Electronic Arts Sims 2: Castaway User Manual

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OFFICIAL GAME GUIDE

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Requires The Sims™ 2 or The Sims™ 2

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Where’s the best place to open a business? Where the customers are, of course—and that’s usually where other stores are already open. Hence, begin with the creation of a special shopping district where your Sims can travel, either to open or patronize Sim-run businesses.

Actually, the shopping district has no special functionality; businesses may

be established in any kind of neighborhood (base, downtown, or shopping districts) except universities, and Sims may reside in a shopping district as well as in base neighborhoods and downtown. What associated neighborhoods provide is physical expansion to the base neighborhood and a pre-made, Maxis-designed destination that highlights new features of this expansion pack.

This chapter explains the anatomy of this new kind of neighborhood and how it interconnects with every other type.

The Structure of Shopping Districts

Shopping district neighborhoods exist as offshoots of your game’s base neighborhoods (such as Pleasantview or Strangetown, and others). In other words, any single version of a shopping district neighborhood that you play is tied exclusively to one of your base neighborhoods, and has no connection to other base neighborhoods.

The first time you open one of your base neighborhoods or press the Shopping District Chooser button in the upper left corner, you can associate with an existing shopping district or create a new one.

Once a shopping district is associated, the full Shopping District Chooser appears, listing any associated shopping district(s) and including a button for creating new shopping districts of your own design.

Sims from other base neighborhoods, therefore, do not exist in a shopping district, even if the same shopping district is also associated with other base neighborhoods. In other words, shopping districts exist in sort of a suburban parallel universe. For example, if Pleasantview and Strangetown are both associated with the Maxis-designed Bluewater Village, the Grunt family will never be seen wandering the lots of Pleasantview’s Bluewater Village and the Goths won’t be caught dead in Strangetown’s Bluewater.

Shopping Districts

Chapter 2

Shopping Districts

Chapter 2: Shopping Districts

Click on a shopping district and you’ll see its preview pane.

This is why you must begin the life of any shopping district by associating your base neighborhood with it. The Sims™2 Open for Business comes complete with one very densely featured shopping district and the ability to create any others you wish.

For a full directory of lots in Bluewater Village, see Chapter 15.

Once you add custom shopping districts, they appear alongside any existing shopping districts.

You may, of course, eschew shopping districts entirely and put down business roots right in your base neighborhoods or downtowns.

For sheer tutorial value alone, associate and explore the Bluewater

Village shopping district to get an idea of how to properly build a business lot and what kind of businesses are possible. In combination with this book, Bluewater Village should provide a perfect crash course in Sim entrepreneurship.

Base and Shopping District Neighborhoods: How Do They Relate?

Functionally, base and shopping districts neighborhoods aren’t all that different.

Though they mostly function the same, the Maxis-designed shopping district

that came with your expansion pack (“Bluewater Village”) is different from the base neighborhoods in terms of the number and design of its community lots.

Sims can live in shopping district neighborhoods just as they can in base neighborhoods.

Shopping districts share Lots & Houses and Sim Bins with their base neighborhood, allowing families to move from one to the other and maintain their relationships.

Sims you meet in a shopping district neighborhood can be invited over, added to a group, or called for a date or outing by a Sim who resides in the base neighborhood (and vice versa).

Teen Sims residing in a shopping district neighborhood are eligible to attend college at any of the base neighborhood’s associated universities (if you have THE SIMS™ 2 UNIVERSITY expansion pack installed, that is).

Generally, when a lot is moved from a neighborhood to the Lots & Houses Bin, its relationship data and other essential information is deleted. When the lot is a business lot, you’ll also lose all business info including employees, Customer Loyalty, and Business Value.

Chapter 2: Shopping Districts

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Whether your Sim wants to be a purveyor of haute couture, a convenience store magnate, a toymaker to the king, or a restaurateur, there are some procedures and systems that underlie all businesses. This chapter examines the basic mechanisms that make business ownership possible and lay the foundation for the amazing flexibility that arises from them.

Home and Away: The Basic Business Types

At the most basic level, there are two kinds of business: home lot based and community lot based. They function the same in many ways but

they differ profoundly in

how they are set up and significantly in how they’re run.

Locking Doors

Controlling where your customers can and cannot go and directing them to the merchandise you want them to browse is possible, thanks to the new locking doors feature.

Any gate or door can be set to limit

access to:

The Sim who locks the door only The Sim and household members The Sim, household members, and employees No one, including the Sim who locked the door.

To lock a door or gate, click on it, choose “Lock” and select which access control you want to apply. This restriction remains in effect until it’s changed or deactivated or the locking Sim moves off the lot or dies (automatically unlocking the doors).

Any playable Sims on a lot may unlock or change locks on doors locked by any of the lot’s other playable Sims.

If walls are set to Cutaway, you won’t be able to see interior doors. To set their locking restrictions, change wall settings to Walls Up, apply the lock, and reset to Walls Cutaway.

Owning and Running a BusinessOwning and Running a BusinessOwning and Running a BusinessOwning and Running a Business

Chapter 4

Chapter 4:

Owning and Running a Business

Chapter 4:

Owning and Running a Business

Home Businesses

Any Sim can turn a home lot into a place of business. All it takes is some planning and a simple phone call or computer interaction.

The telephone or the computer is the first step in the journey to home business glory.

Begin by using a phone (or the computer). Select the Start Home Business interaction. This service of the local Sim government costs nothing and takes effect immediately. Thus, from the moment your Sim declares a home open for business, the customers start to trickle in.

Home businesses look like any other home lot from neighborhood view, with

only the traditional green plumb bob hovering overhead. Turning a home lot into a business does not mean other playable Sims can travel to it; they can only come as autonomous visitors when the lot is loaded directly.

The first thing to do is to give them a reason to come. A home can serve as several—but not all—kinds of business. It can be a retail store, selling items from the wholesale Buy catalog. It can be a food shop, selling prepared foods from refrigerated display cases. It can be a toy, flower, or robot store, selling the fruits of a crafting station. It can be a venue where patrons pay by the hour to partake of its Need-satisfying or skilldeveloping objects. Or it can be a salon, offering

makeovers alongside, for example, a selection of electronics or other housewares.

There are also several things it cannot be. It cannot be a restaurant, coffee bar, or pub because the objects required for these services are only available on community lots. Likewise, it cannot sell magazines, clothing, video games, perfume, or groceries.

Beyond those restrictions, the sky (and your imagination) is the limit.

Home Layout and Locking Doors

Opening a Sim’s home to the public is a tricky proposition. Proper planning is required to prevent customers from wandering the house and using any and all of its visitor-enabled facilities (for example, the toilets).

Pitfalls can be avoided with a sensible architectural layout and judicious use of the new feature in this expansion pack: locking doors.

Locking a door controls the flow of employees and/or customers. You can even keep out household Sims if that’s your yen.

Depending on what kind of business you want and how much money your Sim has to spend, it’s a good idea (though not required) to physically separate the business and private portions of your Sims’ homes as much as possible. This can mean putting all the business objects in a completely separate building or in rooms that offer no doors to the living portion of the lot.

Chapter 4:

Owning and Running a Business

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