I have only the base game and Pets expansion. So the way I played the challenge was very different from how most others probably did. (No elixirs, no strange life states, no strollers, no Motive Mobile, no vacations, no cool ways to make rocks appear in my yard (well, except one I didn't realize), here.) I did not get a great score (64), but it might be decent considering what I had to work with, and how much I learned as I went. Anyway I thought I would add what I learned since it might be helpful to others.
Before my challenge file, I created a test family to try out a lot of science experiments, including testing some methods of befriending babies. I found out the following:
- A parent with the Friendly trait doesn't make friends faster than a parent without it, despite the way the trait description in-game seems (to me) to read. (I did not think to check whether the baby being Friendly helped.)
- With a test baby, a non-Charismatic (trait) mother could spam "Snuggle" and go from Friends to Best Friends in 70 minutes. Spamming "Play With" instead brought them to Best Friends in 149 minutes. "Play With" builds the parent's Fun bar and Snuggle doesn't, but having more Fun isn't necessary for this task.
- If the mother was Charismatic (trait), then spamming Snuggle could build the relationship in only 55 minutes--fifteen minutes faster than a non-Charismatic mother.
- I suspected giving the baby a bottle repeatedly might build it even faster, but I did not check because the idea was too upsetting.
I completed Charisma challenges on the parents in hopes that babies would reliably jump past the Good Friends stage to Best Friends (among other things). Sometimes the leap from Friends to Best Friends worked, and sometimes it didn't--I often had skipping-past-Good-Friends work for one parent on the same baby, but not the other parent, even though both had clearly completed the relevant Charisma challenge long before. I loved it every time it worked for both parents on the same baby, but that was rare. I still don't know what was going wrong with that.
I almost never sent anybody to school (after I had a breakthrough about it early on, anyway). If I needed the child/teen trait, I had the parents tutor to fix the kid's grades right before the cake-up. Amazingly they could turn a bottomed-out "F" grade into an A in part of a day.
Sitting the camera outside the school at 2pm enables one to see who the current crop of teenagers available for romantic interests are. This was a breakthrough near the end, and much faster than how I was doing it before (which was having the kids slowly "Meet New Friends" while at school.)
I never realized I could cake up NPCs ... I guess I took "You are only allowed to cake up with a birthday cake if you attain the life stage goals listed below," too literally (?). That would have helped a lot with a few of the romantic interests.
I had read on the Sims Wiki that there is a hidden Collecting skill. Several things I have read on the Sims Wiki have turned out to be untrue when tested, but I didn't have much information to go on when devising a collection strategy--so I bet on it. So I was a little biased toward picking up rocks (which couldn't escape/resist) when a child had recently aged-up, all other things equal.
In tests I got better overall spawn rates for collected rares while keeping the map clear--so the children pretty much collected whenever they weren't curfewed or playing on the blocks/oven. (Regrettably, this may have driven me slightly insane.) I wish I had realized about moveObjects on.
I had never used a teleporter before this challenge (looked too scary). Partway through, I realized I could not only use it to teleport away from home, but I could also
dial it on my mobile phone to return home. What a timesaver!
I got really bogged down in the later portion when all the fast/non-pet-requiring available lifetime wishes were complete, and all I had left to pick from were rabbithole-career-related ones. I got bogged down even more whenever my young adults did "Ask for Promotion", because they usually then suffered a bug where the game would incorrectly think I still worked my old hours and days, and it would reduce my job performance if I didn't report to work on a day I had off (but would not give me any job performance for attending). That bug cost a lot of time.
I had Mom and Dad befriend kids' bosses or future romantic interests so that they could have them already invited over and trapped in the house, when a kid needed to work on their relationship.
I had a thorough door-locking scheme in my house to prevent people from getting into just about anything they shouldn't. For example, I locked up the high chair, stove, food processor, and microwave in a room so that no kids would get serious ideas about them.
Especially the high chair--that thing is a magnet for mischief.
I really liked the public-bathroom style toilet stalls (never used them before) since I could cram several toilets into a small space and still have efficient pathing. (I painted the stalls and toilet seats cheery rainbow colors so it didn't look so dreary/officey.)
I learned that Sims with "Dislikes Children" can clear children's and teens' task queues instantly by shooing them from any room. Thornton Wolff made the top of my enemy list when he taught me.
I built a "birthday corral" with a locked gate in the back corner of the lot, so that birthdays would only cause one mass interruption of task queues. This design also happened to isolate fires. I wish I had done birthdays off the lot, though.
Along with not having a sink, when my Sims cleaned out rotten birthday cake or whatever from the fridge, or tried to autonomously empty the toddler potty, I cancelled the action as soon as they had gathered the trash, and then manually dragged the dropped trash to the trashcan for them. I had only the trashcan that came with the lot, to avoid any "Take Out Trash" tasks. I kept the toddler potty in the nursery and, disgusting as it is, never let anybody empty it on purpose. Filth doesn't bother the toddlers or babies, and parents only had to go in there briefly at times.
Well, I hope that is helpful to someone. I certainly cannot wait to someday get the expansion that adds witches, after I've read the stuff you all have done with them.
