Emergencies

Five types of emergencies can occur in your town. When you first begin the Firefighter career, you only have to tackle small house fires.

However, as you get promotions and are on the job longer, you must deal with more dangerous situations, such as house fires that threaten lives and disasters at venues that require extended attention.

Small House Fire

Small house fires are the most basic emergency you must attend to on the job. When a small house fire breaks out, go to the site and put out the flames before too much damage is caused.

The breadth of the fire is very limited and the owners of the lot have already cleared out, so the fire poses no danger to them, only their property.

Just because a small house fire doesn't look like a big deal, don't hesitate to get the job done. The longer the fire lasts, the bigger it gets (within reason) and the lower your emergency score.

Large House Fire/Earthquake

Large house fires and earthquakes are much more dangerous because they pose direct threats to life.

These raging fires must be put out as soon as possible to prevent injury, although there is a good chance that your Sim will be required to rescue people on the lot before putting the entire fire out.

If Sims are trapped in the house, they are noted in the Current Job box.

When you report to a large house fire, you pull out a hose to deal with the flames on the house exterior before you can enter and help out civilians.

Sometimes, to get at a Sim inside a burning house, you must break down a door. Doors that you can break down have axe symbols over them.

If you have put out the fire around the door, you can then choose the Break Down Door interaction. Your Sim pulls out an axe and starts chopping.

Higher Athletic skill means faster door chopping (and that's why you pump iron on your time off). After several swings, the Sim attempts to kick in the door.

If that fails, your Sim must go back to chopping before trying again, which eats up valuable time.

Sims who are not Firefighters tend to panic around flames. And by panic, we mean they stand there with their feet bolted to the floor while the entire house burns down around them.

To get these Sims out of the house before they are killed, you must enter the same room as them and use the Convince to Run interaction.

Your Firefighter gets in their face and makes big motions to start running. After a few moments, the panicked Sim obeys and flees the burning building.

If a child is stuck in the inferno, you Sim must click on the child and use the Carry Out interaction.

Your Firefighter sweeps the kid up and carries her through the burning house, setting her down safely outside to the great relief of the rest of the household.

Once all Sims inside have been rescued, you can go back to putting out the rest of the fire and ending the emergency, hopefully with a good score.

Gnome Invasion

Gnome Invasions are non-fire emergencies that take place on residential or community lots.

Instead of responding to a blaze, your Firefighter arrives to find the family under attack by several angry magical gnomes. The number of angry gnomes is noted in the Current Job box.

To end this emergency, click on each gnome and grab it before it can move to another part of the house. These gnomes do not stay still for very long before disappearing and reappearing elsewhere on the lot, so hurry.

Building Disaster

Disaster sometimes strikes at the venues that your Sim disappears into, like the bistro or the theater. When these building disasters hit, you see them on map view as fire icons on top of venue locations.

Click on the Deal with Emergency interaction to rush to the venue and see what's happening. Building disasters are not interactive like house fires. Instead, your Sim bravely pushes through the gathered crowd to enter the venue.

They remain inside for several hours, emerging only when the job is complete.

There are three special variations on the building disaster—these are epic disasters at the science facility, hospital, and warehouse.

They only occur at these venues. Your Sim attacks these emergencies just like a regular building disaster, but they last much longer and result in a special medal from City Hall.

These are the three epic disasters:

Science facility: When strange, colorful explosions erupt from the science facility, you know something's gone wrong. Rush to the scene to help deal with an experiment gone awry.

Hospital: An x-ray machine malfunction has turned several technicians into electricity-drawing mutants. Get to the hospital and quell these lightning rods before the whole place gets burned to the ground.

Warehouse: The big boss of the local crime facility thought a weather machine would help achieve world domination. Nope. All it ended up doing was pulling every rain cloud into the warehouse and flooding the joint.