The Apocalyptic Terrarium Challenge
Disclaimer: I made this challenge entirely from my own brain! I specifically did not search up other apocalypse style challenges while I was making this so I wouldn’t inadvertently copy someone else's work. If this bears any resemblance to someone else’s challenge, then hey, we’d probably get along! You’re welcome to take elements of this and make your own challenge.
The apocalypse has occurred, the world has ended, and your Sim may be the last Sim alive. Fortunately for them, a luxury fallout shelter was being built right next door! Unfortunately for them, the builders prioritized the luxury gardens rather than the self-sufficient survivalist utopia. Your Sim finds themself deep underground in an unfinished fallout shelter, with nothing but a few workbenches, seed packets, and a mysterious well that seems to whisper to them as they sleep…
Can your Sim rebuild the world from their post-apocalyptic terrarium, or will they succumb to the fallout just like everyone else?
This is an open-ended hardcore Sims challenge where your Sim starts with very little to their name, and must claw their way to surviving the apocalypse, rags to riches style, with nothing but some leftover construction materials and a mysterious wishing well. This challenge requires an understanding of the Sims Eco Lifestyle gameplay, as well as Sims gameplay in general, in order to thrive.
If gardening and fabricating weren’t hard enough, the wishing well whispers in their ears, demanding sacrifice. Every Sunday, Sims must make a donation to the wishing well and make a wish. Results of this wish cannot be reloaded.
Your Sim starts alone, and can ONLY acquire partners by wishing through the wishing well. Your Sim may never have contact with any outsiders, because everyone else on the planet is probably dead. Your Sim must grow their own food, and can only acquire furniture through fabrication, building at the workbench, and dumpster diving.
Lastly, every day you must generate a number between 1 and 100 (googling “pick a number between 1 and 100” will do it for you). On a 1, you must kill a Sim. The wasteland is cruel.
Building the setting for this challenge is limited to some strict layouts and objects. I’ve detailed them below, or you can place my pre-built shelter from the gallery, which uses only the required packs and which comes with all the items you need. The Gallery ID is InkyGrimalkin, and the starter shelter is on the front page. If you want to build your own shelter, read on!
Author's note: Apparently trying to place the gallery lot on a smaller lot size will sometimes cause the basement levels to not appear. If that happens, turn moveobjects on and try again. I tested this on a 40x30 lot and it placed correctly the second time around, although it still forgot to put the roof on over the top. Just slap a roof on that baby if it happens to you.
Begin on the largest lot size. I prefer to bulldoze the park in Oasis Springs and turn it into a residential lot for that apocalyptic vibe.
You may use any flooring, wallpaper, doors, windows, walls, roofs, fences, and other build mode items that you wish, so long as they don’t affect your Sim. You may place any lights that you wish, but remember that your power supply is limited to start.
Build a lush garden underground (using the "moveobjects on" cheat to place trees and bushes, and “grass” flooring). Build a small, enclosed ladder down to the garden, and a small room to the side.
In the small side room, place a Fabricator, Dumpster, Recycler, Candle-maker, Easel, and a Woodworking Table. If you have the knitting kit, you may place a knitting basket.
In the garden, place the Whispering Wishing Well, one large garden bed, and an insect box. When the game goes live, you can purchase either kind of insect for the insect box.
Above ground, place two dew collectors and two solar panels.
Your Sim does not start with a toilet, bed, shower, or sink. The ground is your bed and your toilet!
Purchase one packet of starter vegetables, one packet of starter fruits, and one packet of starter herbs. Place those wherever you wish.
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Lastly, in the challenges section of the lot traits, select Off-the-Grid, Reduce and Recycle, and Simple Living (optionally, if you have city living or Island Living, Quake Zone and Volcanic Activity make for some good ambiance). You may use any positive lot traits you wish, but I recommend Homey to start. Great Soil and Natural Well are allowed.
Start with a Young Adult sim. You may play any occult besides a vampire. You may choose any aspiration that you wish, but remember that many aspirations cannot be completed when you cannot leave your lot. You can choose any trait besides Freegan (too easy). I recommend Genius (for the focused trait, leveling handiness and gardening) and Creative (for creating paintings for our lord and savior, the wishing well).
They can wear any clothing that you wish, but create one extra outfit in any slot that contains as much coverage as possible (full body suit, gloves, hat, boots, etc.). This will be used to brave the nuclear wasteland to repair any malfunctioning solar panels/dew collectors.
Use the cheat freerealestate on to purchase the shelter for your Sim, and once inside, use the cheat Money 0 to remove all your Sim’s money. The challenge officially begins.
Author's note: If you click on the wishing well and there's no wish for romance option, you are experiencing a bug! Scroll to the bottom for my workaround. TL:DR: They need to have known at least one Sim before they can wish for romance. You can simply meet someone on the street and never talk to them again to make the wish for romance option appear.
- No cheats may be used except the initial set-up cheat and those used to fix bugs (moveobjects is okay). No mods that offer unfair advantages may be used, but mods that add realism are encouraged.
- Your Sim must “unlock” items using the dumpster, woodworking bench, and fabricator. You cannot buy items directly unless specified. The dumpster contains many helpful items, such as beds, showers, TVs, counters, toilets, etc. You may keep any item in reasonable condition, but must place items in the world before selling them (to remove their extra value). Anything you get from the dumpster can be sold OR recycled.
- Once you have unlocked a particular version of an item (say, the “Post Modern Shower Stall”), you may use that item in place of any future item you get of the same type.
- For example, if you scavenge two showers, and you like one of them better, you may sell the one you dislike and replace it with an identical version of the one you prefer if you can afford it. This is an option rule for ~aesthetic~ purposes, mainly because I hate a kitchen with eight different counter types. You cannot freely place as many showers as you want, unless you have that many showers to give in exchange.
- The dumpster does not appear to be able to generate bookshelves, so whenever you want a different style of bookshelf you may “trade” a fabricated bookshelf for a purchased one.
- You may freely change the swatch of any item.
- If you reach the point where you desperately want one particular furniture or appliance to really tie the room together, you can directly purchase that item if you trade one equal piece of furniture (chair for chair, fridge for fridge, etc.) AND you use the money cheat to remove 30,000 Simoleons (in addition to the cost of the item). - If you want to replace a burned item from the dumpster, you must remove $5000 Simoleons from your reserve in addition to the cost it takes to replace it. Choose which items you want wisely.
- Every day, or 7 times on a Sunday, you must generate a number between 1 and 100 (googling “pick a number between 1 and 100” will do it for you). On a 1, you must kill a Sim, provided you have more than one young adult or older Sim in the household. If you have only one YA+ Sim in your household, you must delete a bed of crops.
- Every Sunday, you must make a donation to the wishing well of as much as you can afford (if you have $4099 simoleons, you’re donating $1000. $5001 simoleons, you’re making a 5k donation. 5k is the maximum), and you must make a wish. You cannot reload after a bad wish. The wishing well is life.
- Optionally, you may make as many additional donations to the wishing well as you would like (of a minimum of 5000 simoleons), any other day of the week. This rule is in place as a safeguard, in case your luck is bad and you’re simply not getting a romantic partner via the once a week wish.
- I suggest making a holiday out of donating to the wishing well so you don’t forget.
- Spouses can ONLY be obtained by wishing for romance from the wishing well and hoping the wishing well generates a Sim for you. If your pair of Sims is incapable of having a child on their own, you may edit either Sim in CAS to allow pregnancy, and if your new soulmate is not flagged for romance/woohoo, you can change their orientation. You may not adopt or create a science baby. The wishing well provides. You may edit your spouse’s appearance in CAS, but not their traits. When the wishing well generates a Sim for you, move them in immediately. There's nowhere else for them to go, after all.
- If your Sim is abducted by aliens and becomes pregnant that way… sure, why not.
- Children can be obtained by wishing from the wishing well, but it’s recommended you wish for a partner and have children that way. Children born from the wishing well are not counted in the end total or point scoring.
- There is a very small, but not impossible, chance that the wishing well will give you a ghost soulmate on a very bad outcome. If losing a challenge due to random chance is not your cup of tea, you are allowed to delete the ghost sim or humanize them with cheats as you see fit.
- You may not bring in any money from marrying your wishing well spouse. - You may not purchase any infant/toddler furniture, including cribs and beds. These must be earned via the criteria in the “milestones” section. If your pregnant sim goes into labor and does not have a crib, they cannot go to the hospital and must wait the labor out.
- All your childrens’ traits must be randomized. Living in a shelter makes for erratic Sims. You may re-roll only if it’s a trait that is not applicable to isolated underground living (like Child of the Ocean).
- All Sims must live for half of their normal lifespan before you can age them up early, rounded up. So for example toddlers must be 4 days old (out of 7), teens must be 11 days old (out of 21). You may only age up Sims if you can make them a cake, otherwise they must age up on their own.
- You may “banish to the wasteland” any Sim you don’t like by moving them out. Once that Sim leaves you may never talk to them again. No phone calls, no visits. They are gone.
- You must pay your Sims’ bills. Consider that disappearing money to be morale slipping away in this unforgiving world.
- You may not leave the neighborhood for any reason (specifically, the neighborhood as loaded around your lot-- no traveling via phone/map), and no Sim can come visit the lot for any reason. You must keep your outside doors locked for everyone but your household. You must ignore any neighbors that knock on your door; they’re not real. Your Sim cannot have a job, and they cannot order deliveries.
- You may not grow plants or house animals above ground. The atmosphere is too dangerous for them.
- For children/teenagers, you may use any mod of your choosing to prevent them from attending school, or you can make every day on the calendar a “holiday” to keep them home. If you absolutely cannot prevent them from going to school, you can let them go, but they cannot socialize while they are there, and they can attend no extracurricular activities. We’ll pretend they’re out scavenging. It’s a harsh world for children.
- You MAY build upon the space you are in by creating new rooms, and continue to use any doors, windows, fences, wallpaper, paint, and lighting for those rooms. You may furnish those rooms only with items you scavenge or create. You may size objects up and down freely, and use item movement cheats.
- You MAY gain money by selling anything you create, including paintings, wood craft items, candles, crops, etc.
- You may purchase any build mode plants and rocks, so long as they do not offer any benefit to your Sim, to spice things up.
- You may not purchase medicine when your Sim is sick. Power through.
- Your Sim may leave the shelter to perform repairs on the power-generating objects, and to fish or collect collectibles, but may not speak with any Sims they see on the outside. If a Sim approaches to speak with you, you must return to the shelter. They are figments of your imagination. Your Sim may not use the phone/map to travel: they are limited to collecting and fishing in the area directly outside their lot.
- Your Sim may not use Social Bunny or Plopsy, or the phone outside of gameplay necessities. Do not answer if it rings. There’s no one out there.
- Your Sims may create a club, using only members of their own household.
- Your Sims may wear whatever clothing they wish– we’ll just say the fabricator is very good at clothing.
- You must turn down the game if it offers to give your Sim the Freegan trait. Your Sim does not actually enjoy this life.
- If you get money tree seeds from the dumpster, you must delete them/sell them and use the money cheat to remove the profit. You may NOT purchase a money tree as an aspiration reward.
- Aging must be kept on, on a normal or short lifespan.
- By using the money cheat to remove 15,000 Simoleons, or once a week beginning two weeks after you start the challenge, you may purchase one skill item or one children’s item (such as a chess table, activity table, nesting blocks, high chair, etc.).
- By using the money cheat to remove 40,000 Simoleons, or once every three weeks beginning one year after you start the challenge, your Sim may “find” an animal in the wasteland. This can be a stray cat or dog, a chicken, a cow, bee box, another insect box, a llama, etc. You may scavenge (purchase) basic items needed to care for these animals, such as the chicken coop or a dog food bowl, since these items cannot be crafted. Animal aging must be kept on. You may incubate chicken eggs freely and “trade” animals for meat.
- By using the money cheat to remove 5000 Simoleons, or once a week, you may purchase one skill book… provided you have a bookshelf.
- Every time you donate 5k Simoleons to the wishing well, you may purchase a power or water generating object (provided you can afford it).
This challenge is meant to act a bit like Minecraft’s Skyblock– a contained world with endlessly generating material that allows you to build out and create your dream. Using the Reduce and Recycle lot trait means the dumpster is no longer bottomless, and will fill with trash. Dumpster diving for deals and meals will pull random items from that trash.
Of course, you need trash to fill the dumpster. Trash will accumulate in a few different ways, among them uprooting plants, repairing broken items, or discarding a dish instead of washing it. (What’s the lore reason for getting a TV from a discarded plate? Er… slightly malfunctioning matter replicator?)
To start, much of the initial challenge will be simply keeping your Sim up. Eating harvestables barely fills hunger and may make your Sim sick. (Eating the LAST one of any harvestable means you won’t have access to that particular vegetable again for a long time.) Without a toilet, shower, or bed, your Sim will be in a constant state of misery. Dumpster diving is gross.
As your Sim gains fabrication and woodworking skill, they will unlock items to furnish their home. Gradually, life will improve for them. How far can you take it? How successful will your Sim be in this world? It’s all down to you and your resourcefulness.
This challenge is meant to be more open-ended, to challenge you to see what you can make from nothing. That said, there are two potential endings to this challenge.
The first, Repopulate the Earth, occurs when your Sims have birthed twenty-five children in total (children made from the wishing well do not count). This can occur all in one generation (poor mama) via banishing children to the wasteland, or over the course of multiple generations.
The second, A Whole New World, occurs when your tenth generation reaches adulthood. Your tenth generation discovers that the world outside has been rebuilding, and there’s more people out there than your Sim has ever seen in their life. The world outside the shelter is strange and alien, full of things your Sim has never heard of (a movie theater? A grocery store?), and they are ill-equipped to handle it. It’s up to you whether your Sim forges out to explore the unknown, or retreats to their shelter to live out their days in isolated safety.
+10 points the first time your Sim has full needs and no negative moodlets after the first day
+20 points for every skill your Sim raises to max level
+20 points when your Sim gets their first lifetime partner
+10 points for every Sim baby that is born (wishing well children don’t count)
+50 points for every child that survives to adulthood
+20 points for every animal you acquire
+20 points for every Sim that dies an elder
+10 points for painting a portrait of a Sim (limit 1 per Sim)
+5 points for every Sim that you banish to the wasteland
+10 points for every fully-furnished room you create
+50 points when the 5th generation is born
+50 points when the 25th child is born
+100 points when the tenth generation reaches adulthood
Here is a google docs link to the challenge for reference.
- MC Command Center and UI Cheats Extension to manage glitches
- Any of BrazenLotus’s mods to allow your Sims to create sugar, wheat, and other food/crafting options so your Sims aren’t limited to mushroom soup all the time. If you download the wheat/flour making mods, you are allowed to trade any appliance in exchange for the mill.
- Lot 51’s Free-Range mod, which allows you to place invisible markers in place of a massive stone barn for your cow. Those stone barns look really weird in a fallout shelter.
Edit 6/30/23: After some more testing, it appears this bug is tied to your Sim not having formed any prior relationships before trying to wish, which is probably why it's only noticeable when you're playing an isolation challenge! This has an easy fix-- before you send your Sim down into the shelter, have them meet someone on the street. It's kind of annoying, but if you have MCCC you can clear the relationship once your Sim gets their soulmate-- or you can just say that this is someone they knew from before the apocalypse.
Fix number two below still works, but if you delete the Sim instead of removing them from the family, your sim will no longer have any relationships and won't be able to wish again. Weird stuff.
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I initially thought this was only a bug that happened to me, but I've had a few people comment on it since so I figured I had better share my workaround. For some reason, some Sims do not have the ability to wish for romance on the well, and this bug often overlaps with being unable to initiate romantic interactions with other Sims-- not that you'd notice, being stuck in a fallout shelter. There are two potential fixes.
Fix number one: If you're using a Sim that was on the gallery or used in another game, they may have the hidden 'skeleton' trait from Jungle Adventure, which prevents romance. To fix this, open the cheat console, type testingcheats on, and then try sims.remove_buff Buff_Skeleton and traits.remove_trait Trait_Hidden_Skeleton_ServiceSkeleton. See if the option to wish for romance is now there.
Fix number two: If the skeleton blessing thing wasn't the problem, my strange little workaround that seems to help is to type in cas.fulleditmode and then go into CAS with your Sim. Save them to the gallery, and then download them into the household so you have two copies of your Sim. This often 'shocks' the game into letting one or both use the well for romance. Figure out which of them has the 'wish for romance' option, and then banish/delete the other one.
Many thanks to Aelaer, who has provided a lot of very valuable feedback on this challenge and helped me refine it.
