Pinstar’s Top 10 Tips for the Legacy Challenge’s 1st generation

The Legacy Challenge is meant to start you off in a much more difficult position than a ‘normal’ game’s start might dictate. And with the rule change to where new spouses no longer bring in any money, the early game is about to become more difficult.

To help get your familes off to a strong start, here are my top 10 tips for getting started with your Legacy Challenge.

#1: What to buy with your starting $1,800

You’ll quickly find that $1,800 doesn’t go very far at all and you’ll be hard pressed to get items to fulfil all of your base needs. This is by design. In fact, trying to fulfill ALL of your needs with the starting money might actually make things difficult for you. When I start my challenge, I start with:

The better the bed, the less time you spend sleeping. The less time spent sleeping, the more time you spend progressing your family.

I see lots of people starting with single beds. While it is true that starting off, your sim does not need a double bed, having one available will allow you to accelerate your sim’s quest for a spouse, as you won’t have to buy anything new to accommodate them.

The other item is for food.

Terrible for cooking,, but great for founders. The low fridge quality doesn’t impact quick meals, which are FREE and still give small positive moodlets.

Your founder can exist on a college sudent’s diet of chips and OJ (Yum) for free using the ultra cheap fridge. This not only lets you fill the hunger meter for free, you can pick up two +1 Happy moodlets from finishing food and a drink. The negative moodlets that are often associated with this fridge don’t seem to apply to quick meals, only properly cooked food.

This will leave you with $35. But with a good night’s sleep and a way to cheaply fill up your stomach, your founder can fulfill their other needs on community lots until they are wealthy enough to buy more stuff.

#2: Not all Careers are created equal

Getting your founder a job on day 1 is pretty much a given, but your choice of early careers can make your early game a breeze, or a headache. Scan through all the careers. Look at their starting salaries. The highest is tech guru at $31/hour the lowest is criminal at a palty $7/hour. While a career’s starting salary does not always mean it will end up paying the most… you want good pay for the early levels of a career to help get your family established. Pay isn’t everything, however…

Plenty of the careers are viable for your first career. My personal favorite is Writing. While it doesn’t pay as much as, say, tech guru, it has great reward items.

#3: Don’t be afraid to sell Career rewards for cash

Whenever you are promoted you are given a bonus in the form of extra cash, which is very helpful in its own right. However, what might slip one’s notice is that you get a free copy of a career reward object placed in your family inventory. (and gain the ability to buy more of that object later). These career reward objects can be very useful for their mood aura effects…in a normal established home. Sadly, until you get some walls, the mood aura of objects is not going to have much of an impact, even if you turn the auras on. That doesn’t mean they are useless to you. Selling these objects for cash now is perfectly acceptable and you can always re-buy the object later once you are more established. Then again, some objects are useful on their own, even without their mood auras and thus replace the need to purchase a normal version of that object, thus saving you money and advancing the establishment of your home.Tying back in to #2, picking a career based on its available reward objects is sensible.

You can liquidate this level 2 writing career reward for cash, or use it as a fully functional computer so you don’t have to buy one. Either way it is very useful.

#4: Date for fun and profit!

While a date plays like a party, it is easy to get a gold medal and can be done successfully on any community lot. I tend to stick to the park myself.

Inviting a sim out to a date is a GREAT move for a brand new Legacy Challenge founder. Not only does it give you opportunities to further your romantic advancement, if done properly you will earn a gold medal. Not only is this worth it to advance your goal for the Legacy Challenge, you get a nice item at the end of it too.

The flirty mood aura is nice to have for established houses, but right now, sell that bad boy, it is more useful that way.

The great things about dates is that they can be done very frequently. While ultimately not the best long term solution for income, it is great to help round out the missing items in the house in the early game. And when your house is eventually established enough where these are more useful for their flirty aura, just go on another date or two and keep the resulting rewards.

Also: Having trouble GETTING a date? The best ice-breaking interaction I’ve found is the “Bold Pick-up Line”, a romantic category interaction that is only available while confident. The easiest way to become confident is to interact with any sink and select “Brush Teeth” As long as you don’t have any other non-happy emotions, your sim will turn all their +happy moodlets and turn them all into confidence. Flirty is good for established relationships. Making new ones is the domain of confident.

With a little bit of friendship and one or two successful bold pick up lines, your spouse-to-be should be in the mood to accept your date request.

#5: Get your spouse early!

With the most recent rule change, your incoming spouses will no longer bring in their $20,000 windfall…or any money for that matter. This was done to prevent the challenge from being too easy to early. That being said, getting your founder’s love interest moved in on the lot as early as you can still yields you benefits and should remain a top early-game goal.

No money for TVs, computers or other fun objects? Who needs them. A Live-in significant other and a double bed is all you need to fill that fun motive.

A 2nd sim living on the lot means a 2nd career’s worth of income and reward objects. It is a little more work but can help you get more established quickly. Check your new spouse’s skills to see what they came with and thus what careers might be suited for them.

Keep in mind that you don’t HAVE to ‘marry’ your sim’s spouse. A move-in request that eventually turns romantic is just as valid.

#6: One and done your promotions

One of the most reliable ways of getting cash in the early game is through careers. Advancing them not only nets you bonuses but higher base pay. With a little extra work, you can race through the first few levels of a career rapid-fire as long as you do your homework, so to speak.

Every time you begin a career, or get promoted, you start out in the middle of the performance bar. Maxing out the performance bar is always a requirement for a promotion and for most players, getting it to max takes two days of going to work. This can be more than two literal days as forced days off can mean make you wait longer for your promotion. However there is a trick to getting your promotion in just one day. To get a  day one promotion you need the following to happen: You must fulfill all the other promotion criteria for the job. in the early levels, this criteria can be easily met in less than a day. You must complete the job’s daily task to 100%. Every job has a specific task it wants you to do. You must do this task for a number of hours before the game will consider ti complete. Mouse over your work performance bar to see what your daily task is and how close you are to completing it. You must finish the daily task to 100% complete. Third you must go to work in the job’s preferred mood. Unless you are able to get a really powerful and long-lasting moodlet, your sim is likely to lose their mood partway through, but this is OK. Waiting until just before work to pick up the desired moodlet is suggested so you get the most ‘hang time’ at work with the proper mood. Lastly, you need to work hard.

By clicking on your job icon near your mini-portrait, you bring up the job mode menu. Selecting “Work Hard” is the final key to getting a day 1 promotion, as long as you meet the other conditions and dodge bad chance cards.

#7: Pinch those pennies and prioritize your spending

There is so much you need to buy and build to transition from ‘furniture on a lawn’ to a proper home. Having a plan for what you want to get next is key to spending wisely.

Not spending money on food in the early game is important to using your cash wisely. This can be done by eating quick meals from your fridge…but you can also pick up a bowl of chips at the bar for free too.Needless to say: Don’t pay for drinks at the bar.

A fridge and this outdoor trash bin are all you need for quite awhile while you focus on building up other parts of your house. Because the Kitchen is often the most expensive of the base needs, this is a good stop-gap measure to keep your sims fed. And it doesn’t break (unlike the sink).

Don’t forget to keep some funds in reserve for when bills roll around. You don’t want to get hit with Legacy Challenge penalties early in the game just for having your utilities cut. If your career(s) aren’t bringing in enough, try supplementing with hobby items for cash. Writing books, playing songs for tips, selling paintings and selling grown produce is all a good way to supplement your income and build your skills at the same time.

#8: Plan your family

While I do advocate for getting your spouse as quickly as possible, the same might not be said for the 2nd generation. Not only do you have to buy an extra bed for the child. (You can save money and get a free crib from the hospital if you don’t buy one prior to giving birth) but the child will not be able to bring you income for awhile. If going the pregnancy route, it will fatigue the mother and make it more difficult to get her ahead in her career or increase her skills. If going the adoption route, that $1,000 adoption fee stings in the early game.

To WooHoo or Try for Baby. That is the question.

Age can be a factor in how long you can wait to bring about the 2nd generation. Female heirs have an advantage here as they always start out on day one of young adulthood. A Male heir marrying a female townie might get someone who is on the verge of elderhood. Make sure you check their age before you decide how long to wait.

I lucked out and Kenzie is pretty young, meaning we can safely wait awhile before working on the 2nd generation.

With the new spouse rules, finding a new or different spouse is viable if the original one you brought in is too old. Alternatively, you can look at them closely. Adults have subtle visual differences compared to their young adult counterparts. They have a few wrinkles on their face. Finding a young adult will ensure you have a good long window of time for childbearing. Of course, adoption gets around this problem as it does not matter if the female in question is an elder (or if there is a female sim at all for that matter).

#9: Walls

Walls, and by extension, build mode items in general such as windows, doors, stairs and the like are tricky in the early days. They cost a lot of money, they don’t really provide much immediate benefit. However, there are two key benefits they DO provide.

The first is emotional aura objects. Left out to the open, emotional aura objects don’t really do a good job bringing your sims into the desired emotion automatically. This is because emotional aura objects look at the size of the room they are in when determining their effect. Placed outdoors, they are in one giant room and thus have trouble exerting their effects.

This little inspiration room has several inspiring mood aura objects in it. Confined by walls, the objects make anyone who enters inspired, something they could not do if left outdoors. (Search “A Room to Inspire” on the gallery)

The second benefit to walls is privacy. In the early days with your founder being alone…and even later when they bring in a spouse, privacy will be of zero concern. Two lovebirds aren’t going to care if the see one another poop or shower. Introduce a child into the mix, however, and you’ll be seeing a LOT of embarrassing moodlets if the family has no way to privately do their business, shower or woohoo.

10:Don’t be afraid to ask for help

If you find yourself still struggling even with these tips, don’t be afraid to ask your fellow Legacy Challenge players for help. Visit the forums, or heck – comment to this thread if you have specific questions. or concerns and you may find some suggestions and ways to do things that you may not have discovered previously.

That’s all for now! Good luck out there!