More Awesome Than You!

I only just learned today that bookcases, set for sale in a store, allow sims to buy individual books. I guess it was just something I never tried before. I actually think it's a pretty cool feature, and a nice little detail that would make a bookstore seem more realistic. Here's the problem:

I recently went through and futzed around with all the career/aspiration/other rewards to make them sellable in an OfB store. The idea is to set up a group of sims as black market dealers, earning rewards and them selling them off at a substantial markup to other sims who may have more money than time or happiness. The Education bookcase reward is, in my opinion, the big ticket item. I find that whole career track otherwise unrewarding, so I generally don't have many sims go that route, even though I'd like them to have the bookcase. The problem is that the little bastards buy the books off that shelf too, an action that J.M. Pescado has shown to be pretty much useless, as the book itself is only special as long as it coexists with the bookcase.

Ideally, it'd be nice to have the career bookcase itself buyable, while maintaining the per-book behavior of the other cases, but from what I can gather, that looks impossible. I also gather that the issue is now in the arena of BHAVs and such, which is kinda beyond my understanding. Does anyone know of a pre-existing hack (or know how to go about creating one) that would allow entire bookcases to be sold? I searched the forum, and there was some talk when OfB was new about how some people were selling books individually, while some could only sell entire bookcases, but none of the threads ever seemed to settle upon any particular reason why the behavior was different. If I missed something, I apologize, but if anyone has any ideas, it'd be nice to know. Thanks.

I think to sell whole bookcases you need to put it on one of the ofb shelves (the box one with no upper shelves) and set it for sale by clicking on the shelf, not the bookcase. I think so anyway, I am sure I did this before I realised the books could be sold individually.

When I read that I thought, "Yeah, of course! It's so simple! It has to work!" I am in utter disbelief that it didn't. I had to use moveobjects to get the cases up on the pedestal, but even when placing one on the very top of one of the shelves, the sims still managed to reach out and grab a book. I tried setting the price by the shelf, both with the tool and through the sim, and neither worked. Blah.

Oh. Ok I didn't do it that way then :D I'll check later when I play.

Bookcases are not sellable individually, and would require a fair amount of reworking to stub this behavior out. This avenue is not being pursued at this time.

I don't know what would be the maximum you could charge, but if you made the books hideously expensive, couldn't you give the bookcase as a gift to those sims, who are prepared to purchase a book for that price?
It isn't really a solution but a possible workaround if your main aim is to distribute the career rewards.

What did you do to make the rewards sellable?

Yeah-I was selling the actual books, I think. I haven't had a business actually selling books since I first got OFB. Sorry for getting your hopes up.

It's all good, Emma. I guess I was expecting too much, thinking that there might actually be something logical in the game. Now I'm just mad at the devs for not doing it that way in the first place.

doren, that's kinda what I was thinking. Or even cloning some sort of envelope object and jacking up the price, making it a voucher for the case, or making it a "free gift" for buying a bunch of lesser things. There are several different ways to get around it, so I'm not all that bummed. It was just one of those moments where I got everything working except that one stupid thing, you know?

As for making them sellable, there's a field in the OBJD that SimPE labels as "unused" (I believe it's field 0x003C, in the last section of the raw data), and in unsellable objects it's set to 1. You just change it to 0 and you're set. Aspiration rewards are easy because they already come with a price attached: the number of aspiration points required. Thus you can purchase it for aspiration, and sell it in a shop for money. The career rewards have no price, so you have to give it one in the OBJD. The nice thing is that both kinds of rewards won't sell back for money in buy mode, so the only way to sell a reward for cash is to sell it in a shop. Thus, you don't end up with a family getting $16K every time you delete a drained thinking cap. If you want, I'll post the packages I made so you don't have to bother with it too much. I didn't get around to giving the career rewards logical prices, but that's easy enough to change. So let me know if you want 'em.

J.M., thanks for the definitive answer. Now I won't have to waste a lot of time trying to fix something that I can't.

I do. I was thinking about selling aspiration/career rewards before, especially since my sims always end up with a massive amount of aspiration points (the ones I have played for a long time approx. 300,000 points), which they never use for anything. Career rewards on the other hand are very useful, at least some of them. The only one which you will never see in my game - sellable or not - is the cowplant.

Okeydokey, in the zip are 3 .packages: one for career rewards, one for aspiration rewards, and one for miscellaneous rewards. As I said before, the career rewards prices are kinda wonky. I was testing out various things like maximum price (32,000 or so) and how hard it is to sell high-priced items to sims, so you'll probably want to open those in SimPE and change them to something you like. Some of the objects have multiple OBJD files, but the only one that needs a price is the main one, which will be the only one with a sale price to begin with. Sorry, but I haven't sat down yet to figure out the best prices for things. The only things included in the Miscellaneous .package are the wishing well from Seasons and the voodoo doll from Bon Voyage. The wishing well was already deletable, so I didn't change its price. The voodoo doll I set to 1000.

If I screwed something up in all my back-and-forth, let me know and I'll fix it. Also, I'd like to know if I missed any other misc. rewards so I can edit them too. Enjoy!