Visiting Egypt in Sims 3: World Adventures
Your Sims have toured the town, made dozens of friends, held down fulfilling careers, and developed all sorts of fun skills. Now it’s time to reward them – with a vacation! The Sims 3: World Adventures is the very first time your Sims have been able to leave town and go on exotic travels. In World Adventures, your Sims can visit three destinations: Egypt, China, and France. In each location, your Sims meet new people, learn new skills, and explore dangerous tombs in search of treasure.
While working on World Adventures, I did not develop a favorite between the three destinations. Each location offers something special — a certain unique local flavor. It’s not just limited to the architecture either, which is definitely different for each location. Local identity is also quite personal. You find it in the little things. Egypt, for example, is the only place where Sims can buy a snake charming basket and then start practicing this special ability. The longer your Sim charms, the better they get at it. Soon, they can snake charm for tips and even coax a cobra out of the basket. (The cobra is pretty cool. If you ever get a mummy’s curse, the cobra is one of the surprising cures for the nasty hex.) Plus, you can take that snake charming basket back home when your visa to Egypt expires and play with it there, much to the amazement of friends and neighbors.
Egypt’s tombs can get pretty intense. The first few tombs you explore while going on adventures for locals ease you into a world of traps and trickery. But it doesn’t take long before you are moving deep into dangerous territory, trying to find the right switch to turn off fire traps or poison darts. Usually, the more dangerous a room is, the greater the chance of finding rare relics and valuable treasures. In our guide, we map out every single tomb in Egypt (as well as China and France) so you get the most of each expedition. Some of these tombs are really tough, but with our full-color maps and legends that point out how to open every door and locate every secret chamber, you will emerge from catacombs and tombs laden with awesome stuff. These treasures will look great in your house back in Sunset Valley or Riverview, but if you successfully undertake adventures in each location, you can build up your visa until you can purchase a vacation home. How cool would it be to have a vacation home in France loaded up with gilded relics from Egypt?
Like China and France, Egypt is also peppered with lots of collectibles, such as scarab beetles and new butterflies. Just like our Sims 3 guide, we show you the locations of all of the new collectibles in every destination in our World Adventures strategy guide. Your house will be decorated with all sorts of new insects, gems, and metals. If you are a hardcore collector, you definitely want to scour the new destinations in World Adventures to find the new collectibles. Next week, I’ll talk more about some of the fun things to do in France, which is home of the new nectar making skill and some very cool tombs, like the giant Tomb of Isael under the Nectary. That place is huge!
Another Battlefield game is heading our way this week! 
Galactic Adventures has only been out for a few days and there’s already more than 1,000 community-created adventures available for download. So with so many adventures, how do you make yours stand out from the crowd? There are a few simple things you can do to increase the visibility of your adventure in the already crowded Sporepedia. Think of the Adventure Title Interface as the marketing panel; click on the blue “Name Your Adventure” button at the bottom of the screen in the Adventure Creator. Here you can write a description for your adventure, enter keyword search tags, define the genre, and assign detailed view pictures. While all of these fields are important to fill out, the detailed view pictures are critical. These four images appear on your adventure’s title card in the Sporepedia.
Galactic Adventures is out now and as of this post there are more than 140 community-created adventures available for download. Among the new adventures is Spice Trouble, the adventure we created for our 
Ready for the release of the Galactic Adventures expansion? It comes out this Tuesday, and it looks like we’re not the only ones eager for the release. With the help of Maxis, the writers behind 
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Since there’s only a couple of weeks to go until Galactic Adventures is released, I figured this would be a good time to discuss some of the new elements of this expansion. In particular, the new captain parts. In all, there are 32 new captain parts that enhance your captain’s abilities. Some of these parts are weapons, useful during combat-oriented adventures. One of my favorites is the Swarm Magnet, a ranged weapon that summons a swarm of viscous insects to attack your target. But there’s also social-based parts, helpful for boosting your captain’s skills during social interactions, such as the Fettipopper. This device launches confetti into the air, helping impress others during pose-based social interactions.
