I decided to try working on one of the base Sims 3 game badges a few days ago, Get a Sim to have 15 Children and Get a Sim to Have 30 Grandchildren. I thought, since a household has an 8-Sim limit, surely these two badges are the exception to the rule that you need to stay playing the same household in the town to register the badge! Sure, you can use the edit town to move out the children sims, but then how do you get each of 15 children to find a partner and have grandchildren without moving them out and playing separate households??
Well, I guess I found out the hard way when my McElley couple finally had their 15th child – I didn’t use any adoptions because I was afraid it wouldn’t count– and the next time I went into that family, no badge appeared. Very disappointing since I have separate families now for about 7 of the children – each found a spouse and started having children. I was up to about 7 grandchildren with 3 more on the way! But I kept switching to each new household.
I did a quick internet search and found this nice page on buildSims.org to tell you how others have completed some difficult badges. It does give a warning that you have to stay on the same household throughout completion. You can still do it without cheating technically, but there are some techniques that are almost required unless you want to spend a really long time.
Here are my tips:
- Due to the 8-Sim limit in a household, you’ll need to use Edit Town mode to split up your household and move the oldest children out. But only move a child out once they have (at least) 2 children.
- Adopting children seems to work just as well as having them naturally, so you might as well use that to your advantage and adopt. I guess you don’t even need to start with a couple, just a single parent.
- The cycle would be: adopt a child, age them up to Young Adult, have them adopt 2 children, then move that ‘family’ out. Continue to adopt the next child.
- Techniques on aging up:
- I immediately set my game options to make baby, toddler, child, and teen stages take only 2 days. Since I was having babies naturally, this still took a long time to get to Young adult though! If you adopt you can skip baby and toddler stage.
- Buy the birthday cake to age up a child immediately. *Note: The birthday cakes do go bad, so you’ll need to buy them just when you need them. It might save some time to have the grocery store close to your house. It can be annoying especially if it’s on another island in Island Paradiso. I just added a new store closer to the house.
Not as much Woo-Hoo-ing going on with this technique though!
Edit: I tried this approach using only adoption rather than natural births. I got the 15 children badge but not the 30 grandchildren! I wonder what happened! 🙁 I went on to 31 grandchildren and I’ll see if a few more will trigger it. Each child had just 2 children.
