Yet another scenario gameplay thread

Things are going downhill now:

Day 18: 200,806

Thunderstorm
Marriage prompt for Ulrike, she woos Lilith in record time and bags 21,733 $

Here, look:

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Isn't that the most romantic wedding you've ever seen?
On the upside, they have one more wedding guest than Emil and Cameron had, so we should count that as progress.

Emil takes a cutting of snapdragon to hybridize with his Lilys to get orchids that are six time the value of Lilys. Should have thought about at the first day of fall already. And also kept the seasons at the default seven days.

So. Many. Mistakes.

Day 19: 261,360

Five Lilys revert to dirt piles, an alarming incident! I'm not above cheating to repair the plants, but with 276 Lilys I dread having to click each single one.
This is also where I noticed that each Lily plant gives only two flowers per harvest. It used to be six, so that's a big downer. My little greenhouse now feels pathetic when I think about simmers that have completed Making Money in 30 days or less :(

Emil finally earns Never Weary and also finishes Fabulously Wealthy for a daily interest. Another thing to the pile of "should have thought about that and aimed for it earlier".

Day 20: 286,326

Emil travels to Finchwick. The locals don't want to buy my kombucha, there goes the idea of getting a bonus from haggling. Back home I get myself some treestumps, but the rabbits refuse to let me place them inside the greenhouse. The birds don't mind, but they are slooooow to befriend.

Maybe I should look into flower arranging (and more sims).

Day 21: 366,914

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Wolfgang Munch got caught sabotaging the sprinkler!

But since he is such a good friend of Ulrike Faust, my household had a cake for him... a birthday cake! Freshly force-aged up to YA, Wolfgang got "invited" into the household by Ulrike. The game option sounds a lot friendlier than it actually was: my sims grabbed Wolfgang, pulled him inside and locked the door behind him.

And now that he is a household member, Wolfgang can be a dear and help out. There's a flower-related activity that I haven't played around with:

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Wolfgang: "You can't be serious!!!"

Meanwhile the planter boxes at Romance Festival yielded a meager harvest only, but we take whatever we can get.

Day 22: 465,688

Cameron maxes Fabulously Wealthy, too, and earns Rarely tired (the lesser of the no sleep traits). He also builds a gardener bot.

Wolfgang runs out of low level flowers, helps in the greenhouse instead

(This is the day when I realize that two flowers are sufficient to make a sixpack of kombucha. It used to be five. I read online that this got changed to two, but that never worked for me. But now with Seasons installed only two are needed anymore.)

Day 23: 535,066

The first kombucha made with perfect orchids comes out masterwork (selling the ingredients =1,250 Vs. selling the kombucha sixpack = 6,671). Emil sends it in for a review.

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The gardener bot gets activated, but it is slow and not much help. Cameron upgrades it once, because he needs the experience to eventually build a servo.

Emil buys a countertop stove and some seed packets. The only flowers that the household is still missing are Bird of Paradise and Death Flower. (I know how to get/graft them, I just cannot fit it in yet.)

Wolfgang hits flower arranging 5 (mostly from books)

Lilit graduates, though not with honors

14:55 the household hits the halfway mark! For the next day a flower bunny party gets scheduled.

I can't believe I only got a single day finished today. But things have become complex, with lots of micromanaging (that I enjoy, so no worries!).
And was it really only 2 posts and four sim days ago that I complained about not getting anywhere? My scenario household's income is snowballing now:

Day 24: 596,415 simoleons

At this pace I see myself achieving the million before the secondary goals. Part of the million will go towards prettyfying the farm anyway, because in the state it is now (efficient, but drab, even ugly), nobody will want to buy it.

So what else happened?

The Good:

- The "Halfway to the Million" party, of course. I set it up as a holiday (no time off).

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This was the first time that the scenario sims actually got to drink some of their own products. Specifically they are having the dragonfruit soda made from two dragonfruit Emil picket at the Romance Festival. (Since they are not flowers, I decided against multiplying them.)

- Emil could buy a pomegranate from the "Buy gifts-> Flowers" menu, no need to gamble for cherry seeds to graft.

The Bad:

- The society Emil sent his 6,600 simoleons masterwork kombucha to paid... 1,402 simoleons :o That's beyond insulting and I consider sending them Wolfgang Munch to have a "talk".

And the In-character:

Earlier that day Wolfgang had gifted his mother a handmade flower bouquet that she had liked a lot. He's slowly warming up to the idea of learning a real trade and integrates more and more into my little family. So when Wolfgang caught the Flower Bunny stealing Lilys from the greenhouse, his protective urges kicked in and the young man retaliated in the only way he'd known since he was ten or so:

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Wolfgang won and even earned a premature decorative Easter Egg.

Day 28

Last day of fall

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1:49 Ulrike sells a vampire cure and the household gets the Rosebud Achievement for having earned 1 Mio.

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4:09 the sims find a trashed servo that someone has tossed over the fence into their property

7:xx All flowers except the death flower are perfect and in their own planter boxes
Removed ca. 55 Lilys to make room for orchids

12:10 Cameron starts repairing the servo (ingame: starts making a new one)

12:44 Emil grafts a pomegranate cutting to a perfect tulip, unlocking the death flower

13:26 Cameron activates “Flora” the servo.

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Flora initializes with the traits Family oriented, Neat and Perfectionist. She is very eager to clean basically every object, dirty or not. I feel she’d be better suited for indoor tasks in the brewery than gardening.

14:07 Lilith completes Fabulously Wealthy

16:36 I realize the game made my sims fat from not working out. Working in the greenhouse and at the fizzing machines all day would certainly burn calories irl, but both activities were probably planned as light hobbies, and the devs didn’t anticipate an industrial approach to crafting. A quick session in CAS remedies the oversight.

19:07 Cameron upgrades Flora after she has tried her hands at various activities on the lot.

21:50 Cameron maximizes Robotics!

22:38 Everyone gathers outside, then Flora sells a bunch of flowers for the final missing 30K, bringing the household funds to…

https://abload.de/img/screenshot3242paj82.png

… 1,005,181 simoleons!

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And this completes my first officially scored scenario (the other two were just playalong in an un-updated game):

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I said I wasn't interested in the other scenarios, but now I can think of a way to make Surviving the Holidays fun for me. There's a handful of sims that come to mind to use - look out for a poll in the General section later on!

Prologue 1: David Allen (post 2 of 2)

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Enraged, David marched over to the apartment’s little gymn, where his wife, the twins’ mother, was training, assissted by the Allens’ household android, Silke AP700.

David: “How much longer will this take, Silke?”

Silke: “About...”

But David didn’t really seem to be interested in the answer. He had just asked to enter into a conversation situation with the android.

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David: “GOTO - END - RUN.”

Silke closed her eyes. All CyberLife androids, even those programmed for factory work, passed the Turing test. David could just have said “Session’s finished” or something similar. But, no, the human had chosen to remind Silke and everyone around of her machine status, and not even thoughtlessly. David had aimed to hurt.

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Claudia: “Okay, I can make a break. - Feel like punching something?”

At this point David wrestled control from me and proceeded to the “Mean” menu on his own:
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David: “Matter of fact, yes! My younger self! What were we thinking, making those brats of ours!”

Claudia: “Ey...?”

David: “It was all fun and games when they were in the crib, and started to toddle. But now they’ve grown into monsters that think they can command us around like we were androids! And it’ll be another twelve years ‘till they are out of the house...”
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Claudia: “What’s gotten into you? No, don’t answer that. It doesn’t make a difference. You were beyond rude, and you continued down that path when I offered you a way out and a means to work through your frustration.”

David: “Oh, that’s gold! Now those snowflakes of kids of ours drive a wedge between the two of us?!”

Claudia: “More like that kindergarten of a police department that you call your workplace infected you, so you act childishly now, too.”
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David: “Shit, Claudia, at this rate I could just as well have volunteered for the holidy shift at the DPD. It pays outrageously well, but I wanted to go mountaineering with you’all!”

Claudia: “Maybe it’s not too late. You can still...”

David: Yeah, I can still patch up things with the twins.

Claudia: “...volunteer.”

David: “Say again?!”
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Claudia: “I’ll just take Silke along to the trip, then your ticket won’t go to waste.”

David: “The android?!”

Claudia: “It’s got a parenting app, unlike someone I could name. See, I don’t run around catching criminals, and you don’t fly diplomats to Sixam and back. Maybe when we keep you and the kids neatly seperated from now on, we can salvage this family. It’s worth a try.”

David: “Wait, what, you can’t mean that!”

Claudia: “I’m looking forward to missing you a lot over the holidays, but for now get the fuck off my lawn and let me finish my training!”

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“Dear diary (that I still don’t have, because it’s still not manly), today I was the best dad ever by staying clear of my children. Yay for me!”

Enjoying this a lot :) bookmarked.

Prologue 3: Antony Deckart (post 1 of 4)

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That same night a lone figure stood atop DPD central station. The man stretched and inhaled the chill winter air. A smile crossed his face when he picked up the distinct scent of a freshly unpacked electronic device. It basically tasted like electricty.

“C’mon, girl, time to spread your wings!” the man spoke into the direction of a small surveillance drone.

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The man’s name was Antony Deckart, and he was DPD central station’s equipment officer. Everything from handguns through cars up to the patrol androids were his responsibility, a duty the officer enjoyed a lot.

Tonight Antony was testing the latest addition to his carpark, a basic, store bought drone. But the fact that it was the device’s virgin cruise combined with the other fact that municipal institutions rarely got anything new, made the occasion feel like early christmas.

Antony donned his Goggles and connected them to the drone. When he was satisfied with the flow of information, he started the hummingbird.

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The rotors started whirling and then Antony’s newest toy took off into Detroit’s nightsky...

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The drone took flight. From up high - and it didn’t even have to be exceptionally high, just rooftop level - there was nothing Antony couldn’t spy while being connected to the drone’s feed through his goggles.

Every suspicious lurker in a street corner...

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...the smallest activity in some apartment art studio...

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...and every last, however petty, traffic offense, Antony saw as if through his own eyes.

When he was satisfied with the device’s performance, Antony looked up into the sky. He felt gravity pull at him hard, unlike the free-wheeling surveillance drone. But the same power that grounded him also forcing the stars in line was a comforting thought for Antony.

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How awesome would it be to leave this meat body behind? Not as in dying, but to merge with a robotic form that had inherited everything modern computer technology was able to do as its damn birthright! A bit like an android, only fully sentient.

But of course humans were humans and machines were machines. Androids only appeared lifelike and humans could only borrow machine senses for a short while, using clumsy interfaces.

This is perhaps a good time to clarify that androids in this setting are fully sentient, the humans are only in denial about it. The servos are animal-like, closer to service dogs than slaves.

Prologue 3: Antony Deckart (post 2 of 4)

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The nightshift was dragging on. From the corners of his eyes Godefroy Wilson saw a fellow officer enter the main office. The other man passed him by without saying a word, then slipped into one of the android compartments.

There he - or it, rather - connected to the interactive tactical map to update it.

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It had been just a patrol android all along.

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Antony, now sporting a mechanical arm that enhanced his handyness, grunted.

Unlike the other patrol bots, this one had kept his outeskin online, the extra layer that made it appear more humanlike.

“Simulation lag AGAIN”, the equipment officer moaned, then barked at the android: “Skin!”

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There was no need for an additional command, something like “Skin down” or similar. The bark alone was sufficient to work through the glitch and a second later the android cop stood there in his “birthday suit”.

Yelling at an appliance to make it function as intended - now if only that worked on all electronics, Antony thought to himself!

Meanwhile the patrol bot stood in line with its brother and sister models, indistinguishable from them, and also clearly not a human.

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For years, and even far into 2038, taking down the outerskin when standing idle hadn’t been a requirement for DPD androids. But ever since the android riots of November it was part of the regulations, a precaution to prevent people from humanizing the bots too much.

In humans, imagining the machines as being alive, could lead to them sympathizing with glitched or outdated ones to unhealthy degrees, Antony believed. In androids, that the man had witnessed several times, it could lead to the feared android deviance.

Therefore, however much he wanted differently, the officer tried for a cold demeanour towards his patrol bots.

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An android whom the “skin offline when idle” rule hardly ever bothered was Daniel, the DPD’s janitor.

For one, the officers made sure the PL600 android hardly ever was idle, and for two, Daniel in robotic form didn’t radiate the reassuring “Everything’s under control, citizen” vibe the Chief of Police aimed for. To the contrary, Robo!Daniel’s presence said “Back to your dens, little mammals!” It was looking much more amiable in an apron, so that was what Antony put the android into most of the time.

Daniel was a deviant, a term that had become so common that nobody even remembered anymore that Officer Deckart at the DPD had coined it. Deviance, according to Antony’s definition, was when an android was displaying activity that wasn’t dictated by its programming, or even went against it, despite not being bugged or damaged.

On occasion a deviant might claim to be alive, self-determined, what was probably a reflection of the many stories of robots becoming sentient.

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Antony: “Connor’s desk could use some cleaning, too.”

Daniel: “Naturally. Everything that has Connor-stain on it requires deep-pore sanitation with a laboratory grade sterilizer.”

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Daniel: “What exactly are you doing there, Officer Deckart?”

Antony: “Attaching a replacement arm to PM700-302.”

Daniel: “So you’re... arming up your androids!”

Almost a friendly conversation...

...if only Antony had laughed or even groaned at the pun. But glossing the deviant’s attempt at smalltalk over altogether didn’t bode well.

Prologue 3: Antony Deckart (post 3 of 4)

Antony: “Engage it in a friendly conversation, Daniel!”

Ouch. The command, although sensible in the light of testing the new arm’s motorics, felt like a hot knife between Daniel’s ribs. Both the patrol bot and the janitor were androids, whereas Antony was a human, part of a species Daniel claimed to deeply detest. By right Daniel should have preferred socializing with an android any day, even with a non-deviant, robotic one.

But as a deviant he couldn’t help it that interacting with humans came much more naturally to Daniel. Additionally the janitor knew next to nothing about policework. There was simply no common ground at all between him and PM700-302.

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Daniel: “So, uh... how’s the weather outside?”

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A casual reply, because every CyberLife android expected to interact with humans was capable of holding a conversation, an accompanying movement of the arm... that was all Antony had needed to see.

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Daniel: “I see you also padded the sleeve to hide that fact that there is only a thin metal stick underneath. Clever.”

Antony: “Yeah. The damage is hardly noticeable now.”

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Freshly repaired, PM700-302 returned to the android boxes, where it started downloading its next assignment.

Everything seemed in order again.

Surviving the Holidays - my sims moved in!

December 24. The morning of Christmas Eve.

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Since the day Hank had finalized the timetable, the snow had continually melted to the point where the streets were free today. Gavin Reed took that as an opportunity to show off his cold resistance, combining patroling the neighborhood with a jog.

This is actually his work task for the day. Because the scenario is bugged, I must not ever travel with my sims. Gavin therefore works in Military, Antony in Engineering, two jobs they can do from home.

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Meanwhile Antony Deckart quickly retreated into the main office, relieved not to have to interact with the detective yet. Between the “android lover” and the human supremacist stood not only their different worldviews, as of late Gavin had also started getting closer to Daniel, and with Daniel and Antony still (or once again) being as contrary as they had been when they had first met in august, Gavin was Antony’s enemy by association.

After checking on his patrol bots, the equipment officer put up a workbench and started tinkering with abandon.

Antony already knew that he had a Build your own Servo kit coming from Santa this year, in fact, he had taken it with him when he had left home this morning (still wrapped, of course). Now the man was preparing components that he’d need later.

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Gavin passed by Officer Orochi Person*. The woman smiled. Of course she would, Gavin thought. Everyone who had the day off themselves would smile when they spotted a less fortunate co-worker!

Next he saw a man dressed up as Kylon Ren, who sold wooden figurines. The wooden star to the far left looked vaguely christmas-y, so Gavin bought it. After how the detective had sabotaged old Ben last week, not to mention how creative he got to avoid having to chip in for the coffee, Orochi wouldn’t have believed Gavin would ever give to charity. But truth was, having disposable cash to throw around and doing some good felt good to Gavin - in exactly that order.

When Gavin returned to the police station, the reception area was empty. Antony had lit Rika’s and Chika’s advent wreath, but the girls themselves were absent, undergoing maintenance at a CyberLife store.

The men would have to put a patrol android to reception desk duty later, or take turns doing it themselves. Both were social persons, Gavin even moreso than Antony, but despite this he’d fight teeth and claws against manning the reception. To the proud detective being relegated to “Hello, my name is Gavin, how can I help you?” would be unbearable.

Angry at the very thought, the man marched down the hallway.

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Gavin hadn’t yet reached the public area’s Christmas Tree, when he heard Antony address him via the loudspeakers: “Could you stay right where you are and wait for the food delivery? I’m running a diagnosis here, can’t leave now. But I ordered spaghetti and clam chowder.”

“Weird combination, but I’ll take it”, Gavin replied into his walkie-talkie.

“Jokester”, Antony chuckled, secretly relieved that he seemed to get Gavin the office clown for his partner, when he had been anxious about getting partnerd with Gavin the office bully all the time. The detective could just as well insulted Antony for using the building’s cameras and speakers as his eyes and mouth, called him an A.I. or something. But he hadn’t done so. Maybe those three days wouldn’t turn out that bad, after all.

“Anyway, the courier should arrive any moment!”

*...Yes, that’s her surname. You’d think she’d be desperate to marry just to stop the jokes about it, but so far wasn’t interested.