How Much Of A Nerd Am I?

A lot!

I play The Sims in my free time. It can be an incredibly chill game, or you can cause a lot of chaos. I usually spend my time building houses and creating people and crafting whole little worlds because, duh, of course I do.

So of course I built Moonlit Shores Manor from The Weary Traveler in Sims 4. The building engine in Sims 4 is amazing (sadly everything else but the graphics pale in comparison to Sims 3, but that’s a different rant). Since the gameplay is a little meh, and I get obsessed about micromanaging sims because they are intuitively idiotic when left on their own, I instead spend hours just throwing up walls and windows and kitchen counters and stairs and falling in love with stupid, little buildings.

Building the places and characters from my books in The Sims is a pretty nice, passive way to brainstorm too. Oh, what if there’s a little pantry in the kitchen someone can hide in? What if the basement snakes around into a hallway that goes nowhere? What if there’s a man-eating cow plant in the conservatory? You know, normal stuff.

Now the game has limits, and I don’t use any custom content and rarely use mods (cheats on the other hand yes!), so I can only utilize what the game officially gives you to build with, so this build is in no way exact. I also wanted the grounds to potentially be playable, so I had to leave some things out and add other things in. There are no guest bedrooms, just rooms for the main cast to live in. This is what I came up with.

That little building to the right doesn’t exist in the books, but I thought it was fun.

Seamus and Arista’s cottage out back. It’s placed way closer here than in the books, but I only had so much lot space. There should also be forest all around the outside, but I gotta work with what the sims teams already built.

The barn. This isn’t really at all what I imagine for the “real” one, but this was very fun to build with a big loft space and a huge balcony.

Here’s the loft bedroom in the barn, again not oriented like how I imagine for Ren, but it was just fun to create it this way.

Here’s the foyer to Moonlit Shores Manor, and this is pretty accurate (not color-wise necessarily, or decor-wise, but it’s got the right feel!) Also bonus version of Lorelei but in trendier clothes because the clothes the sims team cook up are pretty damn cute, and I cannot resist throwing mid-drift bearing stuff on my sims.

Ziah’s bedroom with bonus Ziah and some artwork that reminds her of the nether.

Conrad’s bedroom with sad-boi artwork because sad. Also the reflections in this game are pretty good, but sometimes they screw up, so don’t look at that mirror, but if you’ve read the book DO look for the Easter egg.

Here’s Grier’s room. I don’t know anything about teenage boys, so this is just how I assume they all live, and that it probably smells really bad.

Hana in the kitchen which doesn’t have nearly enough clutter. Don’t ask why I didn’t put her in an apron, I am disappointed in myself too.

This sitting room sans Mr. Ecknees because I forgot to add him (oops), but imagine him rocking there by the fire eternally. I think I’ll decorate this for Christmas as those are the scenes I’m revising right now in Book Two.

Ignore Ren’s clothes. There is nothing acceptable for a modern elf in the games, so I cycled through about a million outfits til I gave up. The funny thing here is, I let the sims go do whatever they wanted while I grabbed screenshots of specific sims doing the things I needed (like Hana cooking), and when I went to go find Ren, he autonomously had already gone to the cow plant I have pre-planted on the lot and started talking to it. Maybe sims aren’t as stupid as I thought!

If you’re a Sims 4 player and are interested, you can download Moonlit Shores Manor from the gallery. My username is CheeWagaChooChoo. Just be warned I used stuff from almost every pack except Journey to Batuu (fuck that pack), but no custom content! Remember the cheat code for simoleons is “motherlode” because holy deep abyss this place is expensive.