The Sims 4 - My experience with Cottage Living. I met The Grim Reaper way too much!
This time I tried out the expansion pack, Cottage Living. It's actually one of the expansion packs in the Sims 4, I have been most excited about before release! One of the reasons is because of the new animals: rabbits, foxes, cows, chickens. But best of all: you can own a lama.
First things first, I have to move my sim into a house in the new game world, Finchwick. I actually really love this world too. It's like what I feal in the real world: cities and big towns can be fun because there is so much opportunities, but it's so nice to get out of the city and just relax. With this expansion pack you will have the possibility to make the lot to "wild fox" challenge.
When you have moved your sim into a nice house and bought animals, prepare yourself to spend a lot of time caring for them.
This is very logic, but especially your chickens and hens need a lot of care. Foxes can kill your chickens and steal eggs from the chicken coop. I did the easiest thing to avoiding that happening: Just have a fence all around my chicken coop. Just remember to lock the gate. You have also the possibility to install a fox-be-gone alarm on your chicken coop if you don't want a fence around it.
The grim reaper is seen awefully much in this expansion pack.
The reason is that you can be good friends with the wild rabbits and foxes, and they don't live for a long time. The pretty collage of almost every time he showed up is in the end of this blogpost.
It's a challenge in this game to be good friend with a rabbit, fox or the birds.
I chose the challenge to become friends with one rabbit. It took some time for me, because I couldn't find the (damn) rabbits at first. I looked almost everywhere. But all of a sudden did I find a "secret" place, it's where the Creature Keeper lives. It's a lot of rabbits there, and also bird.
The fun thing about the Creature Keeper is that you can buy clothes for your animals of him. Also clothes for the wild foxes and rabbits. I love this little detail in the expansion pack.
Here is some of the clothes you can buy from the Creature Keeper:
I really like that you have a some fun choices! This kind of updates the game a little, and make you want to visit the Creature Keeper a little more often, haha!
A little bit more about my sims hens and roosters.
And she also had a llama and a cow. Not at the same time tho. It's sad that you can't place two animals in the barn. If you want two, you need to place two barns, and that picks up a lot of space. But also, I don't think I could handle two cows or llamas and all my hens at the same time. Because taking care of them takes all my sims time.
You need to feed the cow/llama and your hens two times a day, and almost the same with cleaning the barn or cook.
I had a blue llama!
You can't buy a blue llama, you have to chose from a white or beige llama as shown a little bit earlier in this blogpost. But, you can make then in so many different colors (rainbow for example), if you give them the right animal treats. You can make the treats yourself or buy it in Finchwich, or you can get surprised getting one. You can do the same to your cow, hens and rooster. Your hens makes coloured eggs, and your cow makes coloured milk, or chocolate milk. But you can also give them animal treats that makes them live longer, or you can get more wool from the llamas or milk from the cows.
To learn each recipe of the treats you have to actually make the treats yourself and you'll get a notification that your sim has learned these recipes. Source: Ultimatesimguide.com. Click on the link for more info on animal treats.
Because I can make the llama in different kind of colours, you get different kind of llama wool in your sims inventory.
Because of that you can ask The Creature Keeper to make new clothes for the chosen animal. There is a lot of clothes to chose from.
You have also the opportunity to make some pretty handy crafts too with the wool.
Because it takes a lot of time to take care of my sims animals, I chose a job for my sim that she can work from home: As a gardener.
It's also very nice to have a big garden because then you can make food with your fruits and vegetables from your sim's garden. Your food gets a lot better if you have the right ingrediens, and it also makes it cheaper to make.
And when your sim is getting better in gardening, all the gardening stuff is much more easier. And your plants evolve easier. The new thing about this expansion pack is that you can plant bigger crops. You can also get fertilizer after you have working a little bit in your garden.
If you also buy a house for your insects, you can also make biofuels 8this comes actually with an another expansion pack I haven't done so much with. But Im going to write about it later). You have a great opportunity to live outside of the system (with no electricity, water etc) or live easier (where you only rely on your own ingredients you have either found, planted or bought) if you have a garden like this. The opportunity to live easier comes with this expansion pack, and it's a fun way to not rely on the normal daily life. You can buy meat, cheese, milk, and a lot of other stuff to cook with in Finchwick.
Talking about food and living easy!
If you chose to make most of your food by yourself and you are missing out on something or maybe ate it all up, you can go to Finchwick (a whole new world) to buy more of it. It's exactly found in Grocery Market Stall found in Finchwick Neighborhood. It's always (chocolate) milk, fresh red and white meat and other ingrediens. You can also sell ingredients. I really love this opportunity! You will find two booths. One for food, and an another for garden ingredients.
Just remember these aren't open 24/7.
There is also competitions in Finckwich.
Where you can compete with your best pie, best llama, best llama wool, best egg etc. I haven't competed with anything special before I went through this expansion pack. I both competed with my PINK llama (that won), and it's pink llama wool.
If you aren't competing, you can still watch others compete.
I haven't talked so much about my sim's family.
As you know, she got some chickens and hens and a cow (a llama at first). But she also got four cats! It started with two, a boy and a girl. And all of a sudden the one cat had become pregnant. I wasn't prepared for that at all. And I always thought it was hard for cats to get pregnant at all in this game. But it was actually a nice surprise.
I had to give one of the cats away (to a close friend) because I couldn't handle so many animals at the same time. One of my cats ran away a few times, and that says it all.
But after a while one of the cats got pregnant, AGAIN. And this time, it was actually inbreeding. This game is actually so weird. But it can happen 🤡
And in the end, I want to show you The Grim Reaper showing up almost EVERY DAY:
My boyfriend, 
@pusen, actually said I should stream while I play the sims,
because there is so much weird stuff going on in this game. Only in this expansion pack I have experienced The Grim Reaper almost daily, and inbreeded cats. Often I don't even know creative they have been to make this game. It's so much weird stuff, that amazes me a lot. So it's not a bad idea, but I play the Sims on my mac (the game takes up all of my macs space). So I guess I have to buy a whole new computer, and that is not prioritized at all. We want to get a bigger house, and that is number one.
But, what do you think of this expansion pack?
Have you tried it?
I also want to add that I have some new expansion pack reviews soon. But these blogpost takes a lot of time writing (11 days since last posts). Haha.