Have you ever actually done The Sims’ Legacy Challenge? Do you even know what it is?

The Legacy Challenge started with The Sims 2 and is “a long, 10-generation challenge where you start out with a single founder and very humble beginnings and try to lead the family to fame, fortune and success over the course of 10 generations.” It was created by a fan of the game who longed to make it a little more challenging by actually having goals.

One of the two main rules of the Legacy Challenge is that you can’t use a money cheat and you can’t do things to prolong your Sims’ lives. In The Sims 2, you could drink an “elixir of life” which was a happiness points reward and that would extend your life by a few days. In The Sims 3, you can eat “life fruit” or “Ambrosia” to extend your life and of course, for the sake of the Legacy Challenge, these things are forbidden.

Here are the quasi-official rules for the Legacy Challenge for Sims 3 that are quasi-endorsed by Electronic Arts by the fact that they linked to them via their Facebook fan page last week. That’s when I realized that in the 10 years I’ve been playing The Sims games, I’ve always started out with the intention of doing the Legacy Challenge, but I’ve never really done it for real. And now that I’ve read the actual rules and have tried to actually do the challenge, I realize that a lot of the people I know online who have claimed to have done the challenge are fucking liars because the screencaps I’ve seen of like, their 3rd generation, are in houses with items that are absolutely impossible to get by that stage.

Here’s a little secret about me: I’ve never had a sim die naturally of old age. In fact, I’ve never had a sim age into an elder because I’ve always used the life-extending items in both The Sims 2 and 3. In The Sims 3, they allow you to toggle the aging option and I’ve always played the game with the longest of these options. I’ve also always given up on being poor in the beginning and have therefore always succumbed to the siren call of the money cheat.

The Sims 3 Facebook fan page is actually really annoying in that they ask you the most asinine questions several times a day, such as “Click “like” if your sim went on an adventure today!” or “Click “like” if your sim bought a car today!” but I remain a fan because the fan page is also where they post announcements on upcoming expansions and things like that. So, last week they asked if anyone had done the Legacy Challenge and linked to the challenge’s rules. And I thought, “y’know? I haven’t”, so I clicked on the rules link and educated myself, knowing full well that this month is going to be a shitty month full of bleeding and pain and not doing much else.

So I read the rules, which are actually kind of brutal when you’re used to playing without any real goals or challenges and you typically cheat your ass off, and created Endometria Moody, my legacy’s founder for the Legacy Challenge.

Now in the rules, they tell you specifically which property you have to move your founder into and they do this so you have a huge lot to expand your house and property as your legacy matures and also so everyone starts out with only $1500 disposable income. (Okay they’re called Simoleans, but there’s no sign for that on my keyboard, so I’m just gonna call it money.) And believe me, $1500 doesn’t get you very far. In the beginning, all I had was an undecorated wall, a bed, a toilet, a sink and a fridge and even though I’ve been playing for about 3 days now, I don’t really have much more than that at the moment.

Two optional rules of the challenge are that you can choose to have either a patriarchy or a matriarchy where only sims of a specific gender can become the next generation’s heir and the family trait option where you choose one of your founder’s personality traits that gets passed down to each generation. In the beginning I thought these rules were great, so I wrote down in my sims journal (yes I keep a sims journal) that I would be making a matriarchy and that my family trait would be “natural cook”, which means that you learn the cooking skill faster and you make better quality meals which in turn, give your mood a bigger boost.

Well…my first attempt at doing the Legacy Challenge FAILED COMPLETELY. Endometria Moody started out as a young adult whose lifetime wish was to be a “5-star celebrated chef” and you get 1 point for fulfilling each of your sims’ lifetime wishes. So naturally, I spent most of Endometria’s young adult life getting raises and promotions in the culinary career track. By the time she aged to an adult, she was already on level 8 of her career and the goal as per her lifetime wish was level 10. So here I thought I was doing pretty good, even though to keep her happy and hygienic I had to take her to the community gym every day before work so she could have a shower because I couldn’t afford to by one.

Since she worked so much, the only people she really had contact with were her co-workers, one of whom was Odin Crosby, one of the more handsome townies in the game. Since it’s another rule that you can only procreate with townies, I chose him as Endometria’s object of affection and started the love affair because at this point, I only had 18 days to produce an heir to my legacy – a female, according to my chosen optional rule – or it was game over.

So the love affair began, although there were some glitches I hadn’t accounted for and that’s what had me failing miserably. Odin Crosby had a wife or a girlfriend whom he lived with, named Heather. I convinced him to leave her and go steady with me and while we had crazy amounts of woo hoo, I couldn’t get him to try for a baby, which may have had something to do with the fact that one of his character traits was that be disliked children. After we started going steady and with about 10 days to go before Endometria became an elder where she wouldn’t be physically able to produce an heir of any sex, Odin Crosby stopped coming over. I’d call him up and invite him over and he’d say “Sure, I’ll be there soon!” but before the phone call ended, he gave me some lame excuse about how something suddenly came up and that he wouldn’t be coming over. And this kept happening every single day, no matter what time I called, until finally there were only 2 days left until Endometria would become an elder and since I think it takes 3 or 4 days to incubate a pregnancy, I had no choice but to evict her, wasting 2 days worth of game time, and deleting that saved game so I could start over with a cloned copy of Endometria.

I failed at The Sims. *headdesk*

It became time for round 2. Just as I had the first time around, I started Endometria off as a young adult, giving her extra time to get her career in order and to produce an heir. I threw out the idea of a matriarchy, because at this point I’d take what I could get, and I also threw out the idea of having a family trait at all, although I’m secretly attempting to give everyone in the Moody legacy a green thumb. These two optional rules don’t have any effect on the challenge’s scoring, so I kind of see them as bonuses more than goals.

Something I realized early on that I really took for granted with all my cheating, are maids, repairmen and nannies. Your hygiene level really goes down when you have to clean your own toilet, sink, tub, counters and stoves, not to mention the time it takes. Also, when all you can afford is the cheapest bathroom amenities, they tend to break a lot, which means that my current incarnation of Endometria has a high handiness skill. And nannies…well, I’ll get to that in a bit.

And when you can’t afford seating, your sims eat their meals on the only seat available…

This time around, I decided to focus on producing an heir as a young adult as opposed to getting Endometria’s career in order. The first thing that needed to be done was to procure a mate and to hell with Odin Crosby this time, I wasn’t gonna touch the same trash twice. So I decided to kill two birds with one stone and go to the community garden to harvest plants, which I could plant in my garden at home, and also scope out a new mate with which to procreate. Enter Sherman Bagley. That’s him on the right.

This began Endometria and Sherman’s whirlwind courtship, with the goal to not only produce an heir, but to have a two income household so we could afford to actually build a house with STUFF in it. Sherman was in the military when he and Endometria met, but after she got knocked up (twice), proposed to him, got married and moved him in I discovered that his lifetime wish was to be a forensic detective.

As soon as Sherman, Endometria and their children became a family, my first order of business was switching his career track to better meet his lifetime goals. In the meantime, Endometria was on perpetual maternity leave as she gave birth to a baby boy named Zephyr, twin girls named Penny and Poppy and she’s currently pregnant again with possibly her 4 AND 5th children, seeing as I spent the extra happiness points and spring for fertility treatment.

And this is where the appreciation for The Sims 3 nannies comes into play. Neither Sherman nor Endometria has gotten the good night’s sleep mood boost for about a week as all 3 of their children seem to be on different schedules. The good news, though, is that being a two income household now, when Endometria finally goes back to work, the happy couple should be able to afford to hire a nanny while they’re both at work. I was worried in the beginning that that wouldn’t be the case and that Endometria (or Sherman) would have to put her career on hold indefinitely in order to look after her children and keep the social worker at bay.

What’s killing me about the legacy challenge is things just like that, how with these rules in place, the game really mimics real life, with things like possibly having to choose between being a good mother and having a career or having a job you don’t really want to have because the money’s good, meanwhile your passions lie elsewhere.

This is Endometria eating salad while sitting on a slightly nicer toilet in an actual bathroom with a door & everything because with being a two income household, she and Sherman could actually afford a bit of privacy:

The other thing with the Legacy Challenge is that you get 1 point for every 100,000 lifetime happiness points gained per bloodline sim in the household. Thus, I’ve been juggling money woes with keeping everyone’s wants and needs in mind which are often at odds with each other. That, too, makes the game a little bit like real life. I mean, when you only have $400 to your family’s name and your mother wants to buy a crib for the baby that could sleep on the floor technically, what do you do? Or what if your sim is exhausted but because he’s a neat freak, he wants to clean the bathroom and kitchen, what do you do? You do whatever they want because a happy sim means a productive sim more likely to get promotions at work and those happiness points you can accrue can be spent on rewards like “fast learner”, which enables your sim to learn recipes and skills faster, or “speedy cleaner”, in the case of Sherman, whose OCD tendencies with cleanliness border on pure lunacy and take up a lot of perfectly good sleeping time.

Movin’ on up…Sherman and Endometria can now afford CHAIRS! Sure they’re the cheapest chairs in the game, but it sure beats eating cereal on the toilet!

So this is what I’m going to be doing for the next month or so. As I stated in the beginning, due to my endometriosis I won’t be able to do much other than sitting in this chair, so I figured hey, why shouldn’t I do this and write all about my misadventures on Buttercup?

Have you done the Legacy Challenge for Sims 3 by the book? I know many people have and they post about their legacy families on the official Sims Exchange, but even with some of those that I checked out over the last few days, I think there’s maybe been a wee bit of cheating happening because in the beginning, there’s no way some people have had the homes or items they have only starting out with a $1500 budget. I mean, Endometria and Sherman are about 8 days away from becoming adults and so far all I have is one undecorated wall and a bathroom, everything else is outdoors.

Anyway, if you’ve done the Legacy Challenge, I’d love to hear all about it and if you’ve never done it, why not do it now and then tell me all about it? My plan is to write about my challenge all throughout the month or until I hit the 10th generation milestone, I figured I’d give everyone fair warning!

And now, I’m off to go hide in my Sims Bunker for a little while longer…I can’t wait to see how many children Endometria births this time!