Technobabble.

I've been playing all kinds of "Sims" games for a long time now. It has always been fun. 
I loved The Sims 3 back in 2009. The idea, that you wouldn't be seeing the same faces throughout every generation of Sims (The Sims 2), unless you played several families and switching between them. 


But EA's idea of story progression just made me cry. In stead of getting married and starting a family, over half the population simply adopted babies (with the most horrible traits!).
Somehow I got wind of a mod that was out there that would change that and after looking into that I came across Nraas Industries and immediately fell in love with the concept. I don't know when it was, but I think I've been using Story Progression (SP) for at least 2 years now. I would seriously put The Sims 3 in the recycle bin if I was unable to use SP.


For this particular project, I'm using some specific SP settings that allow for the right circumstances. Normally I hardly touch the settings at all, apart from a few minor things. 
Medieval times call for medieval settings though, so I'm not allowing Sims to break up once they're committed to each other. Affairs, though I don't approve of that concept personally, are permitted and should prove interesting.
The marriage name is changed to "husband" since there was no feminism in that time period. 
The default base number of children setting is changed from 3 to 4, and the sim-days between getting married and being eligible for pregnancy is changed to 1. The change of an unexpected pregnancy is going to get higher, since there was no birth control back in those days. I think I'll set it to 35.
I'm disallowing careers for the queen and any of the noble women. 
I'm disallowing marriage for the priest, though I'm sure he will fool around. 
There will probably be a few minor things that I'll change as well. As a precaution really, because I intend to meddle with everyone.


I'm using more of Twallan's mods, I've been using Overwatch for a while now and it's really only there to fix stuck sims and abandoned cars. I have no roads though, and don't intend to use parking lots, so I doubt I'll see any cars, but they'll be there. I also have Errortrap installed, and Master Controller (MC).


MC has so far been used to assign careers and professions, and I'll be using it to "pollinate" some of the pets. Every family in this world will have at least one pet. Because, which self respecting noble doesn't have a horse, and which farmer doesn't have a cat (mouser) or a guard dog. Noble women are also known for having lapdogs or cats, and noble estates will also need a mouser and/or a guard dog. In medieval times, cats and dogs would've mated whenever they wanted to (without the use of the pet-house), so I'll use MC to simulate this random mating between pets. 


I'll be using Register to alter the amount of NPC's. I don't want any immigration and let's face it, a paper boy or girl just isn't very realistic for the time period, so I'm turning that off. Same with bartenders etc.
I do want additional strays, wild horses, deer and raccoons. 


I've been using the housecleaning for everyone mod for about a year now, just because it makes sense.


Other than these mods, I have store content and a whole lot of CC that I downloaded specifically for this project. You'll see them pop up on my screenshots from time to time. For example the gorgeous medieval bassinette that can be seen in the screenshot of the Royal bedroom in my previous post, and the crowns King Henry and Queen Eloise are wearing. My "Introduction" post has the links to the websites I got these CC's from.


It has been challenging to find a balance between the mods I want and game performance. As I mentioned in my introduction, I'm on a low end pc. I have an AMD Sempron 3400+ 2GHz, 1 GB RAM, Nvidia GeForce 7600 GS 512 MB. It's lucky that I'm using Windows XP or I wouldn't have been able to play The Sims 3 at all. Which is why I had to downsize my game after I installed Showtime. The intermittent lagging and freezing was incredible after that, so I decided to uninstall all of my stuffpacks rather than say goodbye to my mods. And that seemed to have done the trick. It's challenging sometimes because it takes (a lot of) time to load and I still get lag occasionally. That's why I'm hoping a small world with a maximum of 15-20 families, few community lots and no roads will improve the games' performance. 
Other than that, I don't seem to get a lot of problems with my game, I'm even using medium quality settings in-game and I think my pc is handling it amazingly. 


Well that's it for today, happy simming!


Lady ElDi


My next entry: 
Introducing the sorceress
Inside the Wizards' tower