Mehmet and his wife Michaela have recently bought and renovated a lovely three-bedroom home in hopes of expanding their family. Unfortunately they are unable to get pregnant (as per ACR randomization) so now I'm not sure what to do. Should they:
a) remain childless
b) use a sperm donor or surrogate
c) ???

Adoptions haven't been unlocked yet so that's not an option for them. Mehmet's brother Sergey has volunteered to be a sperm donor for the couple, if that's what they decide to do. All suggestions are appreciated!

c) Have they tried IVF or IUI (i.e. with the help of mods, like InSim or SimBlender or InTeen, and a bit of imagination, of course)?

Hope things work out well for them!

P.S. Since surrogacy is an option, this mod by kestrellyn might be useful: https://modthesims.info/d/658001/surrogate-hack.html

Also, what do you mean by 'Adoptions haven't been unlocked yet'?

They're playing a challenge where you have to complete certain things before other certain things are unlocked. I'm honestly surprised that surrogacy/sperm donation was unlocked before adoption.

They haven't yet, I didn't even think of that option to be honest. I do have kestrellyn's surrogate and sperm donor mods which I've been waiting to try out as well.


Yes, sorry, I keep forgetting that not everyone plays a challenge. Surrogacy/sperm donation became available when hospitals were unlocked but adoption requires a Downtown and there isn't one attached yet.

I too am a bit surprised at surrogacy & sperm donation being unlocked before adoption.

What about informal adoption? An arrangement between friends without the involvement of the authorities? Maybe a child from a family blessed(?) with more children than they can cope with, coming to stay with them for a while. It might even become permanent if the child is happy to stay.

When I was a child, my sister and I used to occasionally go and stay for a few weeks with our grandmother who lived about half a mile (1 Km) away. I rather like introducing my Sims to this sort of informal arrangement. The mods that I have that let my Sims propose to a child that they move in, are a help here. The child has the final say on when, and even whether they move in. The Sim asking them to move in may be an adult, an elder, a teen, or even another child, but they have to build up a relationship with the child before the child will accept the proposal to move in. The nearest I can think of this in our Veronaville is Scot Philippine. As it comes, there are two townies in Veronaville with the surname Philippine: Scot (a child) and Nancy (a teen) I decided to make them brother and sister. Now Nancy then got into an arguably unsuitable relationship with a Romance adult playable called Gerard Paton, and he persuaded her to move in with him. Once she had moved in, she set about getting her young brother to move in too. As townies they weren't particularly close, so she had to work quite hard to make him feel welcome in the house she now shared with Gerard. She eventually persuaded Scot to sleep over, and he did this a couple of times before he finally agreed to move in. Their house in Greaves Avenue in downtown Veronaville (across the rod from the Fresh Rush Grocery) is a new build, based on the Nightlife "Tiny House", but built with only one bedroom, like the ones in Mendoza Lane. The delay in Scot moving in gave them time to build a bedroom for him. Money was very tight, so its a tiny 3x2 lean-to structure with a flat roof. There's room for Scot and his bed, and not much else. Though, now that finances are a little better, I think we could squeeze in a little bedside table! Though he was initially a bit reluctant to move in, Scot is now very happy to be part of the family.

I've gone into a lot more detail than I meant to, but I think you could informally "adopt" a child in the same way as Nancy persuaded her little brother to move in with her and her boyfriend. I would strongly recommend doing it with the full agreement of the child's parents; I'm sure Mehmet and Michaela wouldn't want to leave themselves open to the possibility of being accused of abducting a child!! A child informally "adopted" in this way keeps their surname and connections with their birth family, and they can easily move back home if the situation allows. In some ways it might be better than formal adoption, as I'm not convinced that the social workers always consider the wishes of the child.

By the way, MMAA and Charity, it's a version of the Build a City Challenge (BACC). I'm sort of involved since Väinö Mikhailov came to Veronaville looking for a boyfriend (as there were no other gay teens in his native Portland). He has now returned home with a Veronavillian boy called Iain Wells. Pinkdynamite, have you any more news about how Väinö and Iain are getting on?

Interesting! Also, FYI, in some (or most?) medical cases, you may not need a donor sperm or donor egg for IVF or IUI. It can be the couples' or biological parents' own sperm and egg. Depends on the medical case.

I thought about this too, but I don't have any families so far with children to spare. Most of the households have only one or two children, although I do feel sorry for the Sharpes whose four children are all about to age up to teens soon!


I like the Sim Blender for this too. That's the worst part of in-game adoptions, in my opinion.


No news yet. I'll be starting the next play round within a few days and Iain's household will be going first. I'm planning on aging him up to an adult, since he's made quite a few friends so far, and asking Väinö out on a date then. Hopefully they like each other as much as adults as they do teens. I'll be sure to post pictures of their first "official" date. (On an interesting note, Mehmet and Sergey are cousins to Väinö!)

Well, Portland had it's first townie death. Teen Magda was over visiting the Sharpes after school when evidently she got struck by lightning and died. No one in the house noticed until the Grim Reaper was already on the way out, and unfortunately she wasn't friends with anyone who could have saved her anyway. Currently she's haunting the backyard as I'm not sure what to do with her tombstone. Should she be buried at the local cemetery with Portland's deceased playables or should I start a separate townie graveyard? How common is it actually for townies to die, and would a separate cemetery even be worth building?

Just because they're townies doesn't mean that they aren't a part of the community. One graveyard for all.

Now that some of my Pladdervale (Strangetown) sims are getting up there in age, the only one I'm still not sure about is Loki Beaker. The main question is should he have kids? And how?

The Beaker household is currently Loki, Circe, Elrena (illegitimate child of Circe and Vidcund), and Vernous. Loki seems like the kind of guy that would want an heir of sorts, but Elrena has been growing more clingy toward Vidcund and going through an "I wanna live with Dad!" phase in her development, so I don't think she'd want to be Loki's protege. Circe doesn't really want to go through the effort of childbirth again either.

The simplest options would be either adoption or alien abduction, but I like the how in TS3 he had genetically engineered children. As of right now, Loki is a Mad Scientist, and Circe is an Unnatural Cross-breeder, so this makes me wish I could figure out some way to fit this into the story somehow.

@Ivrats Dargy : Playing it the way you are, I think I would go for impregnation by an alien Pollination Technician. I'd prefer not to think too much about exactly how Pollination Technicians carry out their work, but I think it must involve some sort of genetic engineering. Has Loki got any sort of friendship with any aliens or hybrids? One possibility I suppose would be to get PT9 to impregnate him. But I think PT9 has a bit of a bad conscience about his previous profession (issues of consent?), and would be unwilling to do so. He might however be willing to put Loki in touch with another Pollination Technician, who could abduct him, and genetically engineer a child for him.

Yeah, plus I think PT9 would consider it cheating on his wife.

@AndrewGloria : Now that I think about it, alien abduction does make more sense since they've already shown a lot of interest in his family. Both of Loki's and Circe's parents had experienced abduction, but it was in their elder years so nothing came of it.

As for the PT9 suggestion, technically, he doesn't really exist in this interpretation of Strangetown. He's Rick Smith, whose family moved in when he was a teen. It's assumed that his dad, John Smith, had something to do with Lola and Chloe's conception, though.

Anyway Chester Gieke and Joseph Lambert have recently befriended the four NPC hairstylists who work at the Bluewater Baths and Salon. See discussion about hairstylists in the Stupid/Random Questions thread starting here. April Black says in one of her YouTube videos that hairstylists are completely normal Sims (or at least normal for NPCs). Jonasn says they're very restricted. My experience so far seems somewhere in between. (They're not quite normal.) I want to investigate further, which I'll do by Chester and Joseph inviting them over. At present Chester and Joseph have separate small houses in or near downtown Veronaville. It would obviously be easier to develop the friendship with the hairstylists if they moved in together. That's my dilemma. Which house should they move to? Chester's or Joseph's? Both of them live in small houses of similar size (2x2), and each of them have available funds of about §3,000 (though Chester is hoping for a promotion which would give him a little more).

Chester currently lives in a slightly altered Maxis house at 36 Greaves Avenue. 36 and 38 Greaves Avenue (as built) are similar in design to the Nightlife 'Small Home' and the house at 201 Custer Boulevard (where Cornwall and Regan Capp live in my game), but are two tiles narrower, making them rather cramped inside. I have widened 38 Greaves Avenue (where Micah Vincent and Noah Hatherley, who looked after Välnö Mikhailov during his visit to Veronaville, live), but it involved quite a bit of building work,demolishing and rebuilding walls. Chester's house at number 36 is more or less as Maxis built it, save for removing the driveway to make the garden a little bigger.
The main advantage of Chester's house is that it has a second bedroom, useful if inviting visitors to stay the night/sleepover. Admittedly it's really only a single bedroom, and it doesn't currently contain a bed. There is plenty of room in the garden for possible extensions though.

Joseph's little redbrick cottage at 38 Custer Boulevard is just outside downtown Veronaville, on the road leading to "old" Veronaville. If you continue along the road, you will eventually come into Veronaville, going under its iconic aqueduct into the Via Veronaville. It's only a short taxi ride.
Joseph's house has only one bedroom, though it's a reasonably big one (by my standards). There is only one bathroom, but there are also two outdoor urinals on the rear wall of the building. Most of Joseph's visitors are male, but there can sometimes be quite a few in the house at once, so the additional capacity is sometimes needed! These urinals cannot be seen from the street, and really could only be seen if someone looked down from one of the helicopters that regularly fly over the area. The piano in the living room was a date gift from Jack Gill a few years ago.

It would be possible to add an upper floor which could hold an additional bedroom for visitors. It would also obviously better if the karaoke machine could be moved indoors. Or perhaps there could be two bedrooms upstairs, and the karaoke machine could go into the existing downstairs bedroom. An additional bathroom (with a shower that visitors could use) would also be helpful on occasion. The outdoor urinals are of course of no use a all to female visitors.

I think I am leaning towards Chester moving into Joseph's house rather than vice versa, but maybe I am biased because I designed and built this house myself. The semi-rural location would give Joseph and Chester a bit more privacy if that's what they want. It would also be possible to expand the garden here (with the Lot Adjuster) which would be much harder to do in Greaves Avenue, where there are neighbours on both sides. But before Chester, Joseph and I make a definite decision, we'd like to hear what you all think.

Yes, I would also move them both in to 38 Custer Boulevard, @AndrewGloria .

They will have money from the sale of Chester's house so should have plenty to even do a ground floor extension (which has additional costs of foundation). Adding an upper storey would add staircase costs, but could be the better option for space.

You could do something like this downstairs (move the bathroom over and down a bit) which would keep the kitchen and lounge/diner the same, but accommodate the karaoke machine.


Upstairs you could have a bedroom (red), study space or TV lounge (wood area), and another bathroom (green- either as I have it or the full depth of the upstairs space).


Or, if you wanted to ask the hairdressers (or anyone else) to move in, or stay the night, you could add a guest room (blue):

I'd go for Chester's house, because the house itself looks more roomy and the garden is still substantial.

Thanks for your suggestions @simsample and @Charity!

I was thinking of widening the rear portion of Joseph's house by one tile, to allow a staircase to be added at the right hand side of the house something like this:


(This is a picture of an edited version of an earlier version of Joseph's house that I have in my lot bin.)

But when I look at simsample's version with the stairs at the back of the cottage, I realise I like it better. I especially like the "open plan" living area with the piano and the karaoke machine in the same room. That way one Sim can accompany the other singing. I also like simsample's upstairs arrangement with the two large bedrooms, though I'll probably keep the widening of the rear part of the building (adding five extra tiles of foundation), as it creates valuable extra space on both floors. And, as there is no other property adjacent to Joseph's, it be expanded in any direction with the Lot Adjuster. I do wish there was a mod that made neighbourhood deco terrain paint visible in Lot View. Maxis using concrete terrain for Downtown makes sense in the city centre, but Joseph' house is really on a country road leading out of town. The land round his house looks green in Neighbourhood View, but it turns grey when I open the lot.

Chester's existing house really does feel rather cramped inside. When I was playing Micah Vincent and Noah Hatherley in the very similar number 38 Greaves Avenue, we often ran into space problems, until I widened it to be more like the Nightlife Bin Small House. Number 36 was fine for Chester as a single Sim, but now that he's becoming half of a couple, who still want to entertain visitors, I feel they really need more space. There are plenty of other single Sims around, who will be happy to snap up 36 Greaves Avenue, once it's vacant.

Finance: Chester spent much of yesterday studying cleaning (after cleaning everything that needed cleaning!). That should (hopefully) help him towards the promotion he's seeking. I hope that their combined funds should be enough to pay for all the changes, but if not, we could do the the basic structural work now, and add the interior details as finances allow. It may make sense for Joseph to go back to having eight money trees in his garden shed. I accept that, like myself, Joseph isn't really very financially motivated, but sometimes, whether you're a Sim or a Real Life Human, money really is needed!

Get Joseph a job.