Harvest Sims Challenge

The point of the Harvest Sims challenge is the same as the Harvest Moon series of games. You take an empty plot of land and through farming, with a little fishing and collection, earn enough money to upgrade your house, find a spouse, have children, and make friends with the townspeople before a certain amount of time is over. You should have these goals accomplished by the time you turn Elder. You can choose a shorter time frame for yourself for more of a challenge, but on playtesting, I found that YA to A was too short, even though I think I have my game on Long lifespan. I won't tell you what lifespan to play in. You can choose the lifespan based on how much of a challenge you want. I'm not much of a powergamer, so I chose a longer lifespan.

Create a Young Adult sim in CAS, either male or female. The Sim must be single. This will be your farmer. You can give them any traits you want, but because they can't hold down a full or part time job, it would be fairly useless to give them a job-based LTW. If you want to make it easier, I might suggest traits like Green Thumb, Enjoys Outdoors, Friendly, Angler, Handy or Natural Cook.

You can either move into my premade lot based on the house from HM:GBA or you can buy a lot and build your own with similar specs. Your starter house should be a two-room box with a single twin-size bed, an nightstand with whatever items you want on it, a mirror, a bookcase, a chair to sit in while reading, a dresser, an end table near the door, and in the middle, a 2x6 rug with a dining table and four chairs on top of it. Off the back of the house will be a small bathroom with just what you need to get by. There will be just two doors and you can put as many windows as you want. Then you landscape and buy bushes and other foliage until you have about 500 simoleons left. This is your starter money, to do with as you please. There's enough that you can take a class and get the seeds with that, or that you can buy a bicycle and go hunting seeds. Or something else entirely. The 500 simoleons is yours, free and clear.

You might have noticed there is no kitchen listed in there, though. A kitchen is one of the upgrades you will be working towards. First you must save up enough money to expand the house enough to fit the kitchen. Your primary source of income will be your farming. You will grow and care for your plants and sell the harvested fruit for money. You can supplement your farming income with fishing, but your farm should come first.

After you have expanded your house, your next upgrade will be either kitchen counters or a refrigerator. You can decide which one you want first. The next upgrade will be the one you did not choose first. For the refrigerator, save up enough money and buy a mid to good refrigerator, since you won't get to upgrade again until you finish the others. The kitchen counters are as many as you will need in the future and it comes with one sink.I find 6-8 counters to be a good amount.

The next set of upgrades will be your kitchen supplies. Once your have your refrigerator and counters, you can choose from a stove, a garbage receptacle, a microwave, a blender, utensils (under decoration, statues), spices (the Crocks o' Stuff also under decoration, statues), and the pot rack (under cabinets). You can get them in any order you like. You can also get the paper towels, but I don't think they correspond to anything in Harvest Moon.

After you have your full kitchen, you can expand your house once more, to make room for a proper living room. As part of the expansion process, you gain a fireplace along the back wall. After you have expanded, you can add furnishings one at a time, if you like, or you can leave it as it is. You should leave room for at least one more door on the back wall, for an optional upgrade.

Now that you have your fireplace and your kitchen, you can upgrade to a "Big Bed" or a two-person bed. You can either have both beds side by side as they do in Harvest Moon, or you can store the small bed and replace it with a big one. You'll probably need it again for your child(ren).

I tried to emulate the ordering gap of HM in my test game, but about halfway through the game, I realized that it was not working and things were taking too long. So the only limit to how often you upgrade/buy things is how much money you have. If you want to limit yourself further, feel free to.

While you were upgrading your house, you could have, and probably should have, been making friends and wooing a future spouse. However, you have to marry someone before you can Woohoo or Try For Baby. You can have someone stay the night if you want more time with them. You can even share a bed. Just no naughty stuff. And you must have the big bed before you can propose. Once your house is upgraded and you get your big bed, you can ask your sweetheart to marry you and, if you really want to be authentic, get married a few days later, but I'm not picky. You can marry to whoever you want. I was always disappointed by the lack of gay love in HM. You can take the money they move in with to spend on whatever you want, because your house has already had the required upgrades.

After a few days, or even a week, if you think you're ready, you can have a child or adopt one. At this point, your challenge is pretty much over. After you have your require upgrades and your family, you can make optional upgrades, such as upgrading all the windows in the house, adding a sauna (which doesn't exist)/bathing room/pool to the back of the house near the fireplace, changing the color of the wood clapboards, or freestyle expansion on your house to fit the children.

You can keep playing until you hit elder and see how much you can accomplish with fishing and collections. However, you still cannot get a proper job, though you probably won't need one by then.

Here is my slightly less sketchy idea of scoring. I've broken it down into three basic categories. Assume 1 point for every accomplishment, unless stated otherwise. There will be varying numbers for some categories. For the skills, you can claim partial credit for the number of points you do have. I think this seems pretty much balanced, but I will accept feedback since I haven't even really done a challenge before this, much less written one.

Self

- Number of unique plants grown (1 per unique plant)
- Number of unique fish caught (1 per unique fish)
- Number of unique ores/gems "mined" (1 per ore/gem)
- Maxing Gardening Skill (1 point per point = 10)
- Maxing Fishing Skill (1 point per point = 10)
- Maxing Cooking Skill (1 point per point = 10)
- Maxing Handy Skill (1 point per point = 10)
- Total Lifetime Happiness Points at end (added up from rewards and leftover) (1 per 10K)
- Cheating Death
- Number of Perfect Items Harvested (1 for every 10)
- Total plants planted (1 for every 10)
- Number of Farming Challenges completed (1 per challenge)
- Number of Fishing Challenges completed (1 per challenge)
- Number of Cooking Challenges completed (1 per challenge)
- Number of Handy Challenges completed (1 per challenge)


House/Lot

- Net Worth (1 for every 10K)
- Spouse cheating (-5)
- You cheating (-5)
- Number of plants in your garden on last day (1 per plant)
- Number of required upgrades (1 per upgrade)
- Number of optional upgrades (1 per upgrade)
- Number of children (1 per child)
- Family member dying (-5 if accident, -10 if neglect)


Neighborhood

- Number of friends (1 per friend on last day)
-Number of good friends (2 per good friend on last day)
- Number of best friends (3 per best frient on last day)

Good luck. I'll start this again soon according to the new rules and see how it goes this time. :D

I'm totally doing this right now, points be darned!

Ooh, I want to do this too!

It's funny, because when I first bought this game, I had a conversation about it with a friend. We decided that Sims 3 is like Sims+Harvest Moon+Fable 2.

Now if only my Sims would learn how to use a sword...

This looks really fun! My friend and I are COMPLETELY addicted to Harvest Moon, we both have HMDS, HMDSC, HMIoH, HMWL, and we both really want the Friends of Mineral Town games and Another Wonderful Life. Sounds like a great concept X3 I'm doing an in-play testing at the moment of my own challenge but as soon as I'm done I'll give this a go X3

ooh =D I'm gonna try this one =)

I love this

Would like to download the house but the donwload limit... Can you re-upload this?

I'm trying this! HM is my favorite non-Sims game!!!

I'm going to start on this now. :3 If you have ambitions, can you register as a Gardener?

Yes, i actually think you can.

There aren't any 2x6 rugs in my game. Am I to create one or something?

Plus, is okay to use the 500 to buy produce from the grocery?

And is the bathroom attached to the house? I'm not understanding what exactly you mean by "just off the back of the house".

I was wondering if I could add somethings to the challenge? I was going to add them in mine. Things like courting your beloved and friends has to be done with gifts only, once a day? That and some animal things. There's a chicken coop and dairy cow that are on the Sims 3 Store. They cost points, but they're worth it. Or if you don't have the extra cash you could farm fish, horse, and there's a download on here if you search for it of a pig, and you can either farm the little guy or use him as a pet to hunt for things like bugs. And I myself added about 20-30 harvest moon characters to .my game. They're from various games. And with house extinsions there could also be farm extensions,such as adding a barn and or field, a pond to farm fish, a room in your house for various small animals like birds, reptiles, ect, and a stable for your pets.

I like the sound of this challenge and it would be fun to play a modified version of it.

the link gave me a popup virus i coudnt click off...

im going to do it too!

i think that they should do that, its an awesome idea!!!

no i dont think you can buy produce

they mean by the back of the house

I love this idea. So basically, I've decided to do this challenge, except I've added a few things based on my own experience with Sims and Harvest Moon: Tale Of Two Towns.
1. I added a beehive expansion rather than a blender. (Supernatural)
2. I'm having it so that a pond is on my property (kind of like the well, only with a few more uses.)
3. I'm also using the city edit to remove all of the automatic sims within my town and building each house and household to match up with TOTT, that way I can have my favorite bachelors and bachelorettes.
4. I'm adding a horse to the family automatically and having a cat and dog as 'expansions' as well. I'll adopt them from the locals or the adoption center as I go. (Pets)