This update features the new education loans, the factory location and engineer career path, and new transport options.
Education Loans
Instead of paying the full price of education up front, you can now take out an education loan when applying to study degrees and diplomas. You can take a full loan for zero up front cost, or a partial loan for 50% up front cost. Alternatively, you can still pay the full fee to get a 15% discount.
If you decide to take out an education loan, the repayments won’t start immediately. Instead, they begin slightly after the expected time to complete your education. For example, most diplomas are expected to take a year to complete so the loan repayments begin after 56 weeks. This adds a bit of urgency to complete your education before the repayments start.
Even though the repayments haven’t started, the interest on the loan principle starts to accumulate from the moment you take the loan. The loan provider is quite generous though, and the interest charged is based on the savings rate rather than the higher personal loan rate.
Factory and Engineer Career Path
There is a new factory location that contains the engineering career path. In this career path, you can get your diploma pretty early to advance, and then follow up with a degree later on to get even further up the engineering career ladder.
The factory will generally be positioned away from the city center, so it provides a lucrative career path on the outskirts of town.
Transport Options
You can now purchase an electric scooter or a small car from the shopping mall. These vehicles help to reduce travel times between locations, but you get charged a maintenance fee every time you use them. The shorter the distance, the less efficient it is to run your vehicle so you have to decide whether your lifestyle is suited to using them.
Also, I know some people love their vehicles so you can give it a nickname by using the ‘rename’ button. The nickname will show up on your profile when riding it.
Auction Fees
You now get charged a fee when selling anything at auction, and also get charged an additional 5% fee if your object was successfully sold. This was added to handle a certain house-flipping strategy that was overpoweringly lucrative if you knew how to do it.
What’s Next?
It’s time to start work on the next fully-featured map – New York City! This will involve upgrading the events system (again). Depending on how long it takes, I might be able to squeeze in one or two other things as well.
Change Log
- Added education loans to University and Trade School
- Implemented delayed and fixed term repayments for education loans
- Allow only one education loan at a time
- Added discount for paying full education cost upfront
- Adjusted Sue scenario for education loans
- Added Factory location
- Added Engineer career path and related education
- Added Small Car and Electric Scooter to Mall
- Added Ride option to Possessions panel for transport objects
- Added Tooltip for travel time when hovering over locations
- Implemented maintenance costs and variable speed for transport options
- Implemented selling/removing transport possession kicks you off
- Implemented renaming possessions functionality
- Added renaming vehicles, business suits and collectible containers
- Optimised some data structures
- Auctions now charge sellers fees to start auction and when item sold
- Tweaked bid probability of AI auction participants
- Reduced fun decrease from bartender job
- Reduced fun from bar fights and increased hygiene decay
- Added more logging for main menu display issues
- Changed default screensize to non-fullscreen for new players
- Fixed too many movie marathons
