Rainy Sleepy Sunday
Jul. 27th, 2025 11:41 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
crossover_chickYeah, the weather was pretty miserable today, with a lot of clouds and a few bursts of pouring rain. And a lot of humidity, which is apparently going to stick around at least through Tuesday and make it feel like it's 102 degrees out. Bleeeh. >( And yes, it was also one of those days where I just felt tired for a lot of it -- which is annoying, because I actually got a better-than-usual night's sleep last night! Nearly a full eight hours! I should have been feeling more refreshed, damn it... But the body is gonna do what the body does, I suppose. *sigh* And despite the tiredness and the icky weather, I had a pretty good day overall --
Tumblr: Another nothing day on Valice Multiverse, but I fortunately had another productive morning on Victor Luvs Alice (N Smiler) –
A) Started by answering an anonymous ask from someone wanting to know if I’d ever played Lies of P, and, if so, what I thought about crossovers with P – mostly because they’d seen plenty of crossovers between that game and the Alice games (unsurprising, since there’s a pretty healthy shipping community for Alice/P based on what I’ve seen on tumblr), and wanted to know how P would fit into the Forgotten Vows world. I had to tell them that no, I’d never played the game because it wasn’t my jam gameplay-wise (it’s apparently very Dark Souls-esque, and I get frustrated enough with games that aren’t trying to murder me every five seconds!) – but that I was aware of the Alice/P shippers and trusted their judgment on P being a good romantic partner for Alice. After all, Alice and P both do have that “classic literature reimagined through a more violent, psychological lens” vibe going on in their games. :p But yeah, I let them know that I didn’t know enough about P or his game to figure out how he’d fit into the Forgotten Vows verse, so the anon would have to figure that out on their own! And then proceeded to ramble on in the tags about how I’m pretty sure P is some sort of steampunk robot or cyborg, so maybe he’d fit better in Secundus. :p And that he can be an honorary member of the Greater Valicer Polycule, aka the Running Headlong Into The Bullshit nine person relationship, because I already stuck Preston Garvey and Piper Wright from my own Fallout 4 playthrough in there – and am kinda-sorta thinking about having Wyll from Baldur’s Gate III join, as he’s going to be my romance option for my Tav Smiler…
B) Then I headed into my drafts and finished off the “Not-Incorrect Valicer Quotes, Valicer In The Dark Edition, Volume V” post (with scenes featuring the VITD crew and their various pets – Sooty the raven, Guide the cat, Dogmeat the dog, Benny the lap dragon, and Us the intellect devourer) with a few last-minute edits and a bunch of tags about how making these posts always takes a while as I have to make sure I have enough scenes. And how yes, I know you shouldn’t give yarn balls to cats in case they eat the yarn, but the Alice of this verse doesn’t know that, so… Don’t worry, Alice – if you do find out it’s a bad idea, it’ll be through Guide pooping out a bunch of turds on a string and nothing more serious!
C) And finally, I started a draft of a post showing off the teenified versions of Victor, Alice, and Smiler that I made back on Smiler’s birthday, because I never did share the results of that mini-CAS session over on tumblr! Mostly because it took me ages to whip up a post about the save file that they’re supposed to be a part of. ^^; It’s not complete yet, but I feel like I made a good start – I’ve got the introduction; the pictures of everyone in their outfits (with alt text copied from the descriptions I gave the pics over here); the descriptions of why I chose said outfits and what traits I’ve given the teens copied from my initial post on Dreamwidth; and a bunch of tags covering my discoveries that teens in Sims 4 MAY be a tiny bit shorter than adults and DEFINITELY have higher-pitched voices. XD Looking forward to editing it and getting it into postworthy condition later!
Sims 4: I did indeed return to my offline adventures in my Building Save today (after the EA App updated – was a little nervous that was going to force my Sims 4 game to update too, but fortunately it did not!) to work some more on Smiler’s Potion Caravan – and I am very pleased to announce that I had a much better and more productive building session today! Mostly because I took some time beforehand to look up pictures of “fantasy wagons” to get a better idea of what I wanted the build to, you know, actually look like. *nods* Here’s what I accomplished today:
A) After loading into the lot, I immediately took all objects out of the caravan (building a little bit of wall for all the wall-mounted decorations/lights to hang out on) and removed all the doors and stairs and such – then went ahead and “decapitated” the house by removing the room at the front and moving it to a different section of the lot! Reason? My research into what “fantasy wagons” typically looked like (backed up by me looking them up on my phone for a quick refresher) had revealed that I hadn’t built the front of Smiler’s little mobile home right. You see, I’d built it as one big blocky room with an entrance on the side, like what you might see on a modern mobile home –
But all the stuff I saw online indicated that a Proper Fantasy Wagon needed, essentially, a “front porch” of sorts. Usually a place for whoever was driving to sit once whatever was pulling the wagon was hooked up to the front, but even those wagons that didn’t have any place to hook up a horse or goat or what-have-you (presumably being animated by magic or machinery or both) still had that little front porch bit. So I figured I’d better add one to Smiler’s caravan! And since I wanted to make sure I had enough room to do so (as this build is a bit long and stretches almost all the way across the tiny lot I’m building on in Newcrest), I took the front bit off the main body temporarily. Makes sense now, right? :P There usually is a method to my madness! Not always a good one, but a method.
Anyway – once detached, I proceeded to resize the room so it was smaller and raised up its foundation (as all my research indicated the caravan should really be higher off the ground too), then added a “flat square shape” (essentially just a bit of floor that acted as its own room) to the front to make the porch. I then made sure that the new porch used the same foundation as the rest of the build (that minimalistic stilt foundation from Snowy Escape I put on yesterday); readded the wall it had deleted when I shoved it onto the room; made it a little bit smaller to save some space; and stuck the Seasons slatted stairs I was using before onto the front to provide access to where the new front door would be. And once I was happy with all that, I reattached it to the rest of the caravan – after making the next room in line a bit smaller to accommodate the whole kit-and-kaboodle, of course. *nods* From there, all I had to do was make sure the new front bit matched the rest of the caravan in terms of width (it has to be a little chonky to accommodate that huge potion-making cauldron!), pull the roof over the new porch to protect it from the elements, and add a couple of columns to the front corners to provide “support” for said roof (getting briefly confused when I saw two versions of the Snowy Escape “Tests Of Time Cedar Column” that looked identical in their thumbnails while looking for a good one in black (to match the foundation) – however, when I took them both out in-game, it was revealed that one had a wood-grain pattern, and one didn’t. I went with the one with the wood grain as a little more rustic). Voila! One front porch for Smiler’s caravan. :D Without even going over the 64-floor-tile limit for a Tier 2 tiny home, yay~ (Hell, from all the resizing I did, the home actually ended up SMALLER than when I started – which is not a bad thing, as I’m trying to keep it at 64 tiles or less as a personal challenge here. :P)
B) With the front porch sorted, I took a few minutes to check to see if I wanted to change the roof trim (I did not, as all the thinner roof trims looked silly on this particular build, especially when paired with the supporting columns – though I did make it a darker shade of black, as I found that was an option), then made the roof a little higher and more domed before raising up the foundation on the main build to the height I’d decided on while playing around with making the new porch. I then gathered up my Horse Ranch debug wheels, sized them up one time (which, as previously stated, made them pretty damn big), and “attached” them to the foundation –
And holy HELL, it was absolutely amazing how much BETTER the whole build looked! Like, the damn thing suddenly looked like an actual CARAVAN! :D I hadn’t realized just how much the tiny versions of the wheels and the low foundation was hurting the build! No wonder I was struggling so much with making this look good before…it’s always the little things, you know?
C) With a new fire lit under me, I decided it was time to lean into the “rustic fantasy” vibes this thing was supposed to have and started looking for a new front door to match – because as much as I love the “Spoopy Portals” doors from Crypt-O-Club, they just weren’t right for this build. (Though I do still wish I could just draw my own spirals on the stuff I DID select. That would definitely make it more Smilery.) After checking out a few different options (all in black of course – I’m going with black wood as much as possible in this build because black and yellow are THE primary Smiler colors, I already have nice bright yellow walls, and none of the doors I was looking at had a good yellow swatch), I decided that I liked the “Worn Wood Door” from Life & Death the best and got that into place. With the door picked, I then started looking for a nice black worn-looking wooden floor to go with it, and quickly settled on the “Lub Dup Boards” from Spooky Stuff as my best candidate. Once I was satisfied with all that, I then removed all the interior walls from the build so I could redo the internal layout at my leisure; made the build a tiny bit bigger at the rear to make sure there was enough space for all of Smiler’s stuff –
And then repainted the interior with the same “Walk The Plank” wooden walls and “Lup Dup” wood floors as I was using outside. Because, again, while I love the Crypt-O-Club wallpapers, and the shiny purple basketball planks floor from City Living, they’re just not right for this build. *shrug* What are you gonna do? (...keep them in mind while designing Smiler’s living spaces over in my Teen Valicer Save file, of course. THEY don’t live in a rustic fantasy world! XD)
D) With that sorted, I now had to find a good way to light the interior of the build so I could actually see what I was doing! I had some of those bug-shaped wall lights from Realm of Magic kicking around on my “holding these until later” chunk of wall, since I’d added them to the build earlier thinking they looked fun – but once I put them inside the caravan, I realized they gave off like NO light at all. Which would NOT do. So instead I started looking for a good ceiling-mounted light option instead, as I do prefer those lights anyway. I quickly realized that there was a bit of a problem, though –
One, most of the ceiling lights in the catalog weren’t appropriate for this build at all;
Two, of those that were appropriate, they pretty much all used candles, which I wasn’t sure was a good idea inside this giant WOODEN caravan;
And three, the remaining ceiling light that I wanted to use? The other light from good old Realm of Magic that looked cool and really lit up the room well?
FUCKING HUGE. Like, it is an absolutely MASSIVE chandelier and I don’t understand why you’re allowed to put it in rooms with walls that are shorter than the tallest wall height. This thing is NOT something your average Sim could walk around in your average-sized room! And while I could resize it down, it didn’t quite resize properly, leaving three glowing spots of white light around it where the lights on the chandelier SHOULD be. Like, it wasn’t a huge deal, but it was still noticeable! *sigh* Seriously, why did they not include a smaller version of this light? It’s very neat, but you can’t use it in any build that isn’t massive without resizing it and dealing with the visual glitch! *grumble* I mean, I did still end up using it – shrunk a pair down to a REASONABLE size and recolored them black-and-white to match the Smiler Aesthetic – but I’m not sure I’m going to STICK with them. They’ll certainly do for lighting the interior for decorating purposes, though!
E) With the lighting situation resolved, at least for the moment, I then found myself beset by a question – namely, did I want to put the Horse Ranch “Crossbuck” big open sliding doors back on the side of the caravan? On the one hand, I had always imagined the caravan having big doors on the side that Smiler could open up to display their wares and allow access to customers wanting to browse…on the other, while the Crossbuck doors were definitely the style of big open door I wanted, I’d learned over the last couple of building sessions that they didn’t play nice with stairs – if I wanted to stick a set of stairs in the gap, I had to use the “bb.moveobjects on” cheat. And I wasn’t sure if I wanted to MOO the stairs into place, simply because – well, what if I wanted to use this build as an actual house or something at some point in the future? Would having the stairs there break the door in some small but significant way? It was a puzzle to be sure...
Then I went “hang on, I JUST attached a porch to the front of the build by slapping a ‘flat square’ shape against one of the rooms – why not do that here as well and have the stairs attach to THAT?” So that’s exactly what I did, building a three-wide mini-porch along the side of the caravan where I wanted the doors to be, slapping the doors onto the wall above it, then attaching the stairs to it! It mostly worked – while I could put the stairs in front of the door this way, they had to be positioned so they were just attached to the lip of the foundation, instead of being partially-merged into it like the front porch stairs (basically, the top step was extended out an extra square) – if I tried to push them in any farther, they deleted the doors. I briefly tried changing the doors on the side to the “Crossbuck Four Door” version, which has the big shutter doors around a normal pair of hinged doors in the middle, since earlier testing had proved they DID play nice with the stairs – but I quickly decided that I didn’t like the look of the “regular” doors in the gap and went back to what I had before. *shrug* Look, it works well enough, and we can pretend that maybe the mini-porch flips up or something and the stairs fold away underneath it. :P
F) With that sorted, I added an interior wall to separate the “work/selling” space from the “living” space inside the caravan (though I may be shrinking the size of the latter in the future), then put my mind to the question of windows! Because while Smiler had a pair of big honking sliding doors on one side of their wagon, they didn’t have any windows at all, and that seemed just a bit sad. :p I originally thought that I’d just plop on a couple of those really simple “open gap” Werewolves windows, as they seemed to fit the vibes of the rest of the build – but after looking through the catalog a little further, I instead went with the “Broadside Shutter by Taupebeard Industries” window from Island Living! Mainly because it did have a shutter and thus the implication that it could be closed to protect the inside of the caravan from the elements. And we want Smiler and their potions to be safe from those! I ended up placing four on what I consider to be the “back side” of the caravan – two in the “work/selling” room and two in the “living” room. I was going to put two on the front of the caravan too, next to the doors, but quickly realized there was only room for one (as the other one clipped into the open door)...then decided they looked kind of weird there anyway and deleted them. Smiler does NOT need the airflow on that side, that’s for sure. :P
G) And with that sorted, I decided to wrap things up by rebuilding the little “camp” area that I originally created in front of the old version of the caravan (with a campfire, a clothesline and wash bin, and a pee bush) and hiding all the other stuff that was still hanging out on the lot behind the caravan so I could take some pictures! Because I did want to show you all the new version of the caravan now that it’s looking so much better. :D Here you go:
Not too shabby, right? :D I mean, I still very much have to figure out what’s going on with the interior, but I feel like I’m in a much better place now than I was with this thing. *nods* Hopefully future building sessions will continue to go smoothly!
Workout/YouTube: Another Sunday, another night where I combine what I watch during my workout with what I watch after dinner to get through the entirety of “Fallout New Vegas: You Only Live Once Remastered - Part 3 - Biting Off More Than You Can Chew!” Because it’s just easier that way to keep up with Jon’s F:NV YOLO Remastered shenanigans. :p Today’s episode saw P. D. Shoot –
A) Finish looting Primm now that Primm Slim was officially the town’s sheriff! Because, apparently, the minute you name a new sheriff, all the convicts in the town drop dead from a sudden dose of law and order. XD This mainly consisted of her heading back into the Bison Steve Hotel and – after a bit of creeping around making sure all the criminals were indeed dead and F:NV hadn’t done anything funny – collecting a bunch of sweet loot off the bodies and a lot of booze out of the fridges in the kitchen. Plus that skill book she missed in the shop the last time – turns out it was lying right on top of the floor safe exactly where she was standing last time and she missed it because Jon was panicking about getting caught by the roaming convicts. XD It’s okay, Jon, I probably would have done the same thing! She also went around getting what loot she could get out of the local houses (after getting briefly jumpscared by the Primm residents moving back in with their rifles slung across their backs) and checking all the ammo containers in the ruins hoping against hope for Stealth Boys (because apparently there’s a REALLY slim chance for one to spawn in those) – no luck this time, though. Shame.
B) Head over to the NCR Correctional Facility (NCRCF for short)! Taking the long route along the road around the sky-diving shack because going as the crow flies across the desert would have sent her straight into a pack of wild dogs, and – yeah, P. D. wasn’t about to deal with that. Her reasons for visiting the place? Well, the first was to find the local trader and sell him a bunch of the shit she picked up to get those precious, precious caps –
And the second was to do some side quests for the Powder Gangers! Because, to my surprise, the NCRCF was not actually under the control of the NCR – turns out that the leader of the Powder Gangers, Eddie, had managed to take it over at some point in the past and turn it into a base. And he needed a few things doing – simple little jobs that P. D. was only too happy to snap up for the precious XP they would grant her. Especially since she had enough Speech skill to resolve the first two completely nonviolently. :P She thus proceeded to:
I. Head over to one of the smaller Powder Ganger camps to confront a gang leader, Chavez, who was openly flouting Eddie’s rules, and let him know that he should quit while he was ahead – and alive; Chavez said “fine, pickings were getting slim around here anyway)
II. Head back to the skydiving shack to investigate a strange merchant who Eddie had a funny feeling about – turned out the guy was a bounty hunter in disguise; P. D. said he should head out because his disguise wasn’t fooling anyone (he didn’t even have any pack brahmin with him), and the guy agreed and left peacefully
Aaand –
C) Head back to Primm to investigate a rumor that the NCR was planning a raid on the prison to take it back from the Powder Gangers! Specifically, she went to talk to Nash, the old guy who told her all about Primm’s problems when she first arrived in town, and managed to coax out of him that a deserter had let slip that the NCR was indeed planning an assault on the prison to take out Eddie and reclaim the place for themselves. Which both brought P. D. up to Level 4 (she promptly leveled up Sneak a bit, Speech a bit, and Melee Weapons a LOT, and took the “Educated” perk to get two more skill points per level up – she’s not going to get as much benefit out of that perk as she could, given she’s going to stop gaining levels at Level 30, but Jon still felt it was the best option for her of the perks available), and gave her a choice – bring this information back to Eddie so he and his gang would be prepared for the NCR attack (which, in the way of video games, would happen the minute she told him about it and put her immediately in danger), or betray him and go to the local NCR camp to tell them all about Eddie and offer to join the assault (which meant the fighting would only kick off when she arrived back at the prison, and allow her to stay in the back and let the NPCs do all the work).
...Yeah, P. D. immediately went to the NCR camp to betray Eddie. XD And then proceeded to head back to the prison, meet up with her contact Sergeant Lee, and then watch him and his men enter the fray from the safety of the rocks around the camp, waiting to follow them inside until they’d taken out all the tower guards. And then made sure to stay hidden at the very entrance of the facility, looting everything she could get her hands on, until they took out all the Powder Gangers and finished the quest for her. XD Basically, it was a repeat of the “Goodsprings vs Powder Gangers” fight she kicked off back in the first episode, where P. D. got all of the rewards for the side she was backing winning the fight, but none of the consequences. Hell, she even ensured her betrayal would not lead to the remaining Powder Gangers shooting her on sight by making sure not to kill a single one of them directly – she’s still just “Shunned” by the group. Girl knows just how to get everyone to fight her battles for her, it seems! This is a skill that should serve her well thorough this challenge. XD
D) Brave the entrance to the Divide to get some goodies from the Hopewell missile silo that is your first stop on the “Lonesome Road!” Because this one DLC alone allows you to leave it any time you want (it’s narratively important that you can), and she intended to take full advantage of that to leave all the really dangerous stuff for later. XD Her tiny side-trip into the DLC world consisted of –
I. Sneaking up to the entrance, which was apparently not that far from Primm, doing her best to avoid the coyotes along the way...only to find a mother and her pup waiting RIGHT OUTSIDE the gate she needed to pass through. Cue P. D. Grand Slamming them with her baseball bat with a little help from some Psycho, and taking her very first hit of the run from the coyote pup getting in a bite for six points of damage. According to the comments, this near-perfectly mirrors the original F:NV YOLO run, where the original P. D. Shoot got bitten by a dog in episode 3 – delightful! XD
II. Making her way into the Hopewell Silo, discovering that the controls to turn the lights back on were encrypted in a way that she was NOT going to be able to hack, and locating the one being that could get past the encryption and power the place up again – the cute little eyebot companion ED-E! Companions are normally not allowed in YOLO runs, but as it’s actually IMPOSSIBLE to progress through “Lonesome Road” without ED-E at your side to open certain doors, Jon had to make an exception for the bot. Though he made it very clear that ED-E was NOT allowed to join in combat, which was fair – the extra firepower is the whole reason companions aren’t allowed, after all!
III. Getting ED-E to open up the Commissary so she could sell pretty much all of her unwanted guns and medicine to the artificial intelligence inside and get herself a VERY nice set of Riot Gear! Which Jon stressed wasn’t going to make everything easy-peasy (there was only so much it could do to reduce incoming damage), but was still nice to have. Though even nicer to have were the three Stealth Boys P. D. found in ammo boxes right outside the Commissary room – Jon, who’d predicted he was never going to find a Stealth Boy in an ammo box this run after failing to find any in Primm, was extremely pleased. :D
IV. Getting ED-E to decrypt the silo controls so she could turn on the power and sneak a little further into the facility (telling ED-E to stay behind in the main room); collect a second-level security password out of a locked desk in the rubble and use it to shut down a sentry bot in one of the rooms beyond (she promptly raided it for ammo to sell later :P); and finally make her way into the next room to loot the two Marked Men corpses there, getting a really nice Bowie Knife and taking the Scout’s armor because it was actually a pretty solid bit of kit (+5 Sneak AND +1 Agility, nice).
V. Legging it out of there and back to the regular old Mojave now that she had what she wanted – only to find the coyote and her pup had respawned. *shakehead* Fortunately, they’d respawned on the other side of the little path to get to the Lonesome Road, so P. D. was able to sneak past them without any trouble this time around and get back to Primm unchomped. *nods* It’s the little things!
And that (apart from Jon having to TWICE injure P. D. again via console commands because the game healed both when she went into the DLC land and when she came back out again) was that! We left things off with P. D. standing just outside of Primm – next week, she hits the road as Jon hopes to send her on a grand journey around to the Mojave Outpost, then Nipton, then Novac. *nods* We shall see what happens next Sunday! Hopefully no more coyote bites. :P
Writing: Got another page done on “The Van Dort Vacancy” tonight, with Victor telling Kasimir, Barnaby, Alice, and Smiler about the first obstacle that they’ll have to pass on their way to rob the Van Dort vault – Steven and Alan, the two ex-Bluecoat guards his parents hired to guard the entrance. Kasimir noted that, as former Bluecoats, they’d probably be easily bribed – Alice asked if he planned to offer them a cut of the money they were going to steal, but Kasimir had a different plan in mind. Namely, offer them a drink of the nice booze he was SURE Barnaby had on his person, and spike it with slumber essence so they’d be too unconscious to stop the robbery. XD Barnaby reluctantly revealed that yes, he did have a very nice bottle of gin on him, and he WAS willing to sacrifice it for the cause – though he couldn’t stop himself from whining that it wouldn’t taste the same after poor people drunk it. Victor had to bite back a comment about hearing that Barnaby would drink rubbing alcohol if he thought it would get him hammered. XD But yes, the plan has officially been hatched – now they just need to get to Steven and Alan! Which they should do tomorrow...
Aaand I have officially stayed up much later than I should have yet again. *sigh* Well, I'm just gonna head off to bed instead of bitching about it -- night all!
Tumblr: Another nothing day on Valice Multiverse, but I fortunately had another productive morning on Victor Luvs Alice (N Smiler) –
A) Started by answering an anonymous ask from someone wanting to know if I’d ever played Lies of P, and, if so, what I thought about crossovers with P – mostly because they’d seen plenty of crossovers between that game and the Alice games (unsurprising, since there’s a pretty healthy shipping community for Alice/P based on what I’ve seen on tumblr), and wanted to know how P would fit into the Forgotten Vows world. I had to tell them that no, I’d never played the game because it wasn’t my jam gameplay-wise (it’s apparently very Dark Souls-esque, and I get frustrated enough with games that aren’t trying to murder me every five seconds!) – but that I was aware of the Alice/P shippers and trusted their judgment on P being a good romantic partner for Alice. After all, Alice and P both do have that “classic literature reimagined through a more violent, psychological lens” vibe going on in their games. :p But yeah, I let them know that I didn’t know enough about P or his game to figure out how he’d fit into the Forgotten Vows verse, so the anon would have to figure that out on their own! And then proceeded to ramble on in the tags about how I’m pretty sure P is some sort of steampunk robot or cyborg, so maybe he’d fit better in Secundus. :p And that he can be an honorary member of the Greater Valicer Polycule, aka the Running Headlong Into The Bullshit nine person relationship, because I already stuck Preston Garvey and Piper Wright from my own Fallout 4 playthrough in there – and am kinda-sorta thinking about having Wyll from Baldur’s Gate III join, as he’s going to be my romance option for my Tav Smiler…
B) Then I headed into my drafts and finished off the “Not-Incorrect Valicer Quotes, Valicer In The Dark Edition, Volume V” post (with scenes featuring the VITD crew and their various pets – Sooty the raven, Guide the cat, Dogmeat the dog, Benny the lap dragon, and Us the intellect devourer) with a few last-minute edits and a bunch of tags about how making these posts always takes a while as I have to make sure I have enough scenes. And how yes, I know you shouldn’t give yarn balls to cats in case they eat the yarn, but the Alice of this verse doesn’t know that, so… Don’t worry, Alice – if you do find out it’s a bad idea, it’ll be through Guide pooping out a bunch of turds on a string and nothing more serious!
C) And finally, I started a draft of a post showing off the teenified versions of Victor, Alice, and Smiler that I made back on Smiler’s birthday, because I never did share the results of that mini-CAS session over on tumblr! Mostly because it took me ages to whip up a post about the save file that they’re supposed to be a part of. ^^; It’s not complete yet, but I feel like I made a good start – I’ve got the introduction; the pictures of everyone in their outfits (with alt text copied from the descriptions I gave the pics over here); the descriptions of why I chose said outfits and what traits I’ve given the teens copied from my initial post on Dreamwidth; and a bunch of tags covering my discoveries that teens in Sims 4 MAY be a tiny bit shorter than adults and DEFINITELY have higher-pitched voices. XD Looking forward to editing it and getting it into postworthy condition later!
Sims 4: I did indeed return to my offline adventures in my Building Save today (after the EA App updated – was a little nervous that was going to force my Sims 4 game to update too, but fortunately it did not!) to work some more on Smiler’s Potion Caravan – and I am very pleased to announce that I had a much better and more productive building session today! Mostly because I took some time beforehand to look up pictures of “fantasy wagons” to get a better idea of what I wanted the build to, you know, actually look like. *nods* Here’s what I accomplished today:
A) After loading into the lot, I immediately took all objects out of the caravan (building a little bit of wall for all the wall-mounted decorations/lights to hang out on) and removed all the doors and stairs and such – then went ahead and “decapitated” the house by removing the room at the front and moving it to a different section of the lot! Reason? My research into what “fantasy wagons” typically looked like (backed up by me looking them up on my phone for a quick refresher) had revealed that I hadn’t built the front of Smiler’s little mobile home right. You see, I’d built it as one big blocky room with an entrance on the side, like what you might see on a modern mobile home –
But all the stuff I saw online indicated that a Proper Fantasy Wagon needed, essentially, a “front porch” of sorts. Usually a place for whoever was driving to sit once whatever was pulling the wagon was hooked up to the front, but even those wagons that didn’t have any place to hook up a horse or goat or what-have-you (presumably being animated by magic or machinery or both) still had that little front porch bit. So I figured I’d better add one to Smiler’s caravan! And since I wanted to make sure I had enough room to do so (as this build is a bit long and stretches almost all the way across the tiny lot I’m building on in Newcrest), I took the front bit off the main body temporarily. Makes sense now, right? :P There usually is a method to my madness! Not always a good one, but a method.
Anyway – once detached, I proceeded to resize the room so it was smaller and raised up its foundation (as all my research indicated the caravan should really be higher off the ground too), then added a “flat square shape” (essentially just a bit of floor that acted as its own room) to the front to make the porch. I then made sure that the new porch used the same foundation as the rest of the build (that minimalistic stilt foundation from Snowy Escape I put on yesterday); readded the wall it had deleted when I shoved it onto the room; made it a little bit smaller to save some space; and stuck the Seasons slatted stairs I was using before onto the front to provide access to where the new front door would be. And once I was happy with all that, I reattached it to the rest of the caravan – after making the next room in line a bit smaller to accommodate the whole kit-and-kaboodle, of course. *nods* From there, all I had to do was make sure the new front bit matched the rest of the caravan in terms of width (it has to be a little chonky to accommodate that huge potion-making cauldron!), pull the roof over the new porch to protect it from the elements, and add a couple of columns to the front corners to provide “support” for said roof (getting briefly confused when I saw two versions of the Snowy Escape “Tests Of Time Cedar Column” that looked identical in their thumbnails while looking for a good one in black (to match the foundation) – however, when I took them both out in-game, it was revealed that one had a wood-grain pattern, and one didn’t. I went with the one with the wood grain as a little more rustic). Voila! One front porch for Smiler’s caravan. :D Without even going over the 64-floor-tile limit for a Tier 2 tiny home, yay~ (Hell, from all the resizing I did, the home actually ended up SMALLER than when I started – which is not a bad thing, as I’m trying to keep it at 64 tiles or less as a personal challenge here. :P)
B) With the front porch sorted, I took a few minutes to check to see if I wanted to change the roof trim (I did not, as all the thinner roof trims looked silly on this particular build, especially when paired with the supporting columns – though I did make it a darker shade of black, as I found that was an option), then made the roof a little higher and more domed before raising up the foundation on the main build to the height I’d decided on while playing around with making the new porch. I then gathered up my Horse Ranch debug wheels, sized them up one time (which, as previously stated, made them pretty damn big), and “attached” them to the foundation –
And holy HELL, it was absolutely amazing how much BETTER the whole build looked! Like, the damn thing suddenly looked like an actual CARAVAN! :D I hadn’t realized just how much the tiny versions of the wheels and the low foundation was hurting the build! No wonder I was struggling so much with making this look good before…it’s always the little things, you know?
C) With a new fire lit under me, I decided it was time to lean into the “rustic fantasy” vibes this thing was supposed to have and started looking for a new front door to match – because as much as I love the “Spoopy Portals” doors from Crypt-O-Club, they just weren’t right for this build. (Though I do still wish I could just draw my own spirals on the stuff I DID select. That would definitely make it more Smilery.) After checking out a few different options (all in black of course – I’m going with black wood as much as possible in this build because black and yellow are THE primary Smiler colors, I already have nice bright yellow walls, and none of the doors I was looking at had a good yellow swatch), I decided that I liked the “Worn Wood Door” from Life & Death the best and got that into place. With the door picked, I then started looking for a nice black worn-looking wooden floor to go with it, and quickly settled on the “Lub Dup Boards” from Spooky Stuff as my best candidate. Once I was satisfied with all that, I then removed all the interior walls from the build so I could redo the internal layout at my leisure; made the build a tiny bit bigger at the rear to make sure there was enough space for all of Smiler’s stuff –
And then repainted the interior with the same “Walk The Plank” wooden walls and “Lup Dup” wood floors as I was using outside. Because, again, while I love the Crypt-O-Club wallpapers, and the shiny purple basketball planks floor from City Living, they’re just not right for this build. *shrug* What are you gonna do? (...keep them in mind while designing Smiler’s living spaces over in my Teen Valicer Save file, of course. THEY don’t live in a rustic fantasy world! XD)
D) With that sorted, I now had to find a good way to light the interior of the build so I could actually see what I was doing! I had some of those bug-shaped wall lights from Realm of Magic kicking around on my “holding these until later” chunk of wall, since I’d added them to the build earlier thinking they looked fun – but once I put them inside the caravan, I realized they gave off like NO light at all. Which would NOT do. So instead I started looking for a good ceiling-mounted light option instead, as I do prefer those lights anyway. I quickly realized that there was a bit of a problem, though –
One, most of the ceiling lights in the catalog weren’t appropriate for this build at all;
Two, of those that were appropriate, they pretty much all used candles, which I wasn’t sure was a good idea inside this giant WOODEN caravan;
And three, the remaining ceiling light that I wanted to use? The other light from good old Realm of Magic that looked cool and really lit up the room well?
FUCKING HUGE. Like, it is an absolutely MASSIVE chandelier and I don’t understand why you’re allowed to put it in rooms with walls that are shorter than the tallest wall height. This thing is NOT something your average Sim could walk around in your average-sized room! And while I could resize it down, it didn’t quite resize properly, leaving three glowing spots of white light around it where the lights on the chandelier SHOULD be. Like, it wasn’t a huge deal, but it was still noticeable! *sigh* Seriously, why did they not include a smaller version of this light? It’s very neat, but you can’t use it in any build that isn’t massive without resizing it and dealing with the visual glitch! *grumble* I mean, I did still end up using it – shrunk a pair down to a REASONABLE size and recolored them black-and-white to match the Smiler Aesthetic – but I’m not sure I’m going to STICK with them. They’ll certainly do for lighting the interior for decorating purposes, though!
E) With the lighting situation resolved, at least for the moment, I then found myself beset by a question – namely, did I want to put the Horse Ranch “Crossbuck” big open sliding doors back on the side of the caravan? On the one hand, I had always imagined the caravan having big doors on the side that Smiler could open up to display their wares and allow access to customers wanting to browse…on the other, while the Crossbuck doors were definitely the style of big open door I wanted, I’d learned over the last couple of building sessions that they didn’t play nice with stairs – if I wanted to stick a set of stairs in the gap, I had to use the “bb.moveobjects on” cheat. And I wasn’t sure if I wanted to MOO the stairs into place, simply because – well, what if I wanted to use this build as an actual house or something at some point in the future? Would having the stairs there break the door in some small but significant way? It was a puzzle to be sure...
Then I went “hang on, I JUST attached a porch to the front of the build by slapping a ‘flat square’ shape against one of the rooms – why not do that here as well and have the stairs attach to THAT?” So that’s exactly what I did, building a three-wide mini-porch along the side of the caravan where I wanted the doors to be, slapping the doors onto the wall above it, then attaching the stairs to it! It mostly worked – while I could put the stairs in front of the door this way, they had to be positioned so they were just attached to the lip of the foundation, instead of being partially-merged into it like the front porch stairs (basically, the top step was extended out an extra square) – if I tried to push them in any farther, they deleted the doors. I briefly tried changing the doors on the side to the “Crossbuck Four Door” version, which has the big shutter doors around a normal pair of hinged doors in the middle, since earlier testing had proved they DID play nice with the stairs – but I quickly decided that I didn’t like the look of the “regular” doors in the gap and went back to what I had before. *shrug* Look, it works well enough, and we can pretend that maybe the mini-porch flips up or something and the stairs fold away underneath it. :P
F) With that sorted, I added an interior wall to separate the “work/selling” space from the “living” space inside the caravan (though I may be shrinking the size of the latter in the future), then put my mind to the question of windows! Because while Smiler had a pair of big honking sliding doors on one side of their wagon, they didn’t have any windows at all, and that seemed just a bit sad. :p I originally thought that I’d just plop on a couple of those really simple “open gap” Werewolves windows, as they seemed to fit the vibes of the rest of the build – but after looking through the catalog a little further, I instead went with the “Broadside Shutter by Taupebeard Industries” window from Island Living! Mainly because it did have a shutter and thus the implication that it could be closed to protect the inside of the caravan from the elements. And we want Smiler and their potions to be safe from those! I ended up placing four on what I consider to be the “back side” of the caravan – two in the “work/selling” room and two in the “living” room. I was going to put two on the front of the caravan too, next to the doors, but quickly realized there was only room for one (as the other one clipped into the open door)...then decided they looked kind of weird there anyway and deleted them. Smiler does NOT need the airflow on that side, that’s for sure. :P
G) And with that sorted, I decided to wrap things up by rebuilding the little “camp” area that I originally created in front of the old version of the caravan (with a campfire, a clothesline and wash bin, and a pee bush) and hiding all the other stuff that was still hanging out on the lot behind the caravan so I could take some pictures! Because I did want to show you all the new version of the caravan now that it’s looking so much better. :D Here you go:
Not too shabby, right? :D I mean, I still very much have to figure out what’s going on with the interior, but I feel like I’m in a much better place now than I was with this thing. *nods* Hopefully future building sessions will continue to go smoothly!
Workout/YouTube: Another Sunday, another night where I combine what I watch during my workout with what I watch after dinner to get through the entirety of “Fallout New Vegas: You Only Live Once Remastered - Part 3 - Biting Off More Than You Can Chew!” Because it’s just easier that way to keep up with Jon’s F:NV YOLO Remastered shenanigans. :p Today’s episode saw P. D. Shoot –
A) Finish looting Primm now that Primm Slim was officially the town’s sheriff! Because, apparently, the minute you name a new sheriff, all the convicts in the town drop dead from a sudden dose of law and order. XD This mainly consisted of her heading back into the Bison Steve Hotel and – after a bit of creeping around making sure all the criminals were indeed dead and F:NV hadn’t done anything funny – collecting a bunch of sweet loot off the bodies and a lot of booze out of the fridges in the kitchen. Plus that skill book she missed in the shop the last time – turns out it was lying right on top of the floor safe exactly where she was standing last time and she missed it because Jon was panicking about getting caught by the roaming convicts. XD It’s okay, Jon, I probably would have done the same thing! She also went around getting what loot she could get out of the local houses (after getting briefly jumpscared by the Primm residents moving back in with their rifles slung across their backs) and checking all the ammo containers in the ruins hoping against hope for Stealth Boys (because apparently there’s a REALLY slim chance for one to spawn in those) – no luck this time, though. Shame.
B) Head over to the NCR Correctional Facility (NCRCF for short)! Taking the long route along the road around the sky-diving shack because going as the crow flies across the desert would have sent her straight into a pack of wild dogs, and – yeah, P. D. wasn’t about to deal with that. Her reasons for visiting the place? Well, the first was to find the local trader and sell him a bunch of the shit she picked up to get those precious, precious caps –
And the second was to do some side quests for the Powder Gangers! Because, to my surprise, the NCRCF was not actually under the control of the NCR – turns out that the leader of the Powder Gangers, Eddie, had managed to take it over at some point in the past and turn it into a base. And he needed a few things doing – simple little jobs that P. D. was only too happy to snap up for the precious XP they would grant her. Especially since she had enough Speech skill to resolve the first two completely nonviolently. :P She thus proceeded to:
I. Head over to one of the smaller Powder Ganger camps to confront a gang leader, Chavez, who was openly flouting Eddie’s rules, and let him know that he should quit while he was ahead – and alive; Chavez said “fine, pickings were getting slim around here anyway)
II. Head back to the skydiving shack to investigate a strange merchant who Eddie had a funny feeling about – turned out the guy was a bounty hunter in disguise; P. D. said he should head out because his disguise wasn’t fooling anyone (he didn’t even have any pack brahmin with him), and the guy agreed and left peacefully
Aaand –
C) Head back to Primm to investigate a rumor that the NCR was planning a raid on the prison to take it back from the Powder Gangers! Specifically, she went to talk to Nash, the old guy who told her all about Primm’s problems when she first arrived in town, and managed to coax out of him that a deserter had let slip that the NCR was indeed planning an assault on the prison to take out Eddie and reclaim the place for themselves. Which both brought P. D. up to Level 4 (she promptly leveled up Sneak a bit, Speech a bit, and Melee Weapons a LOT, and took the “Educated” perk to get two more skill points per level up – she’s not going to get as much benefit out of that perk as she could, given she’s going to stop gaining levels at Level 30, but Jon still felt it was the best option for her of the perks available), and gave her a choice – bring this information back to Eddie so he and his gang would be prepared for the NCR attack (which, in the way of video games, would happen the minute she told him about it and put her immediately in danger), or betray him and go to the local NCR camp to tell them all about Eddie and offer to join the assault (which meant the fighting would only kick off when she arrived back at the prison, and allow her to stay in the back and let the NPCs do all the work).
...Yeah, P. D. immediately went to the NCR camp to betray Eddie. XD And then proceeded to head back to the prison, meet up with her contact Sergeant Lee, and then watch him and his men enter the fray from the safety of the rocks around the camp, waiting to follow them inside until they’d taken out all the tower guards. And then made sure to stay hidden at the very entrance of the facility, looting everything she could get her hands on, until they took out all the Powder Gangers and finished the quest for her. XD Basically, it was a repeat of the “Goodsprings vs Powder Gangers” fight she kicked off back in the first episode, where P. D. got all of the rewards for the side she was backing winning the fight, but none of the consequences. Hell, she even ensured her betrayal would not lead to the remaining Powder Gangers shooting her on sight by making sure not to kill a single one of them directly – she’s still just “Shunned” by the group. Girl knows just how to get everyone to fight her battles for her, it seems! This is a skill that should serve her well thorough this challenge. XD
D) Brave the entrance to the Divide to get some goodies from the Hopewell missile silo that is your first stop on the “Lonesome Road!” Because this one DLC alone allows you to leave it any time you want (it’s narratively important that you can), and she intended to take full advantage of that to leave all the really dangerous stuff for later. XD Her tiny side-trip into the DLC world consisted of –
I. Sneaking up to the entrance, which was apparently not that far from Primm, doing her best to avoid the coyotes along the way...only to find a mother and her pup waiting RIGHT OUTSIDE the gate she needed to pass through. Cue P. D. Grand Slamming them with her baseball bat with a little help from some Psycho, and taking her very first hit of the run from the coyote pup getting in a bite for six points of damage. According to the comments, this near-perfectly mirrors the original F:NV YOLO run, where the original P. D. Shoot got bitten by a dog in episode 3 – delightful! XD
II. Making her way into the Hopewell Silo, discovering that the controls to turn the lights back on were encrypted in a way that she was NOT going to be able to hack, and locating the one being that could get past the encryption and power the place up again – the cute little eyebot companion ED-E! Companions are normally not allowed in YOLO runs, but as it’s actually IMPOSSIBLE to progress through “Lonesome Road” without ED-E at your side to open certain doors, Jon had to make an exception for the bot. Though he made it very clear that ED-E was NOT allowed to join in combat, which was fair – the extra firepower is the whole reason companions aren’t allowed, after all!
III. Getting ED-E to open up the Commissary so she could sell pretty much all of her unwanted guns and medicine to the artificial intelligence inside and get herself a VERY nice set of Riot Gear! Which Jon stressed wasn’t going to make everything easy-peasy (there was only so much it could do to reduce incoming damage), but was still nice to have. Though even nicer to have were the three Stealth Boys P. D. found in ammo boxes right outside the Commissary room – Jon, who’d predicted he was never going to find a Stealth Boy in an ammo box this run after failing to find any in Primm, was extremely pleased. :D
IV. Getting ED-E to decrypt the silo controls so she could turn on the power and sneak a little further into the facility (telling ED-E to stay behind in the main room); collect a second-level security password out of a locked desk in the rubble and use it to shut down a sentry bot in one of the rooms beyond (she promptly raided it for ammo to sell later :P); and finally make her way into the next room to loot the two Marked Men corpses there, getting a really nice Bowie Knife and taking the Scout’s armor because it was actually a pretty solid bit of kit (+5 Sneak AND +1 Agility, nice).
V. Legging it out of there and back to the regular old Mojave now that she had what she wanted – only to find the coyote and her pup had respawned. *shakehead* Fortunately, they’d respawned on the other side of the little path to get to the Lonesome Road, so P. D. was able to sneak past them without any trouble this time around and get back to Primm unchomped. *nods* It’s the little things!
And that (apart from Jon having to TWICE injure P. D. again via console commands because the game healed both when she went into the DLC land and when she came back out again) was that! We left things off with P. D. standing just outside of Primm – next week, she hits the road as Jon hopes to send her on a grand journey around to the Mojave Outpost, then Nipton, then Novac. *nods* We shall see what happens next Sunday! Hopefully no more coyote bites. :P
Writing: Got another page done on “The Van Dort Vacancy” tonight, with Victor telling Kasimir, Barnaby, Alice, and Smiler about the first obstacle that they’ll have to pass on their way to rob the Van Dort vault – Steven and Alan, the two ex-Bluecoat guards his parents hired to guard the entrance. Kasimir noted that, as former Bluecoats, they’d probably be easily bribed – Alice asked if he planned to offer them a cut of the money they were going to steal, but Kasimir had a different plan in mind. Namely, offer them a drink of the nice booze he was SURE Barnaby had on his person, and spike it with slumber essence so they’d be too unconscious to stop the robbery. XD Barnaby reluctantly revealed that yes, he did have a very nice bottle of gin on him, and he WAS willing to sacrifice it for the cause – though he couldn’t stop himself from whining that it wouldn’t taste the same after poor people drunk it. Victor had to bite back a comment about hearing that Barnaby would drink rubbing alcohol if he thought it would get him hammered. XD But yes, the plan has officially been hatched – now they just need to get to Steven and Alan! Which they should do tomorrow...
Aaand I have officially stayed up much later than I should have yet again. *sigh* Well, I'm just gonna head off to bed instead of bitching about it -- night all!
