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The Sims 3 Collecting Guide
The Complete Guide to Transfiguration
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The Collecting skill has seen some massive improvements with the Sims 3 World Adventures expansion. Not only do we have access to many more items to pick up out in the world, we now have the ability to use transfiguration. When used intelligently, this new feature can allow Sims to make far more money from collected items than ever before. In this guide, we'll learn some example recipes World Adventures owners can use to make great money transfiguring gems and metals.
Getting Started
To try transfiguration, your Sim will need to purchase the Carter's Display Case XL Edition. It can be found in buy mode's sort by function under surfaces - display. Costing just $1,250 Simoleons, it is a small investment to make. The smaller displays won't work, because you need the XL Display Case's capacity of 8 objects in order to activate and begin transfiguration. The process itself costs $500 to use, so it will add some overhead costs to the process but your Sim should have no trouble recovering it.
Note that the display case can only work with cut gems and smelted metals. It is however possible to use random items like artifacts to allow your Sim to transfigure mysterious Mr. Gnomes. There are other transfiguration possibilities as well, such as fragments your Sim can assemble to create new items, along with ancient coins, but these recipes can't yet be confirmed.
Transfiguring Gems
SoulpeaceTo get a soulpeace gem, you need to have your Sim place five Different Gems on the display case and then activate. This is far less complex than I'd initially thought. So, for example with the following recipe my Sim will receive a soulpeace:
4x Emerald Cut Blue Topaz: ~$120
Pear Cut Quartz: ~$35
Polished Split Cut Geode: ~$200
Emerald Cut Ruby: ~$35
Plumbbob Cut Alabaster: ~$100
For a total price of $500 Simoleons (values listed are including the price of the cut) plus $500 simoleons to activate the display, the transfiguration costs about $1,000 Simoleons and produced a Soulpeace valued at $1600. Notice that I only used 4 different gem cuts but 5 varieties of gem. The costs here could have been reduced by using lower value gem cuts. This makes the soulpeace a great way to make extra money from the low value gems your Sim finds lying around. Using higher value gems does seem to result in better Soulpeace gems. They can go up to $4,000 in value if not higher. While your Sim might have to use some more valuable resources to achieve this result, the soulpeace will more than make up for costs when it's cut in heart shaped form or even transfigured into a skull-cut Soulpeace.
How to Get the Skull Cut
If I had used 5 different gem cuts in the previous example, I would have reached the tipping point for the skull cut. With 5 different cuts on the table, your Sim will produce a skull cut. The gem type that results from this combination is generally the type you used the most of. So, for example, using the following combination I could reliably produce a skull cut Tiberium:
4x heart shaped tiberium
1x Spire Cut Tiberium
1x Emerald Cut Ruby
1x Oval Cut Sapphire
1x Plumbbob cut Blue Topaz
Note that only 4 gem types were used but 5 different cuts. This results in a Skull Cut Tiberium. This is a money sink that is for aesthetics more than anything. Spire cut tiberium is far more valuable but many people want these skulls because they flat look cool. Many players want to use the highest value cuts to do this, but it's not really necessary. Use lower grade gem cuts to accomplish this instead and you'll reduce the overhead cost.
To maximize profit from Skull Cuts, use higher value gems as the primary type for a formula such as this. For example, skull cut pink diamonds would be far more profitable than emeralds because of the value multipler. 10x the value of an emerald at $20 is nothing. 10x the value of a pink diamond coming in at $1,500 becoming a large pink diamond can be worth more than $30,000.
Because it's the cuts that are counted here, you can use all of one gem type with varying cuts to accomplish this. It makes skull cut soulpeace more accessible, but remember that you can throw some lower value gems into the mix to help meet the 8 required.
Large Gems
This brings us to large gems. Generally the resultant product is a large gem when you've not satisfied either of the other requirements. Using 8 of any gem type guarantees a large gem. If you used 2 each of four types, your Sim would have a 25% chance of snagging any of those types in large form. Using all large gems in one of the other combinations may result in a higher weight, and thus higher value final product.
Transfiguring Metals
Large Ingots
Placing all of one type of ingot on the display case will result in a large ingot. This can be used to your advantage with the below formulae to produce gems with higher values. Use this when you have many of one type of metal and would like to condense it for use in one of the other two recipes.
Supernovium
Supernovium is produced when a Sim places more more than 5 different metals on the display. Add higher weight, higher value metals to the display to produce a better Supernovium. It will generally come out higher in value but Supernovium and Compendium shouldn't be used to produce Supernovium as it seems to reach a peak value of just shy of $10,000 using this method.
Another method to get large Supernovium ingots is to use a particular metal from each of the three foreign countries. The metals are Iridium from France, Platinum from China, and Mummitomium from Egypt. Using only one type metal, stack four (4) ingots in the upper left slot of the Carter XL Display and one ingot in each of the remaining slots. A total of 11 ingots are used at one time and they must be all of one type of the three metals. This will produce a large ingot of the metal used, plus a large Supernovium ingot valued at around $80,000 (depending on the weight/value of the metals used). Update: Recent testing points to this being a bug that has been corrected by The Sims 3 designer, Electronic Arts. Will update more as needed.
This brings us to the absolute best metal:
Compendium
This is the bread and butter of metal transfigurification. The resultant product will generally be worth about 25% more than the metals used to create it. This means that your Sim can continually evolve better and better Compendium. This type of metal is produced when 2-4 different metals are added to the display. You can expect to almost always see a return on the overall value of the metals placed. Use compendium and supernovium in your mix for optimal effect. It's also worth noting that the best metal should generally be placed in the top-left corner of the display. You can also stack metals but it seems to only be feasible up to 9 total on the display. Any more and you may be wasting money. Work your way up to large ingots and eventually your Sim can bring in tens or hundreds of thousands from a single transmutation.
Transfiguring Other Items
Gems, Metals and Relics can all be transfigured. If you place a mixture of these items on a display case, you'll end up with a result based on the total value of the items placed. Here's a table detailing what you'll get based on various values in Simoleons. Note that Nectar bottles produced this way do age appropriately and can gradually surpass the value of the items transmuted. Be sure to age them in Nectar Racks.| Value of Items | Transfigurification Result |
| $200 and Below | Random Seed (not special) |
| $201 - $499 | $350-$700 Simoleons |
| $500 - $999 | $22-40 Ancient Coins |
| $1,000 - $3,499 | A Mysterious Mr. Gnome |
| $3,500 - $4,999 | Uncut Tiberium |
| $5,000 - $11,999 | Fragments such as Sarcophagus of Kings, Dive Well etc. |
| $12,000 - $24,999 | Sarcophagus of Kings Fragment Specifically |
| $25,000 - $49,999 | Bottle of Nectar around $25,000 in Value |
| $50,000 - $99,999 | Bottle of Nectar around $50,000 in Value |
| $100,000+ | Bottle of Nectar $75,000 - $100,000 in Value |
| Collecting | ||||
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Maps | Bugs | Butterflies | Gems | Metals |
| Space Rocks | Transfiguration | World Adventures Maps | ||
| The Sims 3 Skills | |||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Tips | Cheats | Athletic | Charisma | Collecting | Cooking | Fishing |
| Gardening | Guitar | Handiness | Inventing | Logic | Martial Arts |
| Nectar Making | Painting | Parenting | Photography | Sculpting | Writing |
