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How To: Get Unlimited Money In The Sims 2

I’ve played a lot of The Sims 2 (website), EA/Maxis’s follow-up to the best-selling PC game in history (reference, if you don’t believe me).  I own all the expansion packs ($30 x 8 expansions) and all the stuff packs ($20 x 8 packs).  It’s like a drug habit for me.

The Sims 2 lets you, the player, craft the lives of a sim, or a family of sims, or a neighborhood of sims.  They can become all manner of creatures and work in strange and interesting jobs.  They live or die by your hand.  And trust me, there are some strange ways to see them check out (they can be hit by a satellite falling from orbit).

When you start the game, you’re always scrambling for money.  You need a new TV because the repo-man doesn’t like you ignoring your bills.  There are no walls on your bedroom because you ran out of money buying that bed.  Your sim is always tired and bored because the bed isn’t comfortable enough and the TV keeps breaking.  Sure, there’s a cheat that fixes that.  But with a little finesse and a lot of practice, you can find new and interesting ways to pay the bills.

The Sims 2 is the kind of game where a highly-paid Sim is bringing home $10k a week.  $100,000 is a lot of money.  A million is unthinkable.  I actually did hit a whole million once, before I started looking for ways to make truly ludicrous amounts of money.  And then I got to thinking.  Here’s what I came up with.

Step 1: Buy these expansion packs for the game: The Sims 2: Open For Business, The Sims 2: Seasons, and The Sims 2: Free Time.

Step 2: Start a new household (or use an existing one) with one regular sim adult.  You’ll need enough yard space for a garden.  Your sim must have the Fortune aspiration.

Step 3: Make sim become a Plant Sim (The Sims 2: Seasons).  Make your garden.  It should be at least 4×6.  You should Build that garden in open air (not in a greenhouse, this is important).  Fertilize the dirt if you want to, and plant anything you want in the garden.  Add enough sprinklers to water the whole thing.  Do not place any ladybug houses.  Tend the garden for several days.  When bugs start infesting it, wait until most or all of the garden is infested and then have your sim spray for bugs.  It will take several sprays, but eventually your sim will become a Plant Sim.  Replace your ceiling lamps with grow lights and this sim will never run out of energy.  You can do step 3 and step 4 at the same time.

Step 4: Get Snapdragon Bouquets (The Sims 2: Open For Business).  For this one, make yourself a Flower Arranging Station: in buy mode, go to the Hobbies menu and choose the miscellaneous submenu.  Arrange flowers until you have a gold talent badge.  This will take some time and cost some money, but you can offset costs by selling the crafted items from your inventory from time to time.  When you place the Snapdragon Bouquet in your house, make sure the cloud that sprays from it is pink and not green.  Pink will keep your sims’ motives (except Energy, but Plant Sims do not have an Energy Bar).

Step 5: Replicate your Plant Sim.  These sims can spawn toddler duplicates of themselves, complete with all the same abilities.  These take just a few days to mature.  Keep them occupied under a sun lamp and near Snapdragons, and they will need no attention while they grow.  You need a total of 8 plant sims.  If you want, earn all your sims’ Lifetime Want (The Sims 2: University).  That part is not required.

Step 6: Earn the Investing aspiration reward (The Sims 2: Free Time) for all your sims.  It is the capstone on the Fortune aspiration reward column.

Step 7: Build a room with eight computer desks.  Place a computer and a Snapdragon Bouquet on each desk.  Light the room with grow lights.

Step 8: Cause all of your Plant Sims to “Give Financial Advice” on the computers.  If you have done everything correctly, none of their motives will ever drop.  Each of your sims will earn $200 an hour – more than they could make with a real job, so you can safely quit any jobs they are working.  That’s $38,400 per day.  On Tuesday and Thursday, you should have a sim leave long enough to pay the bills.  Occasionally, leaving the computer will cause it to break.  It will be helpful if one of your sims has enough Mechanical skill to repair the computer.

Step 9: Profit.  On top of the $40k you make every sim day, there is a chance each day that you will gain or lose money on the stock market.  The amount is random, but is always a percentage of your total wealth.  The more money you have, the more you can earn.  If you leave the game on the fastest speed setting, you can increase your money by a power of 10 every hour or two.  Make enough, and you can fund every new house you build in this neighborhood with money you earned legitimately.  After the first half hour or so, the money you make from giving financial advice is worthless compared to your fortune.  But it keeps your sims out of trouble while you earn money.  Your only upkeep is paying bills twice per week.

This is the kind of thing I think about.  I came up with this idea while pursuing some other ridiculous strategy.  I look for ways to “break” open-ended games, like speed-leveling in Oblivion or maxing out experience in Fable II.  When I started my Sims 2 money scheme, I was just curious what data type the programmers used for cash.  You probably remember old games that used an unsigned byte (numbers up to 255) or maybe the early ’90s games like Master of Magic which used a small integer (numbers up to 32,767; they just called it an integer back then).  Some games used an unsigned small integer (65,535).

The data type I expect is either an integer (2,147,483,647) or an unsigned integer (4,294,967,295).  But I got bored and gave up around 700,000,000.  It’s not like I could ever spend that much sim-cash.

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Pingback from Epic Spoon » Follow-Up: Money in The Sims 2
Time January 15, 2009 at 2:48 pm

[…] while back I wrote about how to get unlimited money in The Sims 2 (website).  It was an experiment I started because, as a computer programmer, I was curious how […]

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