New to Sims 3 - Looking for advice and information regarding my playstyle :)

CelSims

Hello every one.
I play Sims 4, my only experience of previous games was a weekend messing with Sims 3 at a friends house a few years ago, so I'm basically clueless.
I'm currently downloading Sims 3 base game. Assuming it works fine on my PC, I'm looking for information regarding what packs I may enjoy with how I usually play. If any one can answer the following I'd be grateful.

1. Is there any way to play off the grid and if so, which packs would help with that?
2. I play Occults so Supernatural is a given. In 4 I enjoy Jungle adventure so I'm assuming World Adventures is a good pick for me. Is there any thing in this pack which compliments occult play?

I'm not a fan of having party sims or sims that socialize a lot. I tend to have one sim starting rags to riches and build a family from there. My main sim tends to be self employed. I enjoy dystopian style builds and stories. Not for me the suburban 2 parents 2 kids perfect family, at least not until they've over come a lot of weird and challenging stuff on the way.
Any suggestions?

My last question is- mods. I know I'll be wanting Overwatch and Relativity. Is there any other must have mods to make sure the game plays smoothly?

Thank you for any answers for this very clueless player

Nikkei_Simmer

Go into NRAAS and download Overwatch and ErrorTrap. These are the two that will stabilize your game to the point where you can play for hours on the game without it crashing. Relativity allows you to control the speed of your game. I like long days so that my sims can get stuff done so I set my speed at 8 which would drive other players nuts who prefer a speedier game.

As far as Occults are concerned. Supernatural is the pack to beat. While Vampires (Sims 4) has the night-crawlers fleshed out more than Supernatural's vampires, you can't beat Sims 3 Supernatural for the amount of occults that you get in the pack. You get werewolves, fairies and witches. I prefer playing werewolves so I haven't really gotten into playing any of the other occults.

World Adventures has three vacation worlds, each a self-contained world that you have to travel to: Shang Sim La, Champs Les Sims and Al Simhara along with a number of tombs to explore in each world.

My suggestion to is to also get Ambitions, Seasons (if you don't want eternal summer in your game) and University Life. These are starters.

I started out in 2017 with a few packs...turns out two years later, I have all the expansion packs and they were well worth it. You will find the depth of gameplay in this game incredible. On top of that, we can and will throw you a lifeline if you have problems with your game. Don't hesitate to ask.

CelSims

Nikkei_Simmer wrote: »

Go into NRAAS and download Overwatch and ErrorTrap. These are the two that will stabilize your game to the point where you can play for hours on the game without it crashing. Relativity allows you to control the speed of your game. I like long days so that my sims can get stuff done so I set my speed at 8 which would drive other players nuts who prefer a speedier game.

I didn't know about ErrorTrap, thank you so much, looking at that one now.

InfraGreen

1. There isn't a true off-the-grid mode but people have been playing historical saves in TS3 for over a decade now, so there are definitely a lot of reskinned electronics that feel analog (regardless as to if you're "truly historial" or not). My recommendations are Danjaley and The Merrye Makers and the best of all, converting the laundry washtub from TS4 to TS3.

2. It's pretty nice to have a skilled witch who can fill hunger/hygiene/bladder while inside a tomb with sheer magic. Otherwise I haven't really noticed occults making that much of a difference with that specifically. The mummies that come with World Adventures have a few advantages and a lot of disadvantages for exploring tombs but it might be a fun challenge, especially because they're the most difficult occult to get IMO.

Karritz

If you have a post September 2012 Base Game and you play using Origin then you will can put your game into off line mode and then you should be able to play when you aren’t connected to the internet.

In addition to above recommendations, think about Late Night because it introduced vampires. But I rarely play vampires so I’m not a vampire expert.

After you install and launch Supernatural check if you can make a Genie in CAS. Originally we had to have both Supernatural and Showtime installed to get fully controllable genies. Genies have some extremely useful abilities.

Finally. If you want to have a look at some videos showing the World Adventures worlds I have a video series doing tomb walkthroughs. My channel link is in my signature and the videos you might be interested in are found in the playlist. The Isla Paradiso Bunch Playlist 2. That series playlist 1 is about their lives in Isla Paradiso.

Talking about Isla Paradiso, if you want mermaids you will need the Island Paradise expansion. You’ll get plant sims with University Life. Aliens come with Seasons.

If you get Mermaids you will find they most likely are missing their scales. I’ve got a simple tutorial showing how to fix that in my YouTube channel. It’s in the Tutorials Playlist.

You might find you need Master Controller and Master Controller Cheats Module from NRAAS.

Have fun. Happy Simming.

Mizzila1297

When it comes to mods, my personal must haves are pretty much all NRAAS mods... If you intend to play long-term, tons of generations, I highly suggest you get NRAAS Story Progression. There's a ton of NRAAS mods, so reading through the descriptions of them would give you a good idea of what things you want to edit/mod. That's how I picked a lot of mine

Playing mostly self-employed Sims, you shouldn't have any issues with maternity leave and such. Personally, I find it quite annoying that your Sims are required to take several days off from their work because they got pregnant, and then more time after the baby comes. I found a mod on MTS that disables maternity leave, which is really helpful for those shorter lifespans.

texxx78

@Mizzila1297 can i ask you why do you prefer nraas story progression over ea's? What's the difference?

Karritz

@texxx78 I use NRAAS Story Progression too.

At first I just put it into my mods folder and left it alone but over time I'm starting to change settings to solve issues or to change the way the game plays. It is a big and complicated set of programs if you get all of its modules as well as the main Story Progression mod.

It gives you access to so many controls it would be impossible to list them all here. You'd be better to go to the NRAAS site to have a read and see if it does things that you might like.

By default it is set to settings that most people apparently like and that's why I left it as I got it. But over time I've used it to fix things. There are pregnancy options I like to change and also I have the Hybrid mod as well and that gives me Story Progression Pregnancy options to control the number of hybrid types a newborn can have. I also use it to set the baby gender to random. With NRAAS SP the gender of newborns is set to balanced by default. I don't often like balanced because it keeps trying to balance the genders populating the world. If you have a lot of single elderly females, then with the balanced option all the babies born in the world will be boys until you either change it to Random or have get to the point where you have the same number of male and female sims in the world. And if your elderly females start dying you could start having only girl babies born. But the boys might be young adults or older before that happens.

I don't know if EA Story Progression has the gender of newborns set to balanced or random. But this is just one example of things you can set with it.

I originally got NRAAS Story Progression to solve issues in the game but it's been so long now I don't exactly remember which issues it fixes and which issues Overwatch fixes. I had Overwatch for a long time before I got Story Progression. I know there were sims vanishing from town. I got Master Controller to fix other issues such as family trees constantly breaking.

Kelvin

texxx78 wrote: »

Can i ask you why do you prefer nraas story progression over ea's? What's the difference?

I will leave the detailed answer for others who are far more experienced than I am with the Nraas story progression mod (and the extensive configurations it comes with) but this precious piece of gem is literally a game-changer; every sim living inside a world is being controlled directly by the mod, they will go on and live their own lives independently (getting a promotion/demotion, a new romantic interest, more kids, new investment in local businesses and all kinds of other things generating many other exciting anecdotes) while you are busy tending to your own household’s needs and shenanigans.

You will feel that the community is ever so vibrant with activities that the whole town no longer evolves around your household solely; for example, “I need to find a boyfriend for Diane asap before all men got into a steady relationship with other townies!” Because with SP installed, you will soon find it almost impossible to find hot local singles to hit on.

But to sum up one key difference between EA’s story progression and that of Nraas’ briefly: EA’s simply doesn’t do 💩 in comparison where sims just get old and die.

texxx78

Thanks you @Karritz and @Kelvin . I think i'll try nraas story progression and see if i like it better. I have just started redescovering sims 3 and haven't realized how ea's story progression works... i did notice that my sim's 2 sisters that left the house as young adults are now elders and didn't get married or had kids

CelSims

@InfraGreen The cc you linked is so pretty, I'll be downloading those for sure. Thank you very much for including the links.

@Karritz Thanks, I'll check out your channel! I have no clue what can even be done in ts3 so hopefully that will give me ideas

Sounds like I need to get the story progression mod also. I thought that TS3 had this already but it seems its very basic from what you guys are saying.

Woah I ended up downloading a few more NRAAS when I saw the list. Thank you guys!

As far as packs go, I just got Supernatural and have the others mentioned noted for when I see another sale.

Karritz

@CelSims I push my computer and my game well beyond it's limits in my YouTube videos but I'm sure you'll get some ideas if you watch some of my stories. They are cumulative and each episode follows on from the earlier episodes. I've been playing since June 2009 and still haven't managed to do everything this game has for us. I started trying to complete badges a few years ago in order to find new things that can be done in the game and some of my video series are set around my attempts to complete the badges. I find doing them is a great way to learn about new ways of playing and new things that can be done in the game.

I didn't start using mods or 3rd party Custom Content in my games until late 2014. Most of my new sims have custom skins and a lot have custom hair too.

If you download the NRAAS Cupcake mod it will restock your bakery items each night. That is helpful because the game deletes all of your baked goods from the bakery storage items each night. The bakery is purchased store content. The reason I mention it is if you happen to download the Cupcake mod from NRAAS and put it into your mods folder, and you don't have the bakery set installed at the time, then your game will crash every time you try to launch it. The fix is to remove Cupcake mod until after you've installed the bakery set.

There is a list of store items that need to be installed first when installing them or they will never appear in your game. This thread will be of great assistance to you if you do decide to start getting store content.

https://forums.thesims.com/en_US/discussion/866577/how-to-install-store-items/p1

My Studio on the Exchange has a few builds but I use lots of store content and I have all the stuff packs and expansion packs and whatever I have at the time goes into my builds. I stopped putting things onto the Exchange after I started adding mods and custom content to my game as I didn't want to risk something attaching itself to one of my builds. There are some fairies there if you are looking for ready made sims. I give all of my fairies the last name of Flower so I can identify them easily.

If you make a sim you want to keep for future games, and I have kept over 800 of them and use them often, then you can easily convert them to Sims3Pack files which you can back up somewhere safe and later on install into future Sims 3 folders using the launcher. You just click the Share Button when the sim is on the clipboard in Edit Town mode. The file goes to the Exports folder in your Sims 3 folder and you can pick it up from there and keep it safe.

I've got sims I made in June 2009 and I still play with them, or at least have them in my games as townies. I like to use player made worlds and often there are no sims in them so I add my own sims from my huge sim 'library'.

Mostly have fun. If you enjoy this game it'll keep you finding new things for a really really long time.

Happy Simming