

It's a really old challenge, but the gist of it is that you start with an empty map and build it up by earning it. I've been known to go to France to just read skill books, too. it makes the game easier, if you do it right. Similarly with ITF - only you age! But with a plumbot making Young Again potions on the chemistry bench aging doesn't matter! Another plumbot cloning a swarm of plasma bugs for $$, and 3 or 4 plumbots mining the mausoleum for alchemy stuff, genie lamps, tiberium, supernovium and so on, you can come back to the future with gobs of Lifetime happiness points (be sure to tag a statue to get either the plumbot or Simolian give away 20,000 LTW points before returning to the present!) The plumbot skill has a very rich dream tree too. you do NOT study out of those worthless textbooks! So, you get all leveled up and you go back and your sim nor you have aged a day! If you're a science major, for example, you read the science, alchemy, gardening or go fishing. I feel like it's a personal failure if my sim studies out of the textbook that he gets when going to uni.

So when I want to level up, that's what University or ITF is for! Most of the useful skills have a university degree associated with it, so you pick a degree that matches the skill you want to learn. When I play a world with well designed sims, like Midnight Hollow, I don't want them to all age up and die on me before I can get some skills to interact with them. The good thing about these worlds is that I stay in them - I just don't care if they all age, die etc. pants from ITF, shirt from Diesel, other's dressed from showtime. Sometimes I play empty world's and use NRAAS master controller to populate them with random sims.
