Warrior Training Grounds Dragon Valley gym makeover
This build was created for CreativeMetaphor on the Sims 3 site, as part of a round robin build exchange. The point of the build exchange was to take us out of our comfort zones, and learn from the other participants as we built different kind of things.
In this build, the Warrior Training Grounds, I was revamping the gym in Dragon Valley to give it a more medieval feel. I had already done this with the library, which was CreativeMetaphor's first request. I ended up building for her a second time when another member ended up dropping out of the round robin, and that was when I revamped this one. Creative Metaphor does not own all of the expansions or stuff packs, so there were some limitations I had to work with.
The original gym was only one story; half of the building was taken up by restrooms, and the remainder of the building had a total of four exercise machines. All of the items were base game; they didn't even bother using the really nice chamber pots that come with the world. It was incredibly boring. I deleted all objects and inside walls from the first floor, and decided to do everything from scratch. There was a thin, rectangular pool outside the building; I widened it slightly, and gave it a more interesting shape. I tried to give it the shape of a sword, but although I gave it a hilt, you can't create diagonal pool shapes, so the closest I could come to the point of a sword was a rounded end.
The next thing I did was to build a basement. Because the gym was built on a foundation, this was a bit of a challenge for me. I have never built stairs going to a basement from a first floor with a foundation before. I was only able to place the stairs in one particular place in the building, so that set the stage.
The ground floor I recreated as a tavern (bistro). I placed the bistro oven on one side of the room, with counters in a small area around it to give the chef some working space. I placed several tables with menus relatively close to this area. On the other side of the room I placed a standard stove, the baker's oven, and the pizza oven. This is an area for Sims to cook their own food, if they don't want to buy from the chef. Several tables without menus were placed close to this area.
When the Sim takes the stairs down to the next level, he will find a fitness area. There are four archery ranges on one side of the stairs, and on the other side are several single-room bathrooms with a single chamber pot. There are several public showers as well, the kind that Sims will use wearing a bathing suit so don't require privacy. Further on there are several martial arts training dummies, and some exercise machines. There are windows looking directly into the outside pool; the exercise machines face these windows.
The bottom floor is a relaxation area. There are two saunas in private rooms, several massage tables, and three hot tubs. There is also an indoor pool with a fountain in it. Due to a bug with the fountain objects, when a player places the building into a world, he will have to go into the build in build/buy mode, delete the fountain object, then undo the action. This will pop the fountain object onto the correct floor. Otherwise it will appear below the pool and not above it. This will only need to be done upon first placing the build, so far as I can tell. It appears to remain in the correct place after that.
In order to give myself more challenge, I decided to add a tomb to the building. I do not know why I decided to do this to myself; it was INCREDIBLY complicated to create, and took much more testing and revamping than a normal build would. You can't test a tomb in the world where you build it; you have to save it to your library, go into a different world (I used a testing world, which just has a single testing Sim and no other lots), and then place it in the other world. Any problems you encounter in testing you need to write down in detail, to make certain you fix them in the original building world. Then you go back to the original world, make the edits, save it to your library, and test it again in the build world. Rinse and repeat. This can take many repeats depending upon the complexity; I made several fairly complex puzzles, which ended up taking dozens of repeats of this.
If you test the tomb in the world you build in, then any hidden doors get marked as "Discovered", and you may or may not be able to mark them as "Undiscovered" again; I had to delete hidden doors on occasion and re-create all the links, because a door would mark itself as Discovered and would refuse to go back to being Undiscovered. I believe you can sometimes have difficulties resetting traps and floor panels as well. When you can't reset them, then clearing all links from the object and deleting it, then placing a new object and recreating all the links, is sometimes the only solution. Since creating the links can get incredibly complicated (particularly when you start using the CPU to set up chain reactions and such), this isn't something you would want to do.
Although I intend to make more tombs, I don't know that I want to make them inside of a regular build again. If I do, they won't be nearly this complex.
The tomb walkthrough can be found here. I recommend trying the tomb before reading the walkthrough. I also recommend having a few invigorating elixirs, and some food on your Sim, before heading into this. The Steel Bladder LTR is also helpful, or else being a high enough level witch to cast motives charms. Once you enter, there is no way out until you complete the entire tomb, and I included no facilities of any sort nor any food. (That was on purpose. I mean, how logical is it that the creators of a tomb are going to include those things?) Of course, you could always xenoport, or use the Testing Cheats teleport, if you really need to get out. But then you'll have to either teleport back to where you left, or deal with all the traps again.