Sims 2 fun

The concept is simple: give Sims a basic household activity while allowing them to develop the Cooking skill long before they're old enough to become serious cooks, but keep it something basic enough that it would easily fit into any household. The biggest inspiration for this project came from Crisps and Kerosene's Functional Logic Toy, and thus, the dough ball was born. A simple object that Sims could interact with to build a skill in a way that felt appropriate for their age and environment.

Admittedly, my first attempt was very crude, but thankfully @eisbae-r was able to see the vision and reached out asking if I wanted to collaborate, and my answer was a strong yes. Eisbaer took my idea and expanded it bigger than I ever could have dreamed, and I am forever grateful they were willing to team up.

What Does the Dough Ball Do?

The Dough Ball provides Sims with:

🍞 Cooking skill

🍴 Cuisine enthusiasm

It's intended primarily as a childhood and teenage skilling object, but there's absolutely nothing stopping adults from using it, too.

Once a Sim reaches level 8 of the Cooking skill, using the dough ball has a chance to produce a basket of dough, which can be used as a stockable fridge ingredient. That way, rather than simply being a way to gain only cooking skill and cuisine enthusiasm, eventually the Sim can use the dough ball for functionality as well.

There are 3 required files included in the download: the mod itself, the fridge stockable dough, and a separate crate mesh. The crate is needed for children to stand high enough at the counter to knead.

DOWNLOAD HERE

Known Issues

Despite all of eisbaer's hard work, the kids still bob a little on the crate. It's fine. They're having a perfectly normal historical childhood. There is absolutely nothing strange happening here. Please do not look at their feet.

Credits

A huge thank you to @eisbae-r for everything you did and for working so hard to figure out a solution to the floating-kid problem. This little object would not have come together without you and I am incredibly grateful for the time and effort that went into making it work and I really hope we can collaborate again in the future! (I already have more ideas 😂)

A big thank you also goes to @teaaddictyt and the Historical Simming Chat channel of her Discord for providing such a wonderful place for historical Sims players to share ideas, ask questions, troubleshoot, and generally enable each other's increasingly specific historical gameplay projects. ❤️

And, of course, thank you to the creators whose work helped make the Dough Ball possible:

Original code and animations used from Crisps and Kerosene per their TOU.

Dough and basket mesh used with permission from Feenwald

Crate mesh and texture used with permission from pineappleforestsims

To make this mod I edited the Grim Reaper BHAV "Sub - Process Death - Pre-UrnStone" to check:

Is Monique's mod installed, and

Did the sim had a bank account.

If no the BHAV continues unchanged, if yes, the mod runs a CT to search for a "next of kin" to inherit their banked money in this order:

Spouse

Children

Any other family member

Siblings (who may be living in another house)

If it cannot find any sim who fits that criteria, the money will simply die with the sim.

Of course, Monique's mod allows for saving money but also for loaning money, so be warned - if it was a loan account, the message will be slightly different...

Poor kid.

Then it's up to you if you want to forgive that loan or not, O Watcher 😉

If the next of kin has their own bank account with savings in it and they are chosen to inherit debt, the mod will adjust their account accordingly.

How to Install:

Replace the "MQ_Computer_Global_Bank_Controller" file with this one from the zip: "MQ_Computer_Global_Bank_Controller_TAtweak"

Conflicts:

I am only aware of one conflict right now which is Lamare's age tooltips mod, so I included a comp patch for that which must load after both mods :)

Let me know of any other conflicts or any issues.

Enjoy!

This bathtub requires 3 buckets of water to be filled and can be used 3 times before the water must be changed.

The amount of hygiene a sim receives from their bath depends on how fresh the water is - on bath 3, their hygiene isn't going to fill past about 75% (tuneable).

Water may be inside the Sim's inventory, or in a water cistern or reservoir if present (see Water Required upload for more details).

The main motives tuning is found inside BCON 0x1000:

Enter numbers in the "Dec" box to tweak as you desire.

For Pets and Toddlers, their motive tuning is inside BCONs 0x1001 and 0x1009:

You can also change how many buckets of water are required to fill the tub in BCON 0x1005 Tuning - Water Usage:

To be clear, Gina did most of the heavy lifting on this code-wise. I finished it off by adding Toddler & Pet bathing, cleaned things up a bit, added some more water functionality, and that was about it. So props to Gina for this one!

Oh, and also, taking baths with this object is set to be non-autonomous. So hopefully sims will waste less water!

You get a few recolours done by me:

But it needs more, so be my guest.

If anyone would like to make other baths that function like this, just clone this one and replace the mesh and textures.

Enjoy, historical simmers!

Mirror

Fixing Custom Objects

Likely objects to need fixing are things like easels, custom cakes and some appliances. I don't know if there are clones of medicine cabinets or teleprompter-type career objects, but if there are those likely need it as well.

I recommend Picknmix's Bhav Finder for this, because it saves you manually scrolling through every bhav to find where the stool is summoned.

1. To start, navigate to the custom object package you are fixing.

2. Use the drop down on OpCode to select 0x2A Create New object Instance.

3. Enter the numbers of the picture into the first four boxes of Operands. Leave the rest empty.

4. Click "Find BHAVs". The program will scan your object and tell you which bhavs in it (if any) summon the stool.

5. In this case I did a custom easel, and found that the stool is summoned in a Bhav called "Paint - Create Child Stool". Take note of the name, and head to SimPE.

If your bhav contains multiple Create New Instance lines, make sure you pick the one with the correct GUID, 0x22555949. If you accidentally add the bhav to a line not creating the stool but something else, the result would in most instances be an error. So keep a backup of the original so you can start over if needed 🙂 But please don't be put off, bhavs are not scary! And this is not hard. You can do it!

Here's what I have for you:

A flag-like banner thing for the roof plus three recolors (take from the base game stadium and the Lucky Palms version). Viewable from NH (Deco > Misc §65)

Note that this is technically a 1-tile STATUE that sinks into the ground. If you pop it at the end of a roof it'll hang over perfectly. I tried a version that was a shiftable wall object, but I couldn't get it to sit in quite the right position between floors.

A pair of two-story hanging banners. The larger one is the PARENT and I included a blue-yellow recolor. These are long enough to attach to the second-floor ceiling but I made sure an adult sim could walk under them without clipping through. Cloned from the H&M banners (Deco > Misc for §156 & §157).

I have a ton of four-tile wall things, so to go through this pic from left-to-right and top-down:

Base game banner on four tiles (Deco > Wall §67). Viewable from NH, original has soccer player on it and recolor has the musicians

Light blue Sunlit Tides Stadium banner (Deco > Wall §67). Has a back side so it looks great if hung across a hallway or in a window

Multi-colored Dr. Pepper Stadium banner (Deco > Wall §67). Also two-sided

Thin blue Dr. Pepper Stadium hallway sign (I'm having a hard time describing this one, but it was tucked inside the rabbithole and I thought it looks nice as a "line up here" or "walk this way" sort of sign?) It has two sides so you can hang it in a hallway or open space (Deco > Wall §67)

Dark blue Base game awning (Deco > Misc §300). Looks great on my ticket window, but you'll have to use "Moveobjects On" to place it there since it's not a curtain

Base game wooden letter sign (Deco > Wall §67)

And my other wall objects:

An ATM from the Dr. Pepper Stadium. Obviously non-functional, but I put it in Electronics > Misc §165

A single-tile price/admission banner that is the same as the one attached to my ticket window. Pulled from Sunlit Tides (Deco > Wall §66)

Two different wall flags repo'd to each other which come with the llama texture plus a cow retexure. From the base game stadium (Deco > Wall §66)

A two-tile sign that looks like another "get tickets here" sort of thing. From the Dr. Pepper stadium (Deco > Wall §66)

Lastly there were some interesting posters from the Aurora Skies and Dr. Pepper stadiums that are pretty low-res so I made them their own wall sticker rather than individual objects.

One-tile miscellaneous wall sticker plus five recolors (how cute is that stadium map?!)

Enjoy, and if you know how to mod and want to use that ATM mesh to make something functional, please go for it! Tag me so I can see what you do :)

Download (SFS)

Hood view Before:

After:

Before:

After:

Lot view before:

After:

Before:

After:

Okay, so, they're still a little blurry when you look at them up close. But I think they at least slightly resemble actual flowers now.

I have these textures sized at 1024x1024 and I think the only way to really make them crisper would be to make them even bigger?? and I don't really wanna do that. Oh, and I did remember to do the snowy states for these ones. Good job, Tea 👍🏻

That said, I am NO texture artist.

To make these, I downloaded this free image, took it into photoshop, and messed with stuff. If anyone who is actually skilled with digital art and photoshop would like to take these and make them better, oh please do 😂🙏🏻 I will not be offended.

That said, I will still use these cos I definitely think they're better than before 🙈 So if anyone else wants them, you can

Issues

Maxis gimped the lot skirt's functionality when compared to the neighbourhood terrain and lot terrain. The most obvious example of this is the lot skirt looking like absolute ass, while the neighbourhood terrain has detailed cliffs etc. - both the neighbourhood terrain and lot terrain support multiple paint layers and alpha maps, whereas the lot skirt is just one, boring texture.

Unfortunately, these limitations cause some semi-annoying problems when forcing hood effects to show up in lot view.

Certain effects have bugged positioning

When you download the mod, you'll notice that along with the usual plugin, there's a config file included too. This config file is important, as it allows you to blacklist neighbourhood effects to prevent them showing up in lot view.

Why might you want to blacklist effects? Well, several effects appear to require something called an 'effect map' to be positioned correctly in the world (don't ask, I don't know what an effect map is either).

The neighbourhood terrain and lot terrain both have an effect map, but importantly, the lot skirt does not. This means that the effects that rely on an effect map for their positioning (mainly those that are placed on water) will appear way up in the sky when you load in to a lot:

If you want to know why they get placed in the sky, it's related to a peculiar bug(?) I discovered while trying to figure out why decal effects (e.g. farm fields and wild flowers) weren't appearing in lot view, even though I could clearly see the game creating and processing them in the debugger.

Basically, things like decals and shadows need to be assigned to an overlay manager which... manages overlays. For whatever reason, when you load a lot from the neighbourhood, rather than assigning these to the lot terrain or lot skirt overlay managers like the game logically should, it instead assigns them to the neighbourhood terrain overlay manager. The same thing happens with the effect maps - the neighbourhood effect map is used, not the lot terrain one.

The neighbourhood terrain coordinates aren't actually 1:1 with the lot skirt. The game generates the lot skirt below the neighbourhood terrain during the loading screen, and translates the position of each object downwards. Couple this with the neighbourhood effect map being used, and you get boats sailing around in the sky.

It isn't until you travel to a community lot or switch to another playable household while in lot view that the game starts using the relevant lot effect map and overlay managers. For example, if you load the Goth household from the Pleasantview neighbourhood screen, then click on the Pleasant's house to switch to them, boats will suddenly start sailing around in their garden as the lot terrain effect map is now in use:

I have no idea whether this quirk has any noticeable effect on gameplay, outside of when trying to get neighbourhood effects to appear in lot view. I've already patched the decals so they correctly get assigned to the lot skirt overlay manager when loading from the neighbourhood, but I'd be interested to know if there are any instances of lot effects not appearing until switching lots due to the incorrect effect map usage!

The config file is preconfigured to blacklist any problematic vanilla effects, so you don't need to worry about adding these yourself - it's mainly there in case you run into any custom hood effects with bugged positioning that you'd want to prevent appearing in lot view.

Decals appear on top of roads

Decal effects will draw over roads in lot view, instead of drawing underneath them like in hood view, as they should do. I can't say for certain why this happens, but I'm pretty sure it's due to differences between the neighbourhood road materials and the lot skirt ones.

If we patch the code that creates the lot skirt roads to simply use the name of the neighbourhood roads instead, we can see that although the roads no longer match the surrounding terrain and have huge holes in them, the decals do correctly draw below them. Weird, right?

Either way, you should probably move any farm fields and wild flowers away from the roads to avoid this happening.

Decals that overlap the current lot's bounds get cut off

This is due to the lot skirt and lot terrain being two separate entities, each with their own overlay managers. Decals can only be assigned to one of these managers, so are unable to be drawn by both.

The lot skirt also does some maths to mask out the lot bounds, which prevents it from drawing its overlays over the lot terrain. You can patch out this mask and allow decals to overlap the lot, but it causes all of the decals and shadows on the lot to flicker like crazy, as both the lot skirt and lot terrain are fighting to draw their overlays on top of the other (aka z-fighting).