Yes, it sounds like an ad for eating your "Five-A-Day" but sadly those bold claims only apply to The Sims 3.

Unless you have turned aging off and without a special diet, your sims will ultimately die. By a special diet, I mean eating foods that can prolong life in different ways. Life Fruit, which gives an extra day, or Ambrosia, which can reset the lifestage back to the beginning or even bring a ghost back from the beyond the grave. Before you send your sims off to the Everyfresh supermarket to buy these for their dinner, they can only be made at home and requires some high skills.

Life Fruit requires Level 7 gardening for starters. Then it requires growing a life fruit plant, which is one of the special seeds. The catch is that you need to find those special seeds and you will only know if it is a Life Fruit plant when it is nearly ready to be harvested. Once you have a life fruit, you can plant that instead.

"An apple a day keeps the doctor away" should be updated to "A life fruit a day keeps the reaper away".

This is a useful thing to have in order to keep your sim living a long life, but Ambrosia is even more powerful but requires very skilled sims in order to make it happen.

Ambrosia has been known throughout the ages as the food of the Gods, believed to provide them with immortality. I originally just thought that it was a type of creamy rice pudding. However, The Sims 3 version of ambrosia is somewhat closer to the first one. For the living sim, ambrosia resets their age to the beginning of that life stage. Therefore, a regular supply of ambrosia can indeed make sims immortal.

For ghosts, ambrosia has the special benefit of being able to bring them back to life. Leave a bowl out for them and they will eat it.

You don't need to be a God to be able to make it, however, but the requirements are very steep indeed. I have not been fortunate enough to get to be able to make ambrosia as it has some very high level requirements. Melody Miles is the closest one I have and we see her here catching a Death Fish. However, I do not know if she will be able to get all of her skills high enough before her time runs out.

It has taken me about four months of playing TS3 to finally see a magician. These elusive non-playable characters (NPCs) are extremely rare and if they appear at all, it is usually in a park. In the case of this one, I found him by the Gazebo in Riverview, although I have heard of them mainly being spotted in Sunset Valley.

They can be male or female but both genders wear top hats, a jacket with tails and they have costume makeup on. This one here being greeted by Dallas Shallow is called Larry Lure. When asked about what they do, they do admit that they are magicians. However, Larry did not stay around long enough to show off about anything he did. He suddenly ran off, jumped in a car, drove to someone's house and vanished into thin air.

I am yet to find out what they really do. Another of those sim mysteries I am yet to solve.

There are regular gnomes and there are magical gnomes.

For those of us who have simmed for some time, we are all familiar with the regular gnomes. We have seen them since The Sims came out and they have been there to admire or to kick or otherwise just have in the garden. This also carried over to The Sims 2. For those with a good memory and the patience to get to grips with the "Making Magic" EP for The Sims, we may have encountered magical gnomes as well. From what I can recall, there was a spell that could be cast on regular gnomes to animate them and get them to do the gardening.

The Magical Mister Gnome (MMG) is a very rare creature, but he can be found in various places with some persistent searching. Lucky fishermen may catch one or if someone goes searching or they can be found if someone goes exploring the catacombs under the Mausoleum. Originally, they look a look a lot like the regular gnomes, as we can see in this picture here. The regular gnomes are to the right and left and the magical gnome is in the middle. He has a star to make him appear just that bit different to the others.

MMGs like to move around but they are shy creatures as they do not like being watched when they are up to something. Some people have told me that their MMG has not moved at all. I was fortunate to find that my MMG has moved several times since he was placed in between his inanimate brethren. A few simdays after the first picture was taken, I found him to be laid asleep by the pool in the Miles's garden. I moved him inside where this picture on the left was taken. When I next checked back on him some time later, I found him to be looking up and around at the room.

Do they confer any benefits? Not that I've found.

Do they harm regular sims? No, but they do frustrate players who want the MMG to do something and he is not in the mood.

I find them to be yet another example of the mystery and innate weirdness of The Sims 3.

We have always known The Sims to be unusual. Being pixellated around "the naughty bits" is something not everyone wants, although it does leave some things to the imagination. Being able to get dressed just by spinning around saves a lot of time, although taking 30 sim minutes to walk to the end of the driveway is not something that would thrill me. Also, a sim can seem to carry everything on their person, even if they are only wearing a pair of speedos. Everything even includes the family's SUV. On the right, we see Holly Alto's inventory which includes a police cruiser. I am too polite to consider where they could be hiding them. I can only assume it is Timelord science and "it's bigger on the inside". This is sim-fare that we are used to. With The Sims 3, there are more things that go beyond this and can only be classed as further weirdness.

Gardening has been part of both previous versions of The Sims, but it has to some degrees "got a bit silly" with The Sims 3. In the main, gardening is a skill that sims can learn, either from taking classes, reading about it or lots of practice, planting, watering, weeding, fertilising and otherwise tending their plants. The better you get, the more you can do. In the early stages, everything seems quite normal, but then you find you can grow some quite unusual things. Eggplants are something I'd already heard of ... but not the sort of eggs you use to make an omelette. If the bistro gives your sim the opportunity to deliver them some perfect steaks, the sim does not need to open an abbatoir, slaughter some livestock and get the steaks from there. No. They grow their steaks in the garden. If they have the right skill, they can plant rare seeds that are found in odd places. With the Omni Plant, you can pretty much grow everything ... including goldfish.

Fishing is another aspect that has come forward through the different previous incarnations of The Sims. Again, it is a skill that can be learnt from taking classes, reading and lots of practice. Sims can learn the different baits needed for the best catch. However, I am sure that the Angling Times would be gobsmacked to find people going shark fishing There are numerous forms of fish that sims can catch, ranging from minnows through to sharks and fish I have never heard of but can only exist in the sim realm. One amazing thing is that no matter the size of the fish when you catch it, it fits perfectly into a tiny little goldfish bowl. Timelord science again.

At some time in the future, I will be coming back to the specific skills, the skill journal and challenges that each skill can give. Before then, I am going to conclude this series of reports about "The Sims 3" wrapping up loose ends.

In the final report of this series, coming very soon, I will be looking at the different ways that we can cheat and looking back over the game, seeing how I feel it could be improved and preparing us for the imminent arrival of the first expansion that takes our sims on adventures around the world.