Thanks to some chatter yesterday in twitter I was feeling in a Sims 3 mood, not that it takes much for me to feel like playing, there’s just something incredibly appealing about that game. Thanks to an EA sale a bit ago I picked up two extra ‘stuff’ packs for free. I’m still missing a lot of expansions but they release them so frequently that I find it incredibly hard to keep up. I have no interest in showtime or whatever the magic one was called. I do want to pick up seasons when it releases in four days.
I started over with a fresh install recently, so my little sim moved into her $15,999 house (fully furnished) and began looking for a job. I placed her as a mundane newspaper girl, and then began browsing the newspaper for a pet to adopt.
I’ve adopted animals before. I have bad luck with them. My dog died almost as soon as I adopted it. My cat also mysteriously died while my sim was making out with some guy in her living room. The guy witnessed the death, got freaked out (because death was literally standing in my living room while we were trying to smooch) and then I never saw him again.
This time around I decided to adopt a horse. Why not! How much work could it possibly be!
Oy. First things first. If you have a small lot, like I do, you’ll want to make sure you have room to purchase a box stall for it. This takes up a huge amount of property. I re-sized (ie: removed) my deck in order to make it fit. The horse I bought was a foal, which means I needed to bottle feed it every time it was hungry. Too young to feed on its own. My bond with Ariel quickly grew, and in a few days she turned from foal to horse. She is currently untrained, so between working my job delivering newspapers, working on my meager art skill, and trying to cram cooking and writing into my daily chores, I took her out riding.
Who needs a car! You and your horse can fly through the town, the wind whipping through your hair. Problem is after riding for a bit you’ll gain the ‘sore bottom’ moodlet.
You gain skill while riding, and eventually you can even enter contests. You need rank 3 in riding before you can. I’m rank 2 so far. It really feels like there just isn’t enough hours in the day to do everything I want, and that’s both good and bad. Bad because my sim hasn’t even met another human being outside of work yet, she spends all of her time with her horse. Good because there’s SO MUCH to do. It keeps things nice and interesting.
I’m glad I adopted the horse, now I want to try to find a good partner for her and breed them. That’s right, horses even have family trees.
As always, happy gaming, no matter where you find yourself!