I have a single sim who, around Cooking skill 7, started running cutting board animations dozens of times more often than the recipe specified. Just that one sim in just that one save. I can take her all day to make fish and chips. At this point, I can only let her cook things that can use the food processor instead of the cutting board.

Does anyone have any idea what could possibly cause this and what might be done about it? Even anything I might be able to look at?

This is admittedly a long-running save, and I have some custom recipes loaded with CCLoader. I'm pretty sure I removed the custom recipes to test, but whatever the case, those recipes are loaded in other saves, and the problem is with EA recipes too, not just custom ones.

I'm not sure if related, but I have a similar thing with a sim on high cooking skill (already 10, if I remember correctly). She's an elder and would keep flipping toast on the fry pan forever. If I cancel the action, she takes them off as unfinished, but if I continue again trying to cook them, the animation will not finish and the food will never prepare. Anybody else in the same household, however, can do that. Odd.

I'm yet to do anything about this or try a solution. It's also so far save game specific abnormality.

Kukko69 post_id=100115 time=1709919804 user_id=18330 wrote: I'm not sure if related, but I have a similar thing with a sim on high cooking skill (already 10, if I remember correctly). She's an elder and would keep flipping toast on the fry pan forever. If I cancel the action, she takes them off as unfinished, but if I continue again trying to cook them, the animation will not finish and the food will never prepare. Anybody else in the same household, however, can do that. Odd.

This does sound like the same thing or almost. Does she flip any other food forever, or just toast? Mine only affects the cutting board for this one sim, but I don't see anything that would be terribly special about the cutting board in the way the recipe process is defined. Maybe it's random that my problem is with the cutting board stage.

I put the game on high speed and let her cook all day, and she did finish eventually. There's some kind of pattern in how the cutting board animations repeat, but I haven't go so deep as to document everything to figure out what it is. It's not as simple as the whole cutting board process repeating; each stage repeats a few times, then it starts back over. But eventually, whatever count it's running does seem to complete.

Maybe it's just a corruption artifact from a long-running game, and there's nothing to be done. I suppose it's possible that there's a cleanup in one of the NRaas mods that might clean it up.

It's annoying because this sim had become really passionate about cooking, and I wanted her to continue the hobby. Now she's into painting instead.

Do you by any chance use the Smoothness Patch? Something about what you describe reminds me of this warning by Chain_Reaction:

Chain_Reaction wrote: ↑

February 18th, 2024, 5:20 am

My stance on the patch it's self remains that it is experimental overall as the simulator running at a faster rate than designed could pose issues

I'm not familiar with this specifically, but it is my experience that getting stuck in an animation usually has more to do with the conclusion of the interaction than the animation itself. If a sim doesn't know what to do next, they will just loop their animation until the script engine frees them from that curse.
The most common variant of this is sims who stand in idle or get stuck in the shower/bath waiting on their outfit change- a somewhat performance intensive step that can take a longer time to load than whatever animation it's coming after.

It doesn't narrow it down by a huge margin, but it may be a lead that you may have to look into what stage is taking all that time to happen more than the red herring of what they get stuck doing instead.
If the interaction can eventually finish, it does point to the game losing track of what it's doing more than something being truly undefined or at fault. Worth testing with no mods at all to figure out whether it's occurring in EA code or elsewhere. I could definitely see it even being related to the specific .package(s) it's trying to read from.

Smooth Patch is also a good call, as events firing out of order is intrinsically related to this.

Do you use Relativity, and has this sim made enough meals to become a "World Class Chef"? I think that's the one where after 75 meals made, sims cook significantly faster. Or is this sim a Perfectionist? What I'm wondering is whether it's possible that with a certain Relativity setting, the game can't properly calculate the length of time the sim is supposed to spend cooking and assigns a much higher time instead.

puzzlezaddict wrote: ↑

March 8th, 2024, 6:02 pm

Do you use Relativity, and has this sim made enough meals to become a "World Class Chef"? I think that's the one where after 75 meals made, sims cook significantly faster. Or is this sim a Perfectionist? What I'm wondering is whether it's possible that with a certain Relativity setting, the game can't properly calculate the length of time the sim is supposed to spend cooking and assigns a much higher time instead.

This is an interesting theory. I am using Relativity, and she is a Perfectionist. I don't think she's a World Class Chef.

I'll see what happens if I take Relativity out.

Well, huh.

Removing Relativity had no effect as far as I can tell, but removing PERFECTIONIST did. I knew that the trait caused creative actions to take longer in exchange for better results, but it never occurred to me that it might be the cause of this problem.

There's no way that the amount of time it's taking her to cook is intended, but it only started at skill level 7 or 8 (she's currently 8). She does have one skill challenge, but it's not World Class Chef -- it's the one for cooking a certain number of different recipes, and the description doesn't indicate that it would affect cooking time.

Perhaps the skill level affects cooking time, and that's tangling with the Perfectionist trait? It seems quite possible that this is actually an EA bug.

That's a relief. I've been taking out custom recipes and other food-related mods, and for a while I thought I might have corrupted her by using her to test my own custom recipes -- which I had already released for download. I panicked on tumblr, and several of my follows reported back that my recipes were being totally ordinary in their games.

So I guess this is the end to the drama. I see a Midlife Crisis reward in this sim's future. Maybe Perfectionist will be replaced with Artist or Natural Cook.

Thanks for the suggestion @puzzlezaddict !

Echoweaver wrote: ↑

March 12th, 2024, 12:43 pm

Removing Relativity had no effect as far as I can tell, but removing PERFECTIONIST did. I knew that the trait caused creative actions to take longer in exchange for better results, but it never occurred to me that it might be the cause of this problem.

Thanks for posting this result! I am yet to go in game and try this out myself, but I do remember this particular elderly cook being Perfectionist so this most likely is the cause for me too!