When you’ve been playingThe Simsas long as I have, you end up getting a little creative with the gameplay – just how much can we “play with life,” as the game’s slogan invites us to do? Sims Challenges began as player-made content shared through fan forums and Tumblr in the 2010s, seeking to add optional twists to the game. There was the Apocalypse Challenge that asked you to eviscerate the town and slowly rebuild by way of career progression and self-imposed rules. Then came the Hunger Games Challenge, tasking eight Sims with inane gameplay tasks to decide a “winner” by (lethal) process of elimination.
The one I still enjoy playing, though, is the Rags to Riches Challenge: you buy an empty lot and set your Simoleons to zero, then try to literally build your life from the ground up. Plenty of the expansions have made it much easier to do than it was in the base game, sure, but none have reshaped Rags to Riches so intenselyas Enchanted by Nature.
This Pack Makes Living Outside A Breeze
While the pack is largely focused on all things fables and fairytales, with its Ireland-inspired world and wealth of storybook content to explore, it also gave us a couple new skills focused more on becoming one with nature.The Natural Living skillhelps your Sims become comfortable with existing outside, and when you physically do not have a house to go back to, learning to feel at home without a home becomes critical.
As your Sim builds this skill, they progressively get better at making the most of the world around them. They’ll replenish more energy than normal from sleeping on floors or benches, forage for food to sate their hunger need, bathe in bodies of water to attend to their personal hygiene, and even can summon a bush from thin air to use as an impromptu bathroom.
They’ll learn to enjoy themselves and have funfulfilling some of their basic needs, and in topping it off with the ability to socialize with nature directly, a Sim can become fully self-sufficient without walls in no time.
Nature Is Easier To Live In When You’re Enchanted By It
Gino Rivoli came out of Create-a-Sim with nothing but a button-down shirt and the love for nature I gave him, mercifully, to make this challenge at least slightly less daunting. I moved him onto an empty lot andbegan foraging on the groundin front of him the second I loaded in, increasing him to the second level of Natural Living just in time – this is the level that lets you summon that bathroom bush, and boy, did Gino have to go.
Level two also came with the ability to forage specifically for food, too, instead of just hoping for the best as you dig aimlessly, so I instructed him to do so as many times as I could before his action bar was full. Playing with Seasons installed, anything he could plant in the summertime was placed on the ground of his home lot to map out a starter garden, while crops out of season were his dinner that evening. He planted a few blackberries and bell peppers before he was desperate for a bath.
We headed over to the nearest body of water – a pondin the park nearby– and he cautiously stepped in and started scrubbing. Going back to his home lot, I had him forage for a bit more food and stop a passerby for a quick chat before instructing him to sleep on the ground amid his budding garden. I could barely see at night and realized I’d need to have him follow the rules of old-timey farmers for now, going to bed when it gets dark and rising with the sun to tend to the crops.
On the morning of day two, some of his basil had grown in, and we earned enough money to look into buying something between harvesting the herbs and selling the inedible foraged goods I collected the day before. Unable to purchase much in the way of furniture, I opted to buy Gino some outdoor lighting so I could at least keep foraging and planting into the night. In doing so, he reached level four of the Natural Living skill and was truly beginning to feel at home without one by bedtime on day two.
The next day, the rest of his plants had grown in, and Gino had dozens of produce items to sell. I planted an aesthetically pleasing garden worth of some veggies from the haul and got the next season’s fruit trees into the ground, too, before selling everything that was left, earning him just shy of 900 Simoleons. I built Gino a three-by-three room with a door before running out of money, tucking him into the garden once again that night. The fourth day’s crop yield provided enough money to buy him a shoddy bed and inexpensive shower, and before long at all, a house was slowly but surely beginning to take shape.
Some Sims Are Meant For The Great Outdoors
But Gino didn’twanta house, it seemed, after days of roughing it out on the front lawn. He woke up the next morning on the fifth day sore from sleeping on the cheapest bed, and he then became uncomfortable from inconsistent water in the bare-bones shower. He went out to tend to the garden again, earning enough cash for a fridge and toilet that day, which I purchased for him before sending him off for more foraging – Fall was just around the corner already, and he’d need some new plants.
When it came time for bed on day five, I decided to have Gino go sleep out in the garden again. He spent some time chatting with his tomatoes before settling in on the ground beneath their leaves and passing out. It rained that night, but his Natural Living skill was high enough that he slept right through it and woke up soaked to the bone but in a better mood than he had the day before waking up dry in an actual bed.
Both the toilet and shower gave him uncomfortable moodlets the following morning, too, so I sent him to the yard once again. His gardening skill was getting pretty commendable by this point, scaling with Natural Living, and he earned enough experience in the skill that he was even having some fun eating the items he was growing. In the spirit of Natural Living, I let him go to the park for another pond bath instead of inside to shower, and his smile was wide practically the entire time.
After getting used to living off the land, Gino mastered the Natural Living skill on the Friday of the week his life in the wild began. I didn’t even contemplate making him go inside that night, either – he scrounged for some frogs and fruit in the dirt, had them for dinner right out of his pocket, meditated for a bit, and snuggled up with his sugar peas once again.
Gino Rivoli did not get rich monetarily during this Rags to Riches Challenge in the Enchanted by Nature expansion, but I like to think he got his ownkindof rich. There’s something to be said about eschewing capitalism, I guess, because he was happier outside messing around in the dirt than he ever was using the items I purchased for him. With time, he could probably become a pretty legendary farmer, using what he learned about the land while he was living off it, so if I ever do another Apocalypse Challenge, I know just which Sim to call on to help restore my food supply.
