How to fix/achieve certain things

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Karamille
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How to fix/achieve certain things

Post by Karamille » June 18th, 2019, 1:24 pm

Hey guys,

I've been having some aggravation with my sims never having the same coworkers for longer than a day or two, which is a real problem when their performance depends on having a good relationship with coworkers. I tried slowing the careers cycle, but it's still doing the same thing. (And they all seem to have a secret passion for being a singer or acrobat.) Is there a way to lock NPCs into careers, at least for a longer amount of time? I wouldn't have thought it was an issue with generating a town worth of NPCs since it's been over a sim-year (50+ days) and it's still going on.

So, related to that, is there a way to put a cap on the number of NPCs in a career? I'd like to max out at 2 performance career NPCs, in particular.

Those are my most pressing questions.
Less important things:
How can I disable or reduce the frequency with which NPC friends call my sims?
How can I disable the spam calls (the ones where the sim angrily goes blah blah blah and hangs up)?
How can I disable toilet clogging, but not breaking entirely?
Can I disable social groups entirely (while leaving the things they introduce, like careers, available all the time)?
Is there by any chance a way to globally set beds energy gain, so that they all give the same energy? Rather than having to adjust them all individually?
How can I adjust the time it takes for sims to shower? The mod I found seems to be out of date and I can't seem to find the same tuning lines via Retuner...

Thanks in advance, and i hope I haven't inadvertently broken any rules ^^

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Cassie
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How to fix/achieve certain things

Post by Cassie » June 18th, 2019, 3:32 pm

Karamille wrote:
June 18th, 2019, 1:24 pm
Can I disable social groups entirely (while leaving the things they introduce, like careers, available all the time)?
How to disable social groups is explained here. There is a mod by devilgurl on Mod The Sims that unlocks the careers, but I haven't tested it yet, so I'm not sure it works as intended without problems.

KittyTheSnowCat
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How to fix/achieve certain things

Post by KittyTheSnowCat » June 18th, 2019, 6:16 pm

How can I disable or reduce the frequency with which NPC friends call my sims?
How can I disable the spam calls (the ones where the sim angrily goes blah blah blah and hangs up)?
How can I disable toilet clogging, but not breaking entirely?
Can I disable social groups entirely (while leaving the things they introduce, like careers, available all the time)?

Find Tuning Mods that ajust those things or download s3pe, read the XML tuning Tutorial on MondtheSims and look through the gamefiles if those things are tunable.

Is there by any chance a way to globally set beds energy gain, so that they all give the same energy? Rather than having to adjust them all individually?
You can use the Transmogrifier to give all beds the scripting class of your favorite bed.
http://modthesims.info/d/592332/the-tra ... anger.html

How can I adjust the time it takes for sims to shower? The mod I found seems to be out of date and I can't seem to find the same tuning lines via Retuner...
You can change the flow of time with Relativity. Or it might be possible to tune the shower ITUN so that the bar fills faster.
Relativity

KittyTheSnowCat
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How to fix/achieve certain things

Post by KittyTheSnowCat » June 18th, 2019, 6:19 pm

Sorry missed the important ones^^

Is there a way to lock NPCs into careers, at least for a longer amount of time? I wouldn't have thought it was an issue with generating a town worth of NPCs since it's been over a sim-year (50+ days) and it's still going on.
You can forbid changing careers with Storyprogression, then the game only gives them careers if they don't have any yet. There is also the placeholder unemployed career (I think it comes with Nraas Careers) to stop it even then.
StoryProgression


So, related to that, is there a way to put a cap on the number of NPCs in a career? I'd like to max out at 2 performance career NPCs, in particular.
The number of coworkers is set in the careers XML.

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igazor
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How to fix/achieve certain things

Post by igazor » June 18th, 2019, 9:46 pm

Not sure, but I think we might be confusing capping the total number of workers in a career per world vs. the number of co-workers the careers call for per sim once some sims have entered it. The latter can be set by way of what is currently the beta testing version of the Careers mod, so that's v88a. But that's not the same thing as explicitly limiting the number of sims who can have a career, not sure there is really any way to do that other than creating SP castes of sims who are or are not allowed to enter certain careers based on criteria we might specify.

Setting that aside for the moment though, the Showtime performance careers are "special." It's not SP that is dragging sims out of their careers and fulfilling those lifelong dreams of being singers and acrobats (dreams they never had in the first place), it's the game itself being annoying and SP can be powerless to prevent that. What I find helps is if I use SP to disallow the three careers and the three performance skills (SP Skill add-on module required) at the Town Options level, then perhaps make exceptions for particular sims if I feel like it at the Household, Caste, or Sim Options levels. I still get some homeless NPCs spawned to be street performers who then never seem to progress or do much in my games, but much more slowly this way and I can decide at my leisure what I want to do with those sims after a small number of each accumulate. If I find that the game is still stealing my favorite homeless Role and Service Sims away again to be street performers that do not perform (so my favorite coffee barista and club bouncer, for example, keep showing up for work wearing silly costumes), then I might give them the Careers mod Unemployed placeholder non-career and lock them into it. I don't think I ever see actual resident sims in full-fledged rabbithole careers ever dragooned out of their slots this way unless their LTW demands a different career for them.

Homeless co-workers are always going to be more volatile in our games than residents would be though, so we do have to be a bit careful with our use of the term "NPC" as it can mean different things to different players. On this site, we usually use NPC to mean Non-Player Controllable sims, so technically homeless and not fellow residents with their own more permanent households.

Back on the prank call question, are your sims getting those through their cellphones? I seem to never get those once I stopped issuing landline house phones to most of my households and took them away from those who still had them.

Karamille
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How to fix/achieve certain things

Post by Karamille » June 19th, 2019, 4:27 am

@Cassie
Thanks, those should help, I'll check them out.


@KittyTheSnowCat
It's more a question of how to find the lines that affect those things. I've adjusted the time sims spend on the loo and washing their hands, for instance, as well as disabled the exhilarating shower buff, but I can't locate an actual shower time option.
I also find looking for mods really difficult these days, as google is deadset that I want sims 4 or even 2, but certainly not 3. Then on the miraculous occasion a mod is actually for 3...it's wildly out of date. Sigh. So I was hoping to be able to adjust everything myself via Retuner (I am so grateful for this mod, honestly).

I might have to forbid career changes, if disallowing performance careers doesn't help.

@Igazor
I cram my game with too many mods to take the risk of a beta :P
I'll try disallowing the careers/skills as you suggest. I'd wanted to keep a small number for town flavour, but the irritation of the constant career changing far outweighs that. Might try disallowing the performance LTWs as well, if that's an option.

As for prank calls, yeah, cell phones. I never even think to give house phones. I'm not sure if they happen less often now that my sim actually has a couple friends, since I've taken to always ignoring phonecalls. But with just one or two friends, she's still getting 4-5 calls a day, and it's driving me nuts.


Thanks all for the answers!

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sittingbear
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How to fix/achieve certain things

Post by sittingbear » June 19th, 2019, 4:34 am

Cassie post_id=66969 time=1560886361 user_id=18582 wrote:
Karamille post_id=66966 time=1560878692 user_id=20353 wrote: Can I disable social groups entirely (while leaving the things they introduce, like careers, available all the time)?
How to disable social groups is explained here. There is a mod by devilgurl on Mod The Sims that unlocks the careers, but I haven't tested it yet, so I'm not sure it works as intended without problems.
Yes and No, I've already tried this myself.
devilgurl's mod does what it says it allows the careers to be unlocked without any Social Influence (or level 0) but the careers won't be available to work in as those careers require a minimum Jock, Rebel and Nerd level of 0 so if you disable the Social Groups they will be stuck at the game default of -1 and if you disable the Social Groups Influence they can never advance in those careers anyway as they will need to level up their Social Group Influence to get promoted.

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igazor
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How to fix/achieve certain things

Post by igazor » June 19th, 2019, 4:51 am

Karamille post_id=66988 time=1560932827 user_id=20353 wrote: I cram my game with too many mods to take the risk of a beta
Totally understandable, but that version of Careers has been in beta for over a year now. Only recently our developer collected responses from those testing it and from what I saw none have been less than favorable. It's possible he is holding back on releasing it fully only because he intends to add more features to it, this happens sometimes (that and mod development pretty much stalled as a result of the work getting things set up on this new site has required since last fall).

In fact, I would regard any of the mods currently in beta testing as safe to use. In case you want to see what they change, fix, or add to the current full release versions, this page on the Wayback machine has the most recent updates explained for each one.
https://web.archive.org/web/20180602084 ... %20Testing

I don't think it's going to solve the issue with the performance careers though as those assignments are coming from a different kind of source than the call for traditional rabbithole co-workers. Just wanted to mention it as an alternative to tuning the careers XML file in case such is needed for some other reason.

I suppose silencing the phone is a good way to stop getting the prank robocalls. But I think you sim needs some higher quality friends, as you said they had been working on, or maybe needs to have a little chat with their phone service provider. We have legislation pending in this country that is supposed to address this issue (or a similar one anyway) for us in the real world, but I don't think it's going to extend retroactively back to animated phone users from a game developed quite so long ago. :|

Just the other day I was tempted to randomly call someone and ask if their refrigerator was running. In case you have no idea what this means, it was the setup for a (trust me) hilarious phone prank that was very popular around forty or fifty years ago, for those who were into that sort of thing. :P

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Cassie
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How to fix/achieve certain things

Post by Cassie » June 19th, 2019, 10:44 am

sittingbear wrote:
June 19th, 2019, 4:34 am
Cassie post_id=66969 time=1560886361 user_id=18582 wrote:
Karamille post_id=66966 time=1560878692 user_id=20353 wrote: Can I disable social groups entirely (while leaving the things they introduce, like careers, available all the time)?
How to disable social groups is explained here. There is a mod by devilgurl on Mod The Sims that unlocks the careers, but I haven't tested it yet, so I'm not sure it works as intended without problems.
Yes and No, I've already tried this myself.
devilgurl's mod does what it says it allows the careers to be unlocked without any Social Influence (or level 0) but the careers won't be available to work in as those careers require a minimum Jock, Rebel and Nerd level of 0 so if you disable the Social Groups they will be stuck at the game default of -1 and if you disable the Social Groups Influence they can never advance in those careers anyway as they will need to level up their Social Group Influence to get promoted.
So devilgurl didn't test her mod properly before posting, and all those thank you's and comments are from people who didn't test the mod either? And I thought MTS had better quality control than that :( That's disappointing, I had plans for one of those careers. At least you saved me the trouble of testing it, thanks for the heads up.

I don't suppose there is a way to tune those requirements for promotion?

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sittingbear
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How to fix/achieve certain things

Post by sittingbear » June 19th, 2019, 1:58 pm

Cassie post_id=66993 time=1560955450 user_id=18582 wrote: So devilgurl didn't test her mod properly before posting, and all those thank you's and comments are from people who didn't test the mod either? And I thought MTS had better quality control than that That's disappointing, I had plans for one of those careers. At least you saved me the trouble of testing it, thanks for the heads up.

I don't suppose there is a way to tune those requirements for promotion?
I wouldn't say it wasn't tested properly all a sim has to do to get level 0 in Social Influence is play a video game, dumpster dive or play soccer etc... just once; most likely the sim she had did something Jock, Rebel and Nerd related and she was unaware of it. I would say more like unaware of the games default level of -1 meaning the skill was never touched.
Besides a tuning value of -1 for those would've been considered an invalid number 0 was the lowest you can go with those tunables.

You would have to edit the Careers XML to remove the influence requirements but that one can be little tricky if you don't know what to look for.

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