Adding to the game’s Build and Buy Mode, “Basement Building” allows players to create deadly catacombs, beautiful burial mounds, and wondrous caves filled with treasures up to 4 levels deep, and if designed correctly, can become quite a horrifying environment with winding halls and dark descents.

The Sims 3 World Adventures, the first expansion to this summer’s “The Sims 3″ is set to debut November 17, but EA released a lengthy “Tomb Building 101″ helper for those giddy with excitement. Have a look at the detailed and lengthy description of just what’s possible. As long as no one pulls a Silence of the Lambs and traps their Sim at the bottom of a basement well, we should be just fine.

Some of the dozens of Tomb Objects and Object Updates:

· Tomb Object (Fogger): The tomb object is the cornerstone of tomb building and will often be placed in every room of the tomb. The Tomb Object is what creates the “fog” that hides non-explored rooms from the player. This lets you create a sense of discovery and suspense as your Sims explore new tombs. The “fog” will recede from a room when a player enters the room through a door, descends stairs into the room, enters a room that is connected to a fogged room with an arch, or if a Sim “Looks Through” a window that looks into a fogged room. Adding or Removing fog is also a potential Activated Behavior.

· Floor Switch: The floor switch is a classic adventure game object. It is a small, 1 tile floor object on which Sims can stand or push statues. Stepping On and Off the switch are both Triggers that can connect to Activated behaviors. Floor Switches can also be set to Appear or Disappear.

· Wall and Floor Trap: The traps are two different objects that can be placed on the wall or floor. These can be set to shoot fire, darts, steam, or electricity on unsuspecting Sims. They can have a variety of states, including hidden and dormant, armed and visible, hidden and armed, or hidden and firing. Each of these states can be activated by Sims walking over them or as an Activated Behavior. Traps can light Sims on fire or knock them out. However, there are multiple ways to handle traps. Sims can disarm them by tinkering with them, or push statues upon them to disarm. Water will disarm a fire trap, which makes a great puzzle element when paired with the steam trap…which creates water! Sims can walk with immunity through a fire trap when soaked. Experiment and come up with your own puzzles!

· Dive Well: Dive Wells are one of the most exciting Tomb Objects. Sims can use them to become Soaked, which makes them immune to fire, or to put themselves out when already on fire. A Hidden Switch can be set at the bottom of dive wells as a Trigger. You can always place treasures at the bottom. Another fun element is that you can set the color of the water in the dive well, so fire tombs can have blood red water, whereas a tomb with a poison theme can have murky green water. Dive Wells are most fun when they are set up as portals. Dive Wells set as Portals will connect to each other. Sims will go to the bottom, and then emerge from the closest dive well on the same floor. It’s also possible to designate a Dive Well as an Uber Dive Well. Here, you designate a name so that you can define the precise point of origin and exit – even across multiple lots in the world. This lets you create one-of-a-kind entrances to island tombs and other inaccessible areas.

· Treasure Chest: The biggest reason to explore anything is to find treasure at the end. Treasure Chests let you fill your tomb creations with various treasures, keys, garbage, or whatever you can imagine. Opening and Inserting a Keystone a treasure chest are also Triggers that can set Activated Behaviors.

· Sarcophagus: The Sarcophagus can act as a large, ornate treasure chest, a place to hide, a place to sleep, and even a place to WooHoo. Most exciting, however, is its ability to spawn mummies. Mummies will patrol tombs in search of unsuspecting Sims to pummel and *gasp* curse! Mummies provide an element of danger and the unexpected to any tomb.

· Torch Lever: The torch lever, like the Floor Switch, is an object for Sims to pull on to trigger Activated Behaviors. Some can be set to active, whereas others can be dummies, forcing players to carefully examine their surroundings. It’s possible to define the colors of the torch light, which allows Tomb Designers to provide hints and clues on how to complete puzzles. Or, to simply set the ambience of a tomb!

· Pushable Statues: Pushable Statues are another classic adventure game element. They can be pushed on top of traps to disarm them, or cleverly pushed through a maze to unveil a formerly blocked path. Their most common use is to be paired with a floor switch. Floor Switch triggers can be set so that they activate something when a Sim is on them, but deactivate as soon as a Sim steps off of them. This means a Sim must push a statue on top of them in order to keep the floor switch depressed. Pushable Statues can be set to be secretly pushable (they require inspection), visibly pushable (no inspection needed), or not pushable at all.

· Hidden Stairways: Stairways from The Sims 3 can be set to Hidden now. This is an Activated Behavior, so that a Trigger can now Hide or Unhide the stairs. Hidden Stairways are a great way to surprise players. Just when it seems there’s no way out, pulling a switch reveals a stairway!
[Source via Eddie Makuch is Blast's Director of Video Game News Contact him at Makuch.E@BlastMagazine.com]

Though I have to wonder if  each country will have their own creatures as they are only mentioning Mummies in Egypt… and they are not saying anything about the weather

As stated on Gamespot: “World Adventures will let you trot the globe to three different worldwide locations, either on a simple vacation (which you can take at any time if you’ve got the simoleons to afford a plane ticket), or as part of an “adventure”–an expanded version of the opportunity system that would randomly pop up at certain points in your sims’ careers. These adventures will take you to one of these three nations to take on quests to explore and plunder trap-filled ruins on behalf of a greedy corporation, though once you’ve fully explored one locale’s ruins, you can decide whether you prefer to side with the company (who would prefer to bulldoze them), or with the locals, who would prefer to keep their landmarks safe.

This kind of quest- and choice-based gameplay is a first for the Sims series, and makes World Adventures a lot more like a role-playing game than any previous ones in the series. You’ll have an extensive adventure journal that will keep track of a huge number of statistics and achievements, including how many relics (a new type of collectible item) you’ve gathered, how many puzzles you’ve solved, different areas you’ve visited, and your sim’s “visa points” (which determine how long you can stay abroad). Stats are very important to the World Adventures team, and apparently to the Sims community, and there will be a ton of them. There will also be tons of new collectible items, including new plants, new seeds, and new catchable fish for all the packrats out there.

We watched a demonstration of a sim exploring a tomb in Egypt, which was filled with rubble that needed to be cleared away (and can be cleared faster with athletic skills). Behind the rubble lay a switch that opened up a stairway to a lower level, though the pyramid also had several other adjoining chambers which were obscured by a fog-of-war. Different chambers may contain treasure caches in urns with valuable relics, or dangerous traps, or worse threats.

We watched our explorer try to navigate a fire trap that belched flames up out of the floor, and fail miserably, catching on fire and making a panicky run to the nearest pool of water and diving in with a cowardly leap. However, after getting dunked, our sim was affected by the “soaked” moodlet (minor conditions in The Sims 3 that can positively or negatively affect your character), which also made him immune to fire, so he was able to safely cross. He moved on to a treasure room full of urns containing items, but didn’t realize that there was a sarcophagus at the other end of the room, from which a hideous mummy emerged. ”

Gamespot carries on with: “Mummies will attack your sims and drag them into a fistfight, and unless your sim is a master of the martial arts skill (which is new to World Adventures), you’ll end up with the mummy’s curse, which will kill you in two weeks’ worth of game time unless you pay a visit to the Sphinx, which is also in the area, and plead your case. Of course, if you prefer to be adventurous, you can actually spend the night inside a cursed sarcophagus and become a mummy yourself, which will cause you to move much more slowly and die should you catch on fire, but will also increase your strength and limit your personal needs (so unlike regular sims, you won’t need to sleep or take bathroom breaks) and otherwise make you much longer-lived. You’ll also get new, unique mummy social interaction options. (Though if you die as a mummy, you can come back as a ghost-mummy. Yes, a ghost-mummy.)

While you begin your adventures on location at a base camp, all three international locations have their own businesses and amenities, as well as locals whom you can meet, interact with, and even fall in love with and marry, then bring home to Sunset Valley (the original Sims 3 neighborhood). Sims from these different regions are being designed to look like they belong to those regions, and will have various behaviors added to their personalities under the hood that will serve the purpose of modeling their different cultures–should your sims decide to marry someone from abroad, their children will evince these behaviors.

Along with new behaviors come new traits, new skills, and new side activities that can be used to generate a handsome income on the side. The three new traits each enhance the expansion’s three new skills. The first new skill is martial arts, which is first learned in China, practiced with a training dummy item, and can be advanced to compete in a special martial arts tournament in that country. The second new skill is photography, which can be advanced through various skill levels to take on new styles (such as panoramic shots or sepia-tone photos), and the expansion will offer a series of photography challenges to fill an album collection, including simpler stuff like grabbing a photo of a new father carrying a baby to esoteric, secret photo setups that will be much harder to nab.

The final new skill is “nectar making,” which originates in France, and involves using grapes to make non-alcoholic “nectar,” which, if made properly, will give its imbibers a “good meal” moodlet that will make them much happier, but which, if made poorly, will make its drinkers spit out the swill and bring their moods down for a while. Skilled nectar vintners can age their bottles in a nectar rack and sell aged bottles for a pretty penny, and having an advanced gardening skill (to grow good grapes) will help considerably in this profession.

In addition to all this other stuff, World Adventures will add the three new explorable areas, each of which will be comparable in size to Sunset Valley, along with a huge number of brand-new clothing outfits, plus tons of scenery items, which can be used by industrious players to build out their own trap-filled ruins to explore, filled with hidden switches, buttons, staircases, traps, and treasures. There will definitely be a ton of interesting new stuff to play in an expansion that will go in a new direction for Sims expansion packs. World Adventures will be released later this year.“

Source via Gamespot

I am really looking forward to this new Sims 3 expansion, so many new things coming up!

So check out the latest screens from this upcoming game!

Interesting…. What do you think?