#hobby lots

First off, I found this info in the Sims 2 section at good ol’ Snooty Sims and took a screen shot so you don’t have to go there to see this info:

So, the maximum number of visitors on an owned lot is 10, which is less than will show up on an unowned community lot when you’ve, for instance, used the “uint prop” cheats to adjust this. Those cheats do not override these particular numbers/limits. From the very little that I was able to find online about this subject, it appears that these numbers are hard-coded. I can understand this to a certain degree -- A reward for a more successful business ought to be more customers, after all -- but I don’t understand why there’s such a limit on a maxed-out Level 10 business...unless it was just a trying-not-to-choke-2004-era-computers thing. But, even if this can’t be increased, 10 fellow visitors on a lot when visiting an owned one is still better than 3. :)

So, I did some testing with that goal in mind. :)

Now, SimWardrobe's Customer Limit Adjuster does indeed increase (or decrease) the number of lot visitors on owned lots...but only when you’re playing the owner of the lot, unfortunately. When I took a playable to the lot as a visitor, there were still the level-linked visitor number limits in place, even though, when I clicked the adjuster object on the lot to check its settings, it was still set to allow 20 visitors. So, when I visited the lot I was testing, only three visitors plus the owner/employees and my playable were on the lot. In my specific case here, the owners of these particular lots are all townies, so I'm always going to be visiting these lots, never playing the owners of them except very briefly to get them set up as businesses. So, this mod is unfortunately not useful for my purposes here, though it IS useful in general, if you play owned businesses.

So then I tried poking in SimPE to change the business’s level to 10. I found a way that I thought might do it -- The lot’s level was displayed and the number was editable and it “stuck” after editing -- but when I sent the owner of the lot I edited to the lot in-game, it still showed as Level 0. So, I don’t know if I did something wrong or if the number I changed simply doesn’t affect anything in-game. I have a strong feeling that it’s the latter. I also have a feeling that what affects the number of visitors is not really the business’s level number but rather the number of customer loyalty stars it has.

So, I think the ultimate answer is to use this mod that @didilysims linked me to. It allows you to manually set a customer’s loyalty level. If you max out a bunch of customers’ loyalty, they will generate lots of stars for the business very quickly, therefore pushing up the business’s level very quickly. The drawback is...Well, that you make those particular customers very loyal to the business. :) So. they will be the ones most likely to visit the lot, thus they are the ones most likely to be taking up those 10 visitor slots. At this point, I’m not sure this is want I want for my situation here, so I have not yet tested that mod in my particular scenario, but I’m going to guess that it’ll work, since it worked in Didily’s situation. 

In my own case, I now have to decide if I want to play around with that mod...or drop the owned-lot concept and just leave the lots unowned but visitor-control them so that only Sims in the lot’s assigned hobby will be drawn as visitors. I’m thinking I will probably do the former because the entire point of my concept here is that I want Sims to be able to make purchases at these lots, which you generally can’t do at unowned lots aside from a few objects that are so enabled. (Like the clothing racks, magazine racks, grocery displays, etc.) Meaning, I want, for instance, an Arts & Crafts “hobby lot” that isn’t hidden and controlled by membership cards, where Sims with an A&C OTH can go to buy easels and pottery wheels and art/craft-related deco and stuff AND use functional art/craft objects in order to gain enthusiasm and creativity points when they don’t have enough money to buy such things as well as to socialize with (a lot of) Sims guaranteed to be interested in talking about Arts & Crafts. The only way to have all of that, that I know of, is to have owned community lots that are visitor-controlled to allow as visitors only those non-playables that have the relevant hobby as an OTH.