So I decided to try and max everything on a single sim. I started off in moonlight falls (i know I'll have to move to isla paradiso eventually, but it makes save files such a mess I'm saving it for the end) and made my sim grab a part-time janitorial job (since i find the ability to start a career so easily without a degree a bit boring) and start working on various skills.

Well, I got a bit tired of my super-crammed house, and decided to go to the the future for a bit. Grabbed a lotto ticket with low advanced tech skill for the legacy statue & the opportunity, maxed advanced tech, explored the crashed ship a few times, worked a bit on bot-building, etc, before coming back and cashing in that lotto ticket. It was for $150k. Donated my $50k for the legacy statue, moved into a medium-sized house since I'd rather not have anything too big yet (the craftsman's mansion iirc? 2br1b), upgraded most of my furniture to future stuff, and... I still have $80k left. And it's boring. I miss doing little things to save money, and actively working to earn money to buy new stuff.

I promised I wouldn't use cheats to do this, but... I might use familyfunds to make myself broke again, lmao. I never realized how boring it is to play rich sims.

Buy a car some of those are expensive. If you are happy to change traits the good trait lets you give money away, but really, get a cool car!

I've never played WITHOUT money cheats.

Yeah it's boring because there's not enough of the drama that comes with being rich (politics, high-level crime, who gets what inheritance, etc) and not enough to spend the money on (multiple assistants, businesses, yachts, luxury items, art, properties in other cities, etc)

Yes, absolutely. Back before TS4 was a thing I had this idea for a "VIP" sort of pack where you hire staff and exert a certain social influence on other Sims. Kind of like an extension of the Business and Politics careers where the highest levels weren't completely bloody useless.

But now that I think about it, both of those things I mentioned could probably be done through mods.

You can always transfer funds to other households using Master Controller, if you feel generous You can also use a mod that increases the sum of money you can donate daily to charities, and another mod that enables donating for all sims, not just Good and Evil ones. Right now I can donate a maximum of $10k per day per sim, and that money goes away fast if you have multiple sims donating. A 'harder bills' mod could also help.

This will only make sense if you have a mod with features like NRaas StoryProgression and its SP Money module (with Unified Billing for the inactives), but you could be good and evil about it at the same time. Use your funds to upgrade the neighbors' houses then watch them struggle as they can't afford their increased property tax bills. SP will likely end up moving them into more humble surroundings as sims can't manage to sell things like furniture, appliances, hot tubs, or large electronics on their own. Rinse and repeat.

Although we might be having some sort of currency unit conversion failure here. §80,000 in cash would not be a sign of poverty, but it doesn't sound like all that much to me.

Keeping in mind that Sim property is, on average, 1/12th the price of real-life property, I suppose there must be some confusion.
That's a very rough estimate, by the way - cheap property can be as little as 5 more expensive in real life, which expensive property will easily go for 20-25 times more.

You just need a different source of conflict - now that your sim isn't having to struggle financially, go for the interpersonal drama, or the ethical dilemmas instead.

We all have dark, dark thoughts sometimes, man. But sometimes it's just better to keep the gruesome things to yourself, even if you're not doing very well. Go talk to someone who loves you. Just get it out there. Just don't let it get to you when life gets difficult, because today you're downloading TS4, tomorrow you're jumping in front of a speeding train.

Actually, the train thing is free. So I'd personally go for that one first.

The real replay value in TS3 is playing other towns. There are plenty of great worlds out there that offer alternate playstyles and potential stories!

What specs does your laptop have?

Download a bunch of mods to make your game harder, that's what I do!
More expensive bills, more expensive university, no free cab rides, lower wages etc. makes the game much harder but also much more rewarding.

I would start buying up additional homes and all the venues in town! Some of those are expensive. Yes you can cash in on them, but then you also have really high bills as a result.

I hate a mod here (http://modthesims.info/download.php?t=554197) that changes the way you can buy other homes and also act as a "landlord" - collect rent from people living in homes that you own and also even have to fix broken objects! You could be a real estate mogul.

Does your Sim have any kids? Why not purchase an empty lot and start building a home for them to move into (if they haven't moved out already)?

It's the Archie comics references that got me to take a closer look at the town at first. Those wear off after a generation or two. But once I added Seasons and made it snow covered and bitterly cold through most of the year, with a short nice but not too hot summer, it became the boring town I grew up in. It was always a great place to be...FROM.

I know that's just me, but while most of my gameplay takes place elsewhere in other Traveler mod connected worlds, Riverview will always be "home base" in my ongoing game.

This is why I can't play normal saves. Try the midnight sun challenge, or half the midnight sun challenge, your sim in a tiny forest with the canning station. that it.

I've always wondered about the possibilities of Traveler and the extent it can improve your game. You can essentially link multiple full worlds and travel between them at will, right? So you could have friends and family in multiple worlds, you could own property in multiple worlds, and you could have Sims from the other worlds come into your home world? Sounds to me like, if you do it right, you can essentially create something like TS2, only way bigger and with more freedom. If you were absolutely insane, you could even create a giant region, SimCity 4 style, and make it look as if those worlds were all located right next to each other.

So imagine you'd have a Downtown Bridgeport world, and it'd be the same size as regular Bridgeport, but everything would be bigger, and you'd have a little distant terrain with deco buildings in it, and if you'd travel to that other world you'd have a Suburban Bridgeport with little deco skyscrapers in the direction you just came from.

But alas, that's another one for the "technically possible but completely unrealistic" category, along with that shader model overhaul I've been pondering about. Or the "rebuilding Bridgeport in another, more advanced game engine and making a more realistic game out of it" thing.

Well, kind of. I think I'm following this, but no matter how you dress it all up each world has to be self-contained. It's not like sims can wander through different connected worlds on their own as they go about their daily business, only one world can be simulated and be in active play at a time while the others are in states of suspended animation. Except for tourists from your connected worlds who can randomly wander through if you allow them (Register mod), but that concept is an illusion unto itself because it's not the full version of the foreign sims doing that wandering around. Transitioning active play from one world to another is pretty jarring and it's not the same day, time, or season in each connected world. So it's not like you can wake up in Suburban Bridgeport, go to work in Downtown Bridgeport, have dinner in Monte Vista, see a show in Starlight Shores, come home to Suburban Bridgeport and call it a day (not that you were actually saying this, just going by memory from what other Traveler-curious players have asked about).

But as for having friends and family scattered throughout the worlds that you can visit or call upon to visit you and moving sims "permanently" across the different worlds, yes absolutely. My second generation had 16 kids between two siblings. It didn't take very long or much advanced math to realize if I kept them all in the same world and many of them had their own large families, pretty soon the entire town would be too closely related to each other and I'd have to shove unrelated households out in order to make room for them all. So I started sending the grown kids to other worlds within the same ongoing game by way of Traveler to spread things out more and I still get to play all of the ones that I want in rotation with StoryProgression (yes, I know you don't want that) taking care of the rest. I also get to arrange for family reunions, those are a blast, where many of them come back together again and with a bit of work and possibly some annoying back and forth I can get cousins to attend Uni together.

In theory, after a much larger number of generations, I will need over 100 worlds to accommodate everyone and my game will implode, but at the slow rate I play I'll be around 175 years old myself by then and probably won't care very much. But then you can all say, "Aha igazor, that game of yours was not sustainable after all and we told you so!" (I won't hear you, though).

That sounds wildly interesting even if you're not at all interested in legacies, like me.
Like I said, a Sim may have a home in Downtown Bridgeport, friends in Suburban Bridgeport and parents on the other side of the country in Evansdale, SC.
And ideally, you could get there via either a portal that looks like a highway sign, or a rabbit hole that looks like a grand central train station.

I really need to go figure out how to create script mods and new meshes, because I'd be on fire once I do.

In the sims, there's always a way to make money.
If you have Uni and WA, clone tiberium or supernovium.
If you have Uni, just clone plasma bugs.
If you have WA, gather gems in Egypt.
If you have the base game, grow money trees.

I gave up on getting a job a long time ago. You fast forward through sleeping then your sim goes to a rabbit hole job, comes home eats, clean, toilet... repeat. That might work if you have 8 sims and need to keep 'em all busy I guess.

Why not have your sims enjoy life? Make more simoleons RIGHT NOW with this ONE WEIRD TRICK! SimGurus hate you!

Interesting gameplay you have going on.
Buy a second home, go on holiday and buy a vacation home. Invest in daycare, build an observatory with all the mod-cons. Just spend it!