In the last update on the Lloyds, Zoey and Christopher had a son, Marty, who grew very rapidly to the child stage. Around the same time, Zoey and Christopher both became elders. So Marty ended up an only child, with his parents just days from death. The Short lifespan really is short. Painfully so.

Marty was a child for just two days. The upside is that it was over the weekend, so he didn’t have to go to school. He could ride around town on his bike (well, it wasn’t really his, as I didn’t buy him one, but there must be one of those community share-a-bike program for Sim kids)…

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When last we left the Lloyds, Christopher and Zoey had just gotten hitched and hopped into the sack for some good old-fashioned wooing and hooing. You may have noticed that they were outside for most of the night, then suddenly in a house when it came time to do le woohoo. That’s because I paused right after Christopher moved in and…built them a house. All Zoey had was an outhouse and some furniture out on the lawn; newlyweds need a proper home in which to cavort and make babies and such.

Of course, as soon as you build a house in TS3, it becomes a burglar magnet. I don’t know why these guys don’t show up when everything is out on the lawn, easily accessible. Nope, they wait until you have WALLS and DOORS. I clicked frantically on Zoey to wake her up so she could beat the robber to a pulp, but I was clicking on the bed instead of Zoey, and she didn’t wake up fast enough.

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OK, I started a legacy-style family, and I’m actually having fun. Part of that is because I’m alpha-testing the Indie Stone Story Progression Rewrite Mod, which is an attempt to rewrite the Sims 3 story progression from the ground up. It’s a core mod, so I had to take out AwesomeMod (*huggles AwesomeMod*), but I like how it makes the town feel more alive.

I’m still not sure how I feel about Sims I’ve created having lives without my input, but it works wonderfully with the pre-mades. They’re falling in love, marrying each other, moving in together (sometimes; the mod has some kinks which need to be ironed out, but hey, it’s in the alpha phase), having babies, and progressing in their careers. And you can filter which updates you want to hear about. I like this because I don’t have to remember to read the paper every day just to get a feel for what’s going on in the town.

It’s also nice to have the town evolve without me having to play every single family. And if you want a Sims 3 town to feel alive, you need a LOT of families. I tried putting a bunch of singles in my empty town and put progression on “silly fast” to see if they would pair up quickly and begin populating the town. Well, even on “silly fast”, it would have taken me forever to fill up the town with Sims. So that’s why I switched back to original recipe Sunset Valley, just to test this mod and do some more exploration of the game.

Another twist I’ve thrown in is that I’m playing this family on “Short” lifespan. So they only have 25 days (maybe a few more than that) of life. I really have to decide what is important for every minute of their lives so no time is wasted. It’s hard to find the right balance. I was focusing on my founder’s career at first so she could get more money and get closer to achieving her LTW, but it suddenly became much more important for her to find a spouse and have a kid, so her family wouldn’t die out. Anyway, if you’d like to read more…there’s more!

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