Sunday 6 August 2006

Pic of the day: I had hoped the picture would catch the delighted surprise in the boy's face, but I am not sure if you can see it. The Sims sure do seem to enjoy themselves in this bed. Here two high schoolers having some fun.

Sims2: Autonomous bed

LizzLove's Autonomous Bed is a nifty invention that greatly increases the free will of your Sims. It does require some setup first though, or it won't be realistic at all.

As you might guess, the bed allows your Sims to do things in bed together without having to be told. Pillow talk, cuddling, kissing, making out, making love, even trying to make babies. It all depends on what your Sims want, not you. Which is as it should be, if you ask me. Because Woohoo wants to be voluntary!

But you should take a few minutes with the text file and set it up correctly first. For instance, do you want teens to be able to woohoo? This is the default condition, and they will (by default) do so with adults too, if they hit it off reasonably well. If you however change from the Swinger ruleset to the default Maxis ruleset, the bed will not let teens and adults go very far together. They can still relax and talk together, but no romantic or erotic interactions. You should probably also make sure it checks for family unless you explicitly want otherwise for story purposes (playing Egyptian pharaohs or something?). You can turn off the try for baby freewill if you want to do the family planning yourself. Conversely, there is a "risky woohoo" option which will land you the occasional baby if you let them keep it up long enough.

Of course, there won't be any pregnancies unless the two participants who go all the way are one male and one female. This is not a requirement as far as the bed is concerned. It will happily accommodate any combination unless you set otherwise with the Gender option. You can also base it on the bias of the Sim itself. They seem to start out with a neutral bias, which may not be entirely realistic. Marrying (or joining, for same-sex couples) will change their bias in favor of their partner's gender. Also freewill romance actions will change the bias. Lizzlove has also made an object that lets you meddle with this bias if you feel the need. But usually once they start down the path of straight or gay, they tend to stick with it unless told otherwise. And even then they won't change inside easily.

You can set how much clothes the Sims wear when they relax (alone or together). Sleeping or woohoo will override these. One of the settings uses the Sim's personality! So one of them may enter the bed naked while the other wears PJs or even everyday clothes.

One important task remains: Set the bed's attractiveness, how strongly it broadcasts its presence to the Sims. If you set it to max, the Sims may well starve to death unless you manually stop them. Of course, there may be people like that too. On the moderate level, it is slightly less attractive than a guitar when it comes to pure fun, but it also broadcasts comfort so if your Sim is getting tired of standing he may still choose the bed. On lower levels, it will compete against the chessboard and then a cheap TV. Or you can turn it off and only use it as an ordinary sleep bed.

You may want to play a little after you have set it up, and adjust if it behaves strangely.

I am quite happy with this download. The truth is, my Sims didn't get much action in bed as long as they had to wait for me to give them the go-ahead. Not even the married ones. And their amount of foreplay should not really depend on the state of my wrists, either. (Although is it just me, or is Lissa getting down to business faster and faster for each time?...)

And now, if you would excuse me, I would like to go play The Sims 2. Watch out for the next project: Taxes! in The Near Future. (If any.)