I FINALLY decide to work a farm...

Thank you all for the tips and suggestions. Next question: My sim wanted to enter his horse in a competition. It started at 5pm. So he took off galloping ALL.THE.WAY.ACROSS.TOWN. and got there around 5:30. At that point, the "action" to go in went away. I told him to try to enter the competition again and that went away but the horse walked in. By the time that all happened it was close to 7pm.

So my question is: how do I enter competitions? And is there transportation to the center besides riding the horse there?

There are two options which comes to mind for getting your horse to competition on time. 1). If you are planning to ride to your destination, leave early enough to arrive on lot before the event. Or, 2). Use the 'Teleport Me Here' feature of the cheats. There may be another way which I do not know but maybe someone else could help with.

Teleporting
Hold ctrl+shift+c to open the cheat box
Type in (without quotes) 'testingcheatsenabled true'
Switch to the Sim you wish to teleport (horse or rider)
then, at the destination site, choose a spot on the ground where you want them to appear, 'hold shift and left click' that spot
The option to 'Teleport Me Here' will appear', select it. Your Sim will soon appear.

Switch to the next Sim (horse or rider) and repeat process.

I suppose I do have farms too I just don't think of it that way. My sims almost always garden and I tend to have huge basement gardens because I don't want to mess up the look of my worlds or houses I build. I prefer to use the space at ground level for other things. Or just leave it empty.

If you're interested in mods there are a few that would help. I'll get to that a little later.

The thing I do is I garden and if my sims need simoleans they use the humble harvest stands to sell their produce. But I don't put the stands on their home lot. Never thought of that. Also don't want random townies showing up as they tend to annoy me when they venture indoors or stand outside shouting through a locked door.

Since they need seeds to plant their gardens, and the best place I know of to get seeds is at the Stones Throw Greenhouse, I always add a greenhouse to my world and put 4 humble harvest stands on it. Then my sims can consign their produce and get paid. The process is like using a consignment store without a sim needed to manage the store. Sims can tend the humble harvest stands if they want to but I rarely bother with that as it just is a way of giving them some different idle actions.

https://i.postimg.cc/g0JLXNFT/Greenhouse-With-Stands.jpg

There are 4 humble harvest stands and the lemonade stand placed in front of the greenhouse. I put it on a 40x40 lot. The greenhouse comes to fit on a 40x30 lot.

The beauty of the humble harvest stands is you can put them around town on various lots. I sometimes place the Al Fresco Market as well. It has the humble harvest stand, the lemonade stand and purple eggplants and lemon trees as well as a few other items.

I almost never use a store venue as it comes from the store because they only use items that come new with the venue or are base game.

The Bohemian Garden set adds extra fruit and nuts.

The Grandpa's Grove adds orange trees.

Plus there are mods that provide new different types of produce with recipes.

If the garden gets too much for my sims to handle I hire a gardening service. This is from a mod.

https://modthesims.info/d/459967/gardener-service-v2-3-4th-may-2014.html

You need to use the landline phone to hire the gardeners. You get enough gardeners to handle the job each day. You can use the phone to sack them if you don't want them any more. They do all the weeding, watering and harvesting. They put the produce in the fridge at the end of each shift. They need access to the garden.

I've had lots of farms but only one that I called the farm. It is a large indoor garden that doesn't have a basement. It has a second level running along the back of the lot which is where the sims can live. I initially meant this lot to be on a second lot owned by the family but decided they could stay there sometimes too.

https://i.postimg.cc/Hx6k9SDL/The-Farm005.jpg

It has cows and chickens too.

https://i.postimg.cc/fLBpWWgH/The-Farm004.jpg

I have the tractor in it but don't like to use that object as the sims inventories get too full and they start deleting the tractor at the end of each run around the track. And their inventories get so full the game just about stops running.

Ages ago I built a couple of Savvy Seller shops and added humble harvest stands to the foyer. When I use these shops in a game my sims consign their produce to the 4 hh stands at the greenhouse plus the stands at the shop(s) and there are 4 or 5 stands at the Al Fresco Market.

https://i.postimg.cc/50sVQQgj/Shops-K7-GFloor-Foyer.jpg

Now there is another mod that is quite new and might interest you. It is the Sim State mod. It allows you to run a business at home. I found it works best on a residential lot. I made a YouTube video on my findings. It will give you a good overview. You will see how the sims buy from the shop and how it gets restocked and you hire staff. And I found the preserves made from Grandmas preserve station sell well.

https://youtu.be/kVYkmJWRmZA

There are some things I've said in the video that I've since learned more about and changed my mind about. But it will still give you an idea of how I got it to work. It isn't perfect but I found it fun. But not enough fun for me to want to use it all the time.

This is Alfina. She owns the shop.
https://i.postimg.cc/0jPyHd50/Alfina001.jpg

This lot was already set up with the Oven from the Bistro venue and also one from the Bakers venue. It's kitchen has Grandma's preserving thing as well. And the shop already had savvy seller shelves and mats. The mod wasn't designed to run with the mats or shelves so if you don't have them then you might get a better result than I did as I may have had conflicts.

Here is Alfina celebrating the arrival of her breakfast.
https://i.postimg.cc/JhjmVD26/AlfinaCelebratingArrivalOfFood.jpg

So the bakers oven still works as does the items that came with the bakery set with or without the savvy seller rugs.

I used the display cases that came with the bakery set and sims kept buying and my sim and her employees kept restocking.
https://i.postimg.cc/HxGwnK3W/BakeryDisplays002.jpg

I found I had to keep an eye on the restocking as after posting the video I worked out the cost of restocking does come out of the household funds and where there are employees they might sometimes line up to restock and item and will all restock the same item and you get charged for it each time so I would suggest you don't let them line up to restock. This should be easy to manage if the items for sale are not as spread out as mine were in this video.

I had a greenhouse in the back yard in which my sims grew the produce used to make preserves. There was also a barn at the side of the house where my sims had horses. The sims lived in the living quarters above the shop. I had to lock doors to the living quarters to keep customers out.

She was earning money from sims buying bakery items and they would stay and eat in the shop or take the purchases home.

There are lots of mods available on Mod the Sims and other places that you can use to change how things work.

https://i.postimg.cc/RFXb2rkC/Old-Mill-Cafe-00015.jpg

I have a scarecrow in the back garden and had to lock the gates to the horses as they got the panicked moodlet when they saw a scarecrow.

Have fun. I hope you've got some more ideas on running a farm business.

EDIT: I realised I didn't give you a link to the Sim State mod. Then thought you'd be better off with a link to the forum discussion on the mod. It is 4 pages of posts by various people and has a link to the mod in it.

https://forums.thesims.com/en_US/discussion/987500/sim-state-the-sims-3-open-for-business-mini-expansion-launch-trailer-available-now/p1

Looks nice, gotta try it some time! I'm afraid that the cow and chickens from store won't work and store fixes crash my game lol

"deavve;c-18016954" wrote:
Looks nice, gotta try it some time! I'm afraid that the cow and chickens from store won't work and store fixes crash my game lol

The most likely reason your premium content won't work is a corruption in your ccmerged.package file in DCBackup folder.

There is a downloadable version of this file. It works for some people and not others.

https://forums.thesims.com/en_US/discussion/740582/how-do-you-fix-the-ccmerge-file-with-nonosims

They way to make a new ccmerged.package file is to
1. rename your existing Sims 3 folder in Documents (the folder that contains your DCBackup folder).
2. launch the game to generate a new Sims 3 folder
3. install ALL of your premium content. There is a lot of it. I'm pretty sure it came from the store. Any content that has extra actions associated with it. I think the first thing I got that was premium content was the wind chimes. This link might help identify it
https://store.thesims3.com/setsProductListing.html?scategoryId=14442
Don't forget the content that came with worlds.

Once you've generated your new ccmerged file then you can rename the new Sims 3 folder and restore the name of the old Sims 3 folder and delete the ccmerged.package from DCBackup and replace it with the new version you just created. And if it works, and you haven't forgotten anything, then you can keep a backup of the file somewhere safe for future use if needed. It'd be a good idea to keep the Sims 3 folder you used to make the new ccmerged file until you have tested all of you premium content works just in case you forgot something and need to install it in the folder you used to make the new ccmerged file.

Happy Simming

@Karritz - You have a very active and large game! I love the look of your greenhouse! Out of curiosity, how do you manage all of the produce your garden yields? I find my Sim's stockpile inventories fills up very fast and I have nowhere near the number of plants you've shown.

When it comes to harvesting my larger gardens, I find the 'Harvester' which is created on the Inventor's workbench to be an adequate tool for the job. Although, personally I prefer for my Sims to do manual work the old-fashioned way by using their hands. While I do own the tractor, I haven't found a real use for it (yet). Maybe it will become a holiday 'hay ride' feature at my winter holiday events.

Wow! I love this thread and all the ideas. I've attempted farms. This thread gives me lots of good information and inspiration!

Thank you for sharing!

"mw1525;c-18017344" wrote:
@Karritz - You have a very active and large game! I love the look of your greenhouse! Out of curiosity, how do you manage all of the produce your garden yields? I find my Sim's stockpile inventories fills up very fast and I have nowhere near the number of plants you've shown.

When it comes to harvesting my larger gardens, I find the 'Harvester' which is created on the Inventor's workbench to be an adequate tool for the job. Although, personally I prefer for my Sims to do manual work the old-fashioned way by using their hands. While I do own the tractor, I haven't found a real use for it (yet). Maybe it will become a holiday 'hay ride' feature at my winter holiday events.

I tend to keep the harvestables but I've learned to check all inventories of sims who have been gardening. Every so often, especially when I have a lot of sims in the game, I start at the top of the portraits on the left of the screen and go through each sim. I check each one for their status of lifetime happiness points and inventory. Plus a few other things depending on the game. If they have any harvestables in their inventory I move them out of there.

I have a variety of ways to move the harvestables and collected items out of sim inventories.
1. Sell them - that's something I rarely do (I do it only if my sim needs simoleans or I've got more harvestables than I can cope with.)
2. move them to chests. I will often have several chests. I try to sort the items so they all go into the chest designated for their type of thing.
Examples of the way I may sort the items from sims inventories into chests include: fish; grapes or produce I might use for nectar making if I have them making nectar; seeds; tomb objects (possibly I'll have a chest for each of the worlds that have tombs).
I have lots of chest like objects that people have made and I've added to my game. Or I might buy chests from one or more of the WA worlds.
I add an insect cabinet and one of the larger cabinets from Supernatural and add all insects to the insect case; and tell sims to add all gems and metals, and elixirs to the other Supernatural cabinet. I might add mushrooms and other produce that is used for elixir making to the supernatural cabinets too.

I find the tractor is dangerous as their inventories fill up so fast you can be caught out and lose the tractor or the game can slow down to a point where nothing much is happening. Using the green dragon to harvest has a similar problem. If you've forgotten to check inventories and the tractor ends up in the garden instead of its proper parking spot then that is a sign you sim's inventory needs emptying. Same for the green dragon, if it resets and reappears near the gate to the lot then the sim's inventory is probably overfull of harvestables.

I rarely add produce to the fridge but if I use the gardening service (from a mod) they will put the harvestables in the fridge at the end of the day.

If my sims need simoleans I use humble harvest stands that I have placed at the greenhouse or in other parts of the world. I find they earn more from sales if I use the hh stands.

@Karritz - On the Riverview farm I mentioned near the beginning of this thread, I have seven 'chest-like' vegetable storage bins outside the house (most of my other farms only require about three). It's these bins which fill up very quickly. Even though I have a small garden, the number of harvestable I get per day adds up very quickly. Normally, I stop the storage count when each veggie, fruit or what-have you reaches 100. The produce grown on this farm is used in a variety of ways and shared throughout the world. I use the fridge to store food which is only for this family's use.

In addition, I use the Canning Station overhaul mod to make 'full meal rations and desserts' from group servings. Those also add up very quickly and tax my storage spaces. However, there's nothing quite like having ready-made meals sitting on the shelves (or in the cupboards) for those times when there just aren't enough Simhours in the day. Add in the normal things that can be canned and that's a lot of little glass jars!

The 'Supernatural Display Cabinet' is where my Sims store all of their elixirs and all ingredients for those elixirs including insects, gems & gem powder, mushrooms and foods specific to elixir recipes. This is the hardest storage inventory for me to manage because my Sims get three bottles of elixir for every single bottle they are told to create.

As a rule, I empty my Sim's personal inventory nightly before I save. During the day, they only carry a few items with them, rain & shine umbrellas, death flower, a book (for studying or reading), a piece of fruit to delay hunger and an MP3 player. They don't seem to need much more than that.

Canning Station Overhaul Mod:
https://modthesims.info/d/580462/canning-station-overhaul-update-aug-2-2016.html

Split Group Serving Mod:
https://modthesims.info/d/611234/split-group-serving-update-may-29-2018.html

@mw1525 Thanks. I do have the Canning Station Overhaul mod and I have anther mod for the group servings. Sadly, I can't remember what it's called now. It allows a sim to call everyone to the meal and they sit down together to eat. Since I usually have such overstuffed houses it is useful because it makes sure there is a serving for everyone. The Sim that is calling them to the meal places the servings at available places for the others to come and eat. Generally at a table.