug one from free time, so I've yet to really make an effort to have my sims start working on the different ts4 ones. 

I'll have to save that as a goal for whenever I make another nature-oriented sim. For Liv, I'm mostly just concerned with having her collect and plant all the different flowers. 

It'd also be nice if your sims could catch bugs in the regular worlds/neighbourhood, but admittedly that does give me more incentive to have them go camping.

Cole tried to bust out his guitar on the first night, and almost immediately set it on fire.

Upon trying to have it put it out, I discovered that there was a glitch with placing chairs around a campfire, in which they will prevent your sims from extinguishing any unintentional fires, and you just kinda have to let them burn out on their own because there's nothing you can do about it without exiting the lot.

Fun!

It did burn out eventually with minimal damage, but I had to replace his guitar.

There weren't any flowers in bloom when I first sent them to the campground, and I was concerned that having seasons was going to make it difficult to collect anything, but luckily most of the plants were ready to harvest by the second day.

I did not realize when I sent Jeff and Alec to Granite Falls that there was actually a secret area besides the one you find when you go exploring at the ranger station?

Luckily you don't need to do anything special to get to it, so I sent Liv off to explore, and see if she could find any fancy bugs there.

She met this dude, who I guess is the ts4 equivalent of bigfoot, but still not as cool as having an actual bigfoot.

She found a couple of rare (?) bugs there, including some fireflies! I'm very pleased that you can display things like frogs and bugs in your house in ts4. She's got a small collection of bugs in her inventory now, and I might end up throwing a couple of them up in her house as decoration.

Assuming they can just be displayed indefinitely like the frogs, anyways.

Another thing I only just discovered is that Liv has the ability to rummage through trashcans for food.

I sent them back home after collecting most of the bugs and plants I could find. Cole kinda just chilled at the campsite for most of the vacation, I guess I could have brought an easel for him to do some paintings...

Anyways, I had Liv identify her new finds, which sims do by eating them, apparently, and then plant the non-toxic ones in her garden.

She's reached a high enough level in her career that I was able to choose the florist branch of her, and I quickly discovered that she was going to need to craft way more flower arrangements. Her first task involve 'scenting' them, and while it actually worked, she wasn't able to unlock the option until she crafted an excellent quality bouquet.

Apparently you can make the bouquets last longer by scenting them with bluebell, and now I'm wondering if it would be realistic for Liv to open a lil flower shop somewhere...

Liv and Cole have maxed out their relationship in game, which is good because they're about to be split up next rotation to go live with their respective partners.

Cole hasn't progressed far enough to choose a branch in the art career yet, however he is very close to completing his grilled cheese aspiration. The last two tasks he needs to do are eat a grilled cheese sandwich in space, which I can do as soon as geek con rolls around, and talk to the Grim Reaper about grilled cheese.

Apparently, once you have a sim die in your save you can find the Grim Reaper around town, so it looks like Caleb dying worked out even better than expected. ;)

Like Liv and her garden club, Cole also leads a club of his own, a group of artists I called 'Different Strokes.'

The irony here is that I have managed to dress all my artistic sims in basically the same colour scheme, which the exception of Hanna, who Livy dressed...

Having been an art student myself though, I can tell you people with ~independent styles~ can absolutely end up dressing/looking the same as other students, to the point where I once thought two guys were the same dude until I ended up in a class with both of them together.

Moving on with the mini Cole section of this update, he managed to pull a Caleb and start a laundry fire by doing some laundry unprompted. Felix appeared, for unknown reasons, and did absolutely nothing to help.

Liv, thankfully, had a little more sense and came running to help, which resulted in her actually looking a little like a zombie!

She extinguished the fire, while looking rightfully pissed.

Felix is also doing... something with his face, although I have never seen a human face make that expression so I can't tell you what it is. An extremely bad impression of concern, maybe.

After the fire's out, Liv takes over the bathroom so that she can make a call her girlfriend on the toilet.

She cleans up the apartment a little while waiting for Zoe to arrive, meanwhile Felix holds a little violin concert in the hall way.

I had her invite Zoe to move in. I would have done it at the start of the rotation, but since Zoe aged a little back when I had townie aging on, I had to wait for her to be the same age as Liv and Cole before merging households.

At some point Felix invited himself back into the apartment, leading to Liv getting a eyeful this time around. Now they're even for the maid incident!

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They don't quite have room for Zoe in the apartment, so she's been taking over Liv's bed, and Liv's been sharing one with Cole.

Luckily they've still got the closet for some privacy.

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So I guess everyone's just getting abducted now??

I didn't even know households you weren't actively playing could get abducted if you happen to be on their lot!

Miko started another fucking laundry fire, and shit hit the fan. At first, I thought I could just pull the same move as I did at the start of their rotation, and have one of them heroically run it and put out the fire.

However, since they were not actively visiting, the game would only let me go as far as knocking on the door, because it would lock me out of the option to go inside, use their phone, or return back to their own apartment.

I kept trying to send one of them inside to see if I could put the fire out, but all three of them failed, and that led to a crowd of sims standing outside the house and panicking.

Andy then returned from her abduction, and ran into the house from the backyard, past the fire, and then joined the gang outside.

At this point I'd exhausted all of my options, and I was locked out from doing literally anything other than having them stay outside the apartment until the fire burned out. Seeing as they have a very large house, I was worried that could take literal hours, so I was forced to exit without saving.

Whoever decided not to include any sort of emergency fire department in this game can go eat a big bag of dicks. Had I not invested hours of my time and hundreds of my dollars into this game I might have actually just straight up quit at this point.

(Luckily, I later discovered a solution to avoid this, so EA can continue to collect all of my dollars, my soul, and my firstborn child.)

I lost a ton of progress, and had to replay through a few days to get back to the spice festival, but at least I have Felix being a fashion icon to cheer me up.

I don't know what it is about my vampires, but they always have the best "situation" looks.

The spice festival went a lot more smoothly the second time around! I actually got way better pictures than the first time I played through it, haha.

Cole attempted the spicy curry challenge, and failed...

Liv and Zoe exchanged some flowers for Love Day, which fell on the same day as the festival...

Cole serenaded Felix, who really does not act like an unflirty sim, because he eats up any attention he gets from Cole even if it's in public...

Zoe conquered the spice festival on her first try, although she's probably built up a tolerance to hot food from her townie days, since they just like to go around and order food non-stop from the stalls...

(Please note Felix making out with his boyfriend in the background like he's not supposedly programmed to dislike public affection.)

Liv and Zoe did some flirting of their own, and everyone ended up with a successful love day. And, no abductions or laundry fires this time around!

Honestly, this whole mess could have been avoided if Felix had just come down to the festival and cooperated like he did this time around. The only reason I was on Miko and Andy's lot was because he wouldn't accept the invite to hang out unless I invited him to a specific lot!

This dude from Get Famous also made an appearance at the festival to play a little guitar. He drew a small crowd, but I'm pretty happy that I've so far managed to avoid celebrities causing a huge fuss when visiting community lots.

I think it might have to do with the fact that I've got fame off by default. I don't have a huge pool of celebrity sims, so it's rare that they appear on my community lots (so far.)

I found another trash plant growing out on the street, so I had Liv research it before gettign rid of it, to see if it would give me anything useful on the plant.

It did not, but now she has a trash fruit she can grow in her garden, I guess.

I did pop over to Liv and Cole for a day during Felix's rotation, because trying to perfectly time all the most suitable festivals for each household is a pain in the ass. Cole got to eat his grilled cheese in space, so now I've just got to have him track down the grim reaper.

Zoe almost summoned the reaper by starting a fire while I was there, but Alec ran in from out of nowhere to put it out.

He's tired of living in a building of paranormal idiots, I guess.

And now it's time for the noisy bitch rundown! Cole breaks out his guitar again, and Jeff is furious that someone else is making noise in the apartment. How dare they, bro!

Whenever Jeff rolls around to complain about noise I usually just ignore him, because he's a noisy bitch and doesn't deserve an apology, haha.

Bro.

Jeff didn't even have time for any woohooing during my next rotation, but that's okay because he apparently gets plenty of action when I'm not playing.

Lacie seems to have some sort of bro competition going with Jeff where they compete to see who can be the noisiest bitch in the apartment.

Lacie's single in my game, but that won't stop her from having a loud woosolo session to win.

Felix still lives alone, so she's probably just yelling at this couch or something. Either way, he did not answer the door. A lesson Liv should really learn, based on the maid incident.