Here are some things I've discovered while playing the game:
- You can only affect the NAP and community space in a neighborhood you live in. I have a sim in Grim's Quarry and she was able to influence the community space to become a community garden, but the other two community spaces in the other two neighborhoods are still the generic community space, and she can't influence them to become anything unless she moves there.
- The first NAP I influenced to get passed in her neighborhood was the Self-Sufficiency one. Now we earn so much influence, just taking care of her garden (every planting, every weeding, every watering, every harvesting, every spraying for bugs, for each individual plant, earns 2 influence points), plus extras for the woodwork she's making to increase her handiness skill, plus fishing (2 influence points for each time you go fishing, not dependent on how many fish you catch).
- If you are in the Civil Engineer career, you'll get an Electronic Drafting Tablet when you reach level 2. Using this builds logic as you draft blueprints. We're only on level 3 of the career and logic 2, so everything she drafts comes out poor quality (the blueprint appears in your personal inventory when it's done and you can hover for quality information like lots of other things). You can "Present Concept To" other sims while interacting, they'll give you feedback and you can go back onto the drafting tablet and modify the concept to increase its quality. So far, I've only gotten from poor to okay, but I suspect that as we go up in career level / logic skill level, her concepts will grow in quality. You can also only present & modify your concepts once. When you're happy with it (or just have one and the timer's ticking down on your work tasks), click on the mailbox to submit your concept to Innovative Solutions Corp. You'll hear back within a day whether their concept was accepted, so far with only poor and okay, none of them have been approved, so I'm not sure what happens yet if something is approved.
- The new harvestable for the pack is soybeans. They're in season for summer and fall. You can collect wax from the plants year-round, but only during summer and fall can you harvest the beans. (Boy did that take me forever to learn! I was trying all sorts of things to try to get the wild soy plants around the neighborhood to let me harvest beans, but once the season hit summer, boom there they were!) You can use the wax for candles, I'm assuming you can probably use the beans for cooking? Maybe it'll cut down the cost of dishes like tofurkey?
- Recycling is really easy. 99% of the time, I catch my sim before she washes her dishes and cancel the interaction, then put the dirty dishes into her inventory (which never seems to bother her). Nearly anything you can have in your inventory (personal *and* household!) can be put in the recycler (there's one on each of the 3 community space lots) to turn into bits & pieces. Taking trash and dishes that your sim naturally creates throughout the day and putting it in your inventory instead gives you lots of "free" bits & pieces. Plus digging around in the dumpsters on the generic community space lots gets you lots of free things you can then recycle.
- I couldn't find a fabricator on any of the community space lots and since my sim couldn't afford one (but needed to acquire an eco fabrication part for work), I just went into modify world and added one to another neighborhood's community space, so she can just travel there and use it when she needs to make the parts (or anything else). I believe if you influence your neighborhood's community space into a maker space, you'll have one there.
- Hovering over items in the B&B catalog gives you information about anything eco footprint, along where you get the other information for objects, such as comfort level or reliability. Some items note that they're a bill reduction item.
- I am assuming that, like comfort (for example) ratings go from 0-10 with 10 being best, power / water consumption ratings work the same way, with 10 being best (uses the least power / water) and lower numbers using more.
And now, I also have a question:
- My sim's neighborhood's eco footprint is currently green, but every time I hover over it, it shows the arrow pointing toward industrial, and it often goes back down into neutral. I've gone into the other residences in the neighborhood and made sure they had at least some eco green items in them, and we've passed the Green Initiatives in Grim's Quarry NAP, and yet the eco footprint still wants to trend toward neutral. I don't know how to get it to go up and stay up!
