Archaeology Kit Progress Update

I've been adding a lot of new features this last month (and have been a bit too quiet here), so here's a preview of what's coming up.

New Skill: Sim Lore

Sim Lore is to the Archaeology Kit mod what Selvadoradian culture skill is to Jungle Adventure. It serves as a knowledge of history, and higher skill allows your sim to authenticate somewhat faster.

The Sim Lore skill allows your sim to Identify Mysterious Relics, and then at higher skill, use those relics. You can improve your Sim Lore skill by authenticating artifacts, attending Skill classes at Britechester University, or reading various historical books.

And there are now more books (not all are pictured here -- there are 8, plus the lower cost reprints). Plus 'University Textbook' style reprints of the ancient history books that you can purchase at any University Kiosk in Britechester (shown at left). Some of the books teach you more than Sim Lore as well...

Archaeology Missions

There are now Missions, and more of them. I have 7 'repeating' type missions, plus two sets of story line missions where your sim leads an archaeological expedition of other archaeologists. I have 10 more story line missions planned at this point. I have a lot of plans for these missions, and I'm not certain how to do some of the things I want to do, but that hasn't stopped me before, lol.

Expedition Journal

I've added a custom notebook to track the historical clues you can get from books, gameplay information and the descriptions of various relics you've identified. 

Timeline

I want to make sure that I have the mission structure nailed down before I release it, even in beta form. When I've been testing it, if I make a change to a mission's objectives and reload that save (if a sim has played through the missions), all sorts of wacky things happen, including suddenly being unemployed again and having to start over, lol. 

So I want to make sure I'm past the point where I'm making major changes like that so that I don't end up disrupting anyone's save with a beta test change.

This new version will need another script (which will be included) that I needed to develop in order to add the custom missions, the custom notebook and a few other tidbits. At some point I plan to incorporate what the XML Injector is doing into this script, but probably not with the next release.

It's coming along well, and is getting much closer to what I had in mind when I began work on the Archaeology Kit.