viccus

A floating kingdom of neon and glass, slicing through the deep Atlantic night. It was a paradise built on hard labour– a place where regular meals and a quiet bunk bed were the ultimate prize. He had spent his entire life trying to survive the night. Now, as the sun was dawning, Luca was finally learning to live.

Putting on the uniform felt like putting on a mask. The cruise line demanded a level of presentation Luca had never before experienced– crisp collars, a tailored vest, and a neat haircut. He presented himself impeccably, but the posture was pure vigilance.

Strikingly handsome, older, and fiercely focused, he blended in with the vacationers who had never known a day of real hunger in their lives. He was there to serve them.

The broken Boroughsburg boy was gone. The cruise ship barback was ready for whatever came next, daydreaming of a new dawn.

Sometimes, salvation hides in places you’d least expect.

Exhausted, newly homeless, and entirely out of time, Luca navigated the city’s seedy underbelly with the heavy tread of someone who had no hope left.

Standing before the stained tiled walls of the subway, he locked eyes with a flyer. It stood out like a sore thumb, bright blues among the soot and sweat of the underground. A barback position vacancy on a cruise ship was being advertised.

To anyone else, it was just seasonal labour, but to Luca, those sparkling waters looked like freedom. It was a ticket out of the cold darkness, a chance to rebuild, and the ultimate way out of the nightmare that had chased him from the very start.

The law has no heart.

His grandmother wanted nothing more than to leave her tiny piece of the world to Luca, a final anchor to keep him safe. But intent meant nothing to the creditors. Her unexpected passing brought a mountain of hidden, outstanding debts to light, and the system didn’t care that Luca was barely a man. He couldn’t do a single thing to stop the institutional wheels from turning; the apartment had to be sold, and the lease vacated to settle her estate.

His sanctuary, dismantled. No more music, no more warmth, just a boy and a bare mattress on the floor. Nearly a decade of safety was erased by a single, unforgiving winter afternoon. The harsh city was waiting for him, but this time around, he wasn’t a little boy hiding from a volatile mother; he was a young man who knew exactly what the world was capable of taking from him.

For two years, Luca lived in the margins, putting aside his pride and resilience he embraced as a teenager, forced back into a state of raw, hyper-vigilant survival. His days became defined by the monotony of unrewarding, back-breaking work. It was thankless, but it kept a cheap meal in his stomach.

The cost of survival has always been high and unstable.

At seventeen, Luca dropped out of school. His grandmother didn’t want to hear it, deeply disapproving of him abandoning his education, but his mind was made up. He needed to work. The part-time jobs he picked up provided the vital extra income they desperately needed to survive, cementing a bond of mutual protection between them.

Freshly eighteen and walking with the heavy, tired tread of life as a young man, Luca returned to the brownstone on a frigid winter night. The blue twilight hung thick and unforgiving over the bustling city as he carefully climbed the icy steps, just thinking about escaping the cold, completely unaware that a sudden, silent storm had already cleared out the only home he had left.

The apartment didn’t smell like dinner, and didn’t echo with the familiar hum of the television. Instead, when Luca pushed the door open, a suffocating stillness rushed out to meet him.

It wasn’t his grandmother waiting for him in her favourite floral armchair, it was Geraldine, their neighbour and close friend, sitting with her face buried in her hands, her shoulders trembling with quiet, muffled sobs.

When she heard the door click and looked up, the silence became deafening. She slowly stood up and wearily approached Luca, her eyes heavy with a grief that needed no introduction, and delivered the words that instantly tore the floor out from beneath his feet.

You can take a child out of his nightmare, but you can’t simply wash the nightmare out of the child.

Despite the stability of new life- even if it was quietly constrained by the reality of surviving on his grandmother’s measly pension and the small remainder of his late grandfather’s benefits- there was an undeniable warmth in their home.

Yet, a loving environment simply couldn’t erase the past. The lingering effects of life in that trailer began to manifest in his choices. He was restless, hyper-vigilant, and drawn to the very vices he grew up witnessing. The world around him had changed, but inside, Luca was still a boy trying to survive the only way he knew how.

He wanted to be normal, more than anything else. He wanted to fit into the world that Boroughsburg had offered him. So, when high school romance came knocking, Luca answered, stepping into the roles that everyone else seemed to occupy so effortlessly.

He forced himself to be affectionate, desperately trying to feel the spark he was supposed to feel, to match the genuine warmth being offered to him, but intimacy shouldn’t require effort or will. No matter how hard he tried to lean into the gesture, something deep down simply didn’t feel right. Every rehearsed gesture only amplified the quiet truth he wasn’t ready to face yet. He was performing a script that he didn’t write, chasing something that wasn’t meant for him.

The truth didn’t arrive with a grand revelation, but it was undeniable. The disconnect he felt with girls in a romantic context became crystal clear. It was a realisation that initially troubled him, a terrifying shift in a life he had fought so hard to make look ‘normal’.

For a while, he carried the weight of it in his posture, trying to shrug off the lingering anxiety of who he was supposed to be. But the initial fear gave way to clarity. Luca didn’t let the realisation become yet another cage; he embraced it, stepping into his identity with a quiet pride that nothing could ever take away from him.

When he finally found the courage to come out at home, there were no dramatic arguments or tears. His grandmother didn’t have much to say, but it wasn’t a lack of care, it was a profound, protective gratitude. In a world that had taken so much from both of them, he was all she had left, and she was all he had left. Keeping him safe and close was the only thing that mattered.

Secrets have a unique way of unravelling when crisis hits. After his mother’s arrest, the authorities managed to locate Luca’s maternal grandmother.

Her life in Boroughsburg was peaceful, slow, and solitary, marked by the sounds of the city outside. Learning about her estranged daughter’s arrest was unexpected, but to learn about her grandson’s existence and the systemic neglect he had endured was a devastating shock. But the grief instantly transformed into a lifeline. She claimed him without a single doubt, determined to turn her modest, warm brownstone apartment into a safe haven the boy had been denied for entirely too long.

Safety didn’t happen overnight, though, but in increments. In the quiet heights of his grandmother’s apartment, Luca’s world began to look like that of an ordinary teenage city boy. The hyper-vigilance of his childhood slowly gave way to the simple luxury of staying up too late just because he could.

For the first time, he had walls he was allowed to claim. He covered the cracked plaster with posters and vinyl records, finding subcultures he enjoyed and finally began sculpting his identity. He remained guarded, but also became defiant, no longer living as a ghost hiding in the darkness and waiting for the madness to stop.

Silence was golden.

I can barely contain my excitement AHHH! This is the very first post of my new Sims 3 story - Luca.

I've been pouring so much love into it, and I can't believe I'm finally sharing the first bits of it with you! We're kicking things off with the prologue to get a better understanding of Luca's past, from his childhood to early young adulthood.

The prologue specifically has themes of/briefly touches on:

Neglect, substance ab*se, domestic ab*se, and loss.

That said, without any further ado, let's begin!

This post focuses on his childhood.

Luca’s journey began in the dark, grungy corners of Riverview. Born to a single mother struggling with substance addiction and generational poverty and scraping by on less than minimum wage, his arrival, albeit unexpected and the result of a one-night stand, was supposed to be a new beginning for her. For a brief period, he was a healthy, happy baby, but a child cannot fix a broken foundation, and so, her old patterns quickly crept back, dragging them both into squalor.

For little Luca, home was defined by a cramped, filthy trailer where the air was always stale, damp, and overpowered by cigarette smoke. When he wasn’t left at a kind neighbour’s house, Luca learned to fend for himself early. He grew up navigating a world of cold leftovers, peeling paint, and quiet isolation, finding ways to entertain himself among things no child should ever be surrounded by.

Consumed by the growing weight of her substance issues and financial desperation, his mother’s world shrank until it was entirely dark and detached from reality. The trailer became a cage of her own making.

The role of a mother was a coat she never figured out how to wear, and frankly, not one she had any interest in wearing. Instead of spending time and bonding with her only child, her days were overtaken by her vices- drinking until the rooms blurred, smoking until the air was thick, and bringing home a different, dangerous man on a far-too-regular basis. For Luca, she wasn’t his protector. She was a phantom lying on a makeshift couch, staring straight through him into nothingness.

Confined to his bedroom, while the rest of the trailer dissolved into utter chaos, Luca’s world shrank to almost nothing. His only sanctuary and witness to the lonely hours spent waiting for the shouting to stop was a worn teddy bear.

His reality was a nightmare he couldn’t wake up from. Clamping his hands over his ears to drown out what felt like, and was, impending doom. He learned very early what fear tasted like. It was in these dark, agonising moments that the foundation of his very being was fractured.

Deep down, Luca still cared for his mother. She was all he had. It broke his heart to see her fall further and further into hopelessness and being mistreated by intimidating strangers. Trapped. Both of them.

It takes a long time to break a cycle, but a single phone call can end it all in a flash. A flash of red and blue lights. Driven by years of accumulating worry and quiet knowledge that Luca wasn’t being cared for at all, a well-meaning neighbour finally intervened.

For Luca, the end of his childhood nightmare didn’t feel like a rescue; it felt surreal.

I'll be posting the first sections of the prologue for my Sims 3 story - Luca. - this week!

I'm beyond excited to finally share it with you all! This is by far the most involved and emotional story I've ever done.

Before we start, I wanted to give a bit of a warning.

The prologue contains some scenes that require trigger warnings. I did not explicitly dive into some of the difficult topics, but I still felt it was only right to set the stage and give a fair warning.

The prologue specifically has themes of/briefly touches on:

Neglect, substance ab*se, domestic ab*se, and loss.

I'll be completely transparent here: this story is anything but sunshine and rainbows, at least not for very long. It's essentially a realistic (or surrealistic) rags-to-riches of sorts. I'm still busy with chapter one, so I don't even know what'll happen in the next one. I'm going with the flow and some basic ideas I have.

I don't currently have any other Sims 3 content planned, aside from this story. I hope that's ok with you guys. I just needed something radically different, and this is giving me a creative outlet I've been craving for ages.

Meet Luca. He’s running out of time, options, and a past that refuses to stay behind him. After surviving a nightmare childhood, his teenage years finally gave him a taste of safety, love, and care, only for it all to be stripped away again. Now, with nowhere left to turn and nothing to his name, he's back on the cold pavement. How do you rebuild a life when the world keeps tearing down your foundation?

I'm finally ready to reveal what I've been working on for the past month or so. Exactly two years ago, I started a story-driven save in Boroughsburg and shared the screenshots on Twitter, however, at the time, I really wasn't in a good headspace, and it hardly lasted a month. A lot of the story was lazy and predictable. This time around, things are very different.

I decided to try again, but make it bigger and better. As a third-year humanities student, I have very little space for creative output, as the vast majority of my studies consist of academic, theoretical and matter-of-fact writing. This gives me the perfect opportunity to combine two things I love, The Sims 3 and storytelling. While I still don't have much of the story planned, I feel much more comfortable playing it out and seeing where it goes.

I will be pushing the game's creative limits and putting in as much detail as I can, wherever I can. I obviously can't promise anything spectacular, but I'm beyond excited to share Luca's journey with you guys. I promise you, after the prologue alone, you'll want to hug him and never let go. Some topics will include trigger warnings, as some aspects are quite heavy and dark, topics out of my comfort zone. The possibilities are truly endless with this story, and I can take it in so many directions.

As of today, June 22nd 2026, I am on my winter break (Southern hemisphere) and have a few more weeks off, so I can spend quite a lot of time on this save and preparing a bunch of content in advance to post once classes start again. I really hope you'll enjoy this as much as I am and fall in love with Luca as much as I have.

I'll be posting the first prologue sections very soon.

𝚏𝚘𝚛𝚐𝚘𝚝𝚝𝚎𝚗 𝚖𝚎𝚖𝚘𝚛𝚒𝚎𝚜 || no cc

SIMS 3 PLAYERS - How many custom sliders do you have in your game?

I'm asking because I have about 400 custom sliders in a folder shared by a friend about two years ago and I've been using them ever since. I'm currently populating an empty world with NRAAS StoryProgression and I'm noticing a massive issue. The genetics from the generated sims are 100% from my bin sims and when I reload my game. Every single generated sim with unique genetics have the exact same pudding face, with all facial sliders at 0. I've changed my max sliders to 500, setting "override custom core sliders" to true, everything. Thing is, sims I've made from scratch with lots of custom sliders keep their genetics. Something is causing this and I'm trying to figure out what. It could either be:

SP struggling with too many sliders and resetting them each time.

a critical issue in SP's code (probably unlikely)

Something else conflicting with it?

I just took out my slider folder and loaded a new save, generated some sims with bin genetics, saved them to CAS and opened them again, genetics stayed and didn't reset. So it has to have something to do with the custom sliders then? The question now is:

Is it happening because of the AMOUNT of sliders or

Is there a specific slider causing this?

Ok so this is a very big problem. I've been generating sims with NRAAS StoryProgression emigration for a new save using genetics from my bin sims. I gave some of them makeovers but when I reloaded my game, ALL of them had the default pudding face preset.

I'm convinced this must be a mod conflict or a setting that needs to be changed.

I set the max slider value very high and tried resetting these sims, as well as taking them into CAS, but all the values are at 0.

I came across this really old sexy butler CC set and immediately knew I had to do a fun little shoot😜

I made this sim a while ago, and he's yet to have a name, but I just love him so much, he has to make regular appearances! Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated. 😉

A lot of us seem to really be struggling. I just wanted to send positive vibes and hugs to everyone who's been feeling overwhelmed and in a dark space. Goodness knows I can relate. I don't want to overshare, but so far, 2026 has been incredibly challenging. I've lost my grandfather, am struggling financially and feeling like I'm being consumed by my college work, but I'm not going to give up. I largely owe it to my faith and, well, my anti-depressant.😂