Adev Caravanserai Beacon - NO CC

At first glance, this lot might make you wonder if your eyes are playing tricks on you, since this almost looks like a lighthouse out in the middle of a desert! Well, you’re not far off- a lighthouse serves as a landmark day and night in places that make traditional maps and navigation less useful, so a vast sandy desert might well have similar constructs to mark routes or important locations like an oasis that provided fresh water to a thirsty caravan! I also want to start defining some of the regions in my medieval fantasy world beyond just Westfall, and the enormous deserts of the Adev across the mountains to the south seemed like a fun place to go next!

Functionally, this is a pretty small lot- it’s 4x4 but most of that space is empty desert, and the tower itself isn’t much more than just decoration. The ‘house’ is just the adobe caravanserai and outbuildings to the back of the lot. This also makes it cheaper (well, cheaper for ME at least), coming in at $119,297 for your aspiring fantasy desert-dwellers. The fact that a desert looks better with less decoration also means there’s less of my usual decorative clutter, so in addition to keeping the price lower, it also means the lot will probably run faster for you.

A few aspects of the layout may not be obvious, so just a heads-up, there’s a shower partly hidden in the palm tree near the water’s edge (surrounded by edging and fencing to provide ‘privacy’) rather than in the small outbuilding with the toilet and washbasin, and the beacon itself can’t be lit as a bonfire (since for some reason the bonfire object doesn’t work right if placed on anything other than the ground), but there are 5 fire jet decorations hidden under it which can be turned on from the right camera angles, as well as fencing which divides the space up so that even with the flames on, you actually don’t need to worry about anything catching fire- I ran it with them on for literal days while I was testing the lot and never had an issue.

I did test out routing and gameplay mechanics with a clone of the lot, which I also used for all the screenshots that include a Sim, so at this point I believe all the routing errors have been corrected, and you should be able to direct your Sims to use just about everything that seems like it should be interact-able. The lot as uploaded has also never been occupied, so it’s free of any potentially harmful Sim references that could cause problems in your game! As always, no CC is used or required in this lot, so you should just be able to drop it down somewhere in a desert and start playing immediately. Please do let me know if you encounter any issues, and I’ll try to get them corrected if at all possible.

And now my typical storytelling vignette, for those of you who’re enjoying the gradual worldbuilding I’ve got going on for this fantasy setting!



Ajjek Az-Jiradhi looked north from the terrace across the sunset sands of the Adev. It had been six days since the last caravan had appeared on the horizon, and even that appearance had been a surprise, since the summer heat was steadily growing worse as the solstice approached. In most years the months of high summer saw no travelers besides the patrols sent from the great Oasis Cities that ruled in the south, and even they didn’t often bother to come this far into the dunes. It wasn’t that the palaces didn’t care about their interests in the hotter deserts to its north, they just knew there was almost no need to check in on them. The beacon towers that Ajjek and other members of his order tended to had stood as landmarks in the trackless sands since before any of the Oasis Cities had even been settled, a strange connection to the vanished cultures that had called the desert home in ages long-since past.

The black smoke rising from the endlessly burning beacon fire drifted only slightly eastward today, and close to the desert floor the breeze was so slight that it was almost imperceptible. Ajjek looked down to the waters of the tiny oasis below the terrace, seeing a mirror-smooth surface only occasionally disturbed by an insect or one of the fish whose ancestors had somehow come to call this tiny pond home generations ago. Looking out across the desert revealed nothing but an empty sea of sand with the occasional desert scrub taking root in the lee of the dunes, gradually turning golden in the waning daylight.



In a landscape that could shift from familiarity into unrecognizability with each passing sandstorm, it was no great mystery why the beacon towers had been built where they were. Trade heading between the Oasis Cities to the south and the kingdoms of Westfall and the Iron Circle to the north had only two options- risk the storms and pirates of the jagged coasts, or cross the vast and unmappable deserts of the northern Adev. A few brave ship captains from the Iron Circle ran heavily armed and armored convoys down the eastern coast every few years, but most trade still went overland by camel, horse, and wagon. For these caravans, the hundreds of miles south of the Redstone Gate had nothing but the beacon towers of the Adev as waypoints in the desert, their black smoke guiding travelers during the day and their fires at night.

Each ivory beacon tower had been built on a bedrock promontory, leaving them fixed in place while the sands eternally drifted around them. Wherever possible they also marked the location of a precious fresh water source, and many of the elders in his order believed that when they had been constructed in the ancient past, each and every tower had watched over its own oasis, some simply having dried and vanished over the course of millennia. Ajjek had the good fortune to have been assigned to one of the smaller oases that remained on the route- there were some beacons that now stood alone in the desert as nothing more than landmarks, and he and his fellow acolytes had heard stories of former order members assigned to them who’d vanished without a trace in the dry years when the water caravans hadn’t made it that far. Ajjek’s oasis wasn’t so large as some, and the last few years had seen its pool shrink somewhat, but the order’s records showed that its waters hadn’t run dry in more than two centuries. Most caravans would spend a few days at reliable watering holes, so during the trade months he often had travelers setting up camp in the surrounding dunes.



Some of the larger oases had far larger and grander caravanserai, practically large enough to be considered towns in their own right, but Ajjek’s small pool could not easily support more than the simple adobe structure that housed his living quarters and served as a gathering place for passing traders. Indeed, his kitchen was hardly large enough for him to brew coffee for travelers who chose to linger at the oasis, and he otherwise seldom chose to build a fire even for cooking if he could help it, the sun of the Adev being more than hot enough even after years of enduring it. The dried rushes shading the small dining area outside kept it cooler in the midday sun, but Ajjek was glad most days to have the heat from his cooking fire just lost to the desert air, depending instead on fruits and dried fish that didn't need a fire to be made edible.

The main level of the small caravanserai served as his sleeping quarters, but open as it was to the outside terrace, it hardly offered much in the way of privacy if any caravans were stopped over at the oasis. This was meant to be true for all members of his order however, and the other quarters of the beacon towers Ajjek had passed on his way north through the desert when he was first assigned his post had all been similarly exposed. Acolytes were not permitted much by way of personal comforts unless they were in service of the passing caravans as well, so most of the space was given over to storing the supplies needed to survive in the middle of the Adev, or to offer hospitality to a visitor. An effusive trader leading large caravan north all the way to Stormwall the spring before last had insisted on leaving an ivory chessboard which he claimed had been enchanted by mages in the south. Ajjek had never seen any proof of enchantment, but he had enjoyed many games with other merchants while they waited out the hottest part of the day in the cool shade of the caravanserai. He counted that game and the conversations it inevitably sparked as one of his greatest pleasures he’d encountered as an acolyte.



The sun sank down until its lower limb began to distort in the haze of the desert horizon, turning the sky above a deep purple with only a few thin clouds to catch the day’s last light. In the gathering twilight the beacon fire itself would gradually become an even clearer landmark than the tower and drifting black smoke had been during the day. This combined with the sweltering heat of the daytime desert sun meant that most travelers actually moved during the night, relying on moonlight to find their way across the Adev, and retreating into their tents or the shelter of a wagon during the day. Ajjek had even heard tales of remote walled cities farther to the south where the entire population disappeared indoors as the sun rose and did not reappear until near sunset. The Westfall trader who had shared that story had been disgusted by this dramatic rejection of what he’d thought of as normal civilized behavior, but having borne the merciless sun of the Adev all his life, Ajjek easily could see the sense of such a lifestyle.

In fact, many nights in the desert were surprisingly cool, sometimes verging on cold, so before the day’s heat had faded, Ajjek walked down to the edge of the pool and performed his evening ritual, bathing in the tepid waters among the reeds and plucking a few ripe desert citrons from the trees that grew at the shore, before lighting the small caravanserai gate torches for the night. He doubted there would be any travelers until after the next moon’s turn, and if the beacon fire wasn’t enough to find the oasis, two small torches would make no difference, but in strict adherence to the tenets of his order, he had lit the torches on either side of the gate each night since his arrival, and he would continue to light them until the arrival of a new acolyte to relieve him. The sun dropped below the faraway desert horizon and Ajjek returned to the caravanserai, the soft nighttime sounds of the Adev whispering through the archways behind him.