World Handyman Championships

[Seabody]

My strategy seems to be covered. I used my 3 vacations visiting each country, finding the items from said country to be upgraded, and upgrading them. I don't think I used Egypt though, as there were no items that needed upgrading to increase my percentage there. In the end I missed out on Food Replicator and Teleporter.

My first thought on this was Tinkering, but in my testing, I confirmed that time was variable. Sometimes it took something like 46 minutes to upgrade, others, way more. But I discovered Tinkered objects add to your "objects upgraded" count (obviously, but I wanted to check) so I alternated between regular upgrades and tinkering.

[smartburn]

Ah, the motive mobile. Being a relatively new user of the expansions beyond Ambitions (I now have all except Pets), I only discovered the beauty of it recently. Even so, I don't think my score would've been anywhere near the top since I still never would have thought of many of the strategies I'm seeing now aside from that reward. I did not have a test file, I just jumped right in.

Mandy Handy was a handy, inappropriate, brave and friendly loner - the first two traits served me well throughout the challenge, but I probably would have dropped brave and/or maybe loner for ambitious.  I kept her in the firefighting career longer than she needed to be, though it was inappropriately helpful at times ("yo, I just saved your life, mind if I stick around to upgrade your trash compactor? Yeah, didn't think so."). By the time I realized what LTW would've been possible to achieve in that period of time (for me it would've been "swimming in cash"), it was too late so there was no food replicator or teleporter in this game.   

I could go on, but I'll stop before this delves further into "oh why did/didn't I do X" than it has already and go back to lurking, lol. I had a lot of fun with this challenge and I hope to complete most if not all of the ones for this year's tournament. Thanks Metro!

[MomOfMany]

Yeah I didn't think of the Motive Mobile either. I have never actually used it so I wasn't 100% sure how it worked probably should have tested that. With my test runs I did time to upgrades to an extent. I didn't time by min but by hour so it wasn't totally accurate but it was enough for me to know which ones to do and which is avoid! But also in my test run I upgraded the doorbell several times and only a few registered so I didn't know the trick to getting it to count every time. Although now I think it is that you must upgrade it back to basic after everyone is that correct? I focused on the LTH but still didn't have enough for the food replicator after buying the teleportation pad and prepared traveler. I did a lot of hopping about town looking for all the unique items to upgrade which I could have avoided had I did better in testing. Also I joined the firefighter career but didn't ever go to work and never went to any emergencies after the first two and I kept the job through out for the money each week! I made it all the way to level 8 too!