The official way to complete this challenge is to start with an empty plot of land and build your house yourself. If you're really worried, depending on the town you choose, there are a few people you could move in as a mate or best friend and they will give you a lot of money to start with and you can build a house that makes you comfortable for a generation or two. Agnes Crumplebottom, Holly Alto, Thornton or Morganna Wolff but make sure they're driving the car from their house, meaning that it's in their pocket. If they show up in the sloppy jalopy, you're only get about 20k if they move in.
Billy Caspian from Riverview is another one that has a lovely car. He gave me 105K from the car alone.
Old Friend is still fine as long as the relationship bar is in the same range as other Best Friends - Old Friend essentially means the friendship has lasted longer than a certain number of sim days, and I think it might decay slower or offer extra friendly interactions.
Instead of turning the Imaginary Friend real, you can try padding the household with pets - you can have 6 pets or 8 sims in the house, but only a total of 10, so if you have 3 pets you won't end up with more than 7 sims. Since pets can come and go from the household, you only have to have them in the house for 3 or 4 days at the most. Getting the founder and husband to have more children might just be a matter of persistence - or, do adopted children count for the LTW? That way you'd get to control the number and I think there's no problem adopting children into the household once the heir is born from a natural pregnancy.
The "Hunted" moodlet is notorious for getting stuck when you get it in a rabbit hole (like school or a workplace). There's probably a vampire at school if that's where you got it. Since this is a known bug I think it would be okay to delete it - use testingcheatsenabled true, and then shift-click on the moodlet. A moodlet manager can probably get rid of it, too, without using the cheat. I think either way it'll keep coming back if you keep encountering vampires in rabbit holes, though, and it's fairly small, so you might want to just live with it.
Thanks for your help, Cathy. I think I'll live with it. Thanks also for the advice regarding old friends. I think that Distant friends vs Old Friends was confusing me. Given my experience with Agnes' Cat Mistopheles, I think I'll bypass playing pets in my family for the time being. It broke my heart to see Mistopheles taken away.
@deklitch
Cathy has a good idea. Grab an elder that your sim is friends with and move them in. Then there won't be room for triplets. I think someone did this to save their game when the sixth generation insisted on having twins out of the blue.
Also, you'll probably have to try a lot for a pregnancy. I'm convinced the older the mom the lower the "try for baby" success rate. Agnes had no trouble conceiving at the middle of the adult stage. But when she had already gotten her birthday coming soon message - yikes, I think they tried seven times before getting the music (and that was with fertility treatment). Although it could be coincidence.
Oh good idea on the Elder sim, Katie. I think I'll do that!
I just checked on the adoption issue. 1) If you adopt an infant, it counts towards Surrounded By Family. 2) It's totally legit to adopt non-immortals. The wish is to raise the children from Infant to Teen, so I think it triggers on Child #5's Teen birthday, meaning that from a natural pregnancy it takes about 3 weeks from the last Try For Baby, or for an adoption a little less than that.
It definitely becomes harder to conceive as the mother approaches her elder birthday - Fertility Treatment might help with that (and I don't think any other immortal will want it, so it could be a good Unique LTR). But if you're in the last week or so of her Adult stage adoption might be worthwhile.
Thanks Cathy! I'll adopt two little blighters.
I gave mother and father both fertility treatment.
The Surrounded by Family Lifetime Wish is not something I would recommend for this challenge. You'll have 2 parents and 5 kids for a total of 7 Sims. You wouldn't be able to bring in generation 2 until the founder's spouse dies. It's going to remain difficult until each of the other 4 kids die. Space quickly becomes a problem with this challenge and using that LTW only complicates it further to the point that you could easily fail the challenge.
I agree Pam. However, if it should come off, I'll be happy and impressed, and I'm always up for a challenge. The twins are about three-four days behind Gen 2 heir, and Gen 1 partner is older than Founder. Their baby/toddler days were difficult, the babysitter was invaluable and was almost used 24-7.
As always thank you all for your advice and suggestions.
Believe it or not, I decided to start a new immortal dynasty challenge. So I've got three of them underway at the moment. I do have the attention span of a gnat, however.
