Partners in Crime

 

Willow seems to have a little problem getting her Coven members to cast spells, be mischievous and basically mean and evil to other non-coven members.

During The Sims 2 years, if your Sim had a good relationship with another and had enough "influence" points, you could get your Sim to influence another Sim to talk to someone for example.  You could also influence other Sims to clean or cook.  Unfortunately this feature is not available in The Sims 4 and I don't remember it ever being in The Sims 3 either.  This feature, had it been added to The Sims 4, would have benefitted Willow enormously in as much as she would have been able to influence her coven members to cast evil spells and do all the mean and nasty things that The Coven members should be doing but don't do themselves.  It seems therefore that Willow, even though she belongs to an evil group of witches, is on her own.

One thing that she does have however are potions.  Giving a potion to another Sim will allow that Sim to drink it - no questions asked it seems!  One such potion is the potion of "Masterful Insults".  Giving this potion to one of her coven members seemed to Willow to be a good idea so as to make that Sim insult others.  How wrong she was!  This potion just made her coven member angry.  Maybe Willow should have hung around a little longer to see what else this Sim would do but after having spent too much time at Pupperstone Park already, Willow was ready to do something else.

That evening, Willow decided to have a party.  Of course, this wasn't just any party, this was a Willow Mendip party.  Music, Pufferfish Nigiri, and fire.

She invited most of the Sims that she was enemies with and, not surprisingly, they all turned up.  Even the Grim Reaper made a show and Willows vampire friend, Caleb Vatore decided to pay a visit.  This is where things became a little more interesting.

After the Grim Reaper had reaped a couple of souls, Willow chatted with Caleb amongst the frozen Sims in her garden.  It came to pass that an option to "Become Partners in Crime" came up with Caleb.  Of course Willow chose this and they sealed the deal by shaking hands.  Now it seems, that Willow and Caleb can plan some mischeivous stuff to do together.

I wonder what an evil witch and a vampire will do to cause a little bit of mayhem in Glimmerbrook.  We will just have to wait and see...

- Minicart

Pupperstone Park

There are three more spells that Willow needs to complete her collection.  Usually these spells can be learned by experimenting with the magic wand, i.e. waving it about to gain experience.  Unfortunately however, each time she tries this, a little notice comes up saying that she can no longer learn any more by doing this due to her rank.  Her rank is the highest that she can be so it has been quite confusing wondering how she can learn these spells.  She cannot experiment on the cauldron to get them as this only gives her the potions, which she has completed.  The only other way I can think of therefore is that she can only learn these spells through reading the magic tomes which she can purchase from a little shop in Casters Alley in the Magic Realm or by searching through the magical bookcases at HQ.

Willow therefore decides to go to the Magic Realm to see what she can buy.  Unfortunately however, these specific tomes for the spells that she needs, namely "Rite of Ascension", "Strangify" and "Duplicato" are not available.  After picking up a few other items, she then decides to search the magical bookcases but alas, nothing is found apart from a couple of orbs.

As Willow is on a mission to be able to learn these three spells, she will have to go back to the Magic Realm at a later date and maybe they will have these tomes on offer then.  Meanwhile she decides to have a little get together with The Coven at Pupperstone Park.

Now, Willow being Willow and an evil witch and all, decides to have some fun in the way of mischief and mayhem.  Her coven members are not really team players unfortunately so it seems that Willow is in this by herself.

She decides to chillio a few people and set off a few fires with no help from her friends but at least she gains another spellcaster experience point and some more points for The Coven.  She even gets into her first fight!

Having had a wonderful experience at Pupperstone Park making lots of enemies and doing some very successful spellcasting, Willow hangs around to see what else she can get up to.  I'm sure she will think of something.

- Minicart

The Witch's House

 

When I first created Willow Mendip of The Glimmerbrook Witch, I placed her in the empty lot in Glimmerbrook so as to build her a nice cheap "starter" home.  I knew that as time went on, she would need something a lot better and bigger.  Being able to afford to purchase something a little more expensive was obviously down to Simoleons.  Even though Willow doesn't go to work, the money trees in her garden will surely bring her enough to afford a more lavish home in time.

With this in mind, I went ahead to create "The Witch's House".  I decided to build this on a larger lot in Glimmerbrook so that Willow would have more room for gardening and of course her famous indoor and outdoor parties.

This build took me longer than usual, some 4 weeks in fact. I also had a little trouble with it at times, due to the platform rooms in the house.  At one point, the landing at the top of the stairs seemed to sink down a little so I had to fix that.

When I play tested it, everything worked fine except that my "test Sim" couldn't enter the conservatory/greenhouse outside.  I found out after a fashion that the little patio outside the door needed to be lengthened for her to get up the steps.  After pulling that out with the tools available in build mode, all of the windows in the greenhouse vanished so I had to put those back in and then re-do all of the vines that I had creeping up and around the windows.

Having finished the build, I took a few photos and then went ahead to create a stop motion video.

This consisted of 849 photographs and around 145 videos and took around 3 hours to do.  It then took me a further 2 or so hours to piece everything together.  Yes, it does take a lot of work to do a stop motion video but I do believe it's worth it in the end.

However, when I came to piece everything together, I found that on a few videos (there were 160 altogether), I had inadvertently recorded myself taking items away for the camera shots and then turning off the video for the transition from one room to another.  So there were about 15 videos that I had to discard and this also meant that I had no video on some parts when turning in a room or going to another room.  I therefore had to fade these through from one image to another instead.

Unfortunately, even though the build turned out really nice, parts of the stop motion video have no video transitions.

Maybe this build is cursed but then I did build it for an evil witch...

If you would prefer to watch a two minute montage of the build, here it is:

You can download this lot from The Sims 4 Gallery - my ID is TotallySimlish.

- Minicart