RELIC ROOM:  In the relic room there are a series of 16 levers.  7 Black, 7 White, 2 gray.  The black levers activate fire traps which you can use to destroy mummies.  White levers will deactive the fire traps.  The 2 gray levers open the doors so you can leave.  When you enter the relic room you WILL be trapped inside with 0 to 6 mummies depending on how many personal affect chests you opened.

MONEY VAULTS:  You can gain access to both vaults, by reseting the combination.  Once you have used the keystones to open the relic area you can go back there at any time.  So go to one of the vaults, loot the relic room, reset the combination and then open up the other vault.  The fake money vault has garbage that I dropped in it from the main house (it stinks) and some minor ancient coins piles.  The real money vault has well over 100k simolians worth of cash and prizes.

This is the final sublevel of the exploritory dungeon.  In it I focused on the processor.  This is the only true dungeon in this set of mini-dungeons.  It is themed and focused on using as many processor applications as I can figure out.  What this means to you the player is that in this dungeon you must do multiple things to accomplish your goals.  Some of the ideas I wanted to do with this dungeon I was not able to accomplish (ie, if you looted certain chests then the value of the vault items dropped).  Some ideas I was able to do.

Puzzles:  To access the money vaults (there are 2 a fake one and a real one).  You must pull 4 levers and only 4 levers out of 8 choices.  The real money vault combination is WHITE, BLUE, RED, YELLOW.  The fake money vault combination is BLACK, PURPLE, GREEN, ORANGE.  If you pull too many levers the door to the vault will open but with traps inside that can not be disarmed or crossed.  Go to the main area step on the trigger plate, reset the combination and try again.  Inside the money vault are 3 keystone placements.  You must insert ALL 3 keystones to open the relic vault.

MOURN:  In each of the 3 burial rooms there will be tomb markers.  By using the emote mourn at ALL tomb markers you will be able to destroy the traps by the chests and loot them.  IF you do NOT mourn the traps will active on opening and you can not loot the chests.  (In 2 of the 3 rooms I put moveable statues so you can destroy the traps that way if you wish).

MUMMIES:  There are 5 chests marked PERSONAL AFFECTS:  If you loot these chests you will get a minor loot and when you enter the relic room you will set off a mummy.  Looting all 5 of these chests will active 6 mummies.

This is the 2nd sublevel of the exploritory dungeon.  You can enter and leave through the same divewell.  This dungeon focuses on traps.  It is nothing but a gaint trap.  There are no walls expect for the area\'s sectioning off the entry way and the rest area.  Both of these areas are trap free and safe.

To orginize this trap room I used colors.  Primary colors are RED, YELLOW, and BLUE.  In the starting area you will choose one of those colors.  From that point on, until you choose a new color in the starting area, you MUST stay on that color or one of its two secondary colors.  For instance, if you pick RED then you can step on Red squares, Orange squares (red + yellow) or Purple squares (red + blue).  Stepping on anyother square will set off a trap and you will get hurt.  If you set off a trap and your sim wanders onto another color look for one of those 3 colors and go back to it immediatly.  If you choose the YELLOW path you can step on:  yellow, orange, green.  If you choose the BLUE path you can step on:  Blue, green, purple.

BLACK:  Black is all colors combinded so you can step on black squres at any time.

WHITE:  Is the absence of color so you can NEVER safely step on white.

There are 2 chests associated with each color (6 total) the goal of this zone is to loot all 6 chests.

This sublevel of the exploritory dungeon is where I worked on the developing my skills at using levers, trigger plates and doors.  There are no traps.  But there is lots of running back and forth.  (ie, pull a lever in one place a door opens in a whole other area of the dungeon).  If you run into problems pan your view out and see if a door or trigger plate has appeared or opened somewhere else.

One problem I quickly realized with this area is that since this is a residential lot, normal doors always gave me the option of unlocking/locking (just as they do in your house).  To bypass this problem I made all my doors secret doors that can not be discovered where I wanted locked doors to be.  Now, instead of the levers and triggers, ect unlocking a door, they reveal where the door is.  The affect to the player is the same but the mechanic is different to build.

In the final room there is the exit dive well and 2 torches.  BOTH torches MUST be pulled.  1 torch opens up access between the entry and exit areas so you don\'t have to go through the whole thing again.  The other torch opens up the doors in the central hub which will allow you to continue on to the next subdungeon level.  IF you do not pull this torch, you CANNOT continue.

This dungeon is just a staging area for the other 3 sublevels.  As you enter the dungeon you go through a couple doors and are faced with a dive well.  If you choose NOT to enter the dive well you will go to a couple more rooms and run into a dead end forcing your sim to return to the dive well and complete the sublevel before continuing on.

This dungeon is a circle.  Nothing complicated to it.  You can only go one way and when  you have gone all around the circle you have finished the dungeon.  This dungeon was designed to do one thing.  By the time you finish it you should have all your subadventure skills maxed out (10 traps, 10 secret doors, 10 divewells, 10 rubbles cleared, ect.).  There are no traps, no puzzles, no tricks.  Just go in a circle, complete the sublevels (there are tricks, puzzles and traps there) and  you are done.  When finished the last divewell will give you access to the lower crypt which is a massive dungeon complex.  You can always return home through the main divewell you enter through so you can play as little or as much of this level as you wish at a time.

This is my first dungeon attempt and I took it easy.  It is composed of 4 sub levels.  Each sublevel focuses on ONE aspect of dungeon design.  The levels are broken down as this:

1.  Central Hub

2.  Secret doors and levers

3.  Traps

4.  Processor (crypt)

By going through all four levels of this dungeon you will have completed the exploritory dungeon.  Access to this dungeon is by divewells in the basement.  Either divewell will take your sim to the starting area.  Each sublevel has a rest area with a kitchen, bathroom and bedroom.  Each sublevel has a divewell that lets you in and a seperate one that lets you out.  Once a sublevel is completed you can return to your house through the starting area of the central  hub or continue to the next sublevel.

With this house I am finally getting skilled enough to start pulling together various building techniques into something close to what I envision a fun house to play in should be.  Ironically some of the most difficult things for me to do were very minor in appearence.  The two arched walk ways instead of steps leading from the ground floor to the main door took me hours to figure out, while dropping in the fishing pool in the living room (a very prominant and visible feature) took me about 10 minutes to build.  Landscaping still gives me the most problems.  Normally it is the last thing I do and by the time I get to landscaping I am tired of building and ready to play.  So this house still has minimal landscaping. 

It took me about 3 real time days to build the house, the basement was added as an after thought, I needed more space (the play test sim family I used was a mom/dad/toddler, by the time I got everything working it had grown to mom/dad/teen daughter/teen daughter/toddler) and didn\'t want to change the main house\'s floor plans.  The stairs up, in the main house, go no where.  I had orginally planned on putting 2 more bedrooms and 3 baths on a second floor but the look of the house felt better to me as a single floor residence (hence the basement instead of a second floor).  So I never added the 2nd floor in, but built a basement instead.  This actually was a blessing in disguise. 

When I comverted the basement from a small room with divewells to gain access to the dungeons to a fully furnished living space.  I realized I had an opportunity to try something new.  The basement and the pool were very close to each other.  So I spent about half a day working out how to connect the pool and basement so that when your sims are in the basement they can see into the pool and the sims that are swimming there.  This ended up being one of my favorite features of the house and was completely unplannned.