Thank you
@Metropolis Man and
@coolsim9999999. And congrats to everyone who completed the challenge.
Key parts of my strategy:
Add missing EA lots - Dust Bowl has a very expensive TV, Willow Museum of Fine Arts has a Suit of Armor and a couple of expensive paintings. Spa gives opportunity to learn wellness without buying anything - for teleporting at the Von Haunt Estate to get expensive paintings.
Join Good Timers to get Rally the Troops; create Klepto Club with Swipe Objects as a club activity - this gives you the ability to swipe any object during a club gathering, regardless of your mischief skill.
Switch around aspirations to get 2500 easy Satisfaction points - Good Vampire and Master Vampire aspiration tasks (Search for information, Read Vampire Lore 1, Get to level 3 in Vampire Lore) provide most of these; Buy Shameless and Always Welcome. Shameless prevents the negative impact of getting caught stealing - your sim can literally steal the computer another sim is using and have no negative impact. I’m not sure if Always Welcome helps, but it seemed like a good idea.
Hang out at the Landgraabs and the spa (placed across the street from Springscape). This was to encourage the game to move sims into Yuma Heights and Springscape. I got this from Ricalynn’s 2016 challenge strategy. I’m not sure how much it helps - the game did move families into both of those houses, but sims were also moved into most of the other empty houses.
Let Belle wander autonomously between steals - when a club has Swipe Objects as a club activity and the club gathering is active, sims in the club will steal objects autonomously. I’m not sure of the specifics of how this works, but based on what I saw, here’s what I think:
- The autonomous steal action isn’t triggered for any
sim you are looking at or for any
item you are looking at - I base this on the fact that I only saw sims stealing autonomously twice and both times I just happened to be moving around and caught them already in the act.
- A sim can steal autonomously even with the cooldown in effect, and the duration of the cooldown does not increase.
- A sim can autonomously steal an item they are not close to, and the item isn’t necessarily gone after they steal it. For example, while I was watching the silver Suit of Armor on the second floor of the Oasis Springs museum (to prevent other sims from stealing it) my sim was on the first floor and autonomously stole a gold Suit of Armor - I only knew it happened because I got the message for it. There is no gold suit of armor on the first floor of that museum, so apparently they can steal something that is on the lot even if they aren’t near it, and the one they steal might be a variation of the one that’s actually there. She also got two Viva More of La Landcape paintings from the Villareal’s, and they had different frame colors. In this case, I didn’t get a message that she’d stolen it - I only knew when I took her back home and checked her household inventory. I scrolled through the messages and there was only the one message about the painting.
- I didn’t take her home to sell her items every time she stole, so I don’t know exactly where the other extra items came from. Most of items were the same as the expensive things I had her stealing, but she did end up with some chairs, 2 Blooming Beauty Wall Paintings, and a variety of decorative items that I didn’t instruct her to steal. I'm not sure but she may have also gotten one more computer than I had her steal. Most of the time the items didn’t say where they were stolen from (that includes the ones I told her to steal). However, in a practice game (and this is how I initially discovered the autonomous stealing) she stole 2 Virtuoso Violins from the Goths - they both did indicate they were stolen from the Goths.
- After finishing the actual challenge, out of curiosity, I checked the household inventories of some of the Klepto Club members to see how much they’d stolen. (Membership changed throughout the game, but these members were each in the club for a period of time.)
Mila Mulch stole 23 items worth $22,100
Mortimer and Bella Goth stole 13 items worth $9,715
Alice Spencer-Kim stole 29 items worth $9,820
Nancy Landgraab stole 26 items worth $11,985
Luna Villareal stole 20 items worth $8,745
Bjorn Bjergsen stole 23 items worth $18,720
Sorry this post isn't very easy to read - only have a few minutes before work. I'll clean it up later.