New features added August 20th, 2005

• Ghosts can get jealous.
• A guest can, though most likely won't bother to, wash all the dishes and trim all the hedges.
• When Romance Sims have platinum aspiration score, they walk around like sex gods.
• You're not supposed to have a Sim fix a broken appliance if they don't have a lot of mechanical points, because they can be electrocuted. So what happens? You call a mechanic... and he comes over and uses a metal screwdriver on a device that's plugged in...
• But if the Mechanic does this with the broken dishwasher while standing in the puddle it makes, you'll have a short term Christmas tree.
• The cowplant will, when hungry, eat other sims.
• Gazing through telescopes on campus still carries a chance of alien abduction.
• It has been known for an NPC to have the exact same name as an existing townie or other neighbourhood resident. This is because Maxis recycles the default names in the game.
• Zombies: It is possible to WooHoo with a Zombie but you cannot try for a baby. Perish the thought. However if you use the Tombstone of Life & Death instead, the results are described as "interesting".
• Sims have been known to have a want to see the ghost of a sim that isn't actually dead. Also sims who hate another sim can have the desire to drink their enemy!
• The game constantly reports that your sim is no longer best friends with a sim who's been dead for some time. Similar "its not too late to repair this relationship" messages also appear.
• If you attach a university to a custom neighbourhood, you may find that said uni has an interesting feature. Basically you can go to class until the cows come home but you won't increase your class performance meter that way. You have to do assignments, papers, etc manually. When you send them for the final exam, they come back early and one hour later you get told they never went and have a grade of C+.
• Sims, for obvious and perfectly valid reasons, can't marry their own family. They have, however, got no problems jumping into bed with their great uncle/aunt and cousins once removed and second cousins.
• If you use the debug cheat and make yourself pregnant with yourself (in a nutshell, for family viewing, WooHooing with yourself), you'll have a baby of the opposite sex. You'll give birth to your twin, in other words, due to the way the genetics worked to make you originally.
• An aspiration level entitled "Black Sheep" apparently exists in the game. No further details.
• The Aspiration love tub needs sims to be in a platinum mood before they can use it, otherwise sims will act wierd with it.
• Sims have been known to dine themselves on lobster on campus. Lucky people. I didn't even get a sandwich.

Previously on this page:

• An empty fridge blocks the "Yes" option when ordering groceries. Solution: Go to the store on the community lot, otherwise ensure that you "fill up" the meter - by default it is empty so the button is disabled.
• Sims won't cook anything other than Toaster Pastries and Instant Meals, even though they're now both at cooking level X. Solution: Buy a food processor.
• Alien babies: if an adult Sim uses the a Telescope between 7 pm and 2 am to stargaze, there's a 5 percent chance of being abducted by aliens. Assuming your Sim is an adult male, he will come back pregnant.
• Are nearly all sim kids born with the same haircut? The boys get the semi-buzzcut and the girls get the short hair-across the face look...
• It is possible to hire multiple nannies. It is also possible for toddlers to break out of the crib.
• Sim babies/toddlers/children who get taken by the social worker can come back to the house they left when you choose to adopt.
• Sims get a kick out of watching a police/burglar fight.
• The keyboard controls for the camera are counter intuitive. That is, pressing < rotates right and vice versa. This seems to be a trend in Maxis games, not just an abnormality in Sims 2 when used in Sims 1 camera mode.
• Oddly enough, you can't use the fancy chairs with the computer; you have to stick a dining chair there instead.
• Wall phones are useless when there's something in front of the object. Unlike Sims 1, they won't lean over the object to get to the phone.
• Alien toddlers have been known to play the the theme from Close Encounters Of The Third Kind.
• A cheat to help get kids into Private School is to basically befriend the headmaster outside of the normal scenario situation. This ups the schmooze score for when you next run the private school scenario.
• Also, the headmaster seems obsessed with the swingset should you have one. He will also socialise with the Social Bunny. Strangely enough, he has no skills if you manage to move him in as a regular Sim, and has been known to basically harrass other sims.
• The move_objects cheat allows you to place objects in places where you wouldn't normally be able to put them. Uses for this: wall objects that float in mid air and, for the creative, you can also make a high diving board for your outdoor pool! (details at the Snooty Sims site)
• The elder sim in the Specter family in Strangeville has an unusual memory: WhooHoo with the Grim Reaper. Also the reaper has apparently been sighted wandering around a house and using the toilet. It is alleged that he is the father of Nervous Subject, a family member also in Strangeville.
• Sims can have family reunion memories. Occurs when you split a family up and move them all back in together again.
• Buy a bookcase. Get a book out. Stop a sim putting the book back in the case. Sell the bookcase. Book now works as cooking, mechanical and cleaning. Saves money.
• The case of the disappearing homework: When a child/teen Sim comes home from school, cancel the celebration they start doing when they have good grades. The homework is gone but the grade is unaffected.
• The value of the items that the Repo Man takes rarely, if ever, matches up to the value of the oustanding bills.
• The smartmilk can be stored in the fridge.
• Sims can crank-call. This is personality-based. Loki Beaker and Nervous Subject, in Strangetown, are both capable of this 'feat'. It appears that the same sims who kick the trash can over can make crank calls - ie the not very nice ones. Sometimes the crank call victim comes over and yells at the crank caller.
• The mailperson is apparently immortal, but some of the NPCs have high skills (anything up to six points across the seven categories) and may be better off in the career market than a random townie.
• Incest may be caused when you package a family and move them around. Case example: Sim's spouse dies, he suddenly fancies his sister and can go "all the way". The family tree remains the same however, the sims just don't remember that they're related.
• If you move somebody out of the house and opt to move a toddler out as well, then assuming he can get to the pavement (toddlers can't use stairs), then the toddler will literally crawl/walk down the street while the adult/elder goes in a taxi, otherwise the kid will just disappear into thin air.
• If you talk to a child on the telephone after 8pm (SimTime curfew) the parent of the kid in question may come over and help themselves to whatever's available. He won't go until you tell him to. Since you get a lot of phone calls if you make acquaintance with a number of sims, you can frequently have this happen if a child is one of the sims with whom your sim made acquaintance. The child calls up, your sim gabs, and the parent shows up and starts helping himself.

New features added May 1st 2005:

• Fiddling with the meshes (the skeletons of the sims) and merging them together can result in some very interesting outcomes, such as noseless kids, babies with virtual moustaches and massive noses.
• Nannies have been known to head straight for the champagne bottle when its present. Even when a kid fills the air with green smoke... The nanny called Karen is more than likely to be a complete waste of money.
• Gnomes can be stolen by other sims.
• When Sims have birthdays, they have been known to grow DOWN or skip an entire age altogether. Its also possible for Sims to end up in the wrong body, such as sim kids going to school but looking like a toddler.
• Just like pizza, food delivered by the delivery person stays fresh if you leave it unclaimed.
• Unlike the original game, burglars now steal from outdoors too.
• It is possible for sims to have a three way conversation on the telephone. To do this, have a chat going between one sim and somebody else on the phone then direct another housesim to use another handset.
• Ghosts can get stuck under tables.
• Inanimate objects and NPCs can get sick with the flu. Seen examples: the toy car and the nanny.
• Using the smart milk and the thinking cap at the same time to train a toddler isn't recommended as the progress bar will keep resetting.
• Toddlers have been known to have a want to hire the repairman.
• Ironically enough, when kids ask parents for help with homework and the parent is reading a book, he/she will ignore the kid.
• Ghosts have been seen to make smart milk.
• On community lots, sims are too stupid to realise when there's more than one till, so spend ages stamping and moaning about somebody at the till they want to use. Very reminsicent of having five bathrooms and six sims trying to use the one bathroom at the same time.
• Toddlers can fight over bottles left on the floor. They can play with the dollhouse together too. As well as playing in the toilet, they can play in the trash.
• The logic of sims in general is warped. They'll make an espresso, drink it, and then look for a place to put the cup. Instead of putting it on the nearest available surface, the sim will insist on putting it on a small table, even if it means walking up three flights of stairs. Same thing happens with the newspaper, books and anything picked up from the spare space next to a computer on a desk. Sims also fight over babies/toddlers and the poor kid often ends up torn limb from limb as the parents alternate between reading/bathing/feeding and sleeping.
• Fences with gates confuse NPCs and other sims. It has been seen that visitors to a house will walk through said house to ring the doorbell on the back door.
• Sims won't wash their hands after using the toilet. Hygiene suffers not. Visitors may wash then wander off home claiming to need a shower.
• Without sinks, sims will throw dirty dishes into the trash.
• Teenage Kids have been known to congratulate their parents on WooHoo.
• Visiting sims can call the house they are visiting, presumably from a mobile.
• Sims will go to great lengths to avoid standing on toddler toys or the remote controlled car, but still stand on books.
• Playing on the handhelds, sims will occasionally want to be best friends with themselves.
• The headmaster has been seen to literally stuff his face with every plate of food available on the lot and, ironically enough, refuse to discuss education full stop.
• You can use the influence system (University only) to schmooze the headmaster by getting him to do stuff with your nicest sim, like appreciate etc.
• You can throw a regular houseparty in your neighbourhood (not college town) and get tips for playing!

• Basements + how to make: See my tutorial on Basements on this site.
• When a Sim wants to see a ghost, it means they want to be scared by one. Take note: May scare sim to death.
• The chess game the Sims play is Bobby Fischer (white) vs Max Euwe (black) played in 1960.
• The game is set to allow up to 8 people to your home at any one time, but you can change this with the intProp maxNumOfVisitingSims cheat. However to be able to have more than two guests at a time, you need to be using hardware rendering (not software rendering), have a processor speed of over 1200Mhz as detected by Sims 2 and not be using one of the non T&L graphics cards (ie those that require a 2Ghz processor). To have eight guests, your processor speed must equal or exceed 1800Mhz.
• According to Usenet, the game was supposed to have a first camera mode option built-in (there is a script available for it, TSData\Res\UserData\Cameras\FirstPersonCameras.txt folder off your Sims 2 installation directory) but it's not used. This would have meant you really would have seen what your sims saw.
• Each tile is about three feet. Sims walk about two tiles per game minute. Therefore each Sim can walk about 360 feet in one hour, compared to the average human speed of about 15k+ p/h.