#rulesets

There really isn't a hard-and-fast set, I'm afraid. I'm kind of making things up as I go along. Initially, this was SUPPOSED to be just a neighborhood to test out some of Sun & Moon's stuff and some playing ideas prior to using those things in another neighborhood I'm developing but where I don't want to experiment. Then it kind of took on a life of its own. *laugh* It has BACC elements merged with the "backstory" of an Apocalypse that can also easily be a "pioneer" or “homesteading” kind of thing with no apocalyptic undertones. :) There are also some elements of an "integrated" playing style. In its pure form that would mean that everything has to be "built" in-hood, with nothing just appearing out of the air. I don't want to go full-on with that -- too tedious and therefore un-fun, IMO -- but I do have some supply chains. More on that further down.

Basically, it goes like this: The end of civilization was coming (Plague, nuclear war, zombies, who knows? And who cares? :) ), and only one person seemed to realize it. That one person was in college at the time. So, rather than focus on his studies so much -- After all, civilization was ending so there goes that MBA and lucrative corporate career, right? -- he focused on making as many friends as possible and convincing them that, "Hey, world's gonna end, we need to get outta Dodge and make a new world." Slowly, he gathered a group of friends -- people who lived in the dorm, a few professors, hell, even a cheerleader -- who believed him and started to make preparations. Everyone else made fun of them, of course, but who cared about that? They were all gonna die or whatever. After graduation, they left, trekking out into the wilderness with (in my imagination) enough stuff like preserved food and potable water and seeds to plant and candles to burn and shovels and saws and stuff like that, to get them by for a while.

And sure enough, they were right! Civilization collapsed. Infrastructure was destroyed or became nonfunctional. Telecommunications systems were gone even if there'd been electricity to run such devices. This group of 16 is out in the wilderness, and other survivors/escapees/whatever are wandering around, too. But the core group has a collectively-agreed-up mission to work cooperatively to make a new and better and simple-living world: Peaceful, completely egalitarian, communal, a world where money and power neither exist nor are desirable, where everyone works together, willingly, for the good of the collective, a world living in harmony with nature. (Basically, my ideal world. *laugh* I really am a communist at heart, only without the oligarchical totalitarianism that modern attempts at communism have been corrupted by.)

At first, they all lived together in one place, sleeping in quickly-built, rough cabins, doing potty business in bushes, collecting rain water for makeshift showers, and eating food that they brought, that they grew/gathered, or that they caught. All the while, they were busy putting together the "raw materials" they needed to build individual houses to live in, each dedicated to a specific function that benefits the community as a whole, the fruits of which would be shared equally with the entire community. Each time a production goal was reached, one person/couple could move off the communal "raw materials" lot and into the lot that could be "built" from the gathered raw materials. And the community grows from there.

Meanwhile, there are those other folks, wandering around alone and frightened and helpless in the wilderness, having escaped whatever the disaster was that occurred. Sometimes, members of the community meet up with them while they're out scoping out the territory. Those poor souls can be brought into the fold as well, added to the communal lot and becoming contributing members of the community.

And that's as far as the "story" goes for now. :) Bear in mind that my neighborhood is age-modded with this mod, so my Sims have PLENTY of time to live out their lives. Not sure playing this way will really work with the standard-length lifestages. You'd have to figure out ways to speed things up rather a lot, I would think or else your founders will be dead before they can even earn a house, much less reproduce and stuff. :) But anyway, the "rules," such as they are, so far:

1) No careers. No vacations. No Uni after the initial "gather your founders" part, if you do that. No subhoods at all. And no money, so if you want to you can give your households a million simoleons because it simply doesn't matter.

2) No electricity. No indoor plumbing. (I intend to add those things as they are "earned," down the line, but only at the earliest when the first born-in-game generation are adults. Haven't figure out exactly HOW it'll be earned, though.) No phones. No nannies, repair people, maids, gardeners, etc., unless you want to set up some sort of in-neighborhood system for that. (Which is certainly doable; I plan to do it later, once my supply chains are in place and I'm looking for "employment" for new people.) No vehicles except "vehicle horses." (Only once you have a horse farm!) Use candles for light sources. Use only charcoal grills for cooking. (Unless you want to download an historical-type oven, but I'm trying to run this with less CC, not more, and I want there to be some big rewards for earning electricity.) Don't use an electric fridge. (I'm using this one.) Use an outhouse, not indoor flush toilets. Use mods so that water has to be gathered to use to fill bathtubs and sinks. Stuff like that. 

3) I recommend using the Visitor Controller to ban all but playable Sims from every lot. Also ban mail and newspaper delivery. You COULD make the neighborhood from empty templates and no stealth hoods, yes, but then you're going to lose the "meet people by hiking" thing, which is how "new blood" gets added to this neighborhood. That function draws from the NPC household that includes things like the BV tourists/locals and the hobby leaders and stuff like that. If you use empty templates and whatnot, you won't have that.

4) Get yer founders. I did this via sending Komei Tellerman to Uni and having him focus on making friends amongst the dormies, professors, and Uni NPCs so that all the founders would at least have a strong relationship with him, if no one else, but you could just make a bunch in CAS if you’d rather skip that part. Or if you don’t have Uni installed, of course. :)

5) Build an initial lot to dump everyone on. (I teleported them with the Sim Blender, aged them to regular adults, gave them the extra want slots they should have as college graduates, etc., since they weren’t yet playables in Uni.) Include everything they need for basic motive-filling but not much else. (You could put a working stack of books somewhere if you want them to skill, but really? With no careers, skilling isn't really all that necessary.) There will also need to be ways to make/gather raw materials. Here's the layout of the one I made, with some useful links to stuff I used on it. This lot houses the founders, any new members added to the community, and ALL born-in-game Sims once they reach teenhood, until they earn individual lots.

Note: For me, I did not want kids on this lot. They have to wait until they earn an individual lot for that. So the only place to autonomously woohoo is the park benches I used as seating for eating. But, I have ACR set so that woohoo on sofas/park benches requires privacy...which is hard to get on a lot with no real walls and a bunch of other people living on it. :) If you DO want them to have kids, then they could woohoo in the cabin-tents, but ACR doesn't enable autonomous tent-woohoo, so...yeah.

Note 2: I let the communal lot run pretty much entirely on free will, only commanding certain Sims to do certain things at certain times. That way, the residents form their own relationships and either succeed or fail at taking care of themselves. They also develop different sleep schedules, which is nice for the player, less of them to keep an eye on at any given time. :) It's also easier to NOT micromanage 16 or more Sims at once, naturally. But this, of course, would be up to the player and how you like to play.

4) Earning a lot: The communal lot has choppable trees, the mining rocks from Sun & Moon's mining set, and Nixnivis's blacksmith station on it. I have fiddled with the trees and the mining rocks to make them autonomous, and the rule is that Sims can never be commanded to chop trees or mine ore. They must decide to do that themselves, so production is limited by how industrious your Sims are. Further, the mined ore has to be "refined" (into things like nails and other things that go into a house). For this, I use the blacksmith station, just having a person make that object's basic single horseshoe object as as "stand-in." (This isn't autonomous; it's one of the things that Sims can be commanded to do.)

NOTE: I could share the edited autonomized choppable trees if someone wants to use this idea; I don't think Beck would care. But sharing the edited autonomized mining rocks would break Sun & Moon's policy, so if you want that, you'd have to do the editing yourself. It's not hard, if you can run SimPE.

In order to earn each new individual lot, the communal lot must produce 75 bundles of chopped logs and 40 horseshoes. And each horseshoe “requires” 2 buckets of ore, so you need to keep track of how many buckets of ore you have in inventories and subtract out the appropriate number of ore buckets when a batch of horseshoes is made. (Just sell them "to the air;" money doesn't matter. Much of the crafting in this hood will work the same way, too, with "prerequisite" objects that need to be produced somewhere first, so get used to the technique. *laugh*) So to get those 40 horseshoes, 80 buckets of ore have to be (autonomously!) mined first. Once you have the required materials, remove them from inventories and sell them to the air. Then, you can build an individual lot and move whoever you want to own the lot out of the communal one.

(You might want to adjust the requirements needed for how you play. For instance, if you don’t want to go pure free-will, you should probably have much higher requirements. If you don’t age-mod, then you’ll want to adjust simply because you just won’t have time to earn lots with enough time left over for your Sims to have kids to keep the neighborhood going. So, yeah. That’s certainly not set in stone; it’s just what works for my set-up.)

5) Supply chains and stuff: Before you build your first individual lot(s), you're going to want to choose what that lot will be dedicated to, because that will dictate how you build it. My list of possibilities -- so far, that is; it's ever-growing as I get new ideas and figure out how to implement them -- is as follows:

RobotsFlower ArrangingToy-MakingPotterySewingSpinning/KnittingWeavingCattleChickensHorsesPigsSheepGoatsWineryPaintingDog/Cat BreederBeesBakingMarijuanaCandle-makingFishingHayCornMaxis OrchardBasketryHerbs/WildflowersHunting/TanningTrappingApothecary (Plus reagents, if witches)Blacksmithing

Some of those are Maxis things. Some of them are CC. Some of them don't actually exist and I'm using stand-ins instead. (Like, for instance, candle-making. Sun & Moon's beekeeping set produces beeswax as one of its end products, along with honey. They didn't yet make a candle-making station, though, so in the meantime, I'm just gonna use the robot station or something and pretend. They can make toy robots that can be one-for-one "exchanged" for functional candles, which can then be distributed. It's easy to do because money doesn't matter.) Most of them have "prerequisites." I'm not going to go into how all of these will work because I'd be here for days, but I'll give you one example of a supply chain and its prerequisites and stuff.

Let's talk about the sewing supply chain, clothing and blankets and stuff being the ultimate end-products of that supply chain. In order to have new clothing and towels and quilts/blankets and other nice decorative things like that, first, at the very bottom of the "pyramid," you gotta have someone who'll grow hay. Because you can't have sheep (and other livestock) without something to feed them. And you can't have wool without sheep. (Or growing cotton or flax for linen or making silk or something, and if I can figure out how to make THAT happen, I will. I have an idea brewing for marijuana -- think hemp -- but for now...sheep.) And you can't knit a sweater or produce fabric without cleaning and spinning that wool into yarn/usable fiber/thread. And you can't have fabric without someone with a loom to weave it. And you can't have leather (for shoes and stuff) without someone killing some kind of animal (domesticated or hunting wild ones) and tanning the hides. ONLY THEN can you have someone making new clothing. And at each step, there's a kind of conversion. Like "1 spun basket of wool = enough yarn to make 1 sweater." So, you sell the basket of wool (obtained from the sheep farmer) to the air, then "spin" (via a CC spinning wheel plus an invisible sewing machine to make a few potholders or something as a "stand-in" for the process), then you sell those potholders to the air and use Beck's knitting ball to make one piece of clothing which can then be distributed and used to "buy" one sweater or whatever.

That's how everything basically works in a supply chain, some of which have more steps than others. Producing new clothing would be the longest one I've come up with so far. So, when building your lots, if you want to use supply chains at all, you must start out with the "anchors" of the supply chains you want to have. If you don't want to be that complicated, you could just pick randomly or pick whatever appeals to you.

6) Individual lots: Plop down a lot. On that lot, build a house but leave room outside for the lot's function plus the outhouse, the outdoor fridge, a well/water pump and a garden. (Eventually gardens can go away, once you have enough food-producers that can consistently produce enough to distribute amongst the population. But until then, folks will need to grow stuff.) The size of your lots is gonna depend on you and how you play. Me, I like smaller lots and I don't mind cramming large families into small houses...which suits a "pioneer" sort of lifestyle, anyway. So, my individual lots are no bigger than 3x3, and the house itself (they're all the same, just different colors, different furnishings, and oriented differently on the lot), for a child-producing household, is a 9x9 square with a 3-tile deep front porch across the front. Floor plan here.

7) Unlike a BACC where CAS Sims are “earned” by certain events, any new, non-born-in-game Sims have to be met via hiking. (It’s one of the possible outcomes of hiking.) It’s a substitute for being out “exploring” or “looking for wandering domesticate livestock to capture” or whatever. If a non-pet “someone” is met, that person gets added to the communal lot, joining the “queue” for an individual lot. (I just use the Sim Blender to teleport them into the communal lot and add them to the household.) I prefer to age up any children to teen and age down any elders to adults, but that’s up to you, of course.

For every neighborhood I play, I make a multi-tabbed spreadsheet to keep track of different things about it. Some of them are really complex (like for “integrated” neighborhoods, where I have to keep track of supply chains and “inventories,” for instance), and some of them are fairly simple, just tracking statistics and which lot I’m currently playing. I keep the neighborhood’s spreadsheet open side-by-side with the game (which is why I play in windowed mode) so that I can easily reference it and update it. And I do it on spreadsheets rather than notebooks because we tend to move around a lot between three houses, so the fewer things I have to remember to pack up and take when we migrate, the better. So, spreadsheets that are kept on the computer rather than notebooks.)

One of the tabs on each spreadsheet is the neighborhood’s rules. I use different rules for different ones. And I often make a new neighborhood just for the purpose of testing out and refining a new way to play, like the pseudo-Amish, so it’s not really easily shareable. Basically, it’s just a lot of text about a lot of different things. But that’s where I list the possible outcomes for things I decide randomly and/or the “algorithms” I use to calculate things. I can give you some examples, but really, you can decide pretty much anything randomly if you want to. Like, I have a mod that makes all chance card outcomes equally likely, and I generate a number to “decide” which option a Sim will “choose” when one comes up. (Otherwise, I’m likely to be tempted to always pick the “good” option because after a decade of playing I know which those are for pretty much all the career chance cards.)

Anyway, there are many things that I decide randomly, many of which happen when I create a Sim in CAS or, for born-in-game Sims, when they turn teen. For example (but this is not a complete list): 

Their primary and secondary aspirations. I just assign numbers to each aspiration, a roll to decide which they get. 

Their sexual preference. Which is a percentage chance. Generally, I like a 20%/60%/20% gay/straight/bi distribution (but I will use different ones for different neighborhoods, too), so I’ll randomly generate a number between 1 and 100 inclusive to decide what they’ll be. 1-20 = gay, 21-80 = straight, and 81-100 = bi)   

What they’ll do to earn a living, if they don’t have a career-related LTW or if they have a career-related LTW but the career isn’t yet open/has no openings. They have many different options. Do a trade (and I use a further numbered list to decide what they’ll do), get an NPC job, get a different regular job than their LTW, open a business, operate a farm/ranch, become a person who fishes for a living, become an “escort,” etc.

The type of relationship they’ll have, for which there are a lot of options. Marriage, either only if they roll wants or whether they like it or not and, if that’s what they get, whether the marriage will be 2-career or 1-career and, if the latter, whether or not they’ll be the stay-at-home parent or their partner will be. Then there’s never marrying regardless of wants. There’s romantic partners living together but not marrying. There’s platonic co-habitation (i.e. just sharing a house/apartment with one or more “roomies,” although if that develops into romance, so be it.) Or polyamory (and I use another roll to determine how many partners), which can be either intermarried or not. Or communal. Or they can go religious, which has a whole other set of rules. Or they can enter a religious order (i.e., a convent), if the neighborhood has one. Etc. etc. I like to have lots of options so that not all households are doing the same thing. 

For CAS Sims, virtually everything about them aside from their appearance -- which I let the game do, because I townify everything and just stick with what the game gives me -- is decided by random number generation. Whether or not they’ll be fat, their aspiration, astrological sign, turns on-off, etc. The only thing I don’t do by number generation is their clothing.

Other things: 

Whether or not they’ll go to class each day in Uni (and I use the same “algorithm” to decide if they’ll do homework as teens, since my teens never roll wants to do so). 

If they’re a same-sex couple, if/when and by what method they’ll have kids (adoption, surrogacy/sperm donation, “genetic engineering” so that they can have a kid that’s genetically both of theirs, if that’s available in the neighborhood). 

Where they’ll go on a vacation, if they don’t roll a specific location want. 

What kind of pet they’ll get if they roll a non-specific or either/or want. 

Oh, and here’s a big one: If a Sim is one whose “destiny” is marriage whether they roll a want or not, and if they haven’t developed a romantic relationship with anyone by the time they start their own household, they get a random spouse. I keep two numbered lists (one for each gender) of all the townies/downtownies/dormies/NPCs, etc., in the neighborhood. That’s two of a neighborhood spreadsheet’s tabs. The random number generator then decides who they’ll marry, and I use a hacked wedding arch to marry them, sight unseen. I think of it as a “mail-order spouse” sort of thing, and my favorite thing ever is negative-chemistry couples. :) Which is probably way weird to some people, but I enjoy it. :)

Having been born and raised in northeastern Indiana, where there is a large concentration of Amish families, and because my parents employed Amish men and women to maintain and run the house and dairy farm they owned (but didn’t operate and didn’t always live on themselves) and that I grew up on, I had a lot of Amish influence in my formative years. Though I’m really not much for organized religion in any form these days, I have always admired the simplicity (and general happiness) of Amish peoples’ lives, their absolutely amazing close-knit families, and the remarkable collective community spirit they have. So, I always had it in the back of my mind that I wanted to try to build such a community – autonomous and self-sufficient simple living free from outside influences, with close-knit individual families and a close-knit community as a whole -- in my game. Almighty Hat’s religion mod finally kicked me into gear…although this way of playing doesn’t strictly require that mod; it just makes things run a little more effortlessly because a lot of the “undesirable” interactions are disabled by the mod according to how you set up the tenets of a religion, so I don’t have to watch the pixels as much to make sure they don’t do anything they aren’t allowed to do.

I don’t really mean this to be a “challenge” at all..although it is a bit challenging in some respects to play. I also did not wish to try to exactly replicate an actual Amish community at all – I didn’t want to find or download Amish/Mennonite-style clothing, for instance, even if such exists – but I did borrow some ideas from how and why the Amish live the way they do, and my goal is to try to create the sort of close-knit and interdependent farm-based community they traditionally have, hopefully without ever having to bring in anyone from “outside.” (Although I’m willing to do that if absolutely necessary.) So, that said…

Restrictions

No attached subhoods. No universities, no downtowns, no shopping districts, and no vacations to “exotic destinations” allowed. No using hobby lots. Everything that these folks do and use has to be contained in the one main neighborhood. So, use a big-enough terrain, you know? :)

No supernatural life states. (I use “organic farming” to avoid Plantsims; no pesticide allowed.) If a supernatural life state should somehow manage to occur (can’t imagine how), the individual will have to leave the community. (Haven’t decided about alien pregnancies/babies yet, but I’m not using the hacked telescope I use elsewhere, so abduction isn’t likely to happen, anyway.)

No vehicles. My pixels walk everywhere, though I suppose you could download horse-drawn vehicles if you wanted to. I would allow the pixels to ride in regular vehicles but not to own them, like the real Amish, but so far there hasn’t really been a need for them to ride anywhere. Even if there was, they can’t call taxis, anyway, because…

No phones, either cell phones or landlines. (The phone booths on community lots are OK. Amongst the real Amish, individuals aren’t allowed to own phones, but there is usually a shed or two with public phones in them that community members are allowed to use if needed. Unfortunately, the game’s community-lot phones don’t function as actual phones, but…Well, there’s the appearance, anyway.)

No gadgets like MP3 players and handheld games.

No jobs outside of the home, for anyone. Generally speaking, I’m not playing this to be a “money challenge” sort of thing at all. It’s more of an experiment in interbreeding than anything else. I started off each of my six starting couples with a furnished house large enough for a large family and a good amount of money (and subsequent new households will get the same), and since they don’t even pay bills (because mail delivery is banned via the Visitor Controller), they don’t need a lot of money. 

No owned businesses, either home businesses or community-lot ones. This might change, eventually, but right now I don’t want them.

No electricity generated from a public power grid. Real Amish don’t believe that electricity (or technology, for that matter) is “evil” or anything. They just wish to be autonomous and separated from “the world” (so no relying on public utilities) in order to avoid distraction from what they consider to be their priorities: God, their family, and their community. So, for my purposes in this neighborhood, they can generate electricity for their own households’ use via solar panels and/or an animated CC farm windmill that I have. In my imagination, this generates only enough power to run necessary large appliances. (Real Amish use appliances that are gas-powered rather than electric, but…) There isn’t enough left over for stuff like electric indoor lighting. (Outdoor lighting is OK, because that could be solar.) Also no TVs, no swimming pools (In the real world, they have filtration machines, which run on electricity), no computers, no electric guitars or basses (Pianos, violins, and drum kits are OK), no food processors, no microwave ovens, and no other small electrical devices like that. I do let them have a juicer; I just imagine that it’s manually-operated or maybe battery-operated. (The Amish will use batteries for things like flashlights and stuff.) So far, I haven’t let them have radios, either. Technically, they could be battery-powered, but I’m thinking it’s a bit too much “outside influence” for the spirit of this place.

No buying groceries, and no pizza or Chinese takeout. Even if they could call to get such things (which they can’t do), each household must be self-sufficient. They can use the food the fridge initially comes with, but after that only food they grow themselves can be used.

No school! At this point, I simply have children “homeschool” by using Inge’s “school changer” to change them to “FlexiSchool” on the same page as the changer. Their “school” consists of studying a randomly-chosen skill from 7AM until noon each day except for church days. (It keeps them out of my their mother’s hair for a while. :) ) Eventually, I might start up a school using the Simlogical school mods, as that would be more authentic, but maybe not. Teens are not schooled at all. Girls help their mothers with cooking, maintaining the house, and looking after their younger siblings; boys help with farm chores and engage in the household’s assigned trade. (More on that in a bit.)

No dating. This applies to already-married couples as well as to unmarried individuals. (So it sucks to be a Pleasure or Romance Sim. :) ) When the born-in-games are of marriageable age and if they decide to stay with the community (still working on what will factor into that “decision”), they’ll get an “arranged” spouse from amongst the other unrelated born-in-games of marriageable age, based on a list of criteria that I’m also still working on because no one is of marriageable age yet…although they soon will be, so I need to get working on that. :) 

No cheating on spouses. These folks mate for life. No cheating, no breaking up. I have ACR and set cheating to be globally disallowed, so this is actually really easy for me. It might not be so easy if you don’t have ACR. (Which is kind of ironic, actually, given that a lot people seem to think that ACR’s only purpose is to turn Sims into little horndogs. ;) )

No interacting with anyone outside the community. I did not create the neighborhood as an “empty” one (although I currently have in an empty Pleasantview template so that townies aren’t generated), but I use the Visitor Controller on all lots to ban everyone but playables and, on residential lots, newspaper delivery. Real Amish folks do subscribe to newspapers, after all, and in the game reading the paper and doing crosswords and making paper airplanes and such is a way they can get some fun (which is sometimes hard to come by when playing this way, I’m afraid.) But more importantly…compost! :D But they aren’t allowed to interact with the newspaper deliverer.

No being nasty to each other, in general. No fighting. No slapping/shoving each other. (Arguing is OK, but nothing beyond that.) No doing anything violent. (This includes things like playing Red Hands, so there goes another good source of fun. :) ) No dirty joking. No pranking. No gossiping. No stealing each other’s newspapers. No kicking over the trash. (Although I deleted the regular trash cans and replaced them with compost bins, anyway.) Etc. For me, the religion mod mostly handles this; some of it might be hard to do manually and would require closer monitoring without the religion mod that bans most of these interactions so long as an individual’s faith is high.

No ostentatious decorating. Meaning, only a limited amount of deco that doesn’t serve any perceivable practical purpose. Like, statuary of a deity has a purpose. Purely decorative coat racks and closets have a purpose. Racks of towels have a purpose. Cookware hanging on the wall or sitting on a shelf or hanging from the ceiling has a purpose. Candles have a purpose. “Sculptures” of condiments or food storage canisters or cooking utensils and shelves to house them have a purpose. Decorative china cabinets and sideboards have a purpose. But pretty and purely decorative wall hangings and flower arrangements and such have no purpose other than being pretty and should be limited. Also, no fancy/patterned wallpaper. No photographs or portraits of anyone. No wall-to-wall carpet. (Area rugs are OK.)

General  way of playing:

The neighborhood must run Spring/Summer/Fall/Winter, in that order.

Each household gets a 3x3 lot, no bigger, no smaller. On it, they need a house large enough to accommodate a large family but with appropriate space left over. That extra space is needed because each household engages in some kind of agricultural pursuit for profit. For me, since I use Rebecah’s animals and a CC beehive that generates honey that can be sold, plus the game’s standard veggie-growing, orchard trees, and fishing, there are ten options:

Veggie-growing (Using the game’s stuff from Seasons only because the CC growables, IMO, grow too quickly and can be harvested too often and are therefore too easy.)

Orchard (Again, using only the game’s trees from Seasons.) 

Fishing

Beekeeping. 

Beck’s animals: Chickens, horses, cattle, pigs, sheep, and goats. (Each household can only raise one kind of critter.)

The results of all of these – grown produce/fruit, caught fish, pots of honey, and extraneous animals (plus milk, eggs, etc.) -- are sold just “to the air” in order to avoid contact (and developing relationships) with anyone outside the community.

Each household also must maintain a food garden large enough to self-sufficiently feed the household. This can include the Seasons growables but also CC growables and harvestable fruit trees and such. There can also be a fishing pond, if there is space for one. I also built a community-lot fishing hole and a “hunting grounds” – using the hunting/trapping stuff at Plumbbob Keep – they can go to if needed or for just recreational purposes. Those households that raise livestock or fish for profit can also choose to keep some of their catch/slaughter and eat excess animals rather than sell them, if food is needed more than money. No sprinklers or greenhouses are allowed (just for a bit more of a challenge), and no crops can be sown in the autumn or winter, so enough must be grown during spring/summer to feed the household through the rest of the year.

Each household also has an assigned trade, which anyone who has time can engage in to develop skills and to generate some income. (Like with farm products, the results of the trade are just sold “to the air.” The allowed trades (given the other restrictions) are painting, writing novels (with Mog Hughson’s composition book or something similar, not a computer), flower arranging, toymaking, pottery, and sewing. (For novel writing, since the households don’t have phones, they don’t get the “royalties phone call.” So, I manually give them an amount based on the number of Creativity points the writer had when they started the novel, which is I think is partly how the game calculates the royalties awarded.)

I’m using traditional gender roles in this neighborhood, but that’s certainly not a requirement. But in my neighborhood, women and girls care for the kids and do all the cooking and cleaning. Men and boys do the farm chores, including planting, maintaining, and harvesting the food garden. This can be broken if a Sim autonomously chooses to do something outside of their usual duties, but I don’t command them to do so. When there is nothing that needs to be done, they engage in the household’s trade and/or I command them to fulfill any wants they have that are allowed and possible. If there are none of those, they free will and do whatever they want.

The eldest sons of a household will, along with their wife, take over running the farm of their birth once their parents are elders or dead (whichever comes first). The parents live in the house until their death. The other kids who decide to stay with the community will marry and move out to their own properties which in turn will be inherited by their eldest son, etc. (So it’s kind of like a bunch of Legacies.) Those who don’t stay with the community for whatever reason will get moved to an empty lot where they won’t be played any further, and they’ll be given prisoner tags so that they won’t appear on other lots within the community. I’ll go in to age them up and eventually kill them in sync with their cohort, but they won’t be played.

Breeding:

One of the points of this neighborhood is attempting to keep it going using only born-in-game Sims without having to bring in any outsiders. As such, in order to have a deep enough gene pool to avoid the game’s inbreeding limitations as well as to compensate for some pixels choosing to leave the community, as many unrelated-to-each-other babies as possible are needed.  Because of that, as well as to sort of simulate the kind of “sex is for procreation, not pleasure” mindset that more orthodox religiously-minded people generally have, all woohoos are “try for baby.” I have ACR, so when an autonomous woohoo that isn’t a “try for baby” one happens, I use a die roll to decide if a pregnancy will happen, using the initiator’s ACR “try for baby” chance. If successful, I use the Sim Blender to impregnate. Beyond that, if anyone rolls a woohoo want, I use the game’s “Try For Baby” method, which has a higher chance of success that doesn’t use a “fertility curve” like ACR does. If someone rolls a “Have 10 children” want, I lock it and do my best to make it happen, using the game’s “Try For Baby” mechanism as often as possible.

Gatherings:

Since there are no phones and computers but one of the goals of this place is to have a strongly interconnected community, I use “church” and other community lots liberally to allow the community members to interact and “naturally” form relationships with each other, since only playables are allowed on those lots. They have “church” twice a week, and each time all possible members of the controllable household go there (leaving behind only babies/toddlers and one of the teen+ females to tend them). “Church” lasts from 8AM to 5PM on those days and there’s a buffet table and a restroom on the lot to entice walkbys to stay there and hang out. Other community lots are used often, as well. So far, there’s the fishing hole, a swimming hole (with a swimmable lake) for swimming wants, a playground for kids, a hunting grounds, a sports ground, and a lot to have cooking contests on. There will probably be more as I think of them. The purpose, aside from recreation, is to form and maintain relationships between community members to the extent possible. Personally, I hate having to “relive” time spent on community lots, so I use the Community Time mod, but that’s not strictly necessary.