Skill mini challenges Retuning?

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Astra M
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Skill mini challenges Retuning?

Post by Astra M » March 24th, 2019, 4:42 am

Background: I've been playing a long challenge that requires completing mini challenges. I know from others' comments that some of the skill challenges are broken, but can be managed with workarounds. But I was wondering if there was a way to complete or tweak the mini challenges directly via MasterController, etc.? So far I can't figure out anything via poking around. Is this a Retuner thing?

If so, one of the mini challenges that I'm trying to figure out is the dog collecting mini challenge. It seems to me that there must be some kind of weighting error in how likely a dog is to find a space rock versus everything else. (If you haven't played the dog mini challenge, believe me, this issue is super annoying.)

It would be nice to have a way to "complete" or tweak mini challenges. Any help would be appreciated.

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igazor
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Skill mini challenges Retuning?

Post by igazor » March 24th, 2019, 4:54 am

Hi there. I do not believe the challenges themselves are reachable or editable with mods, could be mistaken, but it seems reasonable that Retuner could be used to increase (or decrease) the likelihood of things happening or spawning that are required to complete those challenges.

Unless anyone else here has more specific suggestions, I would suggest having a look at the master ITUN file to see what things Retuner is cabable of reaching. It's far too long to read or organize in one's mind generally, but you could do ctrl+F types of searches on it in a text editor such as Notepad or, even better, Notepad++, for interesting keywords. That takes some practice, "dog" for example would be useless with too many results but spacerock or some combination like that might be helpful.

The file is here, linked to at the end of this page. Don't worry that it says 1.63 as the later patches didn't really change this aspect of the game files, so this is the most current version we have to work with.
Retuner-FAQ

Astra M
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Skill mini challenges Retuning?

Post by Astra M » March 24th, 2019, 2:00 pm

Thanks, igazor; that seems reasonable. I did find one way to reduce the total number of rocks required via Retuner, so that was good. I suppose if this were more straightforward a mod would already have been created by now! Thanks again; will post again if I find anything useful along these lines.

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Tropical Insomniac
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Skill mini challenges Retuning?

Post by Tropical Insomniac » March 24th, 2019, 3:10 pm

I found a comment in the DogHunting Skill xml file which I interpret to mean that dog dig spots are spawned by normal spawners. If that's correct, then you should be able to use MC to look for rock spawners, then follow whatever the normal procedure is for locating a dog hunting dig spot. (I don't play with Pets enabled, so no idea if they're visible or what.)

The setting is kChanceOfSpawningDigSpot, and the comment says "Range 0.0 - 1.0. The chance a spawner will attempt to spawn a dig spot instead of the normally spawned objects." It defaults to 0.25.

Astra M
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Skill mini challenges Retuning?

Post by Astra M » March 25th, 2019, 2:44 pm

Thought it would be wise to spell out the Retuner settings for anyone else who'd like to adjust the dog skill challenge to something more manageable:

Sims3.Gameplay.Skills.DogHuntingSkill
kNumGemsForGemFinder
kNumMetalsForMetalFinder
kNumRocksForRockFinder

Value: 50 (default)

On a side note, this method looks simpler than trying to adjust the percentages of rocks found. I need some help understanding what this means:
kEnvironmentPerValue
kMaxEnvironment


Which are all found under the spawners:
Sims3.Gameplay.Objects.Spawners.Gem
Sims3.Gameplay.Objects.Spawners.Metal
Sims3.Gameplay.Objects.Spawners.Rock


The gem values are higher than the metal and rock values, and my experience in the dog challenge is that you will find gems at about the twice the rate or more of either metals or space rocks at the dog dig sites. (I can't find anything that talks about the special objects.) Anyway, even if this is wrong, it seems to me that fooling around with the spawners directly may be too heavy-handed and problematic.

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