ZOMBIEDOLLY'S ZOMBIE APOCALYPSE CHALLENGE

A Sims 4 rebuild challenge. Version 1.9 · Created by ZombieDolly · Built July 2026

v1.9 changelog — Latchkey rewritten. It banned directing children and teens to build skills, which made The Schoolhouse, A Wonder Child and The Coming of Age simultaneously impossible — the Practitioner's Exemption only ever covered one of the three. It now bites homework and grades instead of skills. No Teaching narrowed to adult mentoring and tutoring; caring for a toddler is explicitly not teaching. New universal rule 12: directing children and toddlers is always legal, under every restriction, permanently.

v1.8 changelog — Off the Grid moved from Scientist to Manual Laborer. It is base game content and should never have sat behind a Get to Work career — players without that pack were exempt from a restriction the base game fully supports. Manual Laborer now lifts two restrictions: Barren Ground and Off the Grid. Every lot is off the grid from day one — no power, no running water — and a 3-level teen part-time is the fix. Scientist takes a new restriction, No Method. Manual Laborer moves to #2 in the order, with a new forced ordering: Manual Laborer before every computer career.

v1.7 changelog — One Town now covers travel as well as residence: no loading screens outside your starting world until Journalist clears. No Raising narrowed to the Parenthood parenting menu only — base-game toddler and child skill-building stays legal, so the Raising Track works alongside it. Three new rulings: the child is the practitioner for Character Values; the Raising Track is unaffected by No Raising; and one Sim may claim A Wonder Child (career slot) and Character Values (trade slot) together.

v1.6 changelog — Split the founding rules in two. Journalist no longer gates founding at all — its restriction is now One Town: every household must sit in your starting world until it clears. Splitting off a new household is instead gated by The Coming of Age: the household must have raised a child who earned all four childhood aspiration reward traits before aging to Young Adult. One qualifying child, one split — expansion is continuously earned. The Coming of Age is a household permission, not an unlock, so it costs no lifetime slot. The old one-settlement-per-cleared-tier allowance is retired; the qualifying child is the pacing now.

v1.5 changelog — Added The Raising Track (§7): three new base-game unlocks that run on children instead of careers — The First Lesson (toddler skills → No Teaching), The Schoolhouse (child skills → Latchkey), and A Wonder Child (a fully-raised Young Adult → The Waiting List). A Sim raised into one spends their lifetime slot on it, same as a career. Base game goes 28 → 31 unlocks. Babysitter narrowed to traits only — aspirations now belong to The Waiting List, removing the overlap.

v1.4 changelog — Settled the vertical question. The Footprint is a volume, not a footprint: until Villain clears you have one floor, ground level, on its foundation. Villain lifts the 8×8 and unlocks building upward together. Basements are separately gated behind Manual Laborer — digging cuts into contaminated soil, and Barren Ground's unlock is what declares it safe, so a run that clears Villain first still cannot dig.

v1.3 changelog — Softened Everything Broken: broken objects may now be repaired or replaced on Sundays rather than not at all, until Handyperson clears. The Sunday repair rule survives Market Day lifting. Nothing Runs (Engineer – Mechanical) stays strict and outranks the allowance where both are live. This also removes the last hard deadlock on Handyperson, whose own career needed repair practice.

v1.2 changelog — Adopted the Practitioner's Exemption (§5): a Sim working a career is exempt from that career's own restriction, for job and skill actions only. Without it ~25 unlocks were literally impossible. Settled four Rulings (§5): work travel is exempt from Curfew and Closed Roads; Secure Votes is not a civic action; all screens count as computers; lot restrictions bind only lots you own. Added the Founding Pass (§11). Rebuilt §12 — Writer – Author moved to #3 because skill books are the level-9 fallback for everything, Scouts flagged as a priority the moment a child exists, and a forced orderings table added.

v1.1 changelog — Added the Starter Planter (§4): one indoor planter box from setup, exempt from Barren Ground, indoors until Space Ranger clears. Added the two move-out routes (§11): into an existing structure only once Bodybuilder and Villain are both clear, otherwise a Family Grant of at least §5,000 and you bulldoze and custom-build an 8×8. Clarified that Barren Ground binds the Sim, not the lot, and that wild harvesting is always legal.

v1.0 changelog — Every unlock now carries a How to complete it entry with its exact skill requirements — see the Relay Board tracker, which holds the full data for all 89. Research corrected six requirements that were wrong in v0.95: Cross-Stitch and Nectar Making cap at 5, not 10. Medium and Dancing cap at 5. Vampire Lore caps at 15. You cannot become a Sage — the three Sages are fixed NPCs, so Realm of Magic now uses the Virtuoso rank. My Wedding Stories uses a gold medal, not 5 stars. Freelancer has no star rating, so its target is now 20 completed gigs. Secret Agent–Villain is an 11-level career, the only one in the game.

v0.95 changelog — Added the Wonder Child Clause: your founder may be downloaded from the Gallery, and a Wonder Child is the recommended pick. Carved the founder out of the Criminal–Oracle Gallery ban (this also fixes a contradiction in v0.9). Added Born of the Ash (+25) for anyone who wants the old CAS-only opening as a declared handicap.

Every career you finish gives the whole region something back. You are not surviving. You are putting the lights back on.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

1. The Story
2. What Makes This One Different
3. The Blackout Rule (no pack, no problem)
4. Setup
5. Universal Rules
6. The Five Tiers
7. Base Game Unlock Matrix
8. Expansion Pack Unlock Matrix
9. Game Pack Unlock Matrix
10. Trades: careerless packs
11. Settlements and the Outlands
12. Recommended Unlock Order
13. Scoring
14. Failure
15. Optional Difficulty Modifiers
16. Credits and Sources

1. THE STORY

Before

Nobody wanted to feel bad anymore.

Vitalyte started as a wellness startup in Newcrest, back when Newcrest was still four square miles of graded dirt and construction signage. Their whole product was one drink. Focus in a can. It didn't just perk you up, it set you. Confident before an interview. Inspired before a canvas. Flirty on a Friday. Bottled emotion, forty simoleons a six-pack, sold by every influencer in San Myshuno.

The active ingredient was a pale fungus growing on the walls of the Forgotten Grotto, the flooded mine under Oasis Springs. Wild-harvested. Rare. Expensive.

When demand outran the mine, Vitalyte stopped harvesting and started culturing.

The cultured strain was not the same organism. The wild fungus regulated a Sim's emotional state. The cultured one replaced it. And unlike the wild strain, it kept a body walking after the Sim inside it had stopped.

The Flatline

It went region-wide during a heat wave.

Everyone was drinking. The Newcrest water treatment plant, sitting on the same aquifer, went into overdraw and pulled straight from the grotto table. Within thirty-six hours, Willow Creek, Oasis Springs and every crew site in Newcrest were drinking the culture out of the tap.

Sims didn't die. That's the part people still can't get their heads around.

They flatlined. Every moodlet gone at once. No happy, no sad, no tense, no bored. Nothing on the face, nothing behind it, and a body that kept standing up and walking toward whatever was still warm and still feeling something.

Survivors call them the Flat. You can tell one from fifty feet by the way it doesn't react to anything, until it reacts to you.

The Signal

ZombieDolly was streaming when the grid dropped.

Nineteen hours into a marathon, in a Newcrest apartment with a battery wall, a solar array her landlord never approved, and a satellite uplink she'd bought to fix her ping. When the towers died, hers didn't. When the broadcast stations went dark, she was still transmitting.

So she stopped playing and started reading.

Coordinates. Water sources. Which bridges held. Which blocks were Flat. And then, once she'd raided what was left of the regional archive server, something better: procedures. How a chef keeps food cold without a chain. How a civil engineer restarts a filtration plant. How a doctor sterilizes without hot water.

The archive was mostly corrupt. What survived, survived in fragments, and every fragment was tied to a job. She could read you the theory. She could not do the work.

That's what the survivors are for.

DollCast broadcasts on 91.7 and it never stops. One voice, the same voice, every night: "You are not the last ones. Here's what we know tonight."

When somebody out there masters a trade — really masters it, top of the ladder, the whole body of knowledge recovered — they radio it in, and Dolly puts it on the air. And every household in range of the tower gets it at the same time.

That is why one Sim's career unlocks something for everyone. The knowledge isn't hoarded. It's broadcast. One chef in Oasis Springs figures out refrigeration and by morning every settlement on the Relay has cold food.

The one they invested in

There's a particular kind of person who survived this well, and it isn't the one you'd guess.

Before the Flatline there was a fashion among people with money and anxiety: pick one child and pour everything into them. Every lesson, every tutor, every advantage, every hour of both parents' attention, funnelled into a single kid while the siblings grew up around the edges of it. Enrichment as an arms race. Wonder Children, the magazines called them, and there was a waiting list.

It was, by any reasonable measure, a stupid way to raise a person.

Then every institution those skills were meant for stopped existing, and it turned out the region had accidentally built exactly what it was about to need: a handful of people in their twenties who could cook, build, garden, negotiate, fix an engine and set a bone, because somebody spent eighteen years making sure they could do everything.

Most of them died anyway. The Flatline didn't care what you knew.

The ones who didn't are the reason there's anything left to rebuild.

Your founder is one of them. Somebody's whole life savings walking around in a body, with nobody left to be proud of it.

What you're doing

You start with one Sim on a dead lot. No neighbors, no power, no water you'd want to drink, and a radio voice telling you that you count.

You are going to rebuild the trade base of an entire region, one career at a time, and then you are going to spread it — a second household, a third, a settlement in Newcrest, then out past the ridgeline to towns you've only heard on the air.

Nobody wins this by hiding. You win it by getting the lights back on for people you've never met.

2. WHAT MAKES THIS ONE DIFFERENT

This is built on Pinstar's Apocalypse Challenge lineage (see §16), and deliberately fixes the five things that make that challenge stall out.

3. THE BLACKOUT RULE

If you don't own the pack, that part of the world never went dark.

This is the load-bearing rule of the whole challenge. Read it twice.

• If a restriction comes from a pack you don't own, that restriction does not apply to you. It is considered lifted at the start.
• The career that would have lifted it is not required for your completion.
• Your run is scored only against the packs you actually own (§13).
• Base game alone is a complete, winnable challenge. 31 unlocks, 5 tiers, full story. You are not playing a lesser version.
• Buying a pack mid-run: the new restrictions switch on at your next in-game Sunday. Sell off anything now banned. This never fails you.

No apologising, no house-ruling, no asterisks in your screenshots. Base game runs and all-packs runs are both legitimate finishes. They're just different lengths.

4. SETUP

The founder — the Wonder Child Clause

• One Sim. Young Adult or Adult. Any gender, traits, aspiration.
• You may download your founder from the Gallery. This is the one permitted import in the entire challenge (see the Oracle exception below). Build them in CAS instead if you prefer.
• Recommended: a Wonder Child. Somebody else's Wonder Child Challenge graduate — a Sim raised with every advantage, maxed skills, the works. They are the best possible founder both mechanically and narratively, and the fiction is built around them.
• Whatever skills they arrive with, they keep. That's the point of the clause. A founder who can already cook and garden survives Night One instead of starving through it.
• They must quit any existing job. A pre-maxed career does not retroactively unlock anything. Aspirations and reward traits they arrived with are kept.
• Occults allowed, but see Passing in §5.
• Not ZombieDolly. Dolly is on the air, not on your lot. She is never playable.

The Starter Planter

• One planter box is permitted from setup, and it may be used to grow food. This is a standing carve-out from Barren Ground — the Manual Laborer restriction — and it is the only one.
• It must be indoors, under four walls and a roof, until Astronaut – Space Ranger clears. Until then all gardening on your lots is strictly indoor.
• One box. Not one per Sim, not one per lot. One, in the Anchor, until Space Ranger lifts Under Cover and gardening can move outside.
• Everything else in Barren Ground still binds: no second planter, no ground plots, no orchards, no hiring a gardener.

Finding one: search the in-game Gallery for the hashtags #wonderchild, #wonderchildchallenge or #pinstar, filter to Households, and sort by Most Downloaded. Look for a Young Adult with several maxed skills and a completed aspiration. Nothing about the Sim's origin is verified by the challenge — if a Sim reads as a Wonder Child to you, they are one.

The lot

• Any empty residential lot, 30×20 or larger, in Oasis Springs (recommended — nearest the grotto) or any base game world.
• Bulldoze an existing house to claim it if you want.
• Paint the ground dirt, sand or concrete. No trees, no shrubs, no flowers, no landscaping.
• The house must sit on a foundation, stilts, or a platform. Never directly on the ground. The culture is in the soil.
• Off the Grid from day one. Set the Off the Grid lot challenge on the Anchor at setup, and on every lot you found. No power, no running water, until Manual Laborer clears. The collapse killed the grid; you are not the exception.
• One floor. Until Villain clears, the 8×8 is a volume, not a footprint — ground floor only, no upper storeys.
• No digging until Manual Laborer clears. No basements, no below-grade rooms, no terrain excavation. A basement is a hole cut into the thing that ended the world. Even after Villain lifts the 8×8 and frees you to build upward, the ground stays shut until Barren Ground lifts and the soil is declared safe.
• You may not move lots for the rest of the challenge. The Anchor stays the Anchor.

Money

• No funds cheat at setup. Play the default §20,000.
• The restrictions make money almost meaningless by week two. Don't overthink this.

Game settings

• Aging on, normal lifespan, for all households.
• Autonomy on or off, your choice, set once at start and never changed.
• Neighborhood Stories: on, all options. The world keeps moving without you.
• Fill Empty Homes: off. The region is empty. That's the point.

5. UNIVERSAL RULES

These apply from the first minute and are never lifted.

1. No cheats except the ones a restriction explicitly requires (funds zeroing under Investor). testingcheats is allowed for the required cheats only. MoveObjects is banned until Criminal–Oracle clears.
2. No mods that grant an advantage. MCCC for story progression and UI is fine. Cheat menus, money mods, and career-speed mods are not.
3. Custom content is allowed for looks only, never for function. A CC dresser is fine. A CC fridge that ignores the Cold Chain is not.
4. One career per Sim, per lifetime. Only the first career a Sim tops counts as an unlock. They may work more afterward for money, but it unlocks nothing. This is what forces generations.
   • Exception — Trades: a Sim may bank one career unlock plus one trade unlock (§10) in a lifetime.
   • Exception — teen jobs: a teen part-time job spends the Sim's career slot. Choose deliberately.
5. Unlocks are regional. The moment any Sim in any of your households tops a career, that restriction lifts for every household you control, present and future. It's on the radio.
6. Who can unlock: anyone living in one of your households who was born into it, married into it, or moved in legitimately after Tier 0 cleared. Servos, adopted Sims, and NPCs you never moved in cannot unlock anything.
7. No aging up early. Cakes for celebration only. The age bar has to be bubbling.
8. Passing: occult Sims (vampires, spellcasters, werewolves, mermaids) must stay incognito until the pack career or trade that governs them clears. No public transformation, no visible feeding, no casting in front of anyone outside the household.
9. Honest mistakes don't fail you. A Sim autonomously does something banned, you cancel it, you move on. Fix it immediately and it never happened.
10. Rules changes never fail you. If this document updates and something you own is now banned, sell it and keep playing.
11. Play every household you control on rotation. You may not park a settlement and forget it.
12. Directing children and toddlers is always legal. No restriction in this challenge may stop you queueing actions for an infant, toddler, child or teen, or stop you directing a Sim to care for one. Raising a Sim well is the point of half the board; nothing gets to block the controls.

The Practitioner's Exemption

A Sim actively employed in a career, or actively working toward a trade, is exempt from the restriction that career lifts — but only for actions required to do that job or to build its required skills.

• The exemption is personal and narrow. Nobody else in the household may use the object or take the action.
• The practitioner gets no other benefit. The Chef may cook on a stove for skill and for work; the household still eats one grilled meal a day, and the Chef may not use that stove for anything else.
• It covers only their own career's restriction. It does not free them from anyone else's. A Barista still can't build Mixology on a bar until Boil Order lifts — that's an ordering problem, not an exemption.
• A Sim who quits, is fired, or is between jobs loses it immediately.
• When they top the career, the exemption becomes the unlock and the whole region gets it.

Without this rule roughly 25 of the unlocks are literally impossible — the restriction bans the exact action the career needs. Pinstar's original did the same thing object by object: "Only Culinary Sims may use the Chocolate Maker," "Only Military Sims may use the Obstacle Course," "Only Law Enforcement Sims may use the Fingerprint Scanner." This just states it once instead of 25 times.

It's also the fiction. Dolly's archive fragments give one person the procedure. The practitioner is the one who's been read the manual.

Rulings

Four things the rules used to leave open. These are settled.

6. THE FIVE TIERS

Restrictions are grouped by how bad they are to live under. You do not have to clear a tier in order, but the tiers tell you where the pain is.

TIER 0 — SILENCE

Restriction: you are one Sim. You cannot move in, marry in, or invite any Sim to live in your household. You may not found a second household. Pregnancy and birth are allowed and are how you're expected to survive this.

Lifts when: your founder tops any career at all, their first one.

When it lifts: Dolly reads your coordinates on air. Two nights later, someone knocks. You may now move in and marry in Sims normally, and your founder's career restriction lifts too. That's two unlocks for one career. Take the win.

7. BASE GAME UNLOCK MATRIX

31 unlocks. A complete challenge on base game alone.

Format: Career → the restriction it imposes → what topping it gives the region back.

Tier 1 — Survival

Tier 2 — Settlement

Tier 3 — Region

Tier 4 — Society

The Raising Track

Three unlocks that run on children instead of careers. All base game.

Children are otherwise pure overhead in this challenge — they eat, they take years, and they exist to become career slots. The Raising Track gives those years something to be, and it closes the loop on the story: you begin as somebody else's Wonder Child, and you finish by proving the region can make one again.

A Sim raised into one of these spends their lifetime slot on it, exactly as a career would. That's a real choice — a Wonder Child is a Sim who will never top a career.

On timing. These are slow by nature — a toddler-to-Young-Adult arc is most of a Sim's childhood. None of them will be early clears, and that's fine. Start The First Lesson with your first toddler; you'll be glad of it.

On Latchkey. It was originally no directed skill-building for children and teens, and that was a mistake — it made The Schoolhouse, A Wonder Child and The Coming of Age impossible at once. Rewritten in v1.9 to bite grades instead of skills. Directing children and toddlers is always legal (universal rule 12).

8. EXPANSION PACK UNLOCK MATRIX

Only applies to packs you own. See §3.

Confidence note (PD-001): career names and pack attributions above are sourced from The Sims Wiki, EA Help, and Carl's Sims 4 Guide (§16). The 2025–2026 packs — Businesses & Hobbies, Enchanted by Nature, Adventure Awaits, Royalty & Legacy — are sourced but I have not personally verified their in-game branch names. If a branch name is wrong in your game, use the real one and tell me; I'll correct the doc.

9. GAME PACK UNLOCK MATRIX

10. TRADES

Packs without careers still count. A Trade is a maxed skill or completed system that unlocks like a career does.

A Sim may bank one career unlock and one trade unlock in a lifetime. That's the exception to §5.4 and it's how you keep the smaller packs from stalling your run.

11. SETTLEMENTS AND THE OUTLANDS

This is what makes it a region challenge instead of a family challenge.

The Anchor

Your founder's lot. It never moves. It's the first dot on Dolly's map.

Founding a settlement

Two separate permissions, and they answer two different questions.

1. May we split at all? — The Coming of Age

A household may split off a new household once it has raised a child who earned all four childhood aspiration reward traits — Creatively Gifted, Mentally Gifted, Physically Gifted and Socially Gifted — before aging to Young Adult.

• One qualifying child, one split. Raising another qualifying child earns another. Expansion is continuously earned, not unlocked once and forgotten.
• This is a household permission, not an unlock. The child does not spend their lifetime career slot on it. They may still take a career, or claim a Raising Track unlock, normally.
• The qualifying child does not have to be the one who leaves. Any Sim in the household may go.
• In the fiction: a household that can raise a whole person is a household that can seed another. Until then you're surviving, not expanding.

2. May we settle in a different town? — Journalist

Until Writer – Journalist clears, every household you control must sit in your starting world.

You can split, found, and grow all you like — but it all happens in one town. Journalist is what puts you on the map elsewhere. If you own StrangerVille you also need Military – Officer cleared to move a Sim out at all; without that pack the Blackout Rule means the gate doesn't exist for you.

How a Sim may move out

Two routes, and which one you get depends on what you've cleared.

• The Grant is a straight transfer at the moment of founding, and it is exempt from Ash Economy — you may hold it long enough to build with it.
• The Founding Pass. Founding includes one Build-mode pass, exempt from Market Day, on the day you found. The settlement stands immediately. From the next day Market Day binds normally. Your Anchor gets the same pass at setup.
• Moving a Sim between two households you already control is not founding. No qualifying child needed, no Grant. Gated only by No Muster, if you own StrangerVille.

Every household you control plays under the same restrictions, and any of them can lift one. Play them all on rotation — no parking a settlement and forgetting it.

Foraging and other people's plants

• Wild harvesting is always legal. Barren Ground bans tending, not gathering. No career lock, nothing to clear first.
• You may not tend a plant anywhere. Barren Ground binds the Sim, not the lot. The Starter Planter is the only exemption.
• You may harvest from plants on other lots, public planters included, once you can reach them.
• Getting there is the real limit. Closed Roads (Diamond Agent) blocks travel to community lots and other households' lots. Open-world wandering in your own neighbourhood needs no loading screen and is fine. Curfew (Criminal – Boss) keeps everyone home 8pm to 6am. Work travel is exempt from both.
• If you own Eco Lifestyle: No Foraging (Green Technician) means foraged items may not be used, eaten or crafted with until it clears. You may still pick them up.

Newcrest — The Board

Newcrest is empty in base game and that is canon here. It's where the aquifer breached and the first bodies stood back up. Nobody has been back.

• Newcrest lots may not be built on until Tier 2 is fully cleared. Newcrest is in the base-game map, so One Town does not block it if you started in Willow Creek or Oasis Springs — check your own save.
• Every settlement you place in Newcrest is worth double on your Region Score (§13).
• Optional finish condition: fill Newcrest. All 15 lots occupied by households you founded. That's the maximalist ending.

The Outlands

Every pack world is a town that went quiet. Each one opens when a career from its pack clears. If you don't own the pack, the town simply isn't on the map — no penalty, no gap.

Worlds for Businesses & Hobbies, Enchanted by Nature, Adventure Awaits and Royalty & Legacy are not listed because I have not verified their world names. Use the pack's world, gated behind that pack's career.

12. RECOMMENDED UNLOCK ORDER

Most people who quit this challenge quit because they picked a bad first career. Don't.

Founder's first career: Culinary – Chef. It's the fastest career in the game to max, it clears Tier 0 and the Cold Chain in one move, and it makes everything after it easier. Cooking skill is trivially grindable on a grill.

Then, roughly in this order:

1. Culinary – Chef — Tier 0 + food. Do this first.
2. Manual Laborer — the biggest single unlock in the challenge. It lifts Barren Ground and Off the Grid together: agriculture, digging, power and running water, all from one 3-level part-time job a teen can hold. Nothing electrical works until it clears — no computers, so no Author, no Journalist, no Investor, no Management, no Startup, no Oracle. Gardening 2 on the Starter Planter is the whole requirement.
3. Handyperson (For Rent) — if you own it. Everything Broken limits repairs to Sundays and compounds with every object you acquire.
4. Writer – Author — skill books are the level-9 fallback for every skill, and Burned Libraries deletes that fallback for your whole run. Lightest career in the base game. Needs power — Manual Laborer first.
5. Military – Officer (StrangerVille) — if you own it. Unlocks moving Sims out.
6. Writer – Journalist — One Town keeps every household and every loading screen inside your starting world. Needs power.
7. Secret Agent – Villain — the 8×8 is a volume, not a footprint: one floor until this clears. The only 11-level career in the game.
8. Retail Employee — Market Day is a scheduling tax on everything else.
9. Business – Investor — stop deleting your money. Needs power.
10. Scientist (Get to Work) — research objects back.
11. Doctor (Get to Work) — plumbing and choice about babies.
12. Culinary – Mixologist — before Barista, which needs Mixology 2 off a bar that Boil Order bans.
13. Scouts (Seasons) — the first moment you have a child. Scouting Aptitude: +25% to all skill gains, for life.
14. Everything else, by whatever hurts most in your save.
15. Criminal – Oracle — last. The Gallery and MoveObjects unlock is the finale. Dolly's last broadcast.

Forced orderings. These are not preferences — the earlier one gates the later one:

13. SCORING

Two numbers. Report both.

Days Score — lower is better

Total Sim days elapsed from the founder's first day on the Anchor lot to the moment your final restriction lifts.

Region Score — higher is better

Reporting your run

State it like this, and the Blackout Rule means everyone can read it fairly:

ZombieDolly Challenge · Base Game + Get to Work + Seasons · 38 unlocks · 412 days · Region Score 85

A 31-unlock base game finish and a 93-unlock all-packs finish are both complete runs. Compare days-per-unlock if you want to compare at all.

14. FAILURE

You fail if:

1. You knowingly break a restriction that hasn't lifted, and don't fix it.
2. Every household you control is empty. Bloodline extinction across the whole region.
3. You move the Anchor lot.
4. You abandon a settlement — stop playing a household you founded for more than one full rotation.

You do not fail if:

• A Sim autonomously breaks a rule and you cancel it.
• You make an honest mistake and fix it immediately.
• These rules change and something you own is now banned. Sell it.
• A single household dies out. That's a settlement lost, not a run lost. Note it in your Region Score and keep going.

15. OPTIONAL DIFFICULTY MODIFIERS

Declare these before you start. Adjust your Days Score by the listed amount.

Harder (adds to your Days Score — you're claiming a handicap):

Easier (subtracts — you're taking help):

On the zombie mod

SACRIFICIAL's Zombie Apocalypse mod is the only thing in the ecosystem that actually puts zombies on screen, and — verified — no published Apocalypse Challenge ruleset integrates it. That's an open gap and it's yours if you want it.

Suggested integration, untested:

• Infection stages map to the Flatline. Turned Sims are the Flat.
• A Sim who reaches Zombified is dead for challenge purposes. They cannot lift anything and their career slot is spent.
• The cure serum is locked behind Doctor (Get to Work). Before that, infection is a death sentence.
• Firearms are locked behind Military – Officer. Before that, you run.
• Curfew (Criminal – Boss) becomes literal instead of narrative.

16. CREDITS AND SOURCES

This challenge stands on Pinstar's work. The Apocalypse Challenge lineage:

• Pinstar — created the original Sims 2 Apocalypse Challenge (c. 2004), the Legacy Challenge, the Wonder Child Challenge (which the Wonder Child Clause in §4 borrows its founder from), and the design idea this whole family of challenges runs on: restrictions as consequences of collapse, careers as acts of rebuilding. The premise everyone still quotes — every Sim in the region flushing at half-time and melting down three nuclear plants — is his.
• ImaginingMystic — co-author of the official Sims 4 rules.
• Ashleigh825 (2009) and Mikitta — Sims 3 adaptation, which invented the advantages/handicaps/bonus-points scoring architecture.
• Poopsie Sims (Mariana Colin) — the "Two Birds" and "It Takes a Village" variations, and the suppression-vs-lifting distinction.
• Raerei — "Modified Unlocks" and the StrangerVille Prequel. Her diagnosis — Pinstar's TS4 rules cover 25 careers and the game has 57 — is the reason this challenge exists.
• Florrie64, Granny Lawlor, stormydayzgamez, MiCat Game — ongoing pack-complete maintenance.
• SACRIFICIAL — the Zombie Apocalypse mod.

Rules sources

• The Wonder Child Challenge Rules — Pinstar
• Sims 2 Apocalypse Challenge Rules — Pinstar
• The Sims 4 Apocalypse Challenge Rules — Pinstar & ImaginingMystic
• 1.01 Rules update
• Sims 3 Apocalypse Challenge
• Poopsie Sims — TS4 Apocalypse Rules
• Raerei — Modified Unlocks
• Raerei — StrangerVille Prequel
• Granny Lawlor — Apocalypse Challenge Ruleset
• Florrie64 — Sims 4 Apocalypse Challenge
• stormydayzgamez — sims4apoc
• MiCat Game — TS4 Apocalypse Rules
• SACRIFICIAL — Zombie Apocalypse Mod

Career and pack sources

• The Sims Wiki — Career tracks
• The Sims Wiki — Part-time job
• The Sims Wiki — Freelancer
• Carl's Sims 4 Guide — Careers
• EA Help — The Sims 4 careers
• Wikipedia — The Sims 4 expansion packs
• Wikipedia — The Sims 4 game packs

You are not the last ones. Here's what we know tonight. — DollCast 91.7