First Round House and Some Rather Morbid Mods

I've finally got my first round house up! I had asked jones for an extension because I recently got a job and moved back to Cinci. This happened during the same week that the house was due. I'm very committed to my sims, but after job searching for over 9 months, I do have my priorities straight.

As part of the contest, jones gave us bios for 4 families, and we are free to pick whichever family we want for each house, but the catch is that we don't know what kind of house will be next and we can't reuse the families. After some figuring, I decided that all 4 families could be related and proceeded to make them in game. I started a generation back so that the future adults will be able to have good skills and such, but it put me a bit behind. At the time of having to turn in my house, I haven't yet gotten the families all aged up and appropriately matched.

The Williams family (empty next of 5 kids) is the main family. Hugh is the oldest, and he has already moved out and settled into the Application house with his bride-to-be, a romance lady who may or may not be having extramarital affairs, and who will die in her third childbirth. (See below about this morbid issue.) The next oldest is Stacie, who is still a teen and just starting her relationship with Brian Johnson. According to jone's bios, they will be having twin girls. After her is a son named Richard, who was added to bring the count up to jone's required 5. I decided he needed to be a boy and in the middle to help explain the age differences between Stacie and the other two moms-to-be. After him is Johanna, and her betrothed is Lowrie. (I really dislike the name Larry, Lowrie isn't much better, but it is better imho.) Johanna just recently grew up to a child, and the toddler of the house is Lora.

I've got a lot to do to get them all grown and fixed up with their partners, who are also at the same ages in their own households. Little Lora and Joshua are going to be my Round 2 house, and they are the furthest from adulthood! I need to step on it. I think this weekend I'm going to start work on the house and get it a fair amount done first just in case I run into trouble meeting the deadline again. I really prefer taking my pictures with the families in the house and in the shots, but I only have so many hours to play now that I have a job. Anyways, here's the house:

The other thing I've been working on is a more realistic life expectancy mod for my medieval hood. Reading about this stuff is super depressing, most sources say only half of the population made it to adulthood, with 30% dying before the age of 6. I have mods like 'deadlier diseases' and I've edited the age spans, but that still doesn't help with the sheer number of infants and toddlers I'm supposed to lose. For all the families in jones' contest I rolled a random number between 1 and 100 to determine when they will die. Most of these starter families had more children originally. I used my Random Family Generator to make myself a bunch of families, and then the dice roll dictated who lived and who didn't. If it didn't match well enough with who I needed to have at the end, or had too many infants dying early in the family (I can't create infants in CAS, so it made it hard), I rerolled. The Johnsons originally had 8 children, but they are left with Brian, his kid brother, and a toddler girl. The parents both rolled a want to have 10 kids, so I'm going to let them have twins to fulfill that. 5 kids is a lot to lose; its over half. I don't know if either of the twins will make it very far, the surviving toddler girl was half a twin set, but that's where the next part comes in.

I don't like rolling at birth to know exactly how long the new infant will live. I'd rather grow attached and then be heartbroken later. It sounds completely backwards of what you'd want, but I don't want to start treating the doomed children any less than the ones who are fated to make it. Real parents back then had no idea, they just had to be ready to bury a child. To do this, I've asked a math forum about the probabilities of surviving each stage and I'm thinking I'll create some sort of mod that will tell you each morning who is still alive, or possibly auto-kill off whoever didn't make it. That way I can't become sentimental and try to stop it.

There was also a high rate of death during childbirth, so I'll be including that as well. For the existing families I pre-rolled everyone because I needed to know who I'd have at the end of the generation to work with. Hugh's romance wife drew a short straw of an early adulthood death. To me, this means death during the childbearing years. Then I rolled to see how many times she could survive giving birth. At first it rolled that she immediately died, but my application house has rooms for 3 beds, so I didn't like that. I decided to use the first number that gave her three kids. Unfortunately, her number came up quickly on death during the birth of the third child, so while the baby will survive childbirth, the mother will not.

Rosalinda is my first doomed sim. They are all doomed really, but she is the oldest and the one with the least amount of time before her end. I'm going to work hard on letting her have her promiscuous ways during her short time. I never usually play romance sims, but I've got another unwed guy her age (not enough girls to go around) and she thinks he's pretty cute too. I think I'm going to have her second child be his. He has red hair, but her mother did too, so maybe Hugh won't notice. (Both Hugh and Rosalinda have brown hair, Hugh's mom has blonde hair, so the genetics work out that they pair could legitimately have a red-headed child on their own.) Perhaps the three children will be named (and the same gender) as their parents, the first two will be boys named for their dads, and the last baby will be a little girl to replace her mother. Idk, planning is nice, but also not knowing makes it more real and more fun. I'm not above gender selecting on the infants, but deciding how long they have to live is something that will just make me feel sad and guilty.

So, that's enough talk about killing off pixel people. I've got till next Saturday to get Lora, Joshua, and Edney's house done. Wish me luck!