Facebook The Sims Social Tips and Tricks

Facebook The Sims Social Tips and Tricks by Luggage

Well, I was a closed Beta tester for The Sims, and thought I’d write down a list of tips, tricks, help and information. I don’t want to duplicate the FAQ or online tutorial, etc, and have glossed over those areas. And .. if anyone wants to write something more detailed, feel free to use this information.
Note that this is relevant to the last version of the closed beta, and it may have changed, so if its wrong, don’t blame me!

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The facebook version of The Sims is basically a game where you build your house by purchasing rooms & indoor/outdoor decorations for your property. Your Sim has basic needs that must be kept up or your Sim will not obey you. Your Sim has various challenges that s/he can complete as well – missions, building furniture, and raising up skills (Cooking, Painting, etc). And of course there is the friendship/romance from The Sims as well – this time with your friends.

Your Sim can have 1 of 7 different types of personalities. You can change it during the game, but it will cost you simcash. Each Personality has its own special action, which will work depending on the personality of the other sim. The sim also has its own special action that it will often do when idle. The starting equipment in your house is also dependent on your personality choice (i.e get a basic computer instead of a typewriter, but both cost similar, so no real difference). Certain chat actions are more effective against different personalities too. Apart from all that, there is no real difference for choosing a certain personality over another – there are no jobs in this game, so my guess is to pick which you prefer.

Primarily, your aim is to become inspired so you can get bonus cash from raising skills. To achieve this, you will need to raise your Sim’s needs (Social, Fun, Hunger, Hygiene, Bladder, Sleep), until they are all in the green.

***IMPORTANT TIP***
Look carefully at the bottom of your posts, especially when inviting friends. There is a checkbox there which is automatically ticked, and states ‘Don’t ask before sending The Sims Social requests to XXXXX.’ This means that you won’t be seeing facebook messages pop up when sending requests, so don’t think that it isn’t working because you don’t see a popup box.

TIP: You will not become inspired until the last reward icon dropped has been collected. E.g. Say you only need to raise sleep to become inspired. So, take a nap. However, your sim will not enter the Inspired status until you click on the green smiley face generated from sleeping (or the game automatically collects it). The coins and experience dropped do not need to be collected immediately.

Traits:
As you play, your sim can have up to six different Traits. Traits are bought using Lifetime points, which are acquired when mastering skill levels of skill objects. E.g. Paint on the Easel until you finish a line. A golden icon of a paintbrush will appear when you finish the last portion of the line.

TIP: As with the tip above, the game will not register you having completed a line until the golden paintbrush icon is collected. So if you want to unlock a new line, you need to collect the icon first.

Once you have enough Lifetime points, you can purchase traits. If you wish to, you can also swap out a trait, and purchase a new trait (you don’t lose the level of the original trait, but it does cost you Lifetime Points to swap traits).

Traits and their usefulness:
TIP: If your toilet is broken and you don’t want to spend energy to repair it, simply visit a friend and use theirs.

Slob – Mainly useful for amusement purposes. Yes, they don’t care about personal hygiene, but … that doesn’t help the sim become inspired. The amusements are at lvl 3 when the Sim uses the shower / bath as a hygiene AND a toilet booster (you really don’t want to know!), or lvl 5 where the sim can eat from a trashcan.

Steel Bladder – Who cares? Spend a free action at your house, or at a friend’s if yours is broken. If you dislike having to raise your bladder need then buy it.

Neat – Average. Bonuses include your sim automatically washing it’s hands after using the toilet (save a click). Raises fun as well when cleaning. I’m not sure, but at Lvl 4, polishing may lengthen the time between objects getting dirty.

SuperMechanic – Useless. So what if you repair faster? It doesn’t affect anything in the game at present.

Insane – Useless normally, but decent if you only have or want a few friends. Reduces the need for social. You can also use the telephone to raise social.

Ogre – Useful & Amusing. You get ‘burp’ (and possibly ‘fart’) negative actions with other sims. The bonus is that you don’t need to bother to spend energy to clean items.

Ninja – Useful trait. You walk faster, run or teleport about the place. Very useful if your house is large.

Great Kisser – Useful trait. Means you can kiss earlier in the relationship without negative repercussions.

Night Owl – Useless. Like Steel Bladder.

Special Ingredients:
Here are a few special ingredients and tips on how to obtain them (other than requesting friends).

Fury: You need to give rude chat lines to friends and insult them for a chance to obtain this. You might find that certain actions work better against differing personalities. The slobs ‘burp’ action tends to work fairly well to generate fury. Yes, your relationship level will drop, but you can soon raise it again.

TIP: I have found that it is useful to make enemies out of certain friends simply to generate fury. You also get a large range of amusing pranks that you can play on them.

TIP: Since Bella is a NPC, you cannot send her requests to raise or lower relationships, so you might as well abuse her as much as you want.

Goodwill – The opposite of fury, this is obtained by giving nice chat lines to a friend. Same rules apply.

Love: You don’t need to be in a relationship to obtain this – you simply need to do an action together with a friend – e.g. watch tv together.

Bling – Once you have finished building an object, post a message on your wall, and your friends can collect Bling from the post.

Other Tips:

An item with a hammer sign in the top right corner is a buildable item – you will need to gather parts or ingredients before you can finish the item and use it. If need be, simply put the unfinished item in storage until you have all the parts needed to avoid wasting space.

To cook at a stove, the sim will need an empty counter top to prepare the food on.

Your sim will always use the newest item unless broken or dirty. E.g. You install a sink in the kitchen. Then, when your sim has wants to wash it’s hands, it will use the sink in the kitchen. This means that if your sim is in the bathroom, it will walk across the entire house to reach the kitchen, which takes a lot of time, so not a good idea. You can prevent this by clicking on the ‘use’ of the sink in the bathroom, say, instead of just clicking on the need icon down below.

Once you reach a skill level and unlock a new skill item, it’s a good idea to purchase that new item and start finishing lines on that new item. This gives you a larger choice of skill options to raise, and prevents getting stuck if you don’t have a certain ingredient needed to unlock a skill line.

In certain missions (e.g. Joining the IQ club), you are required to perform an action several times, but once you perform it once at your house, it is greyed out. Well, rather than having to buy it with cash, or ask from friends, you just need to visit a friend and perform the same action there. E.g. Daydream – the action can only be done once in each house (or maybe in each chair??) In any case, you get the idea.

You can place outdoor items indoors if you wish, and indoor items outside. There is no need to buy rooms, however you obviously cannot hang pictures up outside.

In the top right corner of your screen are 6 little icons. With these you can zoom in and out, and choose to display the walls of your house or not. This is useful if a wall is in the way of something.

As one objective of the game is to raise the value of your property, remember that you can also wallpaper and decorate the outside of your home. Simply show all the walls, and separate rooms from each other, decorate, and put back together.

When you level up, you gain max energy, so watch your experience. When you get close, and you are low on energy, try to use freebie energy packs (coffee cup, choc bar, etc from your backpack (under craft)) one by one and using them until you level up.

Talking about that … sending free energy to friends and back is very useful for extra energy. Also posting is good (though spammy), you get about 30 rewards per day that you can pick up from posts, which if all simoleons adds up. And remember that you have a limit of 15 (I think) of each, so keep using them if you have a lot of friends.

Tips and Tricks by Tarasayswoof

Some of these are posted elsewhere so not all mine

Traits
Insanity is your best friend (also makes you your own best friend )
Level 2 (the second bar) removes the need for spending energy on social interactions, since you can now talk to the plants when your at your own home…this is the #1 trait to get purely for this reason

Objects
Placing rugs under your toilet/shower etc will stop puddles forming so you never need to clean them up!

Can I start over?
No not at this time….you’ll have to roll with what you have…

Do I have to buy Simcash items to improve my Skills?
No – there are other options as you improve what skills you have, with what you have to get a new skill item…altho the cash items might make your life easier…

I have a lot of trouble with quests/relationships/other bugging out
This game is still in Beta – This means its not finished and still has bugs – deal with it – they are getting fixed slowly but surely!

To minimise having to repair items in your house
Always go to a neighbour and hang out there to keep your Sims needs up to date – you can’t break/dirty friends house items (and therefore not your own either!) This will also help keep your Sim out of the black with your needs – to a point…

Keep an eye on when you’re going to level up!
Make sure you keep your energy low or at 0 – if you forget to look and level up with a full energy bar – that’s 15 energy lost! :/

There is a limit on requests!
This includes sending ‘thank yous’! You can only send around 100 (I hear – I haven’t counted but have hit the wall on this) requests / day before you will get a popup saying you have reached the limit – keep this in mind. There is also a limit on Wall posts you can collect / Friend – I though it was total but seems per friend, since I can get the “You cant handle any more gifts” message on 1 friend but not on the next…

As above – you can use the same friend for requests every 4 hours or so – but found that sometime they can only send back 2 of however many requests you sent – this does vary however..(bug?)

Use the SEARCH function here in the Forums!
I am guilty as anyone for not doing so – but the answer your looking for is probably here already – so use it! This will stop the 100’s of exactly the same posts/questions being asked over and over – making the Mods life easier and things that need attention easier to identify for them (which will get things fixed/addressed faster).. this is something we all want…

Pay attention to what you are doing ingame!
There are a few traps such as the clothing shop/buying by mistake – selling items and so on that are easy to get caught with – so slow down and look before you click!

Send and request energy!
Since you need a lot – send energy as gifts and also request from your friends when you run out (keep in mind the request limit noted above) but doing this will help a lot – especially early on in the game!

How do I get the FREE stuff?
Go here: http://forum.playfish.com/showthread.php?t=2529376
You’ll have to “Like” the Fan page 1st if you can’t se the page..(if it doesnt load/white screen – scroll right to the bottom of the page and check the language setting)..

Make sure there is a free square in between items such as furniture
Even though you may have 2 items on a diagonal from one another (corner to corner) – Sims cant walk though the gap between the corners of said items even though it looks like they can. This will become more apparent once you house gets more and more cluttered

Money
The fastest way to make money is by improving your skills – thats it – the more energy you spend on them the more maey you get faster – however always make sure you are inspired before performing skill tasks – so you get the bonus! Yes you can farm or w/e but that doesn’t help you get to better items that give you more money when using skills/energy on them so…

Tips by Nicholaus Cjj

Like the title, I will tell you some tips and some tricks. Here we go!

Part 1 – Money

Trick 1 – Plant all day long.
Start having less money but lotof energy? Go plant strawberries! Cost 6$ for 30$ every 5 minutes. It means your profit each minute every time you plant it on one field…

= (30$-6$) / 5minutes
[Actual profit is the total you get minus the total loss]/[duration of planting]
= 24$ / 5 minutes
= 1.2 $/minutes
Now on the start you have 4 fields, make your profit per minutes to 4.8 $/minutes!!!

And now the calculation of energy!
Started by 15.
Used 4, 1 of each fields.
Gain 1 every 5 minutes.
So, every you pick the plant, the calculation will at least like this.
15 – 4 + 1 = 13 -> First session
13 – 4 + 1 = 10 -> Second
10 – 4 + 1 = 7 -> Third
7 – 3 = 5 -> Fourth
5 – 3 = 2 -> Fifth

So you can do planting 5 times if you have 15 energies. This will lead you to gain…
= Number of Session (NoS) * Profit per Minutes (PpM)
= 5 * 4.8 $/minutes
= 24 $/minutes

Duration you plant for 5 session = NoS * Duration per Session (DpS)
= 5 * 5 minutes
= 25 minutes
Total you gain = DpS * PpM
= 5 minutes * 24 $/minutes
= 120$
So, you’ll gain 120$ every 25 mins!

Tips –
1. While you waiting you can do other things like browsing other tabs.
2. Other plants won’t work if you want to gain money fast. Faster = More profit.

Trick 2 – The Advantage of having an enemies.
You got your friend be your enemies? No worries. It means that you’ll get more money! Every time your enemies do something to you (Place fake spider, Pee on your plant, Prank Call, Steal Food, etc), you’ll get money, with chance of getting Goodwill!
Tips – You can ask one of your friend or more to be your enemy(ies). Ask them too to spend all the bonus energies to do it.

Trick 3 – Be an artist.
This trick works quite well, or i can say Sudden-Big-Profit. But you’ll need to be a bit experienced.
Start by buying Easel. Make yourself Inspired, then do paint lot of times. Get clean collection. When your energy runs out, visit friends and spend all the bonus energies, then back to Make yourself Inspired. Do this until you have enough materials to make cleaning collection. Before you use, make sure your energy bar is LESS than 12. This to prevent waste of bonus 3 energies. You also get 120$, too!
Tips – You REALLY need to make yourself inspired. Why? Two reasons.
1. To get extra bonus.
2. Everytime you fulfill your Hygiene needs, you’ll get a chance to take cleaning materials.

Part 2 – Mood

Trick 1 – The Advantage of having neighbor
Have a broken things at your home that makes you can’t fulfill the needs? It’s easy. Just go to your neighbor’s home and do all the things you need.

Trick 2 – Inspired all day long without feel tired.
Going AFK? Want to make sure your ‘TSS’ tab open with perfect mood, but you didn’t have any energy? It’s simple. Go to your friend’s home, don’t move your cursor so the ‘AUTONYM’ will work by itself. Now enjoy watching your sim filling the social-needed, FOR FREE.
Tips –
1. This won’t work if you want to raise your relationship.
2. You can use this advantage to gain money.
Example – For the Money Trick 1, you can go plant, go to your friend’s place, wait for 4 minutes (make sure your social need has full), do all the things until you’re Inspired, go to your home, wait a bit, pick the strawberries, with freshness bonus and Inspired.

Part 3 – More tips.
1. NEVER make any potion that granted instant Inspired / green (Instant clean, fun, etc). You waste your material just for that while you can afk on your friend’s home and browsing for a while, while your sim slowly reach inspired status.
2. Keep socialized with your friend. Remember that the key of success playing this game, the most important one is having a friend. And make sure they’re active. If they’re not active, it’s ok. But more active is better.
3. Do quest. About the material is the second. You need to do quest for unlocking items.
4. Always check your friend’s wall. Helping your friends may grant you items that you need.

I think that’s all for now. I’ll make sure it’s update. Correct Me If I am Wrong. Thanks

*Another tips – Explore forums. Find useful Tips and Tricks.

Tip To Get Rid of Water Puddles Once and For All

 If you place a rug under the bathroom fixture like (Shower, sink, toilet, etc…) it will never get water puddles if it ever breaks. I checked and the water does not even go under the rug. So, you will never have to mop a water puddle again.