Yeah it's my first post, but I'm not going to be long with my introduction. I'll just say I'm a power gamer and it's kinda odd I'm been strung out on Sims 3. I'm just the kinda person who will cheat through single player games to juice every bit of possible interaction and storyline variation out of them. So needless to say I burn most games up in a couple of day if not hours for FPS. The Sims 3 has me amazed at the amount of content a fairly simple in appearance game can contain. So I've been browsing the guide and wiki to help burn through skills and different occupations. I've found something a bit confusing in the sculpting guide and so here's my take on sculpting.
The guide more or less states that "Your Sim will get better and better at sculpting each specific type of sculpture. What they learn about making a dining chair in clay will carry on to its stone counterpart. So, you can train your Sim and boost the value of all future works. I recommend doing this with clay. Find a type of object you know sells well, and start making a few dozen. You can then be a specialist in that type and produce it in stone. This will maximize profit over time. It's really the only way to get exceptionally good profit out of sculpting.
Otherwise your Sim's experience is spread all over the place and you never see a masterpiece for $8,000 Simoleons or more. "
Which that bold statement has come to appear to be partially wrong in my game play. I'm running a fully patched game with all additions and expansions and testingcheatsenabled to set my sims moods to static so I can burn through the sculpting very quickly... which isn't too quickly at all... After 5 hours of fast forward sculpting I feel my brain grow numb. I did however start to understand the sculpting calculations better.
1. While there is a multiplier for the base cost value that only applies specifically to one type of sculpture there is also a universal one. Meaning that it doesn't matter what material or type of sculpture your sim makes the next one will likely be worth more. However, this multiplier is chance like and sometimes the value will be slightly less but eventually you will see it climb up. Ex. A sculpture that was usually around 200 will be worth 500 several hours later.
2. Some sculptures have a naturally higher base value than others. So it seems like the multiplier on the value has a really big variation. In reality I've tested it to be only around 50similion difference on the same object that's ranked good. It's just that some objects are naturally worth more than others so they will come out costing more while others will come out costing less.
3. As I pointed out there is a universal multiplier so making your average price on clay ones go from 200 to 500 will result in a much bigger change in the higher cost materials such as stone.
4. Essentially it seems possible to be able to sculpt masterpieces in any given material and sculpture but it will simply take much longer. For the sake of further investigation it's important to note my sim also has savvy sculptor trait and Artisan Crafter lifetime reward.
Which I suppose this is pretty useless information unless you're playing the game like me with no aging on and intend to make several hundreds of sculptures. The best way to make use of this universal multiplier is to make a lot of sculptures from clay or topiary as they tend to go by the fastest. But I've not tested whether making sculptures from more valuable materials makes the multiplier raise up faster. I'm still trying to get all the possible sculptures by grinding away on clay ones.
