#since it's past Christmas and I DID buy Horse Ranch and Home Chef Hustle using my parents' cashola

[victorluvsalice]

Welcome to the first Chill Valicer Save update of 2024! Where we discover that the gang is a few months ahead of us in the calendar and already celebrating Egg Day. :p However -- before we get into that, we first have to cover a mini-update I did before playing through Egg Day proper, where I took a crack at updating the house a little bit! I'd hoped to do a bit more with replacing furniture and such, but ended up deciding to hold off until after Christmas/my birthday (when I received the cashola to buy Horse Ranch and Home Chef Hustle) when I'd have more options. Here's what I did manage to update, though:

A) I took all the new plants out of Smiler’s inventory (black bean, soybean, coconut, pineapple, noxious elderberry, poison fireleaf – as it turns out, I didn't need them to buy a pomegranate as we already had a pomegranate tree), plus the spare planter that Victor made way back when from the household inventory, plopped all those in the greenhouse, and started rearranging! I now have all of Smiler’s herbalism stuff together, with the noxious elderberry and poison fireleaf next to their counterparts; all the veggies together; all the fruits together (with the pineapple next to the dragon fruit); all the flowers together; the soybean and black bean in the new planter; and the coconut in the empty patch in the orchard. So basically everything is now grouped a lot better. I may still rearrange the planters themselves in the future so certain types of plants are closer to the crafting stations that use them (like putting all flowers near the flower-arranging bench), but at least now all the similar plants are grouped together properly! Oh, and while I was in there, I tried replacing the "stuck" juice fizzer (that was permanently displaying a "ready to collect" screen with nothing in it) with a new one, just so the gang had one at home if they wished to use it. I later discovered that the new one ended up "stuck" too, but at least I tried?

B) I replaced both the upstairs and downstairs litter boxes with the fancy kind that shoots lasers to automatically vaporize cat poop. XD Hey, look, the family can afford it, and it saves them having to clean the litter boxes.

C) I recolored Moory’s shed to some cheerier colors after being like “why would THIS FAMILY, of all families, go with a beige cow shed” – now it’s bright yellow! Isn't that nicer?

D) I replaced the toilet and sink in the downstairs bathroom with more expensive versions – with decorative slots, so I could put a soap dispenser on the sink. :) I was going to do the same upstairs, but ran into a problem because the two bathrooms have very distinct color schemes, and I’m not sure the toilet and sink combo I used downstairs would fit with either...have to ponder that one a bit more!

E) I penned in Toothy – which involved MOVING Toothy to the other side of the front yard, by the tree in the left-hand corner and the wind farm, because as it turns out cowplants need surprisingly big pens. Possibly because Sims have to stand a certain distance away from them to feed and play with them. If I’d left Toothy in its usual spot, I wouldn’t have had any way to get to the pet obstacle course in the corner by the kitchen. I’m still not ENTIRELY happy with the placement, but it’ll do for the moment, and it means Toothy is now cut off from anyone who can’t get through the gate – which is anyone but household members. *nods*

F) And this one I didn't get a good shot of (though you'll see it in a future update) – I copied one of the grouped photo frames I got from that family reunion I did a little bit back and put some of Victor and Alice’s honeymoon photos from Selvadorada in there. It looks nice (even if I still have a couple of spare photos that have to be arranged around the grouped frames), but I still need to decide how to handle all the photos they’ve got hanging around. I’ve been thinking that I should maybe cull a few so they have more space on their walls and perhaps look a touch less narcissistic...but the problem there is, I personally love the photos, so I don’t know if I could bring myself to delete them. *sigh* We SO need “photo albums” in the this game. Give me a book object that you can put photos in, and that when you click on it, plays a little slideshow of the photos, and I will be CONTENT.