Strange Days of Uncle Jack: Alien Technology and How to Deal With Glitches

As far as the challenge is concerned, Alien Technology is completely optional. And certainly in some instances, it can be quite tricky to lift. Check out The Think Tank - who has time to do all of that at University? Who would even want to try?

You should. If your founder has a Science degree, you should absolutely try and lift Alien Technology. It is rare and hard because it is probably the most powerful restriction in the game. It is all about the lifetime rewards. Note that all of them have some other restriction as well, but regardless they are extremely powerful.

How powerful? Compare Criminal to Master Thief. If your opinion on these restrictions even slightly compares to mine, then you'd have to concede that Master Thief was much stronger - indeed, the only real reason to clear Criminal is access to a better bed.

But if you have already lifted Alien Technology, then it becomes a much closer choice. It will all hinge on how many LTR points you have - specifically, whether you can afford a Moodlet Manager or not. If you can, or if you will be able to soon - perhaps you've almost lifted Symphonic, or you are about to finish a LTW - then Criminal may well be the best bet. Consider:

• Master Thief is not valued so much for its own immediate effects - those are really just "can skip work without getting fired" which is, admittedly, useful if you're using Generations - but rather because it unlocks the ability to effectively choose your next job. So you can go after Culinary, or Medical, for example.
• But Criminal means you can buy a Moodlet Manager, which in turn means that Culinary and Medical are much less valuable lifts! Anyone of teen or older age simply zaps themselves with the Moodlet Manager whenever they get tired, or hungry, or lonely, or stressed, or dirty, or need to go to the bathroom.

You never have to sleep, you never have to eat, you don't even have to worry about Fun or Social if you don't want to. And that's just one of the rewards that Alien Technology allows. There is also the Collection Helper (invaluable if you're going to lift Naturalist), the Motive Mobile (the best argument to play with Generations, or at least the second best if you like bunk beds), and many more. Alien Technology is worth your investment. Don't get distracted by the "optional" nature; if you see an alien visit your lot, or if you find your founder has to pursue a Science degree, make the attempt. It will pay great dividends eventually. There's a reason whenever some new feature is added to the game and the challenge needs to be adapted, that one of the first proposals for anything awesomely powerful is to put it under Alien Technology. That's where the awesome stuff is.

Anyway, Harold is ready to move out now. He has 19000 LTR points, which is not enough to buy any new Alien Technology objects, so I just kick him out.

Proceeding with the plan, Ivy gets his first game at the sports arena. She has Athletics 10, spent the previous day preparing for the game (at a cost of a promotion for the day), and has a reasonable relationship with her team mates - she even got to the game early to prep. So she should win easily:

One of the things you have to get used to in the Sims is that no incarnation of it has ever been bug free. Since inception, Sims 3 has had the promotion after midnight bug for the Criminal career; since the introduction of "multibuildings" this Athletics bug has existed. Multibuildings are the buildings that were introduced in an early expansion to make better use of town space; they are a single building that fulfils multiple careers. Specifically here is the Crestville School and Stadium, which combines the School and the Stadium.

Most multibuildings work fine. The only disadvantage is they count as one building for the purposes of real estate, so there are less buildings for your Sim families to buy (assuming you've lifted Business and, if you want to buy it outright, Politics). But if you combine the Stadium with any other building, then you will always lose every game that your professional athletes play there.

The general rule with the Apocalypse challenge is that any reasonable amount of "cheating" is allowed to fix bugs. This is a glitch I was in fact previously aware of, but neglected to check for when I set up the game. So what I'm going to do is destroy this building and place a school and a stadium separately:

I bulldozed this, and then went into Buy/Build and found "Community Objects":

There are two stadiums; I chose the Llama Memorial, but you can have Llama Co if you prefer:

Go back out to Edit Town, and set the lot type to "Visitors Allowed". Give it a name:

Ignore the warning that it has a special building on it. It will work fine.

For the school, there was a deeper problem - there are no empty lots to place it on. So the first thing to do is rectify that. In Appaloosa, there is a blank spot behind the stadium that looks like it will hold a school, so I go to World Editor and place a 50x25 square there:

Change the type to "Visitors Allowed" and place one of the schools there, same principle as the stadium. I went with the Community School for the Gifted.

I haven't noticed any specific bugs with any other multibuildings, but I wouldn't be at all surprised to find they exist. Use a similar technique if you encounter them.

Now, when you do this, you may well find that you lose your job:

Remember: we're allowed to cheat, within reason, to fix glitches. Ivy was a Rookie with about 70% of her bar filled. If you have Master Controller, here's how to restore that. Click on the Sim, select Nraas->Master Controller->Intermediate:

Select Career->Choose Job:

Find the job you want and select the tick button. Then select the Sim again, to bring up the Career menu. This type, select "Level", and pick the level you were at. Finally, do the same thing and select Job Performance, and then set it to whatever your bar was at, roughly (I'm conservatively selecting 50). You should end up with something like this:

If you're lucky, it will even remember your team mates and restore those as well (it partially did for me).

Now, I know anyone reading this blog would never do anything like this, but let me stress just for completeness: this is not a licence to cheat. If your Apocalypse goes south and you find yourself in danger of losing, don't cheat. Do the best you can. In a tournament you're allowed a certain number of cheats to save things (it just costs you points); play honestly. These techniques (and Master Controller in general; Pescado's AwesomeMod has similarly powerful abilities) can obviously trivialise any game if you use them like that, but you're not going to have much fun if you play something challenging and cheat as soon as it starts to get hard. I've gone on at length here to show you what to do to fix glitches, and I'm sure it will be taken in that spirit.

As expected, once we have a stadium on its own, things are very different:

Nothing has changed except the building; if anything, her relationship with her teammates is actually slightly worse. A bit later I get the Motive Mobile which is really good for getting promoted quickly (since you always arrive at work with full mood) - the Moodlet Manager will have to wait for Criminal.

Anyway, pushing on, eventually:

As you can see, I have lifted Athletic, Espionage, Journalism and Gamer. It is day 141 of the challenge. It's not quite time for the next generation though - I said before that I was going for the Copious Librarian and Admirable Adonis prestige options.

NOTE: at the time of writing, there is some dispute here about how these work. For the purposes of this blog, I am assuming that the restrictions are lifted already, and that the prestige stuff is effectively just extra points.

Ivy (the athlete) has 20 days to go until she becomes an elder. While (as you can see) she has completed all the challenges, she has not yet trained anyone and must train 30 Sims 10 hours each. That's a total of 300 hours; not really enough time until she becomes an adult to do this. Also neither Karen nor Lilandra have Athletics 10 yet.

Karen (the journalist) has completed all writing challenges except Speed Writer (and she's close to that, with $28568 of $30000 needed). She has read 97 books, and will easily make the 100 book requirement. But my collection of books stands at a pitiful 19 - I need 100.

Abandon the prestige? Well, I'm not ready to roll over. Having lifted Espionage, Military, Politics, and Symphonic, I am allowed to travel to foreign lands. Having also lifted Business, I can buy a house there. This immediately lends itself to a strategy. Since time stands still while on a World Adventure, I can make use of the extra time to train more Sims (foreign Sims, most likely, after James, Karen, and Lilandra are trained). Since I'll need to increase the amount of time I can stay, I can have James explore tombs and complete quests. We'll tackle that next time.