A great duo. Maxis chose to give these two Sims of mine great likes that I love. (waaay high on the pet-likes) As Maxis likes to say when adopting a pet, I have grown quite fond of them and would like to adopt them.
But reading through all the University threads, it appears they are doomed never to join the n.h. from which they were created. What is their fate then once they have finished college? Is there any way to move them to the n.h.?

What on earth are you talking about? They're playables, so you play them till they graduate, then - throw the final big drama-filled graduation party (inviting all their lovers!) and to the main neighborhood they go! Just like every other University playable.

Mine are already graduated and living in a crappy apartment in Bigg City, the downtown I attached to Widespot, with their LTW jobs and a few caught-cheating events under their belts.

What did you read in the University threads that made you think differently?

What a lovely name - I want an Embiggen City now.

I will see your Bigg City and your Embiggen City, and I will raise you one Bigmegahugehonkinopolis...whenever I get around to building it, that is. It'll look like those galaxyscrapers from Unreal Tournament, as far as the eye can see.



Fear my setHighestAllowedLevel mastery!

But yes, it's perfectly okay for college Sims to leave college and come home to any neighborhood, regardless of their supposed neighborhood of origin. That's why I'll eventually be giving Stella Terrano a home in Pleasantview, despite her obvious origins in Strangetown. I checked her memories and her relationships, and none of them relate to anyone or anything in Strangetown. So it's okay.

As long, of course, as you never move sims between neighborhoods that have their own folders in your Neighborhoods folder and their own icons on the main menu. If you have ALT attached to Pleasantview, and think Jonah and Roxie are from Riverblossom Hills (for whatever reason) you will either need to attach ALT to Riverblossom Hills or attach a subhood version of Riverblossom Hills (Tarlia's Clean Hoods are the current state of the art) to your existing Pleasantview.

If you don't want the ALT campus attached to the neighborhood you think they're from, you can add ALT alongside another college and then delete ALT; the ALT sims will all appear in the student bin (if playable) or in the dormie/NPC pool, as appropriate.

Not so much what in particular I read, just so many topics and posts dealing with moving pets and Sims to the n.h. Penny I have not gotten to that point where they graduate so I didn't know. That's why I asked the question.

Ah, then you have so much to look forward to!

When they graduate, they will have 72 hours during which they are allowed to remain on campus, wrapping up loose ends, making that last conquest, whatever. At any time during those 72 hours, they can choose to pick up the phone and "move back to Main Hood." The game will grow them up, put random (probably awful) clothes on them, and summon a taxi which will carry them off the family bin, where they will sit with the usual $20K (unless you mod that out) until you decide where you want them to live. Alternatively, they can choose to throw a graduation party, at which they (and any dormies they invite) will wear cap and gown. At the end of the party there will be a cutscene of the graduate getting a picture (which, alas, is not saved by the game; but if you have your screenshot program on and have good reflexes you can screenshot it) of him or herself, leaning on a friend's shoulder; then caps will be thrown into the air and the graduate will stride out to the curb to do the growing-up video. Graduates who grow up in cap and gown generally grow up into a job-hunting suit which is slightly less-awful than the everyday outfit, but which will not remain in the wardrobe after the first time the graduate changes clothes for any reason.

Sometimes you'll get a glitch and the game will not grow the graduate up on cue; but you can always exercise the "move back to neighborhood" phone option if that happens.

Oh, and no one can leave the lot between the five-hour notice on that final final, and the graduate's return with his final grade; so don't be alarmed! Once the sim gets home, the capacity to leave will return.

My Roxie and Jonah also live in a downtown area attached to Widespot, but unlike Peni Griffin’s downtown, mine doesn’t have a name. I never thought to name it, but it’s based on the city of Chicago.

I love the fact that each individual sim starts out with $20,000 after they graduate. I first moved Roxie and Jonah into an empty lot to combine their money. Then I moved them into a house that I built for them. I had to combine their money first because their house cost more than $20,000. They still had enough money left over to furnish the house and buy new clothes though. Their house has a garage where they keep their band instruments and Jonah’s workout bench, because that’s more realistic than keeping an actual car in the garage. lol

I love Jonah and Roxie. They are a fun couple to play. Jonah is currently a Broadway star in the show business career in my game. Roxie stays home and takes care of their son, who of course I had to name Austin. Austin is a toddler now and he’s adorable. Austin will most likely be a romance sim when he grows up just like his parents. Here is a picture of them.


I hope you have as much fun with Roxie and Jonah as I do no matter what you decide to do with them after they graduate.

You forgot to mention the post-graduation streaker who runs in front of the camera right after your Sim gets his or her "free world" clothes. It's just one last thing for your Sims to remember college by, I suppose.

And you're right; Sims tend to get some pretty ghastly clothes when they grow up and graduate from one life stage to the next. I've even taken the precaution of buying clothes for the next life stage, like "Lindsay's a child, so I'll buy her some teenager clothes that look really sharp." It doesn't help; Lindsay becomes a teenager and she magically spawns a cream jacket with a blue skirt and brown sandals anyway. But at least that way, I can send her right to the wardrobe and change her into those snazzy clothes that I bought. Too bad the ugly clothes are still in her wardrobe and she can't get rid of them ever.

I think they usually spawn two-piece outfits (and randomly chosen two-piece outfits do tend to clash horribly), but they'll spawn a one-piece outfit now and then. I'm still wondering if one of them will ever grow up and randomly spawn a ninja outfit or a gorilla suit. That could be interesting.

(And you would think that the knight armor would help Sims win fights. Isn't that why those kindly blacksmiths back in the Middle Ages gave us the gift of full plate armor in the first place? )

Which reminds me: Isn't it a bum deal that your college Sims can't take all of their college money with them after they graduate? Graduate with $100 in your pockets? It all goes away and gets replaced with $20,000. Graduate with $45,000 because you got straight A+'s, worked your butt off on that robot bench and fleeced the secret society a little bit? It all goes away and gets replaced with $20,000. Ouch. I guess the education board's really stingy about their grants and rewards, and they're not too good at tracking what money they gave you and how much money you earned with that robot bench.

So for my bit of pre-graduation advice, I advise taking all of your college Simoleons, sinking them into fixtures that your new house will need (like a shower, a refrigerator and so on) and/or items that you can sell the moment your Sim arrives at his/her new house (and thus get all of his/her money back), then you stuff all of those items into your Sim's inventory. If you want to keep your Simoleons handy in order to throw a whopper of a graduation party, no problem; just pause as soon as the taxi rolls up (but before your graduate climbs into it, mind you), bring up Buy Mode and take care of business then. Take that, Sim State education board!

(But please do the right thing and resist the temptation to steal every last bauble and doodad in the dorm on your Sim's way out. Other students might want to use that dorm in the future too. Besides, it's cheating. Sure, maybe sinking your own money into Simmy goods and stashing them in your Simmy inventory might also be considered cheating, but that's the good kind of cheating. There's a difference. )


You've definitely groomed then into a cute little family. Well done!

(Also, for some strange and mysterious reason, I feel like reinstalling Unreal Tournament on my new supercomputer now. I used to miscalculate my grenade jumps, plummet off those galaxyscrapers and burn up in Earth's atmosphere so many times.... )

You need Pescado's clothing tool from MATY. It lets you change your growing up outfits.

That's not quite how it works. If a student is the only playable in a household, and that household has more than 20,000 in cash, that sim should graduate with the whole amount of money. (I've played many an Apocalypse Challenge where this was an absolute necessity, and you're not allowed to stuff your inventory full when you start an AC.) If, however, there are multiple playable sims in the household, the cash will be divided against the number of sims, and if the result is less than 20K, your graduating sim will be given the usual 20 and nothing will be deducted from the household. If it's more than 20, they will get that amount.

So, say you have three playables in a dorm or rental house, and they have 45K. When the first one graduates, the game calculates 45/3=15. 15K is less than 20, so the sim gets 20 from out of nowhere, and the household still has 45K. The next sim graduates, the game sees that it's 45/2=22.5, and that sim gets 22,500 from the household cash, leaving the same amount with the last remaining student.

That's how it's been for as far back as I can remember, so it's possible that if you're playing with only base game and uni, or something like that, it may be different for you. Otherwise, I'd try it out, and if you still don't get the money you should, look for glitchiness or hacks that affect money.

No, I'm pretty sure that college Sims lose their college money and get reset back to $20,000 after they graduate and leave the college subhood. That's why I had to start "investing" their Simoleons into inventoried goods in the first place.

But you may be right, or you may be wrong, and I always enjoy a good experiment, so I'll tell you what: I just started a household of six new college students. As soon as I figure out what their predestined hobbies are and sort out a few other things, I'll split them into two or three dorms. When the time comes for them to graduate, I'll leave one group's money the way it is, spend the other group into abject poverty through constant partying and/or bad grades, and maybe try to get the third group up to filthy rich levels (using the motherlode code to do so if I must, even though I have a distaste for cheating). Then I graduate their groups one at a time and check on the last Sim to leave each dorm to see how much money he or she came away from college with. I'll even take screenshots to record my findings. For science! How does that sound?


So it'll let me finally get rid of those ugly rags that my Sims wouldn't be caught dead wearing? I'll search for it. Thanks.

I'm always in favor of science, and people shouldn't blindly take the word of strangers on the intenet, so go ahead. For myself, I don't need it, since I've already done it a zillion times. But like I said, it's possible that some different combination of EPs, or lack of some patch, may give someone else a different experience, and I don't know what your set-up is. (I don't remember it ever being different, but hey, it's been many years since I first played with uni.)

I'll be back in a few days, then. For science!

(It also just occurred to me that I can ensure Group 2's lack of moolah simply by doing my usual "cash to inventory" thing. I think I'll do that instead. That way, if it turns out that some 1's and 0's got changed along the way and so now you're right, my Group 2 Sims won't be too badly off when they get to Pleasantview.)

Also, Charity, MATY is not a very user-friendly, navigable website, and the Wiki article's a dead end. You wouldn't have a link to that clothing tool, would you?

(Also also, I finally got around to downloading and unpacking SimPE, and I'm running it now. This thing is a brick! Why hasn't anyone said anything about how slow SimPE is? )

If you don't have M&G (I think; if not M&G then AL), then college graduates will always arrive back in the main neighborhood with $20,000 in their pockets, same as if you just made them in CAS. M&G changed this in general, in that fresh-out-of-CAS multi-member households get more (but not a lot more) than $20,000 to start with and move-outs get a percentage of the original household's funds. Each member of the move-out gets a certain percentage, so the more you move out, the more they get to start with. In this, they changed the game so that it mimics (but not as severely) Pescado's "no 20K handouts" mod.

That said, I myself am uncertain what graduating Uni students get when you've got M&G and you move graduates back to the main hood. I simply don't remember and don't care enough to figure it out because I do a Frank Sinatra and do things my way. But they definitely don't get exactly what they had when they left, which bugs me because I'm kind of a stickler for money in the game. My little pixels have to work for what they have, so it irritates me if they suddenly have money they shouldn't have thanks to a handout from the game or if they lose money that they worked hard for thanks to the game "forgetting" that they earned it. Me, I don't bother with the "buying stuff" method for Uni graduates. It will work, in general, but it's inexact because you'll never be able to buy such that the buying price exactly equals how much they have in the "bank." And, like I said, I'm a stickler for this. Like, to the simoleon. You'd think I was a freakin' IRS auditor or something.

Soooooo, when I've got graduates, I make note of the exact amount of money they have at the time that they are leaving campus, then move them out back to the main hood, and then immediately use the "familyfunds" cheat to set their household funds at exactly what it should be. It has to be done more or less immediately because if you have more than one household with the same last name, the cheat will affect the newest household with that name. So, if you don't do it immediately, it's easy to lose track of which "Smith" household is the newest one. AND, if you accidentally move out two pixels with the same last name, you won't be able to use the cheat to adjust the first one you booted back into the real world and will have to use other means, all of which will be inexact to a certain extent. (Like, you can use Monique's hacked computer to add or subtract funds from a household, but you can only do so in increments of $100.) So, if I'm graduating and moving out two pixels with the same last name and they won't be moving out together and then living together in the main neighborhood, thus making them separate households, then I move out the first one and then adjust his/her funds to what they should be and then move out the second one, etc.

As for SimPE: It has to suck in all of the information from your game, all neighborhoods. So if you've got a lot of big neighborhoods, it takes a while to process, indeed. This is part of the reason why I delete all of the Maxis pre-made neighborhoods. I never play them, so it makes no sense to stuff up SimPE with them. Also, if you're using it to clone/recolor stuff, then the more EPs/SPs you have, the longer it will take to load because it has to "import" all that information, too. The good news is that once it's loaded the info it needs for whatever it is you're doing in it, it generally runs smoothly and quickly. It's just the initial load that can take a while.

So on a slightly related tangent, if I want to change a Sim's skin (because I downloaded an incomplete skin and so now I have a Sim who turns invisible from the neck down whenever she takes a shower), would that be under Resource Tree > Sim DNA, or would it be something else?

I should probably find a SimPE Help thread, assuming that one exists hereabouts.

MATY? Not user friendly? You shock me. XDDD

It's in the Director's Cut. Clothing tool and clothing tool globals.

http://www.moreawesomethanyou.com/s.../topic,8.0.html

It's AL that changed the amount of money starting sims get. I've always had variable money for larger households, and nothing about how my starting funds changed when I added M&G.

Y'all must work your butts off in college, making that much money! When do you throw parties? It's taken me a full generation to build up big stocks of cash at the Greeks and Alma Mater House. And I keep depleting them by buying real estate or letting students go on spending sprees (like Bad News Bev blowing the Tri Var budget on clothes) or doing a massive redecoration. Keeping a sim's nose to the grindstone is a waste of that sim's college years IMHO. And it's easy to get too much money to be fun once you get to the hood, anyway.

Pizzatron, the easiest way to do that is to open the sim using the Sim Browser, and then pick the Sim DNA option in the plugin view (it might be under More, I forget). Find the skintone code and replace it with the code for the skintone you want the sim to have.

You'll probably want to copy the correct code from another sim first, unless you're going for S1, S2, S3 or S4 (which are just 00000000-000000-000001 etc, iirc).

Not necessarily. All it takes is a genie visit and wealth wishes. (I always roll a die to pick which wish they make.) If they roll to wish for wealth all three times, bam! $60,000. And if they don't roll wants that force money expenditure, like for things or clothes or what-have-you, they hang on to most of it. For mine, spending lots of money on their residence isn't in the picture because it's mostly not allowed by my rules. (If they're in a dorm, they can only decorate with objects that can be removed when they leave and that will fit in their room or that can realistically be put in their inventory. If they're in a rented house, they can buy whatever furniture and decoration they want, but no structural changes or painting or things like that are allowed. Everything they buy must be taken with them when they leave and any original furnishings restored, so such things can only be placed in inventory to represent being in storage somewhere, not sold.) If they want to go on a vacation, that can eat money. But, pretty much, mine seem to hold on to their money, except for the odd Fortune Sim who wants to buy all the things and they live in a rented house so that they CAN buy all the things.

Still, for me, I'm usually adjusting money DOWN when they graduate because mine usually graduate with far less than $20,000 or whatever it is that the game will give them. This is mostly because I charge them tuition, which, aside from a percentage they can deduct from whatever grants they get, they have to take out loans for so that they start their adult life in debt.



I don't know about anyone else, but for me, how a pixel spends their college years depends on what wants they roll. Some of them are very studious. Some are there just to throw parties and be social butterflies (Most of those, by my rules, end up dropping out at some point, however, because they never roll wants to do anything academic and have a very low chance of going to class. By my rules, any Sim on academic probation must drop out. Otherwise, the extra time they spend in college screws up my age-synching in the rest of the 'hood.) Some are there to find a mate and possibly procreate because I have Inteen. So, for me, it all depends. Plus, many of my pixels don't even get to go to college, so there's that, too.

I save my lamps in inventory so I have them when I need them for story purposes. Except for the first couple of semesters of college, my sms always have more money than I know what to do with. My sims can't change the structures of on-campus residences, either (except Alma Mater House, which is owned by the Alma Mater Foundation, and the Greeks, which are owned by their respective organizations), but they get to decorate to their hearts content, and Petra Ottomas and Edward Beare recently added a workshed to Romantic Resources. But that's increasing the value of the property - they got permission to do that!

I love this game because it's so endlessly malleable. People with gaming goals I can't even comprehend can play it with just as much satisfaction as me and there's no one to tell us we're wrong - because we're all right!

AL changed the amount you get when you create a household of multiple sims in CAS, true. But I've had uni students graduate with more than 20K and get to take it all home with them at least as far back as, let's see, Seasons. (I think it's been longer than that, but this much I can definitely say for certain.) Without it, my first Apocalypse founder wouldn't have been able to build herself that nice house on her first day back in the main 'hood. She brought something like 60K back - she'd spent a lot of time with the florist bench and the robotics bench, and got a lot of date gifts that she sold.

Aw, now I miss Saga. She was a great founder.

@Peni: Yes, it's true. You can play this game in many different ways. It's like a blank canvas that way, and it's amazing (to me) what some people find enjoyable, given that if I played the game they way they do, I'd hate it. (Like, for instance, with free will off.) And I'm sure those people would be horrified by how I play. But, that's the beauty of it.

As for my Sims and lamps, my rule is that they have to be used right away, all three wishes on three consecutive days, unless the recipient is younger than YA, in which case it goes into their inventory and then must be used as soon they are out of their birth house, which for me is either as an independent teen or a YA, depending on whether or not they go to college. And, like I said, I roll (Which, for me, means "use a random number generator to generate a number" since I don't own any dice) to determine what they'll wish for. So, on rare occasions, I do have someone roll three wealth wishes, which pretty much sets them for life.

@Felicia1066: Well, so far as I've experienced, you're an exception. Pretty much everyone else who's spoken up on the subject has had to invent ways of getting their Uni graduates the right amount of money. For most people, that involves buying stuff and putting it in inventory and then selling it back when they get back to the main 'hood because their graduates have more than $20K. For me, it's usually taking money away from them because mine are "supposed" to have (usually a lot) less than $20K. I wonder if you might have some sort of hack that's affecting this. If so, I want it because then I wouldn't have to screw around with familyfunds.

We used to discuss the Apocalypse Challenge in the Boolprop forums, and it's was a common recommendation to make a lot of money in college so you could build your house the way you wanted it when you graduated. Here's a thread as an example:

http://boolprop.prophpbb.com/topic2087.html

You'll notice that in the discussion of ways to make money in uni, nobody mentions any trouble getting the money back home with them. And there'd be no point in spending time making all that money if you couldn't take it with you, right?

I think it's simply that most people don't usually have a single sim in college make more than 20K, so they don't see it... But that's just my guess.


ETA: Have you tried the "No 20K handout" from MATY? It makes sims always take their share of the cash on hand when they move out, whether from college or in the main 'hood. I've only recently installed it myself, so it hasn't affected the experiences mentioned above, but I'm liking it so far.