malymin: A wide-eyed tabby catz peeking out of a circle. (Default)
2025-07-06 05:19 pm
Entry tags:

Making Spreadsheets for fun and profit

Trying to finagle a way to make a more considered version of this guide... it seems some of the information I got from the Sims Wiki was... inaccurate? Or at the very least outdated.

Hmmm.

EDIT:

Current analysis suggests that, in the base game, every possible 'special' grafting combination can be held within a minimum space of:

  • two 2x2 garden planters, which each hold four small plants or one tree (eight plants)
  • three 1x1 garden pots, which each hold one small plant or tree (one plant, two trees)
  • total number of squares occupied: 11

With the vertical planters (which are very space efficient, but cannot hold snapdragons, lilies, or orchids) from Eco Lifestyle:

  • four 1x1 vertical planters, which each hold two small plants (seven plants + one free slot)
  • four 1x1 garden pots (two plants, two trees)
  • total number of squares occupied: 8

The wiki claims that Dragon Fruit can't be held in vertical planters, but this seems to be...wrong?


Further notes.

In my original post, I claimed that growth rate influences how often product is generated. This is untrue - it was true in old builds on the game, but in the modern version of the game all plants produce product at 5 am every morning, regardless of growth rate. It may still have some influence on how long a plant takes to mature, though.

In an outdoor garden, with Seasons installed, the optimal grafts (listing the "base" plant first, and the "donating" plant second) for max production days are:

  • Snapdragon (Spring/Fall) + Strawberry (Spring) = Dragon Fruit
  • Snapdragon (Spring/Fall) + Dragon Fruit (Fall) = Cow Berry
  • Snapdragon (Spring/Fall) + Lily (Summer) = Orchid
  • Orchid (Spring/Winter) + Pomegranate (Winter) = Death Flower
  • Bluebells (Spring/Summer) + Strawberry (Spring) = Grapes
  • Rose (Spring/Fall) + Grapes (Fall) = Bonsai Buds
  • Sage (All Seasons) + Basil (Summer, Fall) = Parsley
  • Chrysanthemum (Summer/Fall) + Tulip (Spring) = Bird of Paradise
  • Lemon (All Seasons) + Pear (Fall/Winter) = Plantain

Additional notes:

  • For an indoor garden with vertical planters, the first two snapdragon recipes should be reversed.
  • Daisies (Spring) and Strawberries (Spring) are basically interchangeable in their grafting recipe.
  • Apples (Fall) and Cherries (Summer) are both active for one season each, though Cherries have a slower growth rate.

Finally, the following base game plants are neither components nor products of any splicing "recipes":

  • Summer: Tomato, Blackberry
  • Fall: UFO Fruit
  • Fall/Winter: Onion
  • Winter: Spinach, Potato
  • Spring/Fall: Carrot, Mushroom
  • All Seasons: Trash Fruit, Growfruit, Forbidden Fruit of the Plantsim, Wolfsbane
malymin: Duck from Princess Tutu, as a duck. (duck)
2025-03-01 01:30 pm
Entry tags:

The people the Sims won't let you make.

One thing about the Sims franchise is that it has always been pretty aggressively abelist?

Mostly an ableism of absence. I can't make a blind sim, a deaf sim, or a sim who uses a wheelchair, or any number of other physical disabilities. Walking canes exist, but only elderly sims are allowed to use them, and even for them it's purely aesthetic. I struggle to find a way to represent developmental disability, or traumagenic illness. Sims, more often than not, feel deeply allistic to me as an autistic person, no matter what traits I give them to try to model how I or other autistic people think. You can't really make any kind of plural sim, at all - but then again, I don't trust the Sims to handle that.

Because the Sims also has a pretty bad history of making psychosis and other divergences labeled as "insanity" a punching bag. The "insane" trait in the Sims 3 is so deeply, deeply rooted in abelist ideas of mental illness, of severe mental illness as both morally depraved and a hilarious laughingstock. Look at how the list of "lifetime wishes" that "insane" sims naturally roll are largely associated with villainy. The "erratic" trait in the Sims 4, originally also called "insane" at launch, is at best slightly better, for not explicitly aligning "erraticness" with the concept of evil... but I don't think it's by much.

I can't speak for the Sims 1 or Sims 2. But I doubt it's much better there. And you know, the Sims has never had a way to adjust a Sim's height, so of course you can't make a sim with dwarfism or gigantism, either - because you can't even make someone at the "typical" extreme ends of short and tall.

The closest I've ever felt the Sims 4 has gotten to modeling what disability feels like is its take on werewolves, where they end up skipping from work and ruining their social lives because of meltdowns, developing individualized "temperaments" that make anything from loud noises to being indoors to intellectual pursuits more stressful and draining. And that's... a fucking werewolf. I love werewolves, I love monsterhood as a metaphor, but if the only way I can make my sim feel disabled is by making them nonhuman, something is... wrong.

No matter how much the series tries to improve with regards to race and queerness, disability gets left behind in the dust.