iSimChi's cc finds

Restaurant Lot Controller

This little object was actually designed before my 'Cafe Mod' even started to be made, but you may notice similarities between this thing and my Cafe lot controller. The Cafe lot controller was actually based on this, lol.

1. You can ban / allow pets irrespective of the Visitor Controller

2. You can toggle "eat or go home" to kick sims out if they're not hungry.

3. You can set an hour in which the restaurant kitchen will close (more on that below 😉)

Sims can also "view menu" and gain cuisine hobby enthusiasm, and I included some "toggle object model" options including 2 outdoor standing menus that I meshed up in Blender, and some Maxis potted plants and different decor objects I could see being used on a restaurant lot. The menu on the menu stand matches my menu default:

Most of the maxis object models shouldn't look out of place at a restaurant 😊

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Better Food Businesses - Updated

If you got my "better food businesses" mod when I released the Cafe mod, this also ties into that. Namely:

You can underpay your staff and get away with it a little easier. I discovered that Maxis have a whole system for underpaying staff - basically, if the employee has a high relationship with the boss, you can underpay them and they won't quit. With this mod, the relationship requirements have been halved... but only for food retail, cos I've worked in food retail and it's #truth lol.

Customers will arrive on the lot HUNGRY and are therefore more likely to go and order something to eat instead of standing around like idiots

You get more sims appearing at your restaurant per business rank.

Maxis / Default customers per business rank:

Essentially, starts at 3 and slowly goes up to 10 customers at a time for a rank 10 business.

Modded customers per rank (food businesses only - mod must find a restaurant controller or a cafe controller on the lot to take effect):

You can absolutely open this file and tune it however you like, but I've set it to start at 4 and go up to 20. If your computer would blow up with 20 customers on the lot, you may want to lower it. I've also lowered the max customers for a business at rank -5 down to 1 lol, cos good luck getting anyone through the door at that stage.

Better Food Businesses also creates lunch and dinner rushes for non-owned restaurants or cafes, cos I thought it would be cute. That's all inside the "Avg. Lot Populations (of Townies)" BCON file which can also be tuned to your liking, or you can delete that if you don't want it.

This mod conflicts with Visitor Controller but I have patched it to be compatible as long as it loads second. Repeat: Load AFTER Visitor Controller.

It also conflicts with SimWardrobe's Customer Limit Adjuster. I have also made a patch for this which much load LAST (after "better food businesses" and after "customer limit adjuster") - if you have SW's object on the lot, it will "win" in terms of setting how many customers should be there.

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Close the Kitchen mod

I alluded to this one before, but in Open For Business, if a restaurant lot has no tables, or no chef stove, the host podium will display an "under construction" sign and the kitchen will be "closed". I wanted the ability to close the restaurant kitchen whenever I liked for multi-purpose lots.

For example, I have a pub in my BACC that has a restaurant, but also has a lot of other entertainment. I want to be able to close the restaurant at 10pm but have the pub & bar remain open until 2am or 3am.

So I made a clone of the "under construction" sign, re-textured it and gave it it's own GUID (it says "The Kitchen is Closed" in Simlish which tickled me!), and re-did some BHAVs so that if the restaurant is deemed "closed" for whatever reason, it displays this cute sign instead of the "under construction" sign. Then I added a custom interaction to the Maxis podiums:

So that now your sims can close down the kitchen before they want to close the business, they can, and you can send the restaurant staff home.

It also ties in with the restaurant controller mod as I mentioned above - if you set up a "kitchen close hour", it will automatically close the kitchen at that hour.

Any sims interacting with the podium at the time should* have their interactions cancelled, and may either go home, or go and do something else... otherwise your staff may have to finish seating and serving them before they go home. Needs more testing.

I have also bundled in a mod a made a long, long time ago, before I even knew how to mod lol, which was a TTAB override that made the podium only attract sims who are hungry, instead of advertising also to the 'shopping' and 'fun' motives. This way, if you have a restaurant at a club, sims might also go and dance and do other things to have fun, instead of being obsessed with the restaurant podium.

I have updated the following CC podiums to work with the "Kitchen Closed" mod, as well as bundling in my motive advertising changes, AND making sure that the "no podium phonecalls" mod is integrated too:

Deelee's 4t2 Dine Out Podiums: Here and Here

Sunni's Versatile Restaurant Podium: Here

Hodgekiss's modern POS restaurant podium: Here

All are included in my download. I also adjusted the slots on DeeLee's podiums cos otherwise you wouldn't have been able to see the sign lol.

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Better Staff Breaks / Staff room controller

Staff breaks in OFB have always annoyed the crap out of me. You send your staff member on break, and they stand around talking, complaining, getting in the way, and then you have to force them to get back to work and they haven't fixed any of their motives.

Well, I started digging into this and discovered that Maxis never made any code to handle an employee on a break. They're just... left to their own autonomy devices. So, no wonder they're a bit dumb 😂

I converted this base game burglar alarm from The Sims 4, intending it to look a bit like an employee clock in machine thingy, which you can place inside a designated "staff room". It will scan the sims on the lot for anyone on a break, call them every 10 minutes to 'come here please' if they aren't in the staff room, then push them to do something useful. You can change it from every 10 minutes to whatever you like inside a tuning BCON within the file:

Just enter a minute value into the 'Dec' box to change the minutes between scans.

Default Maxis breaks last for 60 minutes. This is also tuneable, and for your convenience I included the Maxis BCON for that too:

so that if you want to change how long a break lasts for, you can.

So every 10 minutes, if the sim is not in the staff room, it will call them over, and run the following checks on them:

The order of priority is: Pee, Coffee, Eat.

If there is no coffee machine, they'll obviously skip that one and move straight onto food.

When it comes to food, I curtailed a very short list of things the employees may eat on a break: Cup o' Ramen, TV dinners, Instant Meals, Sandwiches, Chef Salads, and Cereal.

If there is no microwave on the lot, Ramen and TV dinners will not be included on the list. This is to stop staff from trying to cook on a stove, for example in a restaurant, where the chef may be busy.

Massive thanks to @lamare-sims for help with coding this part of the mod. I was hopelessly lost on this for a good long while 😂

Hopefully, now, breaks will be much more worth giving your staff.

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Employees Warn Before Quitting

This mod came to be because I was playing my off-camera BACC and I'd changed my staff wages mods around, resulting in everyone being "ridiculously underpaid". Every time I loaded into a business, before I could do anything, the staff members would march up to the boss and quit instantly. Very annoying.

Now, employees will give a warning before quitting.

They'll display one of two messages depending on personality.

The "warning controller" will delete itself after 2 days. To break this down:

Wednesday: Staff members warns that they might quit

Later on Wednesday: if they try to quit again, they will quit.

Or, if perhaps you give them a bit of a payrise or fix their motives...

Wednesday: Staff member warns that they might quit

Thursday: Staff member is grumpy but don't quit - warning controller deletes itself

Friday: If staff member tries to quit, they will give another quit warning.

I hope that makes sense.

I know there are mods that stop employees from quitting altogether, but I like to play with that risk in my game, just... I also like to be given the chance to fix their needs or payrate before they march out the door lol.

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Showering on Business Lots

Last but not least, a small mod that enables customers to take a shower at an open business, so that they may shower at the gym, for example, instead of leaving because they're grumpy about their hygiene being low. Squinge had a mod for this that was never updated to Apartment Life, mine should work with Apartment Life.

This was requested by @kayleigh-83 and @joplayingthesims on Discord 😊 So hopefully you both, and others, find it useful!

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That's all for now 😂

As always, please do let me know of any issues with these mods and I will get fixes out ASAP. Also let me know of conflicts and I can try to resolve them.

I can't believe I've finally made it!!!! I first started working on this overlay in 2024, I tried like three times to create a box, but it wouldn't work. So I settled for replacing a texture I don't use in another box with mine and putting it on my sims. But I've always wanted to upload it, because I think this is a very needed item. After a long fight I finally understood overlays very well and learned how to make them. And I'm so happy that I can upload this box now!

So, what is this? It's an overlay box that contains only one swatch that covers your sim's palms, making them look more realistic on dark-skinned sims. I tried to pick a tone that would be quite universal, it can be used starting with skins around S3 and all the way to the darkest skin tones. The texture is handpainted, I did my best trying to optimize it to look good on the Maxis hand mesh, but there might obviously be imperfections because both the mesh and the texture are quite simple. The texture is unfortunately a bit pixelated; as I've mentioned, I had put it in a different package for personal use at first, and it appears that I don't have the original image file anymore, so I had to pull it out of my game and then back into the game, which... probably didn't help its quality, but it's the best I could do. I think it looks gorgeous, pixelated or not. And if you're not zooming in too closely, it's not even noticeable.

To use this, you just have to place the overlay "box" object on your lot and choose "Add Light Palms" in the pie menu. There is also an option to remove the overlay. The object can be found in Miscellaneous/Dressers for §0. I based it on a mesh made for TS4 by yourdorkbrains and converted to TS2 by trishasimma. It looks like this:

Examples of how it looks on different skintones, before and after:

I hope you enjoy using it! I am very happy with this overlay and it brings me so much joy to finally be able to share it with the world.

Credits: me for the textures, @themeasureofasim for the overlay tutorial and the box I based mine on, yourdorkbrains for the TS4 mesh, @trishasimma for the TS2 conversion.

♡ Download ♡

⋆ NoFaceOverlay.package is required and included in the upload. Please make sure you don't already have it in your Downloads folder, one copy is enough (if you have other overlays in your game, it's likely already there).

SFS | simblr.cc

The textures were made by taking a screenshot of the terrain painted ground from straight above and at a level of zoom where 1 tile in game measured about 256x256 pixels. By matching the mesh size to the image size I grab, the scale of the pattern remains the same. I included a texture reference image to hopefully make it a little easier to understand what I mean.

The biggest update is that the Café Lot Marker will now scan customers regularly and check if they're drinking coffee or eating food and if so, build customer loyalty if your café is a sim-owned business. This should make it much easier and faster to build your business rank up

(HINT: make sure you have THIS MOD to stop customers being absolutely ridiculous over plates being left on a table for 5 seconds before they get cleaned up, my goodness!)

The lot marker also now comes with some beautiful recolours by the very talented @kashmiresims:

Which are honestly SO GOOD, she knocked those out of the park!

I also did recolours of the lot marker frame in Annas colours and iCad's woods (Lazy swatch pics):

Because we love recolours 😍

Another large update has been made to the café displays, which can now be used also as regular OFB style displays much more successfully. Thanks to Aysarth (MTS creator) for the inspiration to do that.

Contents can now be toggled all for sale / not for sale using the sale tool:

And should hopefully be sold from and restocked with no major issues.

I also fixed a routing issue for group meals that were placed on the top shelf in one of the two-tile, 3 tier displays (Veranka's or Jinxx's for example) which sims couldn't grab. A single plate sure, but a group serving? Forget about it. #SillySims.

This involved tweaking another semiglobal BHAV (0x201C Eat - Grab a Plate) and thanks to @joplayingthesims we found a conflict with SimWardrobe's "No Free Lunch" mod, which solves a bug that I had no idea existed wherein on a community lot, sims could keep taking food from an empty group serving plate! lol. So that fix has been bundled into my mod, if you have SW's "No Free Food" mod you can delete it and just use the Cafe Mod files.

BETA testing also found a conflict with Midge's Cake Stand, so there is a comp patch included for that too.

There is now a new fix for Lamare / MogH's "Auto Put Away Leftovers" mod which stops sims from putting away food in a display case. Thanks to @lordcrumps for that shout! There are two versions included as per Lamare's original edits, check her post for more details.

All other existing comp patches have been updated and are included.

With all comp patches, these are only required if you have the original mods, and need to be loaded LAST, after both the original mod and my Cafe mod files.

Inside the Zip you will see:

Make sure you have the required globals or the mod will not work. The "Displays_Replacement version" are Veranka's 3t2 Bakery Display and JinxxSims's 4t2 Display with the same GUID as their original conversion, so will overwrite their file. If you'd like to use both their original conversion and my tweaked and modded version, choose the files within "Displays_StandaloneRepoVersion".

I've also included an updated standalone Simple Counter Decra Chill, created by the wonderful @morepopcorn. For that counter to not flash blue, you must have Poppy's original Simple Counter and BB's Nooks and Niches main file. See her post for more details.

In "CustomFoods_AddThese" you will find the resources required to update any CC foods in your game to work with the Café mod, and I updated the instructions from a notepad document to a shiny PDF with pictures included. Remember that any CC foods will not automatically work in a Café setting without being updated.

Otherwise, code has generally been tweaked a tidied up, but is more or less the same as before!

Let me know of any other conflicts that need solving, bugs, issues or problems, otherwise send me pics of your cafes!

Love, Tea xo