I have a problem.
When I plop down in front of my computer every few months for my regular Sims binge, the part I always look forward to the most is building. I love building houses, I always have. At this point, creating and playing with a family isn’t the point of the game, it’s just the vehicle with which I create countless homes.
Not a problem, you might think. Enjoying the original point of the Sims series (seriously, it was originally designed to be an architectural/interior design program – the dollhouse part of it happened sort of organically), where’s the harm in that?
The housing crises I create aren’t based on mortgages or resources. They are based solely on the fact that I build too many. If I had to guess, I’d say that an average sims family, controlled by yours truly, will own at least four houses in their overall playtime. Like some real-life people, I have had countless families adopt the “move into a fixer-upper and make it beautiful” attitude. It all goes wrong after I’ve been playing in the same file for a decent amount of time.
For me, the average sims family starts off with one to three sims, rarely growing beyond four or five. Naturally, this doesn’t leave these eager first-time home-buyers with a lot of simoleons at their disposal (the game starts you off with §20 000 minimum for a 1 sim family, adding an additional amount per family member). Of course, there aren’t many houses that fit that budget from the get-go. In my architectural/interior design fervor, I snap up the cheap lots and demolish them, making way for something completely different.
Of course, none of these poor families have nearly enough money to fund my modern house mania, so they inevitably end up with wealth that is soon squandered on creating buildings with an excessive number of windows.
Like a lot of Sims enthusiasts, I like to work from real blueprints, though I’ve gotten into watching other players’ build videos and either attempting to recreate their house or working with their idea to create my own thing. It’s a bit tricky, at times, considering real blueprints work with metres or feet. In Sims, you’ve got your nondescript grid. This often winds up with houses being too big or small. If I’m working from a video or blueprint, the house can often take me at least three hours to complete. By the time I’m finished that, it’s often quite late and my desire to actually play with the original family has vanished.
Thus, we arrive at the biggest problem. Eventually, I reach a point where I’ve destroyed almost all of the original houses in the game and find myself swamped in houses that, on average, cost almost §90 000.* The irony of this is that, most of the time, I’ll spend ages building a house only to move the family occupying it into a new lot, create a different family, then bulldoze the original lot to build something completely different.
I promise that I treasure almost every house I build and that I’m not treating them as disposable entities to satisfy my muse.
I totally am, though.
It’s like I’ve forgotten about those poor pixelated people with a bank account that just can’t support the kind of real estate market that I’m creating. To be honest, I hadn’t actually played with families in-depth for so long that it took the free update that brought toddlers into The Sims 4 that made me actually sit down and just play the goddamn game.
That being said, in going hunting for screenshots for this post, I rekindled the urge to build more. So, I’ll be off to do a bit more of that.
*This was based on the average cost of 27 of my houses in my current game. The exact figure was §88 372.
Here’s a gallery of more screenshots for your perusal:
juliameadows 