IllusoryThrall’s Home Page

Hello, and welcome!  You’ve found my sims blog.  I’m known as IllusoryThrall on Sims 3/4 Forums, the gallery, Origin, Twitch, and on Twitter; and Wyldhawke on modthesims.com and boolprop.  Please send me a friend request on any or all of those! 

Over the years, this blog has grown, and it is no longer just used for my Sims challenge attempts and stories, but also the headquarters for info on my streaming on Twitch, and a safe place to keep the challenge rule sets I have either updated or written for Sims 4. To that end, in January 2022 I am relaunching this site with a new theme and an entirely new menu structure to attempt to make it easier to find things. Below, you will find snippets of the sections this site contains and links to find out more about them. Feel free to explore, there’s plenty of interesting things here to find!

My Builds

One of my favorite things to do in Sims is building. Even when my brain isn’t working well enough to play a challenge, I can still build. So I’ve amassed a rather large (in my opinion) collection of builds I’m actually proud enough of to share. They’re up on the gallery, but as we all know, the Gallery pictures never show the true beauty of a lot… so I want to add some pictures to show them off on this blog. This is a section that is very much still in-progress, though, so bear with me as I work on it over the next few months.

Some things to check out in this section: progress on my Save Files, my Historical Builds, pages devoted to showing off the channel point redeem builds I have done for other people, and my #100daycreativity builds.

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SimLit & Challenge Attempts

Simlit comes in many different forms. Some people think it’s just stories about the sims, but I believe it can also refer to any writing that is inspired by your sims. Stories, commentary and picture posts.. Heck, even just a series of pictures can tell a story and show what’s happening in your game. I am utterly addicted to challenges. Playing them, writing them, thinking about them, and most of all… starting a new challenge. Which explains why there are so many different stories and challenges listed in this section. I tried to split them up in a way that makes sense – I separated out the ones that are fully stories about the sims themselves and their lives from the challenges where I just take pictures to document what happens in the game, then write some commentary to explain each picture. I enjoy writing both styles, but they both come with their own pitfalls. Their own highs and lows. And more than anything – they both require a certain amount of pure inspiration and creativity. Which is 1, why I like them.. And 2, why sometimes it’s hard – or next to impossible – to write on any given day. I always fully plan to go back to stories I’ve had to stop for one reason or another, and I will always feel at least a bit guilty for the ones that I’ve simply had to fully face the fact that I need to throw in the towel and retire them. I’ve tried to make this section as easy to navigate as I possibly can, but with so many stories, keeping things organized is sometimes difficult. If you find a missing or wrong link, PLEASE tell me so I can fix it. I do try to always have links from each post to the previous post in that story as well as the following post, and I hope that helps navigation. Enjoy your browse here, and feel free to leave comments!

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Challenge Rules

My love of challenges is widely known… and with my overly creative mind, it only makes sense that, eventually, I would turn to writing my own challenges. It took a while for me to get up the nerve to actually write a fully original challenge. Being that those are not easy to write and test, many of the challenges I have written are ultimately inspired by another challenge. I try very hard to make sure to credit the original challenge writers (if I can find them) when I do a challenge – and have even gone so far as to get the writer’s permission to adapt their challenge for my use. 

The first original challenge I actually wrote was my Apartment Switch Challenge, which, ultimately, was inspired by the Drifter Challenge, which is one of my favorite challenges of all time. That challenge took me months to write, and a couple years to fully test. It’s also the ONLY challenge I’ve written or edited that I have, ultimately, done a full test run on with both difficulties played. I’m working on testing the others, but I didn’t feel the need to make sure they were possible as much as the Switch. 

After the switch, there have been others, and there are some that are in the works as I write this (as well as some others that are mere errant thoughts or ideas floating around my head). Therefore, this section will continue to grow. I will make every effort to describe the challenges on this page through the page excerpts to make it easier for you to pick out which, if any, you want to play yourself. I also split my challenges up between what I think are the two main types of challenges: build challenges and gameplay challenges. This should make it easier to figure out what the challenge will entail.

One final note: if you like one of my challenges, and find that you want to change or adapt the rules for yourself or others to play, I am 100% okay with that. All I ask is that you credit me in your write-up and maybe put a link to the original challenge instead of saying the whole thing was written by you. Beyond that, enjoy these challenges! If you have any questions or comments about any of them, feel free to post them!

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Thrall LIVE & Shells

January 2022: Things have changed drastically for me in the last year, and almost all of it has been positive. This is the section of this blog that is dedicated to that journey. Suffice it to say, Thrall has gone LIVE. I now stream full time on Twitch, and most of it is devoted to Sims 4. I also have a youtube channel, and I’m actively trying to be a part of the current Sims 4 community. I miss blogging, and I do plan fully to go back to it, but much of my life is now devoted to streaming and all the time and energy that goes along with that. I started streaming on a lark, and in what I thought would be a futile attempt to get past my crippling social anxiety.

Long story short: not only have I reduced my social anxiety and made a ton of new amazing friends – but I have found that streaming 100% helps with my mental health. I am more stable now than I have been for MOST of my life. And that’s not something I am willing to stop. So – if my blogging is suffering, I’m sorry.. But this is for me, and right now what it turns out I really needed was social interaction and a purpose each day. Welcome to Thrall LIVE.

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