Develeopment of Skills
Martial Arts
If you want to study Martial Arts then the place to be is China. China is the home of the Phoenix Martial Arts academy.
Not only is Martial Arts easy to learn but you can also be rewarded for it too. In China you can partake in an adventure chain that will reward you with Visa Points and cash while you train.
If you don't want to learn from the adventure chain then head over to the Academy in China and start practicing on the dummy. After you get to level 3 you can start practicing on the block breaker. Finally, once you've hit level 5 you can start training simply by meditating. Not only do you learn martial arts skill from this but you also gain some other neat benefits too.
Really the most important things you gain from meditating are the ability to Zeneport after a few hours of meditation and a boost in efficiency. Zeneport will allow you to go to any point in the neighborhood that you can see instantly. You will also see a moodlet develop while meditating. Basically you become calm and can do things faster and better. What this means is that if you meditate and then study at the library, you'll learn even faster.
Unfortunately if you Zeneport, you also lose the productive moodlet. However if you meditate for 150+ hours you'll become a Master of Meditation and be able to use the "Tranquil Transference." This will teleport you like Zeneport but you will only lose 30 minutes of Meditative Focus. You can do this as long as you have 30 minutes of Focus left meaning that you can do it multiple times and you don't have to be meditating to do it.
But... Remember the block breaker? This can be used to make you money. Once you've gotten your skill up and are capable of easily breaking a few Thin Stone Blocks at a time you can move up to the Space Rock. Space rocks will drop gems and you'll get better at finding gems and break the rocks faster with some practice.
All gems may be sold as is or cut for (usually) more value. You can get gems ranging from under $30 all the way up to about $1500. But the gems you want aren't just normal gems. You want the Tiberium crystals. If you manage to find tiberium, don't leave it in your inventory for too long or you will start to get sick. If you put it out, the gem will likely grow and when it reaches the form of a Large Spire Cut, it will be worth roughly $40,000.
It takes roughly 30 minutes to break a space rock. It's not the best method of income but it can really provide a boost.
Also, remember that just because you've reached level 10 in Martial arts, that doesn't mean that you're a Master yet. You can still be defeated quite easily. Like the chess system, you have a hidden skill value for sub-categories of a skill. You improve in sparring the more you spar and you improve in board breaking the more boards you break. It is worth it to become a master at sparring because this will help you defend yourself against Mummies who are very skilled and may curse you if you lose.
Belts
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Sparring and Tournaments
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Nectaration
Nectaration is how you make Nectar and Nectar has two nice qualities. The first is that when you drink Nectar you can receive quite a few moodlets, sometimes bad if the drink is a bad mix but usually good especially with the right mix of fruit. The second benefit is the amount of money you can make doing this. But first you need to buy a Nectar Maker which runs for $1,500 and can only be found in France.
You can make over $2000 in a very short period of time provided you have the right fruit (THAT is the tough part). Better still, if you store the Nectar in a basement on a good rack, your Nectar will increase by 10% of it's base every day. For instance, if you start with a $500 bottle then every ten days it will gain another $500 in value. A full rack of such bottles would start at $7500 and gain $7500 every 10 days.
Clearly it's an investment. Where your Nectar Makers are located doesn't change the quality of your Nectar but where you store it does. Whether it's stored inside or outside doesn't matter. It doesn't matter what floor of the basement you store it on, as long as it's in a basement. The only actually differences in storage come from which type of rack you store it on and whether you store it below ground level or not.
The good rack and below ground level will net you 10% value increase per day. Any other combination won't be as good. You can also store the really old bottles you may have gotten in France (the ones that are thousands of years old) and they will age and gain value in the same way but it will be at a rate based on some other number, not the value you got it at. For instance, I had a bottle worth $9,626 and it only increased in value to 9,823 the next day. A far cry from the 10,588 that would have been a 10% increase.
Also, as for best mixing combinations, you can try a variety of things. You don't have to use just grapes, you can use any fruit. If you use a sufficient amount of special fruits like Life Fruit or Flame fruit then you will receive the benefits of the fruits like gaining a longer life. There are two mixes that you should try though.
9 Life Fruit, 1 Pomegrenate - this has gotten me a bottle of roughly $605
6 Life Fruit, 3 Flame Fruit, and some other fruit (maybe expenive grapes) - This second combo will give you well over 100 points from positive moodlets.
You should be mindful of the challenges associated with this skill because they greatly increase the value of Nectar Making and one of them will tell you how good a fruit combination will be before you waste the time and fruit to make it.
Photography
To start taking pictures, you need to buy a camera. You can buy cheap, disposable cameras but they're cheap, disposable, and don't have any nifty features. For the two better types of cameras you'll have to travel to Egypt. Once you have a camera, head over to the book shop in Egypt and buy the book to learn photography. Start reading.
This will get you up to level three fast but after that you just have to practice. Walk around and take pictures of everything. Take pictures of sims, furniture, landmarks - whatever you can think of. After a couple of pictures of the same thing or sim, you won't gain any experience for it. Try again another time and you may gain more experience.
There are really only two main aspects of Photography, collections and money. The better you get at photography and the more challenges you finish, the more money you will make on pictures. You'll be able to add different filters and mix things up to get the max value. It's not hard and it's fast for the most part. It's a decent source of income.
As for the collections, pictures are broken up into sets. If you finish ten of these then you will finish a challenge as well. Otherwise, finishing these sets is just for fun. There are sets for all sorts of things. When you take your first picture of a collection, it will be added to your journal and you can see what else is in that collection. Have fun trying to find all the parts to a collection.
