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The Sims 3 Collecting Guide

The Complete Guide to Transfiguration

Collecting
MapsBugsButterfliesGemsMetals
NanitesSpace RocksTransfigurationWorld Adventures Maps
A large ingot in the Sims 3 World Adventures produced by the Carter's Display Case XL Edition

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

Soulpeace
To 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 be worth about 11% 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 ItemsTransfigurification Result
$200 and BelowRandom Seed (not special)
$201 - $499$350-$700 Simoleons
$500 - $999$22-40 Ancient Coins
$1,000 - $3,499A Mysterious Mr. Gnome
$3,500 - $4,999Uncut Tiberium
$5,000 - $11,999Fragments such as Sarcophagus of Kings, Dive Well etc.
$12,000 - $24,999Sarcophagus of Kings Fragment Specifically
$25,000 - $49,999Bottle of Nectar around $25,000 in Value
$50,000 - $99,999Bottle of Nectar around $50,000 in Value
$100,000+Bottle of Nectar $75,000 - $100,000 in Value

Transfiguring Tiberium
This tip was submitted via email from Jagid, who has provided the following numbers to help maximize profit with gem cutting/transfiguration. Since you need to be within the 3500-4999 range in order to get Tiberium, it's actually a waste of money to cut a pink diamond into a heart shape and miss out on the huge profit Tiberium can provide. Here's a quote with the value ranges:

"My results studying the cuts were interesting. I based my study on the theory of making the most profit possible. That includes never making a cut that ends up to be worth more than 4700 simoleons. That way the sims can add a few junk cuts, relics, or metals to stay below 5000 and transfigure a Tiberium, let it grow a while, and make 35-40k."

0-60 Emerald
61 Oval
62 Pear
63-84 Plumbbob
(Skip Marquis)
85-166 Crystal Ball
(Skip Sculptor's Egg)
167-500 Brilliant
501-940 Heart Shaped
941-1342 Brilliant
1343-1566 Sculptor's Egg
1567-1807 Crystal Ball
1808-2043 Marquis
2044-2350 Plumbbob

So with Jagid's data, we would not use a heart shaped cut on a $1000 gem, as it would be too high to make Tiberium. Instead, we'd use Brilliant and throw in some smaller gems to get an extremely lucrative Tiberium. Thanks for the tip, Jagid! You can also find a helpful program he created to calculate gem cuts.

simone23 at our forum wanted to include the star cut, and approach this the other direction by ensuring gems are not worth over 3200:

The info that Jagid has compiled is fantastic, but it doesn't include the star cut. Here are my calculations on maximum profitability, aiming at a finished value of 3200 on the more valuable gems (figuring that the value of the other items in transfiguration will make up the other 300 to get to Tiberium).

Emerald <= 40
Oval 40 - 60*
Skip pear, skip marquis
Plumbob 60 - 83
Crystal Ball 84 - 166
Brilliant 167-300
Star Cut 300-600
Heart 600-799 (value to get a 3500 finished gem: 700)
Star Cut 800-914 (3500 finished: 875)
Brilliant 915-1066 (1000)
Sculptor's Egg 1067-1230 (1166)
Crystal Ball 1231-1391 (1346)
Marquis 1392-1599 (1521)
Plumbob 1600-1828 (1750)
Pear 1829-2133 (2000)
Oval 2134-2559 (2333)
Emerald 2560-3600 (2800)
Heart 3600+

The furthest that you can really stretch the emerald cut and still have a prayer of sneaking in under the tiberium cap is to start with a gem with an uncut value of 3920. This will give you a finished value of 4900, so unless you have some very low valued trash to fill out the display case it's better to just use the heart shape.

*On gems with a starting value of 60, the oval, pear and plumbob cuts are all equally profitable, and really you're just cutting these for Soulpeace transfiguration, so what you want to aim for on any gem with an uncut value of under 75 or so is emerald cuts on 7/8 of your cheap gems and oval cuts on the other 1/8.

To see how the math was generated, click here.

The Sims 3 Seasons: Alien Transmute
LordHellscream of our Sims 3 Forum provided a tip for using Seasons' Alien transmute ability to make big money with Transfiguration.

  1. Step 1: collect metals, the best/easiest way to do this is having a werewolf sim. I started a brand new game with a werewolf just practice hunting solo at your front yard for a couple days you should have level high enough to hunt for specific collectable type, then I just had him hunt for metal.
  2. Smelt all your metals, then combine them to make compendium.
  3. Once you have the compendium, hand it to your alien friend to transmute, each transmute adds to about 15%-20% value, but that's not what makes this crazy. What makes it crazy is that, the transmute also convert the type of the material to UN-SMELTED metal of 1 category higher. So when you transmute a compendium you will get mummitomium, not a mummitomium ingot, but a RAW un-smelted mummitomium. Transmuting the mummitomium will get you unsmelted supernovium (which is the best type you can get), once you get supernovium, you continue transmute it for up to 4 times total to get the max value.
  4. Now this is the best part, please note that for this part to work this best you should have the gatherer's trait, which increases the values of metal ingot after smelting. It likely works fine without the trait, but with this trait, each time I smelt a metal, the value increases ~10 times of the value of the un-smelted metal. Which means, however much your supernovium rock worth, it will worth 10 times after.
  5. Once you get the supernovium ingot, you wouldn't be able to transmute it more, since the game is still considered that to be the same item, and you can only transmute the same item 4 times, but remember you can turn any metal into compendium and the total value of the compendium is worth 11% more?
  6. That's right! combine the supernovium ingot with 7 other ingots (total of 2-4 types) to form a compendium ingot. Which now can be transmute again into RAW supernovium, which can then be smelted to increase its value for 10 times more.
  7. Repeat this and in just a few days you can get something that worth billion simuleons.

Note: the game is has a max limit on cash which is 100 million. so keep that in mind.

Collecting
MapsBugsButterfliesGemsMetals
NanitesSpace RocksTransfigurationWorld Adventures Maps
The Sims 3 Skills
Advanced TechAlchemyAthleticBot MakingCharismaCollectingConsignment
CookingFishingGardeningGuitarHandinessInstrumentsInventing
Laser RhythmLogicMartial ArtsMixologyNectar MakingPaintingPhotography
RidingScienceScuba DivingSculptingSocial NetworkingStreet ArtWriting


Share Tips and FAQs (11)

Our Sims Forum is the place to go for faster answers to questions and discussions about the game. Use the form below to share your own experiences and provide helpful tips to other readers.

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Blossom says...
If you have the Supernatural expansion pack, then gem dust counts as one type of cut. So, to get a soulpeace gem, you can place all but one piece as gem dust. For example, one each of; geode, amethyst, smokey quartz, and ruby gem dust. Then 3 gem dust piles of quartz and 1 plumbob cut quartz. This combination will get you a soulpeace gem at almost no cost to you. however, if you use all gem dust, you will receive gem dust.

The gem dust pile will also count as one of your cuts for the 5 cuts required to receive a skull cut gem.
22nd January 2014 12:10am
terakhan says...
With the addition of the Science skill from University Life, this can become even crazier for income.
Create a high-value piece of compendium, clone it repeatedly, transfigure the pile of clones, and clone the result in turn.
13th June 2014 11:33am
Christy says...
Seriously? I've had this stinking expansion since it was released (so, YEARS) and I'm JUST now finding out about transmutation? I'm so excited to try it out...
20th February 2014 5:40pm
Gracefulclutz says...
I totally did this on accident once, I was playing and my cat knocked into my hand while I was playing. I started freaking out, but then the display stopped moving and out popped a 50000 Simoleon Nectar Bottle. And that got me thinking. Does anyone know if nectar produced by Transfiguration helps complete the Bottomless Nectar Cellar Lifetime reward?
26th March 2014 11:36am
Jess says...
You can transfigure space rocks as well.
7th February 2014 1:00pm
Wirxaw says...
I think there is something missing in the guide - the price of the gems matter, not their number.
I am making a collection of Skulls, and among all the failures, two were distinctive:
>More than twice have I tried 5 different cuts of the SAME gem type. Say, 5 amethyst with 5 cuts. Remaining 3 gems I've used whichever were spare, already "skulled". So if these gems were something MUCH more valuable than all amethysts combined(any 1k+ gem) - the resulting Skull would be in fact this expensive gem, not amethyst, regardless of 5 different cuts coming from amethyst and that there are 4< gems of the same type.
>When I tried to transfigure a Soulpeace(meanwhile trying to see if it accumulates price, like Compendium), I've used Sun cuts of 8 different gems. Since the guide states that for Soulpeace - cuts do not matter, gems do not matter, only as long as there are 5 different gems.
In the end I got a supposedly random(since it wasn't most expensive) Large Sun Cut.
27th June 2014 10:06pm
Wirxaw says...
Just ****ing now did 5 different cut Cintrines, Sun\Heart(one of them was heart, don't remember which) Tanzanite, Luminous Gem and Smoky Quartz. Clearly Luminous is most expensive, but now... Large Skull Cut Tanzanite! What gives?!
So far I can only figure that 3 remaining gems have to be LESS in price than the 5, even if it means emerald cuts... Will test further later.
27th June 2014 10:21pm
Dogwolf12 says...
If you have Supernatural, get the Gem Cutting Machine. It only costs 975 Simoleons and if you want to make a living off cutting gems, get it. It cuts gems for no cost into any unlocked cut (not skull cut or cuts received by Transfiguration) so if you have the heart cut you can possibly break even with one gem!
27th May 2018 9:50pm
Cassie says...
Where can I find the Carter's XL Display Case?
14th August 2015 3:15pm
Sorreah says...
It should be noted that the regular/smaller display works just fine for this. It does fit 8 objects, the larger one just holds a lot more and gives you a lot more room to play with other objects/the value of gems due to how many more gems it can hold
28th October 2015 10:54am
Sorreah says...
Edit: okay, the larger doesn't hold more, that was my mistake, but they both hold 8
28th October 2015 12:01pm
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