The first thing I did was decide what collections I wanted to do. Decided not to try to complete gardening, fossils, and insects for Sim A and all of those plus space rocks for sim B. For me, gardening is too much work, fossils don’t spawn in the right places, I don’t know where to find all the insects, and Sim B won’t be going on any space missions.
My sims followed the same weekly schedule and I switched sims every Sunday morning.
Week 1: This week is mostly about dig sites. Both sims joined the science career, and went in for a few hours for the collectibles to spawn. Then they would collect them every 2-3 days. This would net about 50 collectibles at a time. For Sim A, the rest of the time was spent at the neighborhood spawners. While waiting for the parks dig sites to spawn, I went to the frog ponds and got about a dozen frogs to start breeding them. After the first few days Sim A's time was spent building the rocket ship and going on the space missions to max rocket science for the wormhole and to collect aliens and space rocks. This sim was unlucky with the missions and so didn’t finish the space rock collection. So by the end of week 1 we had Sixam available which gives 20-30 good collectibles at a time and gives you access to the geode collection. Between Sixam and science career, you can finish all the dig collectibles in week 2.
Since Sim A had made the rocket ship, Sim B was able to go to Sixam every day of week 1 and science career every few days to make good progress on her dig collections. The second half of the week she hired a repairman to come mentor handiness to level 8, then upgraded the observatory and microscope. So by the end of week 1 these are fully upgraded and you have a level 10 handiness sim to break into grotto for fishing.
Week 2: This week was mainly spent on space prints, microscope prints, and postcards. Each sim went to Sixam once a day until they finished trophy and alien collections and went to science career once or twice until they had finished metals and crystals. The rest of the time, the searched for prints. With upgraded machines, the prints come very quickly, and postcards are easy. These collections were easily finished in a few days. However, I messed up Sim B’s postcard collection so they got a 0 on it. Sim B had extra time this week and started their fishing collection.
Week 3: This week was dedicated to fishing. The first half of the week is at the home worlds until the fishing collection was complete. Luckily sim B had a head start on this because it took her 4 days to find the last fish-the shark. After finishing fish collections both sims had 2 days left so I headed to Granite Falls and searched for insects while the sim fished for the Outdoor Retreat Fish. I also got the Outdoor Retreat plants while I was walking around.
For fossils and other plants, I dug and harvested them if I walked by but didn’t go out of my way for them. Also, I ordered the seeds from the planter boxes to get some more easy plants.
So Sim A finished all collections but Gardening [31], Fossils [12], Space Rocks [3] and Insects [12]. Sim B finished all but Gardening [36], Postcards [none], Fossils [8], Space Rocks [none], and Insects [14].
