This is a default replacement for all the conversation icons: the basegame interests, the Freetime hobbies, the "tell story about" interaction that came in Apartment Life, and the pet interests that will sometimes turn up in a pet's dreams or thought bubbles. That extends to the UI elements, where the sim's level of interest in a subject or enthusiasm for a hobby is displayed.
I made this for my Test of Time challenge, because every speech replacement I could find was way too modern for my Stone Age hunter-gatherers.
My sample shots were taken against both Eddysims' high-res speech bubbles and Simborg's TSM speech bubbles, so you can see how they look against both. This was absolutely a deliberate choice and not just that I decided to switch my default in the middle but didn't want to scrap the screencaps.
As you can see above in the crabby toddler shot, I also default-replaced the motives, because I was tired of seeing the same "TOILET!" or "BED!" thought bubbles in the stone age as I'd seen in Pleasantview. A sim who's too hot will think about wanting a cool breeze, not an iced beverage; a sim who's on the verge of bladder failure (or wetting their diaper) will think about relieving themselves in a shrub; a sim in hygiene desperation will think about washing off in a waterfall, because of Marvine's waterfall shower. (If you see the manure pile, they want the place cleaned up.) This is a separate folder from the speech defaults, so you can choose if you want that or not.
This isn't perfect - some icons have some compression/color bleeding that I can't seem to get rid of, and the fuzziness of the era and setting (I don't call it the "Neanderthal" era but that is the official name) means that there are some anachronisms and inconsistencies baked in - the next stage is the Roman Empire, so any New World vegetation or animals shouldn't be there, but they're in a tropical setting, but if there are strays in the neighborhood they have domesticated cats and dogs, which Neanderthals wouldn't... My seven-year-old daughter, in fact, pointed this out and refused to let me have domestic cats and dogs in the children's speech pool. Kids talk about wolves and leopards instead:
The other samples of basegame interest discussion:
In my game, I have Almighty Hat's alien abduction mod, and Plantsims, so the discussion of elves and dryads fits right in. Instead of school or work, sims will discuss important survival skills and cultural knowledge: hunting, fishing, weaving, making tools and preserving food. And so on. It may not suit everyone's game perfectly, but it's better for mine than anything else I could find.
Credit and acknowledgments: The icons used here came from a variety of artists via Freepik and Flaticon. The Puppet Characters collection, Max.Icons, Monkik, and Eucalyp all got heavy use. I also got some from UltimateArm, though I'm having a hard time finding a link to their page specifically.
Without Sims in Low Space, this default wouldn't exist - it was from her novel default that I got the idea to use Flaticon as a source. I also referred heavily to other speech defaults, including Keoni's modern one, and the medieval replacements by ClstlDrmr83 and rugrat0ne.
And if you read all this, you may not want to scroll back up, so here are the download links again:
Everything is compressorized and clearly labeled so you can delete any parts you don't want. Let me know if you use this, or if you run into any problems!