Why Do Venue Types Exist? Growing Together and Residential Lots (Patreon)

Part 1- Base Game

Part 2- GtW, DU, Island Living, and Spa Day

How Do I Find This Stuff? A Video

Part 3- Eco Lifestyle, Get Together, Dine Out!

Part4- City Living, Cats and Dogs, Snowy Escape, and High School Years! And batuu

- RECREATION CENTER - (Growing Together)

• Clubs that like activities relevant to the Rec Center can invite you here

• Easily the most multi-purpose lot type in the game, by design.

• Functions as a simple blend of a Gym, Arts Center, Gaming space, Library, and Kids Playroom all in one.

• Spawns various types of sims:

  • Artists, who use Activity Tables and Easels, and are forbidden from using their phones?

  • Musicians, who play music, listen to music, socialize, and are...also forbidden from using their phone!

  • Children and Teens doing Indoor Activities, who play with child-tagged indoor objects, play all variety of games, use activity tables, and socialize (but can use their phones!)

  • Gamers, who play chess, all sorts of games, use recreation tables for Simbles, and cannot use their phones.

  • Gymgoers, who do gym stuff.

  • Outdoor Activity participants, who grill food, listen to music, play with outdoor activity objects, garden, read books, and do pushups and situps.

  • Generic Visitors, who do misc things- dance to stereos, paint, listen to music, play games, and view paintings.

• Are a great lot for Family Reunions, Sleepovers (Lock-ins!), and pool parties.

• Remember that Venue autonomy is not exclusive. While sims who are "spawned by" a venue have specific things they are more likely to do, that isn't the only thing they will do. There's no spawned swimmers on these lots but it doesn't mean sims won't swim in a pool, for example.

RESIDENTIAL LOTS

- TINY HOME - (Tiny Living)

• Tiny Homes have 3 different "levels" of Tiny, each with their own supremely overpowered benefits.

  • Small- Decreases bills and increases the length of positive moodlets.

  • Tiny- Increases skill gains, improves the game's native "Comfort" "motive" (not related to my mod, lol) and means objects with positive comfort related moodlets perform better, and decreases bills and increases the length of positive moodlets.

  • Micro- All of the above, but also makes social interactions more successful and relationship gains twice as fast.

• Offers a positive buff for merely being in the home.

- HAUNTED HOUSE - (Paranormal Stuff)

• Each night in a haunted house, things get spooky- Specters appear, lights flicker, mysterious noises happen, and cursed objects appear around the lot.

• Specters get upset the longer cursed objects are around and destroying them quickly keeps them happy which offers you beneficial gifts and buffs for interacting with them. Specters can leave behind candy and cupcakes that your Sim can eat for buffs, or leave behind special items you can sell.

• On day 2, Guidry will appear and offer you guidance.

• Each night, every Sim in the house gets 275 Satisfaction Points.

• On Night 5, Temperance appears and causes trouble.

• Surviving an entire week grants you access to Guidry's clothing.

• Seances and Bonehilda summoning (available via a seance) lower the "Spiritual Volatility" of the house. Bonehilda can also fend off angry specters.

• Haunted Houses can also be made significantly more challenging by buying the Helping Hand object and choosing to play in Heroic Mode.

• Maxing out your Medium Skill and talking to Guidry affords you a Paranormal Investigator License, allowing you to do the freelancer job to investigate other homes that are experiencing hauntings. Once you've done this you can freely swap your lot type to remove the nightly occurrences.

  - APARTMENT - (City Living)

• Some apartments feature permanently attached lot traits that make them more challenging or special. They also contain items that cannot be removed, as they are required by the lot trait.

• These special items include mouse holes (which spawn mice that give you a negative moodlet, and can be played with/fended off by cats), pipes (which can burst), electrical panels (which can fizzle out), Cockroach infestations, leaky sewer goo, etc.

• Apartments have Landlords who can be called to solve some of the above problems. The Landlord is more likely to solve them with a good relationship. Sims can solve them themselves, but if they fail, the problem gets worse.

• There is a Bulletin Board in apartment hallways. You can leave notes here depending on your mood. If a neighbor leaves a note you can read it and get a moodlet.

• Neighbors can be noisy and cause issues for your Sims, and can be confronted about them.

• Famously, Neighbors can be loud doing Musical things, Fighting, or Woohooing, and woohooing usually has a male Sim answer the door in a women's maid outfit.

• Apartments feature a number of special neighbor events not found anywhere else in the game, such as:

  • If a Neighbor has the Goofball trait, they will invite themselves into your apartment regularly, a la Kramer from Seinfeld.

  • Brainstormers, who want to discuss art or have deep conversations

  • Kids who want to play with your kids

  • Flirty sims who "need to use your shower"

  • Geeks who want to "geek out" and play games

  • Sims who have the munchies, either Foodies or Gluttons, and want to eat your food

  • Sims who are intrigued by your noise and want you to entertain them (like from hearing guitar playing)

  • Sims who are intrigued by the smell of food in your apartment and want a taste

  • Sims who want to work out with you

• Penthouses function largely the same as Apartments but do not have neighbor doors or hallways.

• In theory, Apartments are cheaper than living in a normal house. I think. I'm actually not sure. It might be more expensive. I do not know what the specific benefit of living in them is.

- RESIDENTIAL RENTAL - (For Rent)

• Functions partly as a multi-purpose lot. Neighbors will regularly spend time in shared spaces and do things like cook or use Gym equipment. They'll do whatever they have available to them, really.

• Features several special events that can take place, such as "Adoption Drive" where random cats and dogs just show up and walk into your apartment for some reason.

• Features several special issues that can take place, such as a sudden appearance of tons of trash, an item literally exploding, the pipes going nuts, the power going nuts, a ghost haunting, etc.

• Feature a Landlord who can in theory solve these problems but is usually bad at it.

  • When one of these problems takes place, it will feature a goal in the corner of the screen. The goal is bafflingly written for both the landlord and the tenant, regardless of which you're playing, instead of being unique depending on who you're playing. Solving an event as the tenant gets you a cash bonus.

  • Events will lower the value of the apartment if failed, which lowers the maximum rent sims are willing to pay.

• The events can be assigned to normal lots too via the Maintenance Troubles lot challenge.

• When a unit's rating is low for too long, tenants will stage a revolt and literally protest for better conditions, although there is not much gameplay associated with this.

• When choosing a tenant, there's a variety of premade sims and premade families that may show up in the applicant list. These special townies are otherwise never seen or available.

• Residential Rentals can be used to pack the world with sims as there can, without cheats, be 6 units per lot. They can also be used to make duplexes, trailer parks, or just multiple-homes-on-one-lot residences that function properly. You can even build a granny flat in the back yard and quite literally kick your sim to live there while their kids continue to live in the main house, as an alternative to moving sims out entirely- or vice versa. Build a house in the garage for your teen to live in and play as them while the parents live in the main house, and you pay rent to them, for example.

• Residential Rentals do NOT feature the special neighbor visits from City Living, nor do they experience the same landlord issues.

• If you build the shared area with things like Bars, Vendor Stalls, etc, they will NOT automatically function, but sims CAN hire employees for them. I have a mod to make these things free explicitly to make it so you can pretend these areas work/ "open them" at will.

- DORMITORY - (Discover University)

• Dormitories can be assigned to a specific university, to a specific sex, and even to a specific University Organization or Club.

• Dormitories can be built anywhere.

• Up to 10 sims live in a Dorm- including the player's controlled sims. This means even with a household of 8 students, there's 2 NPC students, if there are enough rooms/beds.

• NPC Dormmates are assigned hidden archetypes. There are a LOT of these.

  • Art Students/Artists

  • Baking Students/Bakers

  • Techy Students/Computery Guys

  • Music Students/Musicians

  • Fitness Students/Gym bros

  • Bathroom Hogs

  • Public Affectionates (Invite their Girl/Boyfriend over a lot)

  • Absentees (Don't go to class all the time)

  • Pranksters

  • Late On Rent (doesn't pay their share of rent often)

  • "Big Closet"? I have no idea what this one is.

  • Mealmakers (Cook a lot)

  • Super Neat (Clean a lot)

  • Cheerleaders

  • Fixers (Fix objects a lot)

  • Clingy Socialites (invite themselves with you when you go places, often)

  • Couch Potatoes

  • Emo Loners

  • Loud Music Players

  • Party Planners

  • Breakers (break objects a lot)

• Roommates are a feature of DU that can be had on any lot, including normal apartments and residential rentals. When you find a roommate, they'll ALSO be assigned one of the above non-student roles, and exhibit those same behaviors.

• Roommates/dorm mates decorate the space around their bed, albeit with a very limited number of potential items. I have a mod that changes this to be a bigger feature, and also overhauls roommates a bit to make them more "profitable", giving them more purpose, and/or functioning as a crummy alternative to For Rent landlording. It is not a very feature-rich mod and hasn't been touched in a long time, though.

• Dorms spawn maids.

• Dorms have cafeteria employees serve food for all 3 meals.

• The Apartment neighbor events from City Living can happen in dorms as well.

• I believe but have not confirmed that Dorms will sometimes have parties happening that aren't actually a goaled situation- they just happen, such as a keg party.

• Dormmates' parents can visit sometimes.

Next time: Secret and Hidden Venues, assuming they have any special behaviors. But I am pretty sure the bulk of them do not, so this might be it until Life and Death comes out and I can dissect graveyards!

NOTE TO CONTENT CREATORS: I write these posts on my own time, using my own research into mechanics, using my own ability to understand tuning and navigate through it to find what it does, where, and how. If you use this information for any purposes, such as making videos about game mechanics, please, please, please, credit me and link to these posts as the source. I know for a fact content already exists where I am the source and not credited.

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