Lady Bug / Plantsim questions

[TreyNutz]

Yesterday I was trying to play 2 sims on a lot living solely by the food they could produce on their own.  I wanted it to be somewhat challenging, but the plantsim transitions were interfering.  Plantsims are well and good, but too easy to play.  They don't eat and get the gold gardening badge immediately.  Luckily my 2 sims got the gold gardening badge before spraying was a problem, so that wasn't an issue.

Plantsim transitions have 2 other problems - one is aspiration wants and fears related to becoming one and curing one.  I was playing with one family sim and one knowledge sim and they were polar opposites on this issue.  The other problem is that even though plantsim-ism is easy to cure, a cured sim has maxed needs.  This was my biggest annoyance.  It's like a cheap ride on the energizer.  Not quite what I wanted for this lot.

I haven't found a hack to prevent plantsim-ism, which would make this all a moot concern.  So I started thinking about how to work around this issue, and I have 2 questions:

1. Lady Bug lofts - how many do you need for decent coverage to be effective?  I had 4 lofts covering 6 'plots' of soil, each 'plot' being 4x4 with a sprinkler in the middle.  I had the plots arranged one tile away from each other in a 3x2 layout.  Spraying was so frequent in the summer I had 5 plantsim transitions between both sims.  The lofts are fairly expensive, I'd hate to have to blanket the garden with them.  But maybe I'll just have to budget for the expense.  My sims cannot afford greenhouses yet (I want to build up to that).

2. I've read that the spay exposure is about 100 times to turn into a plantsim.  Is that over the sim's entire life?  Or is it a per season/per year count?  I was intending to play with aging off for a few 'years'.  If I got another sim couple through the first year with minimal spraying and no plantsim transition, would a plantsim-ism be more likely the second year?  In other words, does the spay count eventually wear off, or is it absolute and just keep adding up?  Anyone know?

Oh, and one more question:  do the different refrigerators have different finite capacities to stock produce?  I'm curious whether it pays to buy the most expensive one in this respect.  Probably not since food doesn't spoil in the inventory.

[sara_dippity]

No chance of plant sims here.
By the way, when they can afford a greenhouse, I believe there is a hack in Pescado's seasons directory that prevents bugs in a greenhouse. Somewhere in the war room someone said that after a certain ammount of sprays (50? I'll dig it up) it was a 10% chance each spray. Don't know about the lofts all that much.

Edit ~ It is 15 sprays.

[Lorelei]

A friendly note here: more than one person has complained about poor performance and game crapness when installing "too many" ladybird houses. Unfortunately, I don't have a magic number to share with you, as the ladybird house overpopulation saturation limit varies greatly based on lot size, your machine, the EPs/SPs you may have, number of Sims on lot, the colour of the shirt you have on that day, what you ate for breakfast yesterday, your RAM, the amount of other "busy" objects on the lot and pure sadorandomness.

In short, be frugal with the ladybird houses, and if you experience Technical Difficulties, reduce the # of houses on that lot.

[jsalemi]

Different refrigerators do have different capacities; the cheapest holds only 200 units of food, the mid-range 300, and the top-of-the-line 500 or 600 units.

I think there's a fundamental flaw in your idea though.  I don't think that produce is edible on its own; if it's stocked in the fridge, it only serves to make regular food have higher food points. The fridge comes fully stocked when you buy it, but it will eventually run out of regular food if they don't buy groceries. Produce can be used to make juices, some of which fill hunger, but the produce has to be kept in the juicer or the sim's inventory -- once it's put in the fridge, it can't be used to make juice.

The only new Seasons food that's actually directly edible is fish, so your sims would have to have a pond on the lot and catch fish to stock in the fridge and keep it from running out of edible food.

A friendly note here: more than one person has complained about poor performance and game crapness when installing "too many" ladybird houses.

djssims has a hack that keeps the ladybug swarms to a reasonable size so they don't overwhelm your graphics performance.  It can be found on the same page as the link sara_dippity included in her post.

[TreyNutz]

Awesome, I'm not familiar with that site, so didn't find it.  But it's bookmarked now.     Searches here for 'plantsim' didn't bring up that post either.  That hack solves everything.

Thanks for the bughouse warning.  I have a pretty high end machine, but the game chugs on Vista.  XP performance is fine though.  With DJSims' hack I won't need that many.  I don't mind the spaying, just the plantsims.

[jsalemi]

jfade hangs out here, too, and is near-awesome.   He has some great hacks and objects on djssims -- it's one of my favorite sites that's not MATY.

[sara_dippity]

Oh yeah, the food points. I had a fridge (one of the 300 food units ones) that had 160 food units in it. I added over 400 fresh food points to it, the fresh food points went down when they ate, but the food units did not. And the fresh food points (as you can see) far exceeded the food unit max. I don't know if there is a cap to the fresh food points or not.
However, there is a bug, I don't know if it was working to my benefit there or not. I noticed houses that have never touched produce have fresh food complete with fattening bonus. Every lot has fresh food, kind of annoying.

[TreyNutz]

I think there's a fundamental flaw in your idea though.  I don't think that produce is edible on its own; if it's stocked in the fridge, it only serves to make regular food have higher food points. The fridge comes fully stocked when you buy it, but it will eventually run out of regular food if they don't buy groceries. Produce can be used to make juices, some of which fill hunger, but the produce has to be kept in the juicer or the sim's inventory -- once it's put in the fridge, it can't be used to make juice.

Well, I've only had Seasons for 2 days.  On the other lot I've been playing, I stocked the fridge with the harvested produce and didn't see the normal food capacity drop after that even though they were making plenty of sparkling food.  The fresh food capacity was dropping though.  So I just assumed sims could live off what they can grow.  If not, I'll just use harvests as a source of income I guess.  You would think that if you grew food you could eat it.  And yes, I did make sure there was a pond on the lot so they had plenty of fish by winter.

Ah well, I thought it would be a neat idea.  Didn't realize Seasons was so restricted in that respect.

[jsalemi]

Well, I could be wrong about the fresh food stuff not supplementing the regular food -- haven't had any produce harvested yet in my game, so I'm going by what I've read.  It could well be that the produce adds to the total food supply, or that could be a bug in the initial release that may be fixed in a future patch.

[dragoness]

I have a greenhouse on one of my lots and I've never once had bugs inside it, and I don't have any hacks related to the Seasons gardening that I know of.

On the same lot, I have six fruit trees outside the greenhouse (can you even put them in there? hmm... never tried it) in two rows of three. I have two ladybug houses, one in the middle of the first four trees and one in the middle of the second four. They work excellently and I only wind up spraying once or twice a "year."

I'm not sure if they prevent bugs from appearing, or if they automatically remove bugs on a regular basis... if it's the latter, you might be spraying a lot 'cause you're micromanaging a bit too much. I've taken to ignoring my fruit trees mostly, and using macrotastics to Garden whenever I see it come up as available and/or when the plants in the greenhouse or trees need tending. When I started taking that hands-off approach I found I noticed FAR less bugs, so I'm inclined to think the ladybug houses remove bugs after they spawn.

But then again, I'd just adjusted the ladybug houses' positions under the trees so it might've been a radius issue.

Either way, hope that helps a bit.

However, there is a bug, I don't know if it was working to my benefit there or not. I noticed houses that have never touched produce have fresh food complete with fattening bonus. Every lot has fresh food, kind of annoying.

I've heard that's an outdated hack doing that. Before I found this forum I waded through the forums over at Gamefaqs, here: http://boards.gamefaqs.com/gfaqs/gentopic.php?board=914811 There is a lot of stupidity over there, but if you can stand to wade through it, the sparkling food gets mentioned every couple of days and someone always mentions it's a conflict with an outdated version of a known hack. I just can't remember which one.

[jsalemi]

I believe one of TwoJeff's low food warning hacks caused that problem -- the updated version here fixes it.

[TreyNutz]

I played the McGreggor lot in River Blossom Hills for a while, which has 6 fruit trees in a 3x2 pattern and 1 ladybug loft in the center.  Sims did a lot of spraying on that lot.  Could be a radius issue.   Those trees seemed kind of far apart, maybe they weren't in the range?  The garden is on the other side of the lot.  I never put a loft near the plants, and they needed spraying more often.  (On that lot I was happy to get a plantsim though, so didn't mind.)

I was wondering if the lofts are more for prevention or for elimination.  I thought I noticed some bug swarms disappear on their own when I was playing yesterday, but then many did not and the bugs seemed to spread to surrounding plants.  Maybe I'll try leaving them alone longer and see what happens.

[sara_dippity]

Ah! Thanks for the info.

[Lorelei]

A friendly note here: more than one person has complained about poor performance and game crapness when installing "too many" ladybird houses.

djssims has a hack that keeps the ladybug swarms to a reasonable size so they don't overwhelm your graphics performance.  It can be found on the same page as the link sara_dippity included in her post.

My game seems to handle an inordinate amount of ladybird houses, though I do have (JFade's?) winter dormancy hack for the leetle blighters.

Of course, now that I've said this, I will never be able to play the Sims 2 ever again on this machine. :/

[kuronue]

For the fridge, my experience has been that the sims will cook using fresh points until there are none left, then go to regular food points. When I want my sims to eat off the land, they eat normal food until their first harvest comes in- I try to make it so there are no or almost no normal food points remaining by then, using the cheapest fridge. They then restock using fresh food and never call for groceries. I never get an "out of food" notice- they rarely eat all they harvest by the time they have more, especially when they supplement it with fish.

[witch]

Dunno if there's a size limit either, my cheap fridge is up to 1900 fresh food points, then I moved the growing stuff to a business lot. I haven't bought groceries for that lot ever.

[Diala]

I have six fruit trees outside the greenhouse (can you even put them in there? hmm... never tried it)

I've put trees inside the greenhouse. It keeps the bugs off, but you still have to trim them.

[Ness]

It bugs me that fruit trees inside greenhouses still go dormant in Winter.  It makes no sense!  Isn't the point of greenhouses to keep things warm enough so that they can grow all year round?

[J. M. Pescado]

A friendly note here: more than one person has complained about poor performance and game crapness when installing "too many" ladybird houses.

This sort of thing occurs with any overabundance of loop-emitters, items that iterate through the worldspace and act upon other objects: These are more CPU-intensive than other objects, and worse if they cycle more often or act upon a larger class of item.

[NothingToSee]

Dunno if there's a size limit either, my cheap fridge is up to 1900 fresh food points, then I moved the growing stuff to a business lot. I haven't bought groceries for that lot ever.

I have an expensive fridge with over 5000 fresh food points, so it would seem there is no easily reachable limit. I started selling the fruit and veg at a business lot as it'll be many generations before they finish eating that, especially with the use of leftovers.

[Gwill]

I had to check how bad my fridge would be if my servo emptied her inventory:


My finger hurts from all the clicking.  No sign of any cap.

[J. M. Pescado]

The cap is, naturally, 32767. Gwill is in danger of reaching that. If you get past 32767, it will roll over and go negative, as computer numbers are wont to do.

[Gwill]

Speaking of negative...
The Food level was at -47 at one point, but sims would still cook.  I suspect it's the non-awesome fridge.

[jsalemi]

I suspect it's the non-awesome fridge.

Isn't that the fridge from Life Stories?

[Gwill]

A ripped version, yes.