Wedding day! For the first simulated time in my sims3ulated life!

I have played The Sims 3 off and on since shortly after it came out, although I continued to play The Sims 2 at least as much for the first year or so. Yet earlier this month when I decided that my self-sim would marry, I realized that this was something I had never done in the game before. Not just for my self-sim’s various lives in the various neighborhoods of The Sims 3, but at all for any of my computer-controlled character.

My self-sim has sometimes been a “townie”, a computer-controlled character. It amuses me to see how the computer would play someone with my personality, or the best approximation of it that I could make in the game. There have been some amusing moments where I would think “That is so me!” but also some facepalm moments, as the young people would say. One bizarre thing is that my self-sim always seem to end up married to unlikely prospects, probably simply because they were both single at the time. Needless to say that does not happen when I play him.

This time however I made an exception to the celibacy of my avatar. He is now happily married to Jenni, formerly Mrs Goode, born Jones-Brown of Twinbrook, and they have two children together. And one ragdoll. We’ll get to that. ^_^

Jenni is a family sim whose lifetime want was to raise five children. She was pregnant bearing Goodwin’s child when the game started, although I did not know that at the time. Their marriage also passed me by. I only noticed her when she asked my self-sim on a series of dates. At the time I was unaware that she was married – I mean, why would married people date someone else? That is a recipe for disaster, of various kinds. So when I found out, the dating came to an end. Self-sim dedicated himself to gardening, fishing and cooking, as well as writing a little now and then.

Jenni and Goodwin raised three children, grew old and died. Sim-Magnus, on the other hand, did not grow old. He had maximized his gardening skill first, and gathered special seeds. One of them was a Lifefruit seed, and by his late adult years he had enough of them to eat one lifefruit every day. Each fruit makes the sim one year younger (except for elderly sim, who grow rapidly older if they eat lifefruit. I assume it is vaguely based on the Tree-of-life eaten by the Pak protectors in Larry Niven’s “Known Universe” series, except for being a fruit and not a root. Well, they are probably both based on the book of Genesis, but the thing about the herb being poisonous to the elderly is a Niven thing.)

By the time Mr and Mrs Goode had passed away, Sim-Magnus had maximized his fishing skills as well and caught Deathfish, a dubious creature usually found in ponds in or near cemeteries. Combine lifefruit and deathfish, maximized cooking skill and a recipe as expensive as a small house, and you can make Ambrosia. Normally this celestial meal will reset a sim to the start of his current age (mature adult in the case of my self-sim), but if given to a ghost, the ghost will embody again. You can see where this is leading.

So the re-embodied but still elderly Jenni moved in with Sim-Magnus and they married. Next up was chemistry. Experimenting with the chemistry set will improve the logic skill but also from time to time lead to the discovery of new elixirs, some nasty and some nice. One of the last, which I believe requires maximum skill as well, is the Elixir of Youth. It is rather costly at §5000, but it will rejuvenate a sim from old age to young adult. (You can also buy it for lifetime happiness points, it costs 70 000 of those. Come to think of it, I probably had that many by then. Oh well.)

So there you have it. The ragdoll belonged to Marit, their firstborn daughter. She played with it constantly, and when she grew up from toddler to school child, the ragdoll grew up to a fantasy friend. The parents could see her playing and arguing with it, but she could see it as a child her own age. Another chemical elixir eventually allowed the imaginary friend to become real, and Trulte is now part of the family, although not a relative. This is a feature of the Generations expansion pack, and lets you double the child population of a house if you go that route. It seems a few children do not receive ragdolls in the mail, I am not sure whether this is random, but both of mine have. They don’t count toward the raising babies lifetime wish, though. Adopted babies do, but not adopted toddlers and children.

Oh, and both Sim-Magnus and Jenni went through a midlife crisis and replaced one of their incompatible traits with a trait from the other. Jenni changed from flirty to bookworm, and Sim-Magnus changed from unflirty to family-oriented. Thus the rash of children. They are now both stay-at-home authors, letting them keep an eye on the kids while earning a decent living.

The real Magnus is not immortal, alas, so don’t expect this to play out anywhere outside the game. Still, it amused me.