I swear my nice sims are much better at wrecking potential friendships than the grouchy sims. These pics were taken during one trip to the Heart of the Village, during which four sims, all with at least eight points in Nice/Grouchy, wound up with negative relationships with each other. The problem? Trying to initiate “admire” socials towards random strangers, which are invariably rejected.

Anyone else ever had to deal with this? I’m considering modding away “admire” autonomy for non-friends or something...

Nita's wants not long after being suddenly widowed: buy a game, be saved from the Grim Reaper and go on a date. I really need to develop some more of the Kulo Seeri mourning customs - this may or may not turn out to be a good idea, Nita...

It was almost midnight by the time Nita woke, and both she and Anyu were in need of a good meal. Nita lit a fire in the kitchen tent and began preparing the meat, while Anyu warmed his hands by the cooking hearth.

Once the turkey was cooked, though, it became obvious that the meat had gone rotten. As if things couldn’t get any worse. She’d been too hungry to notice at first, but the stench and the buzzing flies were hard to ignore now. That left her with wasted food - one of the worst crimes a Nuidya could commit - and a very messy kitchen tent.

While I slog through the next Kulo Seeri build, I’m queueing up more story posts from Nita’s household. So, picking up where I left off with it: 

Nita had barely left the village when she started feeling terrible. Muttering a quick prayer to the Wood Dragon, god of endurance, family and tradition, and keeping her own family in mind, she forced herself to keep going.

She was able to bring home a turkey, but was so exhausted by the time she returned that the first thing she did was collapse into her sleeping furs.

She hadn’t seen this coming. Of course she hadn’t. Her visions never showed her the consequences of her own actions; all seers had their banes, and this particular one did very little to reduce guilt.

Although the grief was still raw for Nita, the shock of losing Branch was beginning to give way to worry. The last of the winter food stores had been eaten a few days ago during Kuva [the Nuidya New Year celebration] and both she and Anyu still had a persistent sniffle that could easily develop into something worse.

Leaving Anyu to play in the living tent, Nita headed for the kitchen and grabbed one of the spears Branch had used for hunting. Her thoughts were still on the suddenness of it all. She’d never hunted herself - Branch had always been the better tracker and trapper of the two - but now that he was gone, she needed to replenish the stores somehow.

Anyu sat in the sleeping tent not long after midnight, quietly playing with the toy horse Branch had carved for him. That had been one of his stepfather’s strengths, crafting things; he’d been a carpenter in Port Alma, and brought those skills to Kulo Seeri with him. But he’d never taken on an apprentice. Someone was going to have to learn fast.

His stomach was still growling at him. They’d disposed of the rotten meat, observing all the rituals to avoid angering the turkey’s spirit, and then Nita had gone straight back to bed. By then it was too late to ask anyone else to share some of their food stores.

It was then that Anyu had a thought. He’d seen a couple of birds’ nests that morning, in the trees around the village well. Children weren’t supposed to leave the village alone, but he wasn’t that far from the rites of manhood, and anyway the well was right in the middle of the village... ****** Ky was not impressed. Of all the nights to be on watch, it would be the one his nephew picked to sneak out. Still, he couldn’t be angry at the boy. Word of Branch’s death had already spread around the tribe, and Ky couldn’t help remembering his own wife and stepson, lost in a time rage. Anyu might not be ready to pick up a sword or a spear yet, but his intentions were good.

Sighing and yawning, Ky went to check his own food supplies for anything he could share with his sister’s family.

I don’t have many pictures from this outing, but here are a couple more from before Kira decides to get home and snooze.

It’s hard to tell through the chandelier thingy, but Melchol and Kira are talking about crowns here - probably relating to Etan and her recent actions. Which also involve troublesome arkal, so Kira can’t really criticise. Meanwhile, Sophos and Zera both seem to have ACR on their minds.

Nita’s not interested in Sophos though... something tells me Shazia is enjoying her break from serving in the Vedraloga!

Trait Replacement Mod: Neurotic to Worrier

Here’s another trait text default replacement from me! As the title implies, it replaces the Neurotic trait with Worrier - that happened to be the last trait name that still bothered me. Now your sims can still be anxious about all sorts of things, but the negative mental health implications of some of EA’s TS3 traits no longer has to be one of those things! Note that this is the catalog only version of the trait, and still requires @hexagonal-bipyramid‘s trait_MAIN from here.

DOWNLOAD (SFS)

If you appreciate this mod, you might also want to check out other trait name replacements: Unstable to Indecisive and Commitment Issues to Noncommittal by me, and the original Less Ableist Trait Names by @veronavillequiltingbee which inspired me to make my own trait replacements. Credit also goes to hexagonal-bipyramid for the original 3t2 trait mod, my sim Nita zan-Avira of Kulo Seeri for needing this trait replacing, and my own experiences as an autistic worrier who has lived with depression, for giving me the first-hand experience that taught me to be respectful and gentle with other people’s minds and feelings.

The Many Deaths of Serena zan-Nutama

Or “Tribute to a sim who seems fated to not get a fair chance. Aww.”

Backstory: A few years ago, I adopted a group of sims from this post on FlyingRaccoon’s Test of Time blog. All of them were second generation sims who had died before reaching adulthood. In that timeline, Serena Earth (zan-Nutama in her second life in Kulo Seeri) had died as a toddler due to poor health.

When these sims arrived in Kulo Seeri, Serena married Kenan Stone (zan-Ku in KS) and they had a son, Dalos zan-Nutama. In one rebuild, due to a bug of some sort that I can’t remember what, they tried for a baby and Kenan got pregnant. Serena also got pregnant later on the same day. With mpreg being viewed with superstitious fear in KS (although Headwoman Etan is trying her best to counter that) they decided to go somewhere else to have the babies, then come back and claim they were twins.

I sent them into TS3. I do that sometimes when I want a short-term play experience of something slightly different, and/or there’s something I want to explore around the characters. They had their “twin” daughters in Lucky Palms, and then it spiralled out of control, as described in the blog post I just linked. Long story short, Serena was mostly relegated to sidekick role while Kenan built big scary robots - another Nuidya taboo - and although I didn’t like the turn it had taken, I kept playing regardless.

They wanted another kid. Another bug caused her to give birth within two hours of the Try for Baby interaction. I drew up a random dice table for effects on her and the baby, and thanks to a bad roll, Serena wound up dying in childbirth. Her son was born a ghost.

Then Nita zan-Avira, another TS3 spinoff-born sim, travelled back to the canon timeline to warn the Nuidya about the possible threat from Kenan’s robots. So they didn’t leave, and it became an alternate timeline that never actually happened; the “twin” girls were born in TS2 instead. 

Now here’s a spoiler for something I haven’t blogged yet. Serena and Kenan broke up, and she started seeing Hanis zan-Ave. Soon they were expecting a baby, thanks to ROS. And, thanks to another ROS three rotations later, she died in childbirth again. Just as I was planning to find a way of bringing her to the fore in a storyline :(

Goodbye again, Serena. It’s not remotely fair. :(

(PS: I am half tempted to let her ascend into the Nuidya pantheon of greater ancestors as the Red-Shirted Goddess or some such thing.)