An empty 1x1 lot costs §-400 - your sims get paid to move in! It would be quite a challenge to provide basic necessities on the lot without going above zero cost, though. I keep an empty 1x1 lot in the corner of my hood so that penniless sims (leaving home with no20Khandouts) can use it as a staging area to combine funds with flatmates and try to afford one of my cheapest starter houses.

Try making a modded object with negative current value or price. Movement flags sets on evict must be clear. I wonder what happens when bills are due. Lol.

I can make you a value setter if you want to make it be different each time.

You can also do this on an apartment base lot, by the way. You are not charged any money for an apartment until you select the option to rent one of the units, and there's actually nothing really stopping you from squatting on the base lot without actually renting an apartment for as long as you want. From what I remember, you can save the game there, go to community lots, etc. You are limited to whatever objects are in the common areas, but as long as you have all the necessities there, I don't think there's anything actually preventing you from living there for free. You will keep getting a message from the landlord asking you to rent an apartment, but that's it. I've thought about the idea of having a sim live that way until they have enough money for the apartment.

Thank you! I forgot all about this.


That's what I do too. Mine is actually named "Staging Area."


That's a good idea, I didn't think of that. A value setter would be handy for sure!


What a great way to have a sim couch-surf! What happens with bills if they're not actually paying rent?

I didn't actually try playing for long enough to receive bills, but I would guess that there would be none. Bills are generally calculated based on the value of objects on the lot that are in your apartment (in the case of apartment lots), and since none of the objects are in your apartment, I would expect that to work out to zero.

I've had some odd things in my game in the last couple of days. The first one was one Sim's motives stopped deteriorating but stayed constant, so he never got tired or hungry. He was a visiting (therefore non-controllable) Sim, so I didn't notice to begin with. When I did notice (by making him temporarily controllable) I was able to fix the problem quite easily by using Force Error / Reset on him. Then yesterday I had a vaguely similar problem: the family funds of the households I was playing failed to update as they earned and spent money. They appeared to update as I played, but when I saved and left the family, and then re-opened the lot, the funds had reverted to what they had been at the start of the day. I think this may have been caused by the fact I had used the Lot Adjuster on an occupied lot just before I opened the game. As I understand it, using the Lot Adjuster on an occupied lot, is always supposed to be a bit iffy. Whatever the cause, the problem fixed itself when I closed and restarted the game. I suppose I should have done that after doing minimal building work to "save" the changes I'd made with the Lot Adjuster.

The third oddity happened at the same time as the funds weren't updating. I meant to enter Control-Shift-C to open the Cheat Window, instead I must have pressed a wrong key combination. Instead of getting the Cheat Window, I got these rather obscure game statistics displayed in the top left hand corner of the screen:

(I've doubled the size to make them a little easier to read.) I presume it must be an in-game troubleshooting feature, as I don't think I have a mod or a program that would do this. In any case, these in-game stats went away, along with the the funds problem, when I closed and restarted the game. The only one of these statistics I understand at all is "FPS" for "Frames per Second"! Could anyone tell me what the other statistics mean?

[P.S.] In case anyone is wondering about the icon in that picture, my Sim, Mateo Morales, was shopping for groceries in a supermarket in Monopolis by Veronaville, where he lives. So the icon is one of the chill cabinets in the shop. My Sims almost always go to the shops to buy their food. It saves paying a delivery charge, and I think in-person shopping is always more interesting than doing it online or by 'phone. Moreover, for Sims it is an opportunity to meet other Sims, and maybe make new friends. Mateo was in a hurry yesterday, but he still found time to briefly play a pinball machine in an arcade near the supermarket.

Hello, it looks like you accidentally pressed Ctrl+Shift+S It calls the in-game FPS counter.

These stats represent how smooth your game experience is. These are: Virtual Memory (total memory the game reserves from the system to run), Working Set (how much it actually currently uses), Page Faults (how many times it tried to access memory that isn't currently in RAM), Tex is memory used for textures, Vertex Buffer stores the shapes of objects, Index Buffer is for rendering models, Shaders for rendering lights, shadows, etc, and Surface Buffer is memory used to render everything else

Thanks @norunning for a very prompt, informative and helpful answer! The main reason for my game not running smoothly is that I can't keep my finger off the Pause button (P). I'm forever pausing the game to check that all my Sims are safe and happy. Apart from that, I'd say my game has been quite fast and responsive ever since I replaced the netbook I played on for my first 7-8 years as a Simmer, with a new Dell gaming laptop in 2020. On the netbook I was sometimes down to 6 or 7 frames per second! But, with my slow and cautious playstyle, I still enjoyed the game -- enough to get totally hooked!!

I see that you are a very new member here, so welcome to Mod the Sims and to the Sims 2 forum in particular! Though it seems you have a very thorough knowledge of The Sims 2 game!

You may wish to introduce yourself in the Introductions thread.

Ok, so I did some experimenting on this by speed-running my sim through a whole week and this is what I discovered. You indeed aren't charged any money either at first or the week after, the landlord just shows up to say hello when you first move in. You can use a common-room fridge without stocking it with groceries, but you are charged for each meal you make (§10 for a single plate, §40 for a group meal). You cannot, however, use a common-area phone or walk to a community lot. I didn't test with cell phones. You also get a constant message popping up to rent an apartment to "move your sim in properly." Just in case anyone else decides to have their sim be a squatter.

Update: I did some more testing and your sims are still charged §40 for grilling while squatting. They can, however, use a cell phone for all the regular phone functions (invite over, go to community lot, etc).

I presume squatting on an apartment lot is not supposed to be easy

Did you try with a grill? I seem to remember that at least at some point you would be charged for food from a fridge on a community lot, but grilling stuff was free, I remember it being listed as a strategy for legacy founders who start with almost no money. But it's possible this was fixed at some point.

Grilling is not free on community lots.

If he has some charisma points, he may perform for tips and perhaps get some money from the actual apartment residents - if that is allowed.

While interesting, it sounds like far too much trouble for me.

Grilling is free on commlots in my game. The person can just spawn hotdogs or hamburgers on the spot. Only if a fridge exists, they need to go and use it. Maybe you have a "difficulty" mod that takes grilling away.

I have added an ability to set a negative value onto an object in Charles Object Editor. You either spawn a person to do it (the lot won't be clean), or copy a prepared object from the global inventory. The lot will regain its normal value at the next midnight when the object will depreciate to the catalog limit. The object can be bog standard unmodded because they all carry a value that changes over time.

How to use with an example (without going into inventory): https://imgur.com/a/kGs5WTz

I did some more testing and your sims are still charged §40 for grilling while squatting. They can, however, use a cell phone for all the regular phone functions (invite over, go to community lot, etc). I'll update my original post above to reflect this.

As far as I can tell, grilling on community lots is free in my game and always has been. What's more, you can't start a fire on a community lot, unless it's an owned lot and you're playing it as the owner or one of their family. (Of course my Sims can't start destructive fires anywhere, because I have Squinge's No More Fires mod!) But my highest EP is (still) Open for Business, so I can’t guarantee it wasn't changed in a later EP.