I have decided to start over on the Build a City Challenge, because I realized there were several things I had done wrong because I neglected to read through the results entirely. I found the spreadsheet very helpful, which is all well and good, but I guess I had been relying on it too heavily because I found that there were some things I had not done properly because I was only reading the spreadsheet.
I have modified Purzel’s BACC spreadsheet a little bit, adding a couple of details from Purzel’s Build a City Challenge Rules, as well as making a couple of small additions. On Google Drive, here: Calendula’s Sims 4 Build a City Challenge Spreadsheet
I really don’t want to play knowing I haven’t followed the rules; it’s antithetical to my personality. Here are some of the things I didn’t know or am going to do differently.
- Strangerville is a terrible place to start. The rules actually disallow it as a “Special World”, it just wasn’t in the spreadsheet. Don’t do as I have done. Strangerville in particular is very small and thus limiting, it requires certain lots for the story to function, and infected sims are only fun for about 5 minutes. Also there’s a general lack of collectibles or other world resources.
- All careers require that you have at least 5 households. This wasn’t mentioned in the spreadsheet.
- Stalls require Henford-on-Bagley and Townies. This was in the spreadsheet already, I just missed it.
- Joker unlocks and skipping didn’t make sense to me at first, but after reading Purzel’s rules in more details, I realized that I can’t just unlock Bars with a joker because they require a career which itself requires a skill. Had the skill requirement been previously unlocked, it would work.
- I wasn’t looking carefully enough and missed that many of the unlocks are career based and not skill based. This means there are multiple steps involved, and so careers itself is really a priority before most of the unlocks can be achieved.
Other things I would do differently:
- When you live off-grid, gathering water helps a ton. I didn’t do this early on and should have.
- Fish all the time. I was already giving all my sims a home-based income source (Writing, Painting, Gardening, Juicing, etc.). What I didn’t realize is that earning extra money early on is super important. Fishing pays off much faster than any others, and so makes a good activity for any sim who has nothing better to do.
- Every sim should have a bike or broom.
- Every household that wants to travel abroad needs a sim with maxed Photography, so most households should plan for this.
- The community center is a major resource and should be taken advantage of.
- I had added a bunch of fields to my population sheet, but found them to be cumbersome to look at. Most of these I will be moving to this blog. I left a couple of them, in particular “Bonus traits”.
- I need a better way to track the details for each sim on a page dedicated to them, so I can refer back. I will use tags for this, for easy navigation.
The main thing I plan to change:
- Read the rules.