Your home, the bathroom and married life

The four kinds of home

There are four places you can own and they are called by their own names, not lumped together. A wooden shelter is the first and simplest. A bungalow is a step up. A stone shelter is sturdier again. A luxury pool villa is the largest. When the game speaks to you about your place it uses the right name for it.

Getting in and out

Stand at the door and press shift and enter. Once you are inside, press shift and enter anywhere in your own bungalow, stone shelter or villa and your home menu opens: parties, visitors, moving house and the rest.

The doors and staircases inside a villa are used by standing exactly on their square and pressing enter, or shift and enter; on a door square the home menu stays out of the way. To leave, go to the entrance door on the ground floor and press shift and enter, or choose leave the house from the home menu from anywhere inside.

The football in your home

If a football you play with indoors ends up wedged in a wall or under a staircase, open the home menu and choose fetch the football: it rolls to your feet, and standing on it with shift and enter picks it up or kicks it.

Your private field

A private field is not a home: it is a fenced 25 by 25 field with one gate. The gate is a square outdoors; stand on it and press shift and enter to go in, and inside stand on the gate squares by the fence and press shift and enter to come out. The owner, the owner's husband or wife and the people the owner trusts may go in. Village life, then where are my things, names the field and tells you the map and square of its gate, so you can always find your barn, hives and crops again.

Moving house

Step OUTSIDE your place first and open the menu from out there. From outside you can move it so that the door faces somewhere else. This works for a villa exactly as it works for a wooden shelter.

The bathroom

A home does not come with a bathroom. You build one yourself, where you want it, and then it is there for good.

Buy the bathroom set from the credits shop for three hundred credits. Carry it into your OWN home, walk to the exact square you want the bathroom to be on, and use the set from your bag. The set is used up and a real bathroom is built on that square: a toilet, a washbasin, soap, a towel rail, a shower and a bath.

To go in, stand on that square and press shift and enter. Inside it works exactly like the public toilets in town, with the same steps and the same sounds: lift the lid, have a pee or sit down and take your time, flush and put the lid down, turn on the tap, use the soap, and dry your hands on the towel. There is also a shower and a bath. A shower takes one container of water and a bath takes two; the tap and the soap take none, the basin has its own water.

It is not fixed there for ever. From inside the bathroom you can take it up again and put it back in your bag, then build it somewhere else.

Two things have to be true or nothing happens, and you are told which one failed. You must be standing inside a home, not outdoors, and it must be your own home or your husband's or wife's. Each set builds one bathroom, so a second set gives you a second bathroom; you can also take a bathroom up from the home menu while you stand on it.

This is the same in all four homes, the wooden shelter included. The wooden shelter used to have a washroom, a shower and a bath in its house menu that worked without any set; now it works like the others: fit a bathroom set in it and wash there. Until you do, the public restrooms in town and plain water still get you clean for nothing.

Who may use it

You, and your husband or wife. If the villa belongs to musti, then musti and musti's wife may both walk into that bathroom, and nobody else can. The same goes for the aquarium.

The aquarium

The aquarium works the same way. Set it down anywhere inside your own home and it stays there; stand on it and press shift and enter to look into it and see the fish you have caught. Your husband or wife may look in as well, and you can take it up again whenever you like. Sitting and watching the water does you good once a day.

What else married couples share

A married couple share the home properly. Your husband or wife may go into your bathroom, look into your aquarium, drive your car without being put on the allowed list, take the comb from your beehives and harvest your plants.

The point of it is simple: when one of you is offline the other can keep the place running, instead of watching honey and crops sit there going to waste.

Finding them again

Everything you put inside your home shows up in the object tracking list with its direction and distance: the bathroom, the aquarium and the piano. You never have to remember which square you put something on. The bathroom and the aquarium are only listed to the people who may actually use them.

Why it is worth having

Keeping clean matters. Getting dirty affects you, using the washroom regularly lowers your chance of falling ill, and washing is one of the things counted in your daily care. Before this you had to find somewhere else to do it. Now it can be in your own house, on the square you chose.

Electricity and water

Your home has an electricity and a water subscription. Open the home menu and choose bills, power and water: you are told whether the power and the water are on, what you owe and how many days are paid for, and you can pay one day or several days ahead.

Electricity costs 120 points a day, and another 40 for each fridge in the house. Water costs 80 points a day, and another 60 if the house has a bathroom. The counter only moves on days you are actually at home, and it counts at most seven days at a time, so being away for a long while cannot bankrupt you.

If a bill goes three days unpaid the supply is cut off. Turning it back on costs 250 points on top of what you owe.

With the power off, a fridge no longer keeps anything cold, nothing new can be put into it, and ice cream does not freeze. Whatever is already inside can always be taken out, so nothing is ever lost. With the water off there is no hot water in the bathroom, so washing takes off less dirt and gives you no rest, and the tap does not run.

Two things can stand in for the mains. A home generator, 30000 points from the points shop, runs the electricity from a fuel can, six hours to the can. A water tank, 12000 points, holds sixty litres: fill it from water bottles, or leave it out in the rain and it fills at ten litres an hour. The house draws from the tank whenever the mains water is off.

While the mains water is on you do not need water bottles to wash at home; the tap does the work. If the mains is off the tank is used, and if that is empty too, the old way with bottles still works.