Week One

Here begins the real story of Harriet's adventures in gardening, fishing and cooking. Before I begin her story, though, a few last set up comments are in order.

After getting her lot set up, and taking note of the amount of money she had left, I had issues getting the command to set her funds down to $0 to work. I also had cleaned out her fridge and sold off everything that was in there except the links. Then I shut the game down for awhile, asked about the cheat on the Yahoo! group, got some suggestions, and later in the evening I loaded her back up again to try them. But I'd also re-read the rules in the meantime and realized that I was supposed to have kept everything in the fridge and used it for bait. So, as a solution, the first thing I did after loading her up again was to take her down to the grocery store to buy the 3 lettuce, cheeses and eggs that had been in the fridge to get her back to the inventory she should have had. The selling and re-buying had affected her cash on hand some, of course, but since I had made note of the funds before doing all of that, and that is the figure I'll be using for scoring purposes at the end, the net effect is nil really. After she was restocked, I tried again to set the funds to $0, and after a couple tries finally got it to work. And so I was officially ready to start playing the challenge with her.

Since she was already downtown, I looked around for some seeds, but couldn't find any. I guess the game hadn't had time to spawn them yet or something. So I took her down to the river to start working on her fishing and using up the stock from the fridge as the rules call for. She spent most of the day there, and it was quite productive for her.

By late afternoon, she was getting pretty hungry, and since the food in her inventory was off-limits for eating, I took her over to the community garden to harvest some food to hold her for awhile. She hadn't yet used up all the lettuce that had been in the fridge, so I was careful to not let her harvest any of that so I wouldn't get confused on how much she still had to use up.

After a few hours spent harvesting there, she had enough food supplies to last her for a few days, so I let her head home to get some rest and to start reading up on gardening. She didn't make it through the book that night, but she finished enough of it to get her first skill point the next day.

She spent some more time fishing that day, found some seeds around town, and caught some butterflies on the lot next door, then in the evening she set about planting her first seeds.

The next morning, with bills waiting to be paid in the mailbox, she headed over to the science center to sell the butterflies she'd caught.

She then wandered around, gathered some seeds that were laying around, caught some more butterflies and some beetles, and spent some more time fishing.

Before heading home later in the afternoon, she stopped by the science center again to sell the insects she'd caught.

Since it was still fairly early, I sent her to explore a nearby field, and it netted her some more seeds, as well as more insects to sell. Bug collecting was becoming quite a lucrative hobby for her.

That evening, she received her first gardening opportunity, which she naturally accepted.

The deadline for turning in the lettuce was Sunday at 9:59PM. I just hoped she'd be able to get enough good quality lettuce grown by then. The next day she stayed closer to home and practiced her fishing in the pond at the back of her property.

She got to bed early that night, and so was up early the next morning and went out back to fish some more since the garden didn't need a lot of tending yet.

In the meantime, she'd spent a bit of time reading the book on Handiness that was in the bookcase she'd bought, though hadn't yet gained a skill point in it yet. A clogged toilet later that afternoon did the trick though.

Her snackable food supplies were getting a bit low, so that evening I sent her down to the community garden again to harvest some more produce. This time I was able to let her harvest the lettuce there which allowed her to finally have a prepared meal of Autumn Salad the next day.

Friday afternoon and evening was spent exploring the town some more in search of seeds, insects, and other collectibles. I sent her down to Sim Henge since I knew it was a good place for collecting, and for getting rare and special seeds so she'd have some to plant as soon as she had enough skill to do so. She hit the jackpot with her finds as soon as she'd gotten there.

All told, she found quite a few insects to sell, along with a few she already had that she'd caught near her home. The payoff for her at the science center was considerable. Note that they paid her considerably more for some of them than she would have gotten from selling them via the little sell window in the inventory, which is the price the pop ups show you when you catch something. In particular, the scientists paid her about $200 more each for the rainbow and zebra butterflies than she would have gotten otherwise. The price difference seems to be much more neglible on the cheap bugs though, so I think really only the expensive ones are worth taking to the science center.

I couldn't resist sending her out in the fields again to look for more bugs after she sold off that lot, and ended up keeping her up pretty late that night. It was worth it in terms of her cash, though, because she managed to come across a spot that had at least 8 rocks and gems, besides the few more insects she was able to find. Back to the science center once more before I finally let her go home, and she finally got to go to bed several hundred simoleons richer.

I let her sleep in pretty late on Saturday since I'd kept her up so late picking up rocks and bugs. It was still a benchmark day, however, for the crop of lettuce from the one better quality plant she had came in, and it gave her the produce she needed to turn in the opportunity at the diner a little more than 24 hours before it was due.

Harriet, who is a Loner, hated the diner, and the whole time she was there she had the "Too Many People" negative moodlet. It went away as soon as she got away from there though. I sent her out into the fields again to hunt for stuff, and she found several more rocks (actually Saturday was probably the night she came across the huge group of them). When she got home early the next morning, she put them in the mail to be cut/smelted, and picked up the bunch that she'd sent off the day before that the mailman had returned to her earlier that morning.

All that was left at this point was to let her sleep until morning, at which point I paused the game and took stock of her first week's accomplishments. Here is the summary:

I thought she had made it through the entire week without meeting anyone in town, but when I checked her relationship panel one last time, there was one little girl listed there. It puzzled me for a moment, since I couldn't think when she'd have met the girl, and didn't think she'd have struck up a conversation with anyone on her own since she's a Loner, and then I realized it must be the little girl that drops off her paper in the mornings.

And then I remember that on either Friday or Saturday morning, she'd been in the bathtub, then suddenly shrieked a bit and jumped out, then was making shooing motions to someone I couldn't see. There was no one there when I finally looked around the lot. At the time I'd just shrugged and had her go back to her bath once she would listen to me again. In retrospect, I think it must have been the paper girl dropping off the paper that set Harriet off. Because of the breaks in the walls, the interior of the structure still counts as being outdoors, and thus as being in the same "room" as the rest of the lot. So Harriet was reacting as though someone had walked in on her in the bathroom. It's all just silliness really, since as you can see in the picture above, which was taken from where the paper girl would have been, there's no way she would have been able to see Harriet in the tub. Or that Harriet would have seen she was out there. The tub and toilet are in behind that bit of fencing you can see through the side opening. All in all though, I just laughed and shook my head. I'm sure the relationship will drop out of her panel eventually if she doesn't talk to the girl anymore. I'll just have to be more careful about when I have her take her bath, so she's not doing that when the paper girl or mailperson comes.

In parting for this entry, here is an aerial view of her "house".

Though she has a reasonable amount of money now from all her collecting efforts, she hasn't yet bought anything else for the house. She likely will upgrade things eventually though, and will definitely have to get a fire alarm, and possibly a security alarm, since I forgot to put those in when I built it. I might buy her a house phone just because, though they really don't seem to need those in this game.

That's it for now. Stay tuned to see what Week Two will bring for her.