Sims 4 Legacy Challenge, Part 1: Defying the Principles of Economics

Do you know The Sims?

I’ve never actually played it before now. I’ve always been under the impression that the game costs $55-60 just to download, so I never bothered to get into it. I figured it would be something I could play once or twice, maybe, and then would never go back to again, so I’d have wasted all that money on nothing basically. However, one day recently when I was very bored, I happened to look it up on Steam and discovered the base game was free-to-play. Well, might as well try it out, I thought.

And I’ve never looked back.

I started out with a “test run.” I created a female Sim, based off the main character of my WIP, and a male Sim, based off her love interest from that book.

Rose Perry, my founder: her favorite colors are purple, pink, and green, she’s cheerful, loyal, and loves to read, and her biggest dream in life is to have a successful lineage. Thom Perry, her spouse: his favorite colors are black, green, and purple, he’s a goofball, family-oriented, and loves to read, and his biggest dream in life is also to have a successful lineage.

And ooh, boy, was that an adventure.

At the time of me starting this challenge, I’d already had three other Sims families: one a “test run” couple that only lasted me a day or so before I got bored with them, then Rose and Thom in their first iteration (I won’t talk too much about that here, but I will be referencing it at points during this post because a lot of this challenge was me trying to replicate their first life together), then I started a family for the 100 baby challenge. Up until baby number 34 or so, I was using solely the base game, and then after that, I went and downloaded the Parenthood pack, which enhances gameplay with relation to raising children and looked like it would make the challenge a little bit more, well, challenging. But the other day I realized that I was more interested in designing outfits for my matriarch and building houses (and at some point I got obsessed with the idea that I should be able to live in a nice, big house but not pay 6,000 Simoleons in taxes every week, so I kept trying to build houses that looked nice but would be lower taxes) and I thought it might be a nice break to do a different challenge for a while. Because honestly, even with the added features of the Parenthood pack making it harder to age up my kids and kick them out of the house to make room for new babies, it still felt too easy. I’m on baby number 43 now and the challenge feels a bit stale. I wanted a true challenge, something that would really test my skills as a Simmer.

Then I found the Sims 4 Legacy challenge: start on an empty lot with no resources and no money and have ten generations of children.

I thought the idea was fascinating. For those who are unaware of how the Sims works, you create yourself a Sim (a character) at which point the game gives you 20,000 Simoleons (in-game currency) and you pick a “lot” to move into: you can either choose an empty one and build a house on it, or a lot with a house already pre-built. You also have the option of doing “free build” mode where you build a house and place it on a lot without putting any Sims in it, then you can make Sims later and move them in. I’d always wanted to try something like “start with no money and no resources,”, so I set myself the challenge. (Note, these rules/challenges do not exist in-game, they are merely self-imposed, meaning it is up to me to keep track of them) This challenge also has an added aspect the 100 baby challenge does not have, which is you have to stay on the lot for the entire time; in my 100 baby challenge, I have moved houses almost daily because I cannot decide what sort of house I want my Sims to live in, so not being able to leave the lot is something that I think will really test my skills as a Simmer! xD

I though it’d be fun to bring you along on my journey of going from 0 to powerful matriarch. But first, the rules!

The main rule of the Legacy challenge is that you create yourself a young adult Sim (basically the in-game equivalent of 25 or so) who can be any gender you want, with any desired physical or personality traits you like. You move this sim into an empty lot (the only thing it can have on it is a mailbox to start) and use a cheat code to get rid of all your money. And from there, you have to build a house for yourself and your progeny and stay on that lot for 10 generations (meaning you have to plan to support ten generations from the very start, including a family graveyard in the garden). Once the founder dies, the “heir” child takes over, getting married and giving birth to a new generation of kids, still on the same lot.You also must choose your succession rules. What gender of children will be your heir? (eg is it boys only, girls only, etc.) What decides which child is the heir? (eg. is it firstborn rules, lastborn rules, etc.)? How about the bloodline; are adopted children eligible to be heir, or only biological kids?

For my succession rules, I went with Strict Matriarchal, Strict Traditional, First born exemplar. What this means is that my heir can only be a girl. If there’s no female children born in one generation, that’s it! Challenge is over! (this should be interesting because in my 100 baby challenge, I have several times where I’ve had only boys for 5-6 kids in a row with no girls; let’s see if the curse holds up with a new family) Only biological children allowed–even if the current matriarch has given birth to nothing but boys, she cannot adopt a girl to be her heir; the heir must be her biological child. And finally, the firstborn daughter will be the heir in each new generation, however, they also must be “exemplar” meaning they share a trait with their mother. Their mother is a huge bookworm, and as she’s been dreaming of building a house for her progeny, she imagines it filled with wall-to-wall bookshelves and bookish items. So in order to be the heir, the daughter must also have the bookworm trait. If the eldest daughter is not a bookworm, then it goes to the next oldest daughter. But the cherry on top there is that all traits are randomized, so I don’t get to pick any of them, and if none of my girls end up with the bookworm trait, the challenge ends!

With all that out of the way, let’s dive into the Legacy Challenge!

With nothing but the clothes on her back (the game also gives your character a cell phone and there’s no way to get rid of it, but you need it if you want to travel to anywhere except your own house cause there’s no such thing as just walking down the street to the library in this game lol), Rose Perry moved to a new town and managed to obtain the deed for a small plot of land. I accidentally chose the 40 x 30 lot instead of the 50 x 50 lot, which is the one I think you’re supposed to choose? IDK LOL close enough. xD I actually figure it’ll be harder if I’m on a smaller lot; there’ll be less room later for my large family, so I’m just going with it.

Rose spent almost no time at this plot. Instead, she basically lived at the library. She headed straight over there to use the computers to find herself a job. During my first time playing with this Sim, she’d joined the Culinary career and become a successful master chef, so that’s what she did this time, entering the restaurant business as an Assistant Dishwasher.

After that, she wrote a children’s book and self-published it, which would earn her about three Simoleons per day in royalties. Of course, one of the biggest aspects of starting this challenge is that you have no house, so you don’t have anywhere to sleep, go to the bathroom, etc. That problem was easily solved, however: the library had bathrooms she could use, and there was even a nice little padded bench there where I could tell her to “nap,” and I just had her take five or six naps in a row, which ended up equating to almost a full night’s sleep! It was also handy that the library had books on mixology (bar tending) and cooking, which she needed to study in order to get promoted at her job.

Eating and showering were a little more difficult. There were no showers in the library, and Rose had nowhere to cook. While the base game does have food delivery options, just like the real world, it’s expensive. For showering, I opted to visit the gym, which had showers free-to-use, and for food, I befriended a couple of NPCs and ate sandwiches in their kitchen.

Apparently these guys have adopted a couple of kids since the last time I saw them. Also they’re apparently all in a polyamorous relationship together? Loving Summer’s outfit here, though.

Fun fact: when you go to make food in this game, your Sim automatically has the necessary ingredients in the fridge, and it deducts a certain amount of money from your funds automatically. However, if you use the “quick meal” option, you can make sandwiches without paying anything at all! Guess bread, ham, and cheese are all free in this world. xD Also fun fact: if you go to someone else’s house who you’re not very good friends with and try to use their kitchen to make food (eg. make a garden salad), they’ll yell at you and tell you “this is inappropriate” and then kick you out. Even though you’re using YOUR own funds to pay for the salad ingredients and would totally share it with them if they wanted some; you just need to borrow their counter for a few minutes… But if you use their kitchen to make a sandwich, they’re totally fine with it. Guess that old “first rule of economics: there’s no such thing as a free lunch” doesn’t apply in this game. xD

When first starting this challenge, I lamented not making my Sim a Kleptomaniac (this is a trait that allows your Sim to steal small objects from other people, otherwise you can’t take anything from houses/public places that aren’t yours) because I found one of the easiest ways to make money is to have a Kleptomaniac sim visit the library at 2 or 3 AM, when everyone is asleep, and have them steal books. Books, especially ones that raise your Sim’s skill level in certain skills, go for a lot of money in the Sims world. But I quickly realized she didn’t even need the Kleptomaniac trait.

Some things my founder Rose Perry did in the first 48 hours after creation:

-Wrote a children’s book and self-published it. Apparently self-publishing is very profitable in the Sims world; she immediately started getting three Simoleons a day in royalties!

-Played piano for an hour or two at the nightclub. She sucked at it, but still got 50 Simoleons in tips.

-Worked her first shift as an Assistant Dishwasher, bringing home 120 Simoleons.

-Went to an NPC’s house and attempted to make a salad. Got yelled at and kicked out, so went to another house, this time of a super-duper rich dude who lived in a 3-story mansion. As soon as she walked in, the dude set fire to his backyard grill and she had to extinguish the fire and save him from burning to death. You’d think, after all that, he’d let her borrow his kitchen to make a salad big enough to share, right? Wrong! She then went to the kitchen to try to make a salad and he yelled at her and threatened to kick her out! So she waited until he went upstairs and then made a sandwich, instead, at which point she learned that people don’t care if you make a sandwich in their house and it’s a very filling meal.

Rose is decidedly unimpressed with the decor of this house and is getting ideas for how she doesn’t want her own house to look like.

After her first 48 hours, she had enough money to afford the cheapest fridge money could buy, as well as a single kitchen counter on which to cook. Since she was in the culinary career and needed to prepare food and level up her cooking skill, I wanted to prioritize cooking items. I didn’t even bother with walls or anything, just left the fridge right out on the grass. No such thing as burglary in this game!

I also, after her first 48 hours, downloaded Thom from my gallery and inserted him into the game. Maybe it’s cheating to custom-make your founder’s spouse to where they are all but guaranteed to fall in love, but I figured it’d be okay just for the first generation, because after all, Rose is very picky, and also happens to be demisexual and bad at making new friends. So the only one she could possibly fall in love with is her childhood best friend who knows how to make her laugh and understands her autism.

Thom and Rose meet cute (well, cutely reunite xD) at the library

She is a very proud woman, however, so she and Thom didn’t start living together until she’d had a few essentials at their lot: a fridge, a counter on which to cook, the smallest bathroom you ever did see (I’ve perfected the art of the micro-bathroom: a 3 x 3 square with the cheapest toilet, shower stall, and sink available, plus a door to get in and out. It costs just under 1,100 Simoleons in total), and a bed. (Also note: they were not far enough along in their romance to be boyfriend and girlfriend, however, they did have a friendship meter high enough for me to select “add this Sim to household” so it’s still within the limits of the challenge, I feel.)

One other way I made some extra cash was with the magic trash can: if you drag a plate or glass onto it, it “throws it away” and gives you ten Simoleons per household member. So I constantly had them getting glasses of water, then throwing away the glass in the magic trash can. IMHO, this trash can is so handy and makes so much money that I think EA should increase its price to buy it in-game; right now it only costs 1,200 Simoleons and pays for itself within a couple of days.

Once they started living together, they had two incomes instead of one (Thom joined the Entertainer career; in my first play through with this family, he was basically the Sim version of Robin Williams: a successful, famous comedian, so I wanted him to rediscover that passion), took turns sleeping (for some reason, even after I bought a double bed, they refused to sleep in it at the same time, so we compromised by me getting bunk beds), and otherwise bided their time until they had… this.

I didn’t realize until writing this post that I could have put the easel inside, but I figure they’d get better light for painting if it was outside. Painting earns extra money so I wanted them to have that as their main hobby.

Pretty nice setup so far, but I had big dreams for what they could do. In between their jobs and their side hustles, they really had very little time for romance, plus it’s kinda awkward to flirt in a tiny micro-bedroom made of drywall that doesn’t even have any lights installed, so while they were doing all right on the money/housing aspect, their romance was severely lacking. It was, admittedly, very hard to get them to a point in their romance where they would sleep together. They didn’t share a single day off: she worked weekdays and had the weekends off, but he worked weekends and his days off were Monday and Tuesday, so they couldn’t even go on a date or anything because they were both so tired. But they’d been working so much that they eventually had a nice little bundle of savings.

It was at this point that Rose developed “fear for a dead end job” which ended up being very annoying. In her first life, she was a culinary master and loved being the Sim equivalent of Mollie Katzen. After this, I switched her to a career in web design, which was apparently the WRONG thing to do, because immediately after that, the game prompted me “maybe a new career would be a good idea?” and I was like “she already DID switch careers you stupid stupid game! She hasn’t even gone to her first day at her new job yet! Give her some time!”

One day, in order to surprise her, Thom spent his own personal money making some improvements to the house while she was at work.

It was also at this point that Rose and Thom decided they were done waiting to have kids. They had a house, albeit a small one, and enough money saved up to provide for a child, so they decided to start trying for heirs. Thom proposed, and they had a fairy tale wedding right before Rose’s birthday.

I made a whole wedding venue just for Rose and Thom to have their dream wedding! An outdoor venue with lots of flowers and nature. Rose loves flowers (obviously) and in my WIP, Thom is the equivalent of an archer/hunter in his world and loves the outdoors.

They’d been such introverts their whole courtship and not made many friends in favor of scrimping and saving and side hustling, so they only had three friends in total attend the wedding. The day before the wedding, I had our master chef and baker bride make her wedding cake and put it in the fridge so we’d have it the day of. But only fifteen minutes before the wedding was due to start, she decided she was hungry and ate a slice of it, meaning I had to make a whole NEW cake for the wedding! So the bride had to spend the first half hour at her wedding baking a cake in a borrowed oven in her dress!

The day after the wedding, Rose discovered that she was pregnant! (for context, pregnancies in the Sims have a much shorter duration than reality: a Sim can get pregnant immediately after doing the “try for baby” interaction, and the actual pregnancy lasts between 3-4 days of in-game time. Also because in-game time is calculated as “one minute for every second,” technically, from the moment your Sim finds out they’re pregnant to the time the baby is actually born, that’s only an hour or two of gameplay) They’d spent so much time scrimping and saving and waiting to have a child until they were financially stable, and now Rose felt her biological clock ticking. She’d set such strict requirements for her legacy: the baby had to be the right gender, had to have the right traits, etc. that she was afraid she’d never get her heir. So both parents-to-be were extremely excited, and very nervous!

Rose’s belly started to show almost as soon as she and Thom had conceived, and she was so excited she ran right over to where he was cooking dinner to tell him!

As she got closer to giving birth, the two of them looked at their work schedules and salary to see if one of them should quit their job to raise the baby, or if they should keep working and send the baby to daycare. But a miracle happened: their work schedules were aligned so perfectly that one of them could always be home with the baby. She worked 9-5 on weekdays, but he worked nights 5 PM – 12 AM, so he could watch the baby during the daytime and she could take over at night!

Being the perfect husband that he was, whenever he wasn’t working, Thom catered to Rose’s every need during her pregnancy, and did all the cooking and cleaning so she could rest.

Rose comes home from work on the last day before she goes on maternity leave, very excited to meet her baby but a little apprehensive about the actual process of labor. Because it was her first baby, Rose didn’t realize she was in labor, and confused her contractions for “I really need to go to the bathroom.” When he realized that she was about to give birth in the bathroom, Thom ran over to help.

And then there were three! Meet Magnolia Perry, their firstborn daughter. Assuming she gets the bookworm trait as she grows up, she will be our new heir! Right now she is just a blob of pixels in her bassinet.

And that is where I will leave this post. Look for Part 2 of my legacy challenge coming to a blog near you! The next update for my Legacy challenge will be posted on Tuesday, June 20th at this same time, so make sure to hit that “follow” button so you don’t miss it!