Heiva, Part Six
Oh wait, Kiwi's dead? And I have a house of five witches?
I mean obviously my first thought was the long and hard way to get Kiwi back in the flesh. Kaila and Tinsley were evenly skilled in spellcasting (a.k.a. to the level of dueling and nothing more) so I spent a few days queuing up duels for them. I thought I was getting somewhere until I referred back to the list of spellcasting levels/unlocks and
boy, it was gonna be a long journey. If nothing else, though, they mended their friendship. Niles was already a distant memory for both of them.
Also check out Tinsley's elder makeover! One of my favorite ones yet.
However, Tinsley loved to cast love charms on herself. As long as she didn't mess up her NPC friends (Heiva had the best friends for the most part, and she had the NPCs), I didn't care what she did.
Kaila was often the only person around to smooch, though.
And Amedee regretfully told his mother that all her hard work may have been in vain.
He got Oh My Ghost a few days after Kiwi died, and I figured I'd let the weirdness of The Sims take over this soon into the dynasty. Kiwi still loved him but understandably, he was feeling crappy after getting resurrected. And I didn't know he was a mermaid or that he dehydrated...possibly because of the bonfire I placed at The Overlook. Woops.
Kaila took all the credit for this either way.
And so we had Kiwi Hale, who was a mean genius who wanted to be a doctor. His boss was also Heiva's possible future father-in-law, Bae Ling. Bae still showed up as an adult in the relationship panel, but I hadn't seen him around town at all either. I had Kiwi have dinner with his boss so I could answer this question. If he was stuck as an adult, it didn't mean anything good for marrying Iris.
So he turned out to be an elder after all (phew!) and ready to take Kiwi's place in the netherworld.
He also was taken to the dresser and turned out to be visible there. Was it because he was made playable? I had a whole life states dynasty of ghosts and even though I can't remember much from 2013, a few of them looked normal at the dresser but it was a crapshoot as to whom. I think at least one spouse did as well as my second generation heir, but only after her adult birthday. Anyways, it made it easy to make Kiwi look a little...shipwrecked. He had been through a lot after all!
Amedee was more than happy to have him back, in whatever form it took. They could still get married, adopt a kid, fulfill wishes, and be accepted by the family. After the first initial reaction to having a ghost in their house, everyone accepted Kiwi, or at least stopped being disgusted with him.
Now I loved Amedee because he's my sim, but he was pretty useless in hindsight. He was supposed to play guitar and make friends that way (it's a super easy, passive way to do it) but I often left him on free will, which meant playing guitar at home instead. Heiva was holding onto friends as well, if having to call them every few days or throw parties (I'm leaving this to a charismatic housemate exclusively now) His brother at least was a pretty good collector and smelter, even if the dogs did most of the work. But Amedee would also get the house to himself and his husband once the elders passed on, so perhaps he was the real winner here.
Meanwhile, Heiva's life had gone to the dogs!
Also, Iris grew up. She was a little sore after another gym session, but a lot of Heiva's team was too. He wanted to go on a date with his boss, Martin Pepper.
The pitch was to show off how those muscles worked, I think. Anyways, Martin made a lot of faces during his deep-tissue massage and the retreat was absolutely eerie at night. Since the venue is only marked as "Visitors Allowed" and no, you cannot change it for a dynasty, it's usually pretty quiet. Visitors whom?
Saunas are banned for Heiva for now, but things were getting steamy between him and Martin anyways. If he wasn't still getting lots of wishes for Iris, it was more than possible to switch gears and make Heiva a Pepper. Martin had a sister, after all, and I haven't gotten any ugly babies from either of them yet!
But yeah...Iris...Heiva was racked with enough guilt to invite her to the gym again.
She didn't find out about Martin, but her dad died. And Heiva's friend's ghost boyfriend did nothing to stop it! And worst of all, it was a feeling that Heiva understood deeply as well.
Maybe messing around with Iris' feelings wasn't going to be good for anyone.
He apologized about...stuff...or just talked about losing a parent. But it hit Iris in a good place.
And finally, she was a real-deal official girlfriend and I got to see her family tree. No partners for any of her brothers I'm afraid.
So hopefully the rest of this chapter is kind of consistent, because there was a lot of repeating stuff thanks to an aging bug that hit Heiva before his adult birthday. If you want to know my solution: there was none. I manually counted the days to his birthday (like all two of them) and it resolved once he became an adult. Moving houses might have helped too but I was a ways away from that at this point! He was only at level six or seven of his career and that was gonna become my only real regret.
Heiva had a trip to China that I didn't have to repeat, praise the lord. I was waiting on a career op for him that involves going to China and learning martial arts. While I didn't want to supermax it in a decadynasty (with these vacation days?), I knew that martial arts could be useful for the next house's gem collection.
He came with a moodlet manager and also spent some of the time lifting weights, of course. He finished the Timber Terminator challenge for those space rock gems, but not the actual Bodybuilder one that he
had to do.
But here he is finishing his supermax at home. The face of victory.
So this is barely covered in the rest of this update or the next but bear with me: Heiva still had to marathon through the rest of his career. It's a rabbithole career, he wasn't required to exercise anymore, he had a lot of our gen's best friends through his co-workers there already, etc. It was not interesting AND took up most of Heiva's time anyways. Pro. Sports had him working six days a week, even if just for a few hours at a time. I wish I could say I had a fun strategy but I didn't.
Here's some fun strategies to mention though:
1. I mentioned off-hand that Tinsley started making NPC friends early, as a bit of an experiment to myself. Because of her maxed charisma, if it didn't pan out then she could easily make more friends later on. Anyways, she made a lot of early NPC friends, hence why you'll see quite a few original NPCs on the list once I post it at the end. My experiment was to see how long they would live. Again, these are largely NPCs she met when Heiva was a child or even earlier.
Now my strategy was to befriend them and then never invite them back again. Tinsley could afford to do this, as her friendships never decayed. She got multiple "x is about to die" notices for many of them, but they continued to live and stay in her relationship panel. They could be called and chatted to, and invited over if need be, even though that may kill them soon after if they are getting the death notice.
While service NPCs might show up at the park, they are definitely held in some sort of stasis. It works to our detriment when we're desperate in an immortal dynasty and need to turn to NPCs for spouses (because they don't age conventionally and will skip to the next stage at will), and it works to our benefit here for keeping NPC friends, it seems. At least I wasn't scrambling at the last minute I guess!
2. Sunlit Tides has three Big Parks (as in the lot designation but they are all also quite big, yes), which is the only lot that service NPCs will visit on their own. I actually was able to meet NPCs at the park and pretty often too, but I think having three parks increased the chances of seeing one. I didn't change any lot designations here, but for towns with only one big park, it might be worth it to change some eligible small parks to big parks per dynasty rules. (
@hazelnut brought up how few NPCs were at the park in her base game decadynasty in a private message and maybe this is the explanation, who knows though!)
3. My experiment with limiting couples to three babies as much as possible may have worked. This isn't to say that sims never got culled, but I never quite divulged the sort of rampant death I got in previous attempts where I didn't give myself a limit. We're talking about story progression hitting two or three kids in a family instead of losing one
sometimes. It was hard to get out of the immortal dynasty mindset where quantity is king, because breeding just isn't anywhere near as rapid as it can be here, and also I would sometimes spread out one pollinator across several partners, so maybe everything was looked at on a per-household basis. I might be the master dynasty pollinator (I guess) but we're all still learning.
4. Heiva never was starving for ops by keeping his skilling strict before moving (he got a handiness point when he was young, and picked up some cooking skill after getting married, but nothing to scare me
yet) and also by having a rabbithole career. I know there have been successful decadynasty heirs who were self-employed but I changed one plan for the next gen thanks to Heiva. Again, the loose approach to skilling before is definitely an immortal dynasty leftover. I actually did play very fast-and-loose with immortal dynasty skilling, with everyone learning athletic, logic, instruments, and charisma throughout their journey. Fewer ops = less incentive to stay strict to get ops. It's the opposite here.
Where was I?
With Kaila and Tinsley both wanting to get married to someone, I decided to save some space and give them a beautiful beachside engagement. I could also spy on Amedee, Auguste, and Kiwi's family trees for a while until either elder died.
Amedee and Kiwi opted for a bedroom engagement instead.
Heiva celebrated his adult birthday.
And...uh...Kaila died?
We also arrive at the final townie baby census for this generation. Only two to talk about.
Suzuki Hinata and Helen Hoffman had two kids: Antwan and Venus. They were both fairies like Helen, though Venus was a rare sim culled as a young adult.
Tamera Allender (Silas x Mary Sue Pleasant) and Harold Sapota (Adolphe x Rosalind Cruzita) had three sons: Ken, Karim, and now the worst child name I have ever seen in the game,
Bimble. I also haven't seen Ken and Bimble around, so maybe my anti-culling practices are just an illusion.
