Happy Valicer Anniversary!
Jul. 7th, 2025 11:49 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
crossover_chickAnd hey, this year I have the perfect icon for this entry! :D Go me and my premium account. Anyway, it was a decent Valicer Anniversary this year -- not perfect, but I managed to hit every goal I set for myself at the end of yesterday's entry in one form or another. Let me give you the write-up:
Tumblr: Only Victor Luvs Alice (N Smiler) to worry about this Valicer Wedding Anniversary, and I had a fairly productive day over there, happily:
A) First, I finished drafting out my “Valicer as text posts” post, explaining how it came to be and thanking the creator of the “Dead Boys Detectives as text posts” post for inspiration (along with the creators of the original text posts). So hopefully I can throw that into this week’s queue!
B) Then, I did some more work on the “Teen Valicer Save” post, writing up the section explaining what I want each individual member of my OT3 to do over the course of the save – like part-time jobs and after-school activities I’d like them to join while in high school, what occults I’d like them to become (or, in Smiler’s case, start out as), and what their ultimate adult career would be. I’m still not quite done – have to finish off the lists for Victor and Alice – but I made some good progress, and I’m that much closer to getting this darn thing posted!
C) And finally, I reblogged my Valicer Wedding Masterpost (a collection of posts I’ve made documenting all the Valice and Valicer wedding stuff I’ve done over the years – includes links to the wedding chapters of “Secundus” and “Fixing You,” along with other wedding-related fic I’ve written in each verse; links to the Newcrest Adventures Valice wedding, and the Chill Save Valice and Valicer weddings; and a selection of pictures from the Chill Save Valice and Valicer weddings, because why not) again, adding links to some of the fics I’ve written so far this year that at least mention weddings (including, yes, the collection of Not-Incorrect Valicer Quotes I queued up for last Friday about them moving in together – it did mention at the end Victor not wanting to get married until he could marry BOTH Alice and Smiler), and the pictures I took of the trio in their new potential wedding outfits today in Sims 4! Got it up a bit later than I intended, but it went up, and that’s all that matters. :) Yay~
Sims 4: So – as per the above, I did get to do my desired “new formal wedding outfits” dress-up session in CAS with my Valicer trio this afternoon. And it was fun, and you’ll get to see the results below. It’s just...there was some rather annoying weirdness/glitchiness on the way there that made this all take longer than I wanted. Let me take you through what happened:
A) First things first – this morning, before I’d even thought about starting up the game for my dress-up session, I saw a video from onlyabidoang in my Recommendeds on YouTube – with the title “This New Update BREAKS The Sims 4…” I was like “what?!” and watched it after lunch – the details of the video are down in the “YouTube” section below, but the quick summary is that the July 1st patch is buggy as hell (to the point of being gamebreaking in some instances), and Abi was warning his viewers and letting them know they should avoid patching their game if they could to avoid dealing with the disaster. *facepalm* Fortunately, avoiding patching my game was very simple, as per GameRants – all I had to do was tell the EA App to “go offline,” and it allowed me to play The Sims 4 without downloading that buggy-as-hell update. And, as a plus, it allowed me to keep the mods and CC that I’d put back in my Mods folder earlier active, so I could play with them during the dress-up session! :) So yeah – depending on when the patch for the patch comes out, guess I’ll be playing Sims 4 in offline mode for the foreseeable future!
B) After successfully getting into my now-offline game, I loaded up Building Save Numero Dos (the one I’ve been working in the most lately) – and thought, “You know what might be nice? Getting a picture of the trio in their new outfits in Live Mode! And I have a Valicer trio living in this save – why don’t I go to their household, have them Plan Outfits so I can pick the new formalwear, then pop out, get a camera and a tripod, and have them take a picture or two together! They should know each other well enough for that!” So I clicked on their house and hit the big old “Play” button, expecting to just find Victor and Smiler outside chatting and Alice hanging out inside with Dogmeat – and saw this:
My first thought, as you might imagine, was “what the everloving fuck.” I couldn’t figure out why there was suddenly a second set of Victor, Alice, and Smiler Sims standing outside the house, watching the original Victor and Smiler chat. They weren’t part of the household, but clicking on them confirmed they were real Sims –
And hovering over them made me realize, “Oh. Right. These are the teen versions I made a few playsessions ago. Should have recognized the outfits. ...So what the hell are they doing here?!” Baffled, I headed into “Manage Worlds” mode, and, after a bit of fiddling, found the button to “Manage Households” in the Brindleton Bay map screen. And when I clicked on the “Other Households” tab, there the teens were –
Along with the version of the trio I originally made to play around with Valicer In The Dark-themed outfits (featuring mostly-naked versions of Alice and Victor, as they’d been wearing CC Victorian clothes that I currently don’t have in the game, plus a green-eyed Smiler from the old “occult eyes don’t actually remain on Sims faces” bug). AND an Alice I’d made who had a Cheshire Cat that I’d found on the Gallery called “Bloodlines Alice” (who naturally was meant to be a complement to the “Fallout 4 Victor” who – well, he still lives in this save, but he’s not really Fallout 4 themed anymore now, beyond owning Dogmeat and living in a copy of the Sanctuary house). All of them listed as “Not Currently In World,” which I’m pretty positive means none of them have a lot to live on – they just wander around the save, townie-style. I’m not 100% sure how they all ended up as “Other Households” in this save, but I think all three of these households are ones where I’ve hit the big “I’m ready to move these Sims into a save!” checkmark button at the end of CAS design session, only to immediately cancel out of actually moving them into a lot, because my only intention was to make sure they got saved into my Library. I guess that keeps the family in the world as random wandering townies instead? I have no idea, but it’s my best guess at the moment!
C) Anyway – now that I’d established I had two extra sets of Valicer trios, plus a spare Alice, mucking about in this save, the question became – now what? Because I didn’t particularly want them mucking about in the save, even if I barely ever visited Live Mode – but part of me was scared to delete them from “Other Households” because I was worried it would affect the families in my Library. Like, logically I knew it shouldn’t, but my brain kept going “what if,” and given I’d JUST watched a video about how buggy this game was after the last patch…
So I decided the best thing to do was to test things in another save! I thus exited to the Main Menu without saving (though I did turn “Neighborhood Stories” off for the “Other Households” before leaving, just to be on the safe side – I don’t need that chaos in my game either), then booted up one of my other building saves, the “Wiped Windenburg” save (where I was doing a lot of my “potential Tiny Town” stuff). Once I was in there, I clicked the “Manage Households” button, then checked the “Other Households” tab. I didn’t see the Teen Valicer Trio there (makes sense, I didn’t make them in this save), but I did see the VITD outfits trio and the Bloodlines Alice (also makes sense – I made them before I split “Wiped Windenburg” off from “Numero Dos”). I thus deleted those two families, then checked my Library to see if I could still find them in there –
And I could indeed. Whew! So deleting families from that tab does not affect the copies saved in the Library. Good to know! :)
D) With that sorted, I figured I might as well stay in the “Wiped Windenburg” save to do my desired “CAS dress up followed by Live Mode tripod pictures” session – after all, I had a Valicer trio living there too. There was just one problem with this plan – the Smiler living in this save was one of the ones who’d gotten bit by the “no occult eyes” bug, and thus had green eyes instead of yellow ones. “But hey,” I thought, “I already know how to fix this – pop on ‘testing cheats’ and modify them in CAS to change them to a Spellcaster so I get access to the occult eyes! Would be even easier if I could just download the new patch so the occult eye colors were accessible for all Sims, but eh.” I thus looked up the correct wording for the cheat; typed it in; shift-clicked on Smiler (after mistakenly trying to RIGHT-click them a couple of times) and picked “Modify In CAS;” and prepared to change the occult status –
Only to find that I couldn’t – the game wouldn’t let me. The section featuring their occult status was totally grayed out. Baffled, I went over to the head section and started clicking on their eyes, to see if the section to change the color would come up –
And not only did nothing happen, just when I was like “okay, let’s get out of here, something’s not right,” the game straight-up crashed. >( I – do cheats not work unless the game is in online mode? That would be a huge fucking annoyance if so…
E) Anyway – as you might expect, that was the point where I decided I could live without doing a Live Mode picture of the trio in their new wedding-inspired finery. Much as it would have been nice, I was much more keen on just getting the damn CAS dress-up session done, without worrying about weird teenage clones of the trio wandering around or cheats not working and crashing my game. I thus headed back into Building Save Numero Dos, hit the button to create a new household, and grabbed one of my dress-up Valicer families from my Library to replace the random Sim I’d been presented with. And then, FINALLY, I got to spend the better part of an hour deciding on good wedding outfits for them! Here’s what I came up with:
Victor was the easiest of the three to dress – while looking at suits for him that seemed wedding-appropriate, I came across this Vampires suit that I remembered his Chill Valicer Save self wore to both his weddings. And while checking out the swatches (as I didn’t want to go with the same swatch as I’d used for those weddings – this was supposed to be at least SOMEWHAT new stuff), I found this nice dull blue one that I thought suited him damn near perfectly! And which came with matching Vampires shoes with gray spats, and a – sort of matching blue top hat. It’s a little darker blue than it really should be, but it still works. So yeah, that was him set, nice and easy-peasy!
Alice, by contrast, was definitely the hardest to dress, because – well, after more or less copping out with Victor’s outfit, I wanted to do a different dress from the fancy flowery Vampires one that she’d worn to her Chill Valicer Save weddings – but none of the other dresses I tried on her really seemed to suit that “wedding” vibe I was going for! (Though a few did just plain look nice on her – I need to put her in more Life & Death stuff, the goth vibe works for her.) I guess after the Chill Save Valicer weddings, that dress is just her wedding dress in my mind… Fortunately, I was still able to mix things up a little thanks to, one, not having all my CC back in my game and thus not having any flower crowns to stick on her for her wedding “headdress,” and two, being inspired to do the “blue for Victor, red for Alice, yellow for Smiler” color scheme I used in the Polyheart OT3 house for these outfits after putting Victor in that blue suit. So for this version of her wedding outfit, Alice is sporting a nice Get Famous hat in black, with red roses and a short black veil in the front; the Vampires dress in the very dramatic red-and-black color scheme; and some lovely black-and-red Life & Death boots – I mean, you can’t really see them, but they are there! XD Plus her Realm of Magic key necklace, because she always has to have her key necklace if I can put it on her. :) For what it’s worth, she’s also got red stockings on under the dress; a set of red nails that came with Spa Day (I went with ones that kind of looked like the fake ones on the gloves that go with her Royal Suit dress in Alice: Madness Returns); a set of the new Lovestruck eyelashes; a very-lightly-applied pink MAC base game blush; a simple black base game eyeliner; and a lightly-applied base game red eye shadow. ...Look, I wanted to make her pretty for her big day!
And Smiler, fittingly, was neither as easy to dress as Victor, not as hard to dress as Alice. In their case, I was determined not to have them wear the same thing they did during their wedding to Victor in the Chill Valicer Save, just in a different swatch, so I started looking through all the available formal suits and seeing which ones had decent yellow swatches. As it turns out, most of them either didn’t have yellow swatches or had terrible ones, so – after forcing myself to reject putting them in the same Vampires suit that Victor was wearing, only in a swatch with a black jacket and pants and a nice bright yellow waistcoat (because while it looked good, I thought it looked just a little TOO similar to their old wedding outfit – and because I was pretty sure I’d already featured it before while sharing CAS stuff, and I wanted new stuff, damn it) – I started looking instead at separate tops and bottoms, wondering if perhaps a more casual vibe would suit Smiler better. And, as it turned out, it did, as I ended up rather liking this Vampires gold top paired with a pair of Vampires black pants with a shimmery gold leaf pattern on them. Not QUITE the right shade of yellow, but it looks fancy enough for a wedding! A pair of nice black Life & Death slightly-heeled boots, some yellow socks (not that you can see them, but they’re there), a white top hat, some nonbinary nail polish, and their usual yellow base game eyeliner paired with some soft purple eye shadow from Crypt-O-Club (forget which fanpack it came from precisely) completes their look.
And there we have it – three outfits that I could use if and when I ever get these three married in one of my save files again! I think what we can conclude from this is that I consider everything from the Vampires game pack to be appropriate wedding clothing. XD Just glad I was able to get there in the end – I would have been sad if I hadn’t been able to do my dress-up session! Sims 4 is currently the only game where I can see all three of them at once, after all...
Writing: Got to the writing a bit late tonight, thanks to needing a bit of extra time to finish off both the above write-up on the Sims 4 nonsense AND the latest reblog on my Valicer Wedding Masterpost...but I am very pleased to say that, when I did get to it, I wrote almost two pages and finished Chapter 3! :D Mostly because I really, really wanted to reunite Alice and Smiler with Victor today, given it is the Valicer Anniversary. :p Anyway, the final bit of Chapter 3 consisted of –
A) Kasimir genially confronting Alice and Smiler and asking what their deal was, and them replying “kind of depends on what YOUR deal is, and if it’s going to hurt our friend”
B) The confrontation being interrupted by Barnaby and Victor, with the former cheerfully informing Kasimir that Victor had agreed to help them rob the Van Dort’s vault – both Alice and Smiler were a little ??? over this, as you might expect
C) Kasimir explaining that the reason they’re robbing the Van Dorts is that Barnaby gave half the gang’s Coin to a conman claiming to be setting up a dog-racing track in the city (this is something that’s genuinely in the book – I believe mentioned in the write-up of important things of note in Nightmarket, in fact, but don’t quote me on that), and this was the best way they could think of to get their money back (with Barnaby going on about how the gang needed to be committing more “lovely crimes” anyway :P); and Victor explaining to Alice and Smiler about how his mother didn’t care about his well-being and didn’t believe a ghost would want to marry him anyway before breaking down. :( Alice and Smiler both comforted him, and Victor asked Alice if he could stay with her at least temporarily, since he did not want to live in the Van Dort mansion anymore; Alice agreed, despite the smug coming off Smiler XD
D) And Alice and Smiler confirming to Kasimir that they’re all for helping rob the Van Dorts, and Victor sending Kasimir and Barnaby to wait in the wine cellar while he, Alice, and Smiler went up to his room to get his things (Kasimir and especially Barnaby were very happy to wait down there XD)
So yeah, that’s another chapter in the books, yay! :D Now it’s back to “Londerland Bloodlines: Downtown Queensland” for a few days, and then next weekend, we start Chapter 4!
YouTube: Not a great day for the old YouTubes, given I spent most of the day either working on my tumblr, playing Sims 4, or working on these write-ups. But I got in a few videos, including the clips of Corpse Bride, Alice: Madness Returns, and The Smiler that I wanted to watch –
A) First up, as per the “Sims 4” section above, I watched “This New Update BREAKS The Sims 4…” by onlyabidoang right before my playsession this afternoon! Because yeah, uh, looks like the July 1st patch was a lot buggier than anyone thought, prompting Abi taking to the YouTubes to warn his audience not to update their game if they could help it, and to show off as many of the bugs he could in his own game to let everyone know what they might be dealing with. Among the bugs noted were:
I. Being unable to drag dirty dishes into sinks, trash into trash bins, laundry into laundry hampers, and certain collectibles into their display cases
II. Being unable to direct Sims to take a pregnancy test if you had your sims “try for baby” in a bed – and the pregnancy state itself being somewhat broken, with some pregnant Sims not showing their bellies or not being able to progress in their pregnancies
III. Sims and objects disappearing behind curved glass walls (Abi noted that curved walls are buggy as hell anyway, so maybe this should have been expected), and Sims being in rooms with glass walls getting the “Poorly Decorated” moodlet for some reason
IV. Sims coming home from work or school early if another Sim left on the home lot decides to travel
V. Sims with the “Entrepreneurial” reward trait (Abi had some trouble pronouncing that, poor guy) not getting promotions in their careers after a certain point, only raises
VI. And Sims with custom tattoos and pets with custom coats made in paint mode ending up with pitch black skin or fur (I – think I’ve actually seen this in my own game BEFORE this patch, with the Dogmeat who lives with my Valicer trio in the Building Save I use the most often sometimes showing up black in CAS! But apparently the problem’s gotten a lot worse with this patch)
Soooo – yeah. Lot of fun bugs with this particular patch, eh? And everyone was so excited because it finally fixed the “indoor weather” bug… When’s Paralives coming out again??
B) And then, tonight, right after I’d finished talking to my friend Squid, I took a few minutes to watch the following:
I. “Alice: Madness Returns - Launch Trailer” by Electronic Arts (exactly what it says on the tin, the trailer that went out when the game officially hit shelves)
II. “Tim Burton's Corpse Bride – Trailer” by YouTube Movies (the longer of Corpse Bride’s two trailers, with the poem narration)
III. “The Smiler Alton Towers AR Points” by matmi (a look at all the AR points around the park and in newspapers and whatnot that you could scan with your camera to see neat things and unlock goodies in The Smiler Game)
IV. “What Smiler Sounds Like” by docette2015 (aka me – one of two video clips I have of my Chill Valicer Save trio hanging out together (in this case, in Chestnut Ridge to celebrate SimCity Founding), which I recorded specifically so people would know what Smiler’s voice sounds like)
So yeah, I think I got all of my Valicer clips in there. :) Would have liked to have watched more or longer ones, but you have to work with the time you have!
Workout: Hopped back on the bike for another half-hour today, pedaling my way through the beginning of “Tiny Town Finale! - Part 30” by James Turner! Yeah, I know I only just started the Wyrdwood series over on Oxventure, and I am eager to watch the rest of it, but I was also eager to see Tiny Town finally wrapped up after so long. So I decided we’d dedicate this week to the big finale of this series, then continue catching up on all things Oxventure after that. *nods* None of it’s going anywhere, after all!
Anyway – this final episode of Tiny Town is all about finishing unfinished business, making sure everyone is in a good place in their lives, and ensuring the town is in the best state it can be in. James went through the comments on previous videos, made a list of what people wanted to see for each resident, and planned to visit each one in turn to wrap things up for them – starting with the people who had the least “wrapping up” to do, of course. So far, in this first half-hour, he has:
A) Gone by Sonny’s and built a proper nursery for his and Judith’s baby boy, Blue, with some nice plants and a ceiling fan and cute artwork that the baby could definitely not have drawn, but he’ll get there, he’ll get there XD (also, he accidentally built it in “infinite money” build mode because he popped into that mode to fix the roofs and forgot to pop back out again, but James quickly decided he wasn’t going to worry about it because it was the final episode – and besides, Sonny and Judith have their own private vault with half a million in it, so it’s not like it would have been that much of a hit to the finances anyway…)
B) Visited Reuben’s and used the power of “Modify In CAS” to give him a dog, Ruby, because romantic relationships weren’t really his thing but nobody wanted to see him all alone in his house/cafe (the dog is a Vizsla as they are a very orange-furred breed, and she is Active, Playful, and a Hunter – she and Reuben went out on a very long walk as their final act of the episode, during which she somehow learned how to improve a family recipe with a special disease-curing touch. …the Sims 4, everyone)
C) Swung by Pablo’s and widened the “backyard” room in his vault slightly so he could give the guy a swingset (as everyone noticed Pablo loved swinging on Scarlett’s all the time); put a hopscotch board in the hallway for Kyra to play on (so she had something to do in the vault); and stuck Scarlett’s dead cowplant in the desert surrounding the entrance to the bunker (as it was very much more Pablo’s aesthetic than Scarlett’s XD)
D) Hit Silas R.’s with the intent of improving his relationship with his husband Silas M. by forcing them to have a science baby together – only to run into the roadblocks of “they don’t have enough money to have a science baby” and “the game randomly made them kind of hate each other while they were working on breaking into the Community Center vault to get the money for the science baby.” XD I mean, their relationship has always been pretty rocky, but the game had just fixed their compatibility issues by making Silas R. like hardworking Sims like his husband, and Silas M. like lovable rascals like his husband, before suddenly making them fight and tanking their friendship. A very frustrated James thus spent a not-inconsiderable amount of time forcing them to like each other again (via the means of “going into CAS and getting rid of all of Silas M.’s dislikes so Silas R. couldn’t keep annoying him” and “Silas R. spamming Silas M. with friendly messages over Social Bunny to quickly get up their friendship”) so, you know, they’d want to do the science baby thing together. Happily, he succeeded after not too long, and after FINALLY successfully breaking into the vault and scooping up some cash, the two Silas’s went off to the clinic and came back with their own baby boy – Sighlas. Who does not get his own baby room – he just gets shoved into a nook in the couple’s bedroom. XD Their chunk ended with James forcing them to cuddle their new baby while they were both filthy from slipping in the muddle puddles outside (and in Silas M.’s case, dazed from being hit by lightning), and James saying that Silas R. would not be taking pictures of the completed houses in-game because it was a pain in the ass to set up with the tripod – easier for him to just do it himself.
And there we have it – the first four residents of Tiny Town all taken care of! Tomorrow, we move onto Vivienne, Camillo, and Scarlett and see about getting THEIR lives sorted!
Aaand, as usual, doing all that means I've stayed up too late again. Good thing I'm getting used to that? *strained smile* Anyway, I'm hitting the sack as I do have work tomorrow -- night all!
Tumblr: Only Victor Luvs Alice (N Smiler) to worry about this Valicer Wedding Anniversary, and I had a fairly productive day over there, happily:
A) First, I finished drafting out my “Valicer as text posts” post, explaining how it came to be and thanking the creator of the “Dead Boys Detectives as text posts” post for inspiration (along with the creators of the original text posts). So hopefully I can throw that into this week’s queue!
B) Then, I did some more work on the “Teen Valicer Save” post, writing up the section explaining what I want each individual member of my OT3 to do over the course of the save – like part-time jobs and after-school activities I’d like them to join while in high school, what occults I’d like them to become (or, in Smiler’s case, start out as), and what their ultimate adult career would be. I’m still not quite done – have to finish off the lists for Victor and Alice – but I made some good progress, and I’m that much closer to getting this darn thing posted!
C) And finally, I reblogged my Valicer Wedding Masterpost (a collection of posts I’ve made documenting all the Valice and Valicer wedding stuff I’ve done over the years – includes links to the wedding chapters of “Secundus” and “Fixing You,” along with other wedding-related fic I’ve written in each verse; links to the Newcrest Adventures Valice wedding, and the Chill Save Valice and Valicer weddings; and a selection of pictures from the Chill Save Valice and Valicer weddings, because why not) again, adding links to some of the fics I’ve written so far this year that at least mention weddings (including, yes, the collection of Not-Incorrect Valicer Quotes I queued up for last Friday about them moving in together – it did mention at the end Victor not wanting to get married until he could marry BOTH Alice and Smiler), and the pictures I took of the trio in their new potential wedding outfits today in Sims 4! Got it up a bit later than I intended, but it went up, and that’s all that matters. :) Yay~
Sims 4: So – as per the above, I did get to do my desired “new formal wedding outfits” dress-up session in CAS with my Valicer trio this afternoon. And it was fun, and you’ll get to see the results below. It’s just...there was some rather annoying weirdness/glitchiness on the way there that made this all take longer than I wanted. Let me take you through what happened:
A) First things first – this morning, before I’d even thought about starting up the game for my dress-up session, I saw a video from onlyabidoang in my Recommendeds on YouTube – with the title “This New Update BREAKS The Sims 4…” I was like “what?!” and watched it after lunch – the details of the video are down in the “YouTube” section below, but the quick summary is that the July 1st patch is buggy as hell (to the point of being gamebreaking in some instances), and Abi was warning his viewers and letting them know they should avoid patching their game if they could to avoid dealing with the disaster. *facepalm* Fortunately, avoiding patching my game was very simple, as per GameRants – all I had to do was tell the EA App to “go offline,” and it allowed me to play The Sims 4 without downloading that buggy-as-hell update. And, as a plus, it allowed me to keep the mods and CC that I’d put back in my Mods folder earlier active, so I could play with them during the dress-up session! :) So yeah – depending on when the patch for the patch comes out, guess I’ll be playing Sims 4 in offline mode for the foreseeable future!
B) After successfully getting into my now-offline game, I loaded up Building Save Numero Dos (the one I’ve been working in the most lately) – and thought, “You know what might be nice? Getting a picture of the trio in their new outfits in Live Mode! And I have a Valicer trio living in this save – why don’t I go to their household, have them Plan Outfits so I can pick the new formalwear, then pop out, get a camera and a tripod, and have them take a picture or two together! They should know each other well enough for that!” So I clicked on their house and hit the big old “Play” button, expecting to just find Victor and Smiler outside chatting and Alice hanging out inside with Dogmeat – and saw this:
My first thought, as you might imagine, was “what the everloving fuck.” I couldn’t figure out why there was suddenly a second set of Victor, Alice, and Smiler Sims standing outside the house, watching the original Victor and Smiler chat. They weren’t part of the household, but clicking on them confirmed they were real Sims –
And hovering over them made me realize, “Oh. Right. These are the teen versions I made a few playsessions ago. Should have recognized the outfits. ...So what the hell are they doing here?!” Baffled, I headed into “Manage Worlds” mode, and, after a bit of fiddling, found the button to “Manage Households” in the Brindleton Bay map screen. And when I clicked on the “Other Households” tab, there the teens were –
Along with the version of the trio I originally made to play around with Valicer In The Dark-themed outfits (featuring mostly-naked versions of Alice and Victor, as they’d been wearing CC Victorian clothes that I currently don’t have in the game, plus a green-eyed Smiler from the old “occult eyes don’t actually remain on Sims faces” bug). AND an Alice I’d made who had a Cheshire Cat that I’d found on the Gallery called “Bloodlines Alice” (who naturally was meant to be a complement to the “Fallout 4 Victor” who – well, he still lives in this save, but he’s not really Fallout 4 themed anymore now, beyond owning Dogmeat and living in a copy of the Sanctuary house). All of them listed as “Not Currently In World,” which I’m pretty positive means none of them have a lot to live on – they just wander around the save, townie-style. I’m not 100% sure how they all ended up as “Other Households” in this save, but I think all three of these households are ones where I’ve hit the big “I’m ready to move these Sims into a save!” checkmark button at the end of CAS design session, only to immediately cancel out of actually moving them into a lot, because my only intention was to make sure they got saved into my Library. I guess that keeps the family in the world as random wandering townies instead? I have no idea, but it’s my best guess at the moment!
C) Anyway – now that I’d established I had two extra sets of Valicer trios, plus a spare Alice, mucking about in this save, the question became – now what? Because I didn’t particularly want them mucking about in the save, even if I barely ever visited Live Mode – but part of me was scared to delete them from “Other Households” because I was worried it would affect the families in my Library. Like, logically I knew it shouldn’t, but my brain kept going “what if,” and given I’d JUST watched a video about how buggy this game was after the last patch…
So I decided the best thing to do was to test things in another save! I thus exited to the Main Menu without saving (though I did turn “Neighborhood Stories” off for the “Other Households” before leaving, just to be on the safe side – I don’t need that chaos in my game either), then booted up one of my other building saves, the “Wiped Windenburg” save (where I was doing a lot of my “potential Tiny Town” stuff). Once I was in there, I clicked the “Manage Households” button, then checked the “Other Households” tab. I didn’t see the Teen Valicer Trio there (makes sense, I didn’t make them in this save), but I did see the VITD outfits trio and the Bloodlines Alice (also makes sense – I made them before I split “Wiped Windenburg” off from “Numero Dos”). I thus deleted those two families, then checked my Library to see if I could still find them in there –
And I could indeed. Whew! So deleting families from that tab does not affect the copies saved in the Library. Good to know! :)
D) With that sorted, I figured I might as well stay in the “Wiped Windenburg” save to do my desired “CAS dress up followed by Live Mode tripod pictures” session – after all, I had a Valicer trio living there too. There was just one problem with this plan – the Smiler living in this save was one of the ones who’d gotten bit by the “no occult eyes” bug, and thus had green eyes instead of yellow ones. “But hey,” I thought, “I already know how to fix this – pop on ‘testing cheats’ and modify them in CAS to change them to a Spellcaster so I get access to the occult eyes! Would be even easier if I could just download the new patch so the occult eye colors were accessible for all Sims, but eh.” I thus looked up the correct wording for the cheat; typed it in; shift-clicked on Smiler (after mistakenly trying to RIGHT-click them a couple of times) and picked “Modify In CAS;” and prepared to change the occult status –
Only to find that I couldn’t – the game wouldn’t let me. The section featuring their occult status was totally grayed out. Baffled, I went over to the head section and started clicking on their eyes, to see if the section to change the color would come up –
And not only did nothing happen, just when I was like “okay, let’s get out of here, something’s not right,” the game straight-up crashed. >( I – do cheats not work unless the game is in online mode? That would be a huge fucking annoyance if so…
E) Anyway – as you might expect, that was the point where I decided I could live without doing a Live Mode picture of the trio in their new wedding-inspired finery. Much as it would have been nice, I was much more keen on just getting the damn CAS dress-up session done, without worrying about weird teenage clones of the trio wandering around or cheats not working and crashing my game. I thus headed back into Building Save Numero Dos, hit the button to create a new household, and grabbed one of my dress-up Valicer families from my Library to replace the random Sim I’d been presented with. And then, FINALLY, I got to spend the better part of an hour deciding on good wedding outfits for them! Here’s what I came up with:
Victor was the easiest of the three to dress – while looking at suits for him that seemed wedding-appropriate, I came across this Vampires suit that I remembered his Chill Valicer Save self wore to both his weddings. And while checking out the swatches (as I didn’t want to go with the same swatch as I’d used for those weddings – this was supposed to be at least SOMEWHAT new stuff), I found this nice dull blue one that I thought suited him damn near perfectly! And which came with matching Vampires shoes with gray spats, and a – sort of matching blue top hat. It’s a little darker blue than it really should be, but it still works. So yeah, that was him set, nice and easy-peasy!
Alice, by contrast, was definitely the hardest to dress, because – well, after more or less copping out with Victor’s outfit, I wanted to do a different dress from the fancy flowery Vampires one that she’d worn to her Chill Valicer Save weddings – but none of the other dresses I tried on her really seemed to suit that “wedding” vibe I was going for! (Though a few did just plain look nice on her – I need to put her in more Life & Death stuff, the goth vibe works for her.) I guess after the Chill Save Valicer weddings, that dress is just her wedding dress in my mind… Fortunately, I was still able to mix things up a little thanks to, one, not having all my CC back in my game and thus not having any flower crowns to stick on her for her wedding “headdress,” and two, being inspired to do the “blue for Victor, red for Alice, yellow for Smiler” color scheme I used in the Polyheart OT3 house for these outfits after putting Victor in that blue suit. So for this version of her wedding outfit, Alice is sporting a nice Get Famous hat in black, with red roses and a short black veil in the front; the Vampires dress in the very dramatic red-and-black color scheme; and some lovely black-and-red Life & Death boots – I mean, you can’t really see them, but they are there! XD Plus her Realm of Magic key necklace, because she always has to have her key necklace if I can put it on her. :) For what it’s worth, she’s also got red stockings on under the dress; a set of red nails that came with Spa Day (I went with ones that kind of looked like the fake ones on the gloves that go with her Royal Suit dress in Alice: Madness Returns); a set of the new Lovestruck eyelashes; a very-lightly-applied pink MAC base game blush; a simple black base game eyeliner; and a lightly-applied base game red eye shadow. ...Look, I wanted to make her pretty for her big day!
And Smiler, fittingly, was neither as easy to dress as Victor, not as hard to dress as Alice. In their case, I was determined not to have them wear the same thing they did during their wedding to Victor in the Chill Valicer Save, just in a different swatch, so I started looking through all the available formal suits and seeing which ones had decent yellow swatches. As it turns out, most of them either didn’t have yellow swatches or had terrible ones, so – after forcing myself to reject putting them in the same Vampires suit that Victor was wearing, only in a swatch with a black jacket and pants and a nice bright yellow waistcoat (because while it looked good, I thought it looked just a little TOO similar to their old wedding outfit – and because I was pretty sure I’d already featured it before while sharing CAS stuff, and I wanted new stuff, damn it) – I started looking instead at separate tops and bottoms, wondering if perhaps a more casual vibe would suit Smiler better. And, as it turned out, it did, as I ended up rather liking this Vampires gold top paired with a pair of Vampires black pants with a shimmery gold leaf pattern on them. Not QUITE the right shade of yellow, but it looks fancy enough for a wedding! A pair of nice black Life & Death slightly-heeled boots, some yellow socks (not that you can see them, but they’re there), a white top hat, some nonbinary nail polish, and their usual yellow base game eyeliner paired with some soft purple eye shadow from Crypt-O-Club (forget which fanpack it came from precisely) completes their look.
And there we have it – three outfits that I could use if and when I ever get these three married in one of my save files again! I think what we can conclude from this is that I consider everything from the Vampires game pack to be appropriate wedding clothing. XD Just glad I was able to get there in the end – I would have been sad if I hadn’t been able to do my dress-up session! Sims 4 is currently the only game where I can see all three of them at once, after all...
Writing: Got to the writing a bit late tonight, thanks to needing a bit of extra time to finish off both the above write-up on the Sims 4 nonsense AND the latest reblog on my Valicer Wedding Masterpost...but I am very pleased to say that, when I did get to it, I wrote almost two pages and finished Chapter 3! :D Mostly because I really, really wanted to reunite Alice and Smiler with Victor today, given it is the Valicer Anniversary. :p Anyway, the final bit of Chapter 3 consisted of –
A) Kasimir genially confronting Alice and Smiler and asking what their deal was, and them replying “kind of depends on what YOUR deal is, and if it’s going to hurt our friend”
B) The confrontation being interrupted by Barnaby and Victor, with the former cheerfully informing Kasimir that Victor had agreed to help them rob the Van Dort’s vault – both Alice and Smiler were a little ??? over this, as you might expect
C) Kasimir explaining that the reason they’re robbing the Van Dorts is that Barnaby gave half the gang’s Coin to a conman claiming to be setting up a dog-racing track in the city (this is something that’s genuinely in the book – I believe mentioned in the write-up of important things of note in Nightmarket, in fact, but don’t quote me on that), and this was the best way they could think of to get their money back (with Barnaby going on about how the gang needed to be committing more “lovely crimes” anyway :P); and Victor explaining to Alice and Smiler about how his mother didn’t care about his well-being and didn’t believe a ghost would want to marry him anyway before breaking down. :( Alice and Smiler both comforted him, and Victor asked Alice if he could stay with her at least temporarily, since he did not want to live in the Van Dort mansion anymore; Alice agreed, despite the smug coming off Smiler XD
D) And Alice and Smiler confirming to Kasimir that they’re all for helping rob the Van Dorts, and Victor sending Kasimir and Barnaby to wait in the wine cellar while he, Alice, and Smiler went up to his room to get his things (Kasimir and especially Barnaby were very happy to wait down there XD)
So yeah, that’s another chapter in the books, yay! :D Now it’s back to “Londerland Bloodlines: Downtown Queensland” for a few days, and then next weekend, we start Chapter 4!
YouTube: Not a great day for the old YouTubes, given I spent most of the day either working on my tumblr, playing Sims 4, or working on these write-ups. But I got in a few videos, including the clips of Corpse Bride, Alice: Madness Returns, and The Smiler that I wanted to watch –
A) First up, as per the “Sims 4” section above, I watched “This New Update BREAKS The Sims 4…” by onlyabidoang right before my playsession this afternoon! Because yeah, uh, looks like the July 1st patch was a lot buggier than anyone thought, prompting Abi taking to the YouTubes to warn his audience not to update their game if they could help it, and to show off as many of the bugs he could in his own game to let everyone know what they might be dealing with. Among the bugs noted were:
I. Being unable to drag dirty dishes into sinks, trash into trash bins, laundry into laundry hampers, and certain collectibles into their display cases
II. Being unable to direct Sims to take a pregnancy test if you had your sims “try for baby” in a bed – and the pregnancy state itself being somewhat broken, with some pregnant Sims not showing their bellies or not being able to progress in their pregnancies
III. Sims and objects disappearing behind curved glass walls (Abi noted that curved walls are buggy as hell anyway, so maybe this should have been expected), and Sims being in rooms with glass walls getting the “Poorly Decorated” moodlet for some reason
IV. Sims coming home from work or school early if another Sim left on the home lot decides to travel
V. Sims with the “Entrepreneurial” reward trait (Abi had some trouble pronouncing that, poor guy) not getting promotions in their careers after a certain point, only raises
VI. And Sims with custom tattoos and pets with custom coats made in paint mode ending up with pitch black skin or fur (I – think I’ve actually seen this in my own game BEFORE this patch, with the Dogmeat who lives with my Valicer trio in the Building Save I use the most often sometimes showing up black in CAS! But apparently the problem’s gotten a lot worse with this patch)
Soooo – yeah. Lot of fun bugs with this particular patch, eh? And everyone was so excited because it finally fixed the “indoor weather” bug… When’s Paralives coming out again??
B) And then, tonight, right after I’d finished talking to my friend Squid, I took a few minutes to watch the following:
I. “Alice: Madness Returns - Launch Trailer” by Electronic Arts (exactly what it says on the tin, the trailer that went out when the game officially hit shelves)
II. “Tim Burton's Corpse Bride – Trailer” by YouTube Movies (the longer of Corpse Bride’s two trailers, with the poem narration)
III. “The Smiler Alton Towers AR Points” by matmi (a look at all the AR points around the park and in newspapers and whatnot that you could scan with your camera to see neat things and unlock goodies in The Smiler Game)
IV. “What Smiler Sounds Like” by docette2015 (aka me – one of two video clips I have of my Chill Valicer Save trio hanging out together (in this case, in Chestnut Ridge to celebrate SimCity Founding), which I recorded specifically so people would know what Smiler’s voice sounds like)
So yeah, I think I got all of my Valicer clips in there. :) Would have liked to have watched more or longer ones, but you have to work with the time you have!
Workout: Hopped back on the bike for another half-hour today, pedaling my way through the beginning of “Tiny Town Finale! - Part 30” by James Turner! Yeah, I know I only just started the Wyrdwood series over on Oxventure, and I am eager to watch the rest of it, but I was also eager to see Tiny Town finally wrapped up after so long. So I decided we’d dedicate this week to the big finale of this series, then continue catching up on all things Oxventure after that. *nods* None of it’s going anywhere, after all!
Anyway – this final episode of Tiny Town is all about finishing unfinished business, making sure everyone is in a good place in their lives, and ensuring the town is in the best state it can be in. James went through the comments on previous videos, made a list of what people wanted to see for each resident, and planned to visit each one in turn to wrap things up for them – starting with the people who had the least “wrapping up” to do, of course. So far, in this first half-hour, he has:
A) Gone by Sonny’s and built a proper nursery for his and Judith’s baby boy, Blue, with some nice plants and a ceiling fan and cute artwork that the baby could definitely not have drawn, but he’ll get there, he’ll get there XD (also, he accidentally built it in “infinite money” build mode because he popped into that mode to fix the roofs and forgot to pop back out again, but James quickly decided he wasn’t going to worry about it because it was the final episode – and besides, Sonny and Judith have their own private vault with half a million in it, so it’s not like it would have been that much of a hit to the finances anyway…)
B) Visited Reuben’s and used the power of “Modify In CAS” to give him a dog, Ruby, because romantic relationships weren’t really his thing but nobody wanted to see him all alone in his house/cafe (the dog is a Vizsla as they are a very orange-furred breed, and she is Active, Playful, and a Hunter – she and Reuben went out on a very long walk as their final act of the episode, during which she somehow learned how to improve a family recipe with a special disease-curing touch. …the Sims 4, everyone)
C) Swung by Pablo’s and widened the “backyard” room in his vault slightly so he could give the guy a swingset (as everyone noticed Pablo loved swinging on Scarlett’s all the time); put a hopscotch board in the hallway for Kyra to play on (so she had something to do in the vault); and stuck Scarlett’s dead cowplant in the desert surrounding the entrance to the bunker (as it was very much more Pablo’s aesthetic than Scarlett’s XD)
D) Hit Silas R.’s with the intent of improving his relationship with his husband Silas M. by forcing them to have a science baby together – only to run into the roadblocks of “they don’t have enough money to have a science baby” and “the game randomly made them kind of hate each other while they were working on breaking into the Community Center vault to get the money for the science baby.” XD I mean, their relationship has always been pretty rocky, but the game had just fixed their compatibility issues by making Silas R. like hardworking Sims like his husband, and Silas M. like lovable rascals like his husband, before suddenly making them fight and tanking their friendship. A very frustrated James thus spent a not-inconsiderable amount of time forcing them to like each other again (via the means of “going into CAS and getting rid of all of Silas M.’s dislikes so Silas R. couldn’t keep annoying him” and “Silas R. spamming Silas M. with friendly messages over Social Bunny to quickly get up their friendship”) so, you know, they’d want to do the science baby thing together. Happily, he succeeded after not too long, and after FINALLY successfully breaking into the vault and scooping up some cash, the two Silas’s went off to the clinic and came back with their own baby boy – Sighlas. Who does not get his own baby room – he just gets shoved into a nook in the couple’s bedroom. XD Their chunk ended with James forcing them to cuddle their new baby while they were both filthy from slipping in the muddle puddles outside (and in Silas M.’s case, dazed from being hit by lightning), and James saying that Silas R. would not be taking pictures of the completed houses in-game because it was a pain in the ass to set up with the tripod – easier for him to just do it himself.
And there we have it – the first four residents of Tiny Town all taken care of! Tomorrow, we move onto Vivienne, Camillo, and Scarlett and see about getting THEIR lives sorted!
Aaand, as usual, doing all that means I've stayed up too late again. Good thing I'm getting used to that? *strained smile* Anyway, I'm hitting the sack as I do have work tomorrow -- night all!
