Sims 3: Breaking into your neighbors homes with dive wells

Here's a fun trick that requires some minimal tomb building tools.  It's possible to link dive wells together between lots.  That right, you can use them to break into your neighbor's house whenever you want.

Let's demonstrated the technique using the Alto and Goth families from Sunset Valley.

We'll start in the Alto house, because it's got plenty of space in the yard for a dive well.

This trick requires use of the testingcheatsenabled and buydebug.  If you don't know how to activate them, go look it up.  Got it?  Good.  Turn both of them on.

Now, place a dive well on your lot anywhere it will be accessible.

Now, I'm going to assume that not everyone likes to build traps or get into neighbors houses using tomb building tools, so I'll walk through this.  The dive well system is pretty simple - you give the portal a name, and then another portal can link to it.

To get to this magical section, I want you to hold down Ctrl and Shift, and then click on the dive well.  A menu should pop up that looks like the below image.  I want you to click on "Change This Well's Name" as is highlighted in the image.

Don't forget that you can click on these images to see them bigger.

A box should pop up that will allow you to enter in a name for this well.  I have chosen "Alto Home", though feel free to pick anything you want.

That's all we can do on the Alto lot for now.  We will now start building on the Goth lot, for which I had to switch active households to do.

As before, place a dive well somewhere on the lot.  If you wish to actually break in, however, you must place this well inside the actual house.  Otherwise when you travel here you will be stuck outside the house, and honestly we've got cabs for that kind of a visit.  Here I've placed it in the master bedroom.

Again name this well.  This time I have named it "Goth House".  Why yes, I am inconsistent in my naming.  I suggest you do a better job. :P

Now for the fun linkage part.

Ctrl-Shift click on the well again, and click on "Make this an uber warp well".

This will pop up another box.  This is where you enter in the name of the well you would like to link it to.  In this case, we will be linking the Goth well to "Alto Home".

Now we are completely done in the Goth house.  Switch back to the first house and we shall repeat the linking for that well.  Obviously I will be linking the Alto's well to "Goth House".

After that, the only thing left to do is test it out!  Here is a video showing it in action.

The main downside to this is that you have to do a lot of prep work.  You have to place a well in each place you would like to go, switch lots all the time to get things linked, etc.  Plus, wells are huge.  However, it is perfectly possible to create chains of wells.  Alto links to Goth who links to Wainwright and so on.  And if you wanted to, you could place a well inside an uninhabited home and use it as a home away from home, a trick, by the way, that ghosts are also capable of preforming provided the house in question doesn't have a foundation.

I might also suggest turning off both cheats once you are done.  I don't like to leave them on any longer than I need to.  Just because the testing cheats are potentially dangerous, and buydebug is way too tempting.

Homeless Sim

New Sims expansions in the house means playing Sims again.  I'm currently playing a "homeless" sim (tiny plot of land in the middle of no where, no actual house, etc) who's lifetime goal is to make a bunch of money entering horse competitions.  The addition of sleeping bags to the game (from Generations) is very useful.  They serve a similar purpose to the tent, but you don't have to go on vacation or use cheats to get one.

Adopting a horse via the newspaper is free.  I wasted a lot of time attempting to make friends with a wild horse seeing as how they were already friends before I realized you have to have a very high riding skill level to even adopt a wild horse.  I ended up adopting that horse later, although by then she was an elder.  And a she - I was hoping that even if she was an elder, she would be a boy so I could breed the female I had adopted via the newspaper.

Also couldn't breed my main horse with one of the neighbor's horses.  Go figure, huh? :P  Anyway, since she was getting close to old age herself, I bred her via the Equestrian Center and got a little male foal I named Captain Fuzz.  Elder adopted wild horse eventually passed on not too long after the foal was born.

As my sim herself is getting on in years, I decided to have her pop out a kid with her sorta-boyfriend.  Yeah, she was still homeless, though the tiny plot of land which was her technical home had (or at one point had) a rather impressive garden.  Once you stock pile produce it's really easy to be sure your sim is never hungry, AND it's faster to eat two apples than it is sitting down to a whole meal.

Anyway, popping out a kid.  She doesn't have a real bed, you can't woohoo in a sleeping bag (the one advantage a tent has on it), and Appaloosa Plains seems to be very strict with single gender bathrooms.  She finally got lucky backstage of the theater, after having tried the City Hall and Military Base, both of which are combined in this neighborhood and I couldn't get the "Woohoo" options to pop up.  I'm not sure if I imagined being able to do it there in the past, or if perhaps it doesn't work on combined lots.

I figured, taking care of a kid wouldn't be that hard even without a house.  Carry the kid with me wherever I go, no problem.  You can see where this is going, can't you?  Freaking twins!  You can't carry those around with you, and even though she technically has money I had already decided that since she's supposedly just squatting on some public land (story wise, obviously the game think she owns that plot) the babysitter won't have an address to come to.

So she's trapped on the little lot until the babies are kids.  Peeing herself because you can't place a toilet without walls, stinky because she doesn't have water hookup obviously, and grumpy because I typically got most of her fun playing with her horses.  I broke down and bought the kids some cribs at least - let's pretend she bought them in a yard sale or something.

Because the lot is so tiny, I had been having her horses stay at the training grounds area near the Equestrian Center.  Other than keeping an eye out that the horses don't spontaneously decide to come "home", this is a pretty good set up.  She takes care of anything she needs to around town, and then bikes over to hang with her horses and enter competitions.

But, she can't leave her lot.  Again, normally wouldn't be a problem, except for that darn foal.  See, he was born just a day or so before the twins.  And yes, he can nurse from his mommy.  But the option doesn't seem to be there every single time he's hungry.  I had been supplementing this lack with bottle feeding, but there's no room on the home lot to succeed in doing anything with the horses, and she can't step 2 inches off the lot because that's leaving your kids home alone.  Which means a lot more attention needs to be paid to the foal and begging random strangers to feed him with a bottle.

The game crashed just shortly after the twins grew up into toddlers and the foal had grown into an adult.  I can't remember if I saved it after that - I know I saved after they were born at least.

Toddlerhood will be better than babyhood in this case.  I may or may not bother with learning to talk and walk and pee in a potty (hey, mommy pees on the ground because she can't carry both of you to the gym for some reason), I don't really care what traits they get, and they received their Imaginary Friend dolls when they were born which means I don't even really have to do anything with them except chuck an occasional bottle their way or put them in and out of the crib.

I can't wait until they are children though, so that I may get back to attempting to earn money with horse competitions.  I haven't decided if I'm going to purchase a real home once she has enough money, but I have to keep earning if I'm to hit the 40k needed to fulfill her lifetime want, which is my main goal.  The kids are just there to carry on the family line if I decide to keep playing after she dies (or if I keep playing until she does die) and the same goes for the offspring horse.  Well, that's also so that when main horse finally passes on (she's already an elder) I will still have a horse to earn money with.  It's only too bad Captain Fuzz isn't a girl.  If I want to get an offspring for him I'll have to adopt another horse.