Introduction

Hi and welcome to my shiny new blog! :) This is my first attempt at playing a sims 4 Legacy Challenge (more or less) by the rules and to blog about my progress. I am way too old and way too sleep-deprived for both, so I have no idea what I’m doing. Also, English is not my native tongue, so please forgive me for any unintelligible ramblings.

About me: I’m 29, a daydreamer, a long time simmer, and currently a stay-at-home mom of 2 beautiful girls aged 3 years and 4 months. In the sims I prefer decorating interiors and giving makovers to ugly townies. I hate aliens, vampires and other supernaturals from the game’s previous incarnations (which is ironic because I otherwise love and mostly only read/watch fantasy and sci-fi books, movies and tv-shows), they just really irritate me in the sims. I absolutely suck at building from scratch and at landscaping. I’m a huge fan of the motherlode cheat. I’m an uncontrollable custom content-addict. I loved the gameplay in sims 3 and it took me a while to get the hang of it in the sims 4, but I’m starting to enjoy it now that I’ve come to terms with my sims being either lethargic, mad, aroused or hysterical all the time. I haven’t spent much time actually playing before, as most of my efforts went into decorating, but with this legacy I intend to finally develop some stories, too.

About the Legacy: I have tried to create a multi-generational story several times before in the history of the sims games, but all of my attempts died a quick death around generation 2. As I mentioned above, I can’t build a decent house, but I really like nice interiors, so I just motherloaded my way into some huge fancy house, got rid of all the furnishings, and gave my founders the prettiest, most expensive and most effective stuff. Needless to say, the game got really boring pretty quickly, as advancing in careers and building skills became way too easy. My other big mistake was to download a crazy amount of cc and thus causing my game to be unbearably laggy and to crash frequently. Getting tired of the endless loading screens and hours of gameplay going *poof* because I forgot to save before a crash happened, I re-installed the game without any mods and cc, and solemnly swore to keep it that way. Thankfully the new game packs and updates keep adding beautiful and interesting items, so I think I’m going to have fun trying to make the most out of the vanilla game and using creative solutions to give nice surroundings to my simmies.

Okay, so this Legacy starts with Abigail ‘Abby’ Merry, who most ingeniously got her last name from my own family name translated into English, and her first name from a character from a favorite book of mine. I admit I didn’t spend much time on her facial features in CAS, I just tweaked one of the premade sims a bit to my liking; I did, however, carefully plan her personality and her outfits. She is family-oriented (which is a must for a legacy founder in my book), she loves outdoors (very useful trait in the beginning, when the founder is just living on the lawn and makes money from collecting frogs and rocks), and she is creative (which will be the Exemplary Trait of this Legacy Family). Her aspiration is to become a Painter Extraordinaire.

Unfortunately in the beginning I barely took any screenshots, as I didn’t think that her spending the day creating painting after painting at the Gallery in San Myshuno and stuffing her face with free chips from various bars was worth documenting. Soon she started her own creative club for painters and photographers, and made friends with the like-minded sims, but I was creeped out by some of the townie outfit choices – so, still no screenshots. Then she found love, and I decided to give a makeover to her significant other (strictly his looks, not his traits, aspiration or age), and as their house progressed, too, I finally started to take more and more pics.

About the rules: I won’t stick to the Legacy Challenge rules very strictly, as I like to play my sims on a long life span and complete as many aspirations as I can with them in order to give them lots of interesting traits and a fully rounded personality. I will, however, keep a score sheet just for myself, in order to keep myself in check. I intend to experience some new aspects of the game and in order to do this I need to step out of my comfort zone by following the challenge guidelines. I will refrain from using any mods and cheats (except cas.fulleditmode to change looks, moveobjects and maybe the occasional buydebug to create more interesting backdrops). I will only use random townies as love interests and I will aim to discover all their traits in-game, but once I get to know them and decide to add them to the family I will probably force them to undergo some plastic surgery and a full wardrobe change. The lack of story progression really annoys me so I will probably add kids via household manager to my family’s side branches as I really love to see how the mixture of all the genetics plays out. I chose the extreme start option; the lot I’m playing on is the Von-Windenburg Estate. The lot has the following traits assigned in my game: Home Studio, Homey and Natural Light; which, as I come to think of it, might count as cheating, but I really just wanted to try the game’s every aspect and make the most out of all the new the possibilities added with the game packs.

My succession laws are the following:

• Equality
• Strict Traditional
• Exemplar (Creative) and Living Will (I don’t know if this is acceptable per challenge rules but I will attempt it nevertheless)
• Xenophobic

My plans: Since I’m a perfectionist and a control freak, I like to have some general directions planned out well in advance. I want to experience the full scope of the sims 4 game, so I will have each generations focus on a different theme. With the first genration I try to establish the bare basics of the Legacy house, and lay down the foundations for a really creative bloodline by creating a home art studio as the heart of the house. During the second generation I will do the landscaping and hopefully grow a nice garden. With the third generation or later down the line, when I get a sim with the foodie trait and/or a food aspiration, I will upgrade the kitchen to have the most fancy appliances. Through all the generations I will try to keep adding unique custom decorations to the house, like photos, sculptures, paintings and collections.

I think that’s all for now… In the next posts, I’ll start bringing some pics :)

If you managed to read through all of the above and got to this point: THANK YOU! You are awesome! :) I hope you will enjoy my blog as much as I am excited to write it.

Legacy Challenge credits to the amazing Pinstar @ http://www.simslegacychallenge.com/