Moving to bigger house: effect on belongings? Now that they're earning enough simoleons I'm thinking of having my sims move into a bigger and more expensive house. Will they lose all their furniture, aspiration and career rewards, or will this be delivered by a truck to the new place? Actually, I don't care about the furniture, but obviously I would like to keep the aspiration and especially the career rewards!
The house and its entire contents are sold when you move your sims. You can't take anything with you, unfortunately. The aspiration rewards are easy to get back, so don't be too heart broken about them. I'm not sure how difficult it will be to get the career rewards back though. Cass.
All of your loot is sold at massive loss. Your aspiration awards are toasted, but as they're limited-use items in most cases, you can just finish burning them out before you leave. Your used career awards are toasted as well, although unused ones are retained intact and can be used when you reach your new home. In order to regain your career awards, you'd have to quit your job and restart it from near the bottom: If you start at, or above, the level at which you would have received a career award, you don't get one. For instance, the Military track grants the obstacle course at L4, Junior Officer. If you start at or above that level, you will never receive the obstacle course. If you start below that level, you receive it upon promotion to that level. One trick you can use to prestock houses with career awards is to first, level a "builder" family so that between them, all career awards are unlocked and awaiting placement. Do this in an alternate test neighborhood. Once they're levelled up and ready to place their awards, backup the entire Neighborhood folder: Do not package them, this will not properly retain their data, in my experience. Copy the entire N### directory and store it in a safe place. Now move them into the house or lot you wish to furnish. Place the career awards. Now kill the builders and delete their tombstones. This step is important, because you cannot move them out, or all furnishings will be destroyed, and you cannot palette the lot with them still living it, or else they'll be hauled over to your real neighborhood, with the house still occupied, as well as importing their character files. Therefore, execute them. The pool ladder accident or the crematorium will do fine. Delete their tombstones, so they are not part of the lot at all anymore. Save, and exit. Cut the lot onto the lot palette, and paste it into your neighborhood. Move in! If you need to do this again with multiple lots, you'll have to restore the backups: Quit TS2, delete your N### directory corresponding to the construction neighborhood (NOT YOUR REAL ONE!), and then copy your backup over it. Restart TS2, and your builders will once again be alive, with all career awards you want unlocked, ready to be moved out of the grimy hut and promoted again. As for your builders, I recommend a pair of shy, active, knowledge or family sims. That'll help keep them in platinum so they can promote fast. Note: All of this is to be used at your own risk. You are performing file manipulation that requires extreme care. If anything goes wrong, problem lies between keyboard and chair. Don't come crying to me if you accidentally delete your real neighborhood and hose your install.
Seems like a lot of trouble to go to just to move into a furnished house. Personally I'd just forget about the career rewards. They're no big deal anyway and everything else you can get back easy enough. If you really want to move into a furnished house, just go into build mode and build one with furniture. It'll cost your sims more to buy but you won't have to spend anymore money once they're in. *shrugs* Personally, I don't like to make the game more complicated then it already is. JMHO. Cass.
True, it was rather complicated to set up initially, but now that I have all the tools in place, I can bang out a house equipped with career awards in about 5 minutes, and doing all this taught me a few OTHER very interesting lessons about what you can accomplish in TS2. All in all, it was totally worth it.
That is generally what I do, but the reason that prompted this exercise in exploration was encountering one of those bugs that cannot be resolved by any means other than move out, move in. It has nonetheless been productive. I REGRET NOTHING!
Just a quick question: how many Simoleons do you usually have when moving from your first house into your more expensive one? Do you go for a mid-range house first or straight for a top-end one? Actually, that was 2 quick questions
I tend to have Sims go straight from their cruddy shack to their final home. Occasionally I shortcircuit this process and hobo it. Assuming a solo-sim intending to start a family, he'll usually have about 40-50K cash, maybe about 65K NW around the time they're ready to move into a new home: This normally wouldn't be enough to buy a proper 100K-range house, except that they get married to another Sim of similar standing, and right after the wedding, they move. Together that puts them in the 100-130K range, which would be enough to move into a fairly spartan estate, which they then start furnishing in more detail. Other times I'll just hobo it: The sim purchases the lot he, and possibly the others created with him, dwell on. I slap up a halfway completed house, and place out some furniture on the lawn, and they build the house as they earn money. Depending on the number of people, this can mean extended phase where the "home" consists of all the furniture on the lawn and a single wall with the potty stall, a phone, and a burglar alarm attached. Yes, you can still use the old TS1 trick of putting the alarm on the front door. Sure, they try to stop you by saying you can only put it inside: Don't be fooled. It works perfectly fine outside. You can either move_objects it, or just build box, stick the thing "inside" the box, and then rip off the remaining 3 faces of the box. Your call.
