More Awesome Than You!

Am I the only person who gets supremely annoyed by reading a thread title that suggests it is offering information, only to find out it is someone requesting information?  Bah.  Call it "Wanted - A Novel Writing Guide" or something. </grumpy>

I've got a writing/novel guide here (http://www.sublimesims.net/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=276:skills-writing-and-novels&catid=84:faqcheats&Itemid=105).
Masterpiece is unlocked by being a level 10 writer.

Your information is incorrect.

Masterpiece shows up after writing 25 novels.  Usually the author is Level 10 by then, but it won't show up before 25 other novels are written.  As well, vaudeville only needs 2 of each of the types listed, not three.

It is supposed to be a guide, but I need information to fill it in!
Why don't you contribute to it and then it would be a guide rather than a request for information.

I can add in the Articles info when I load my game, since I have a Sim in the Journalism career who just got the article writing ability.

(Aside: I did say I was grumpy earlier.  Am over it by now.)

Edit:  Articles become level at the Freelance Writer position, which is Level 3.

You can also get Opportunities to write Biographies--one of my sims has written 2 of them already and she's a full-time novelist. Both times the Opportunity has been to write the memoirs of her one and only friend.

One of my sims also got an opportunity to write a biography. She was level 8 in the Cooking career. She had only written 3 sci-fi novels up to that point and I wasn't really focussing on writing as a skill for her but I had her go through with it as the person wanting the biography was her boss.

How kind of you to create a guide where none of the information is provided by you.  I stand in awe of your awesome in-game knowledge and helpfulness.

Thanks, that was great.

You can read this stuff I tested out in the game, but the text file pbox attached to her post below is the best guide possible, because it uses the actual game data.

My learnings, let me show them to you:

Genre	av. pages	§	actual royalties earned
Fiction	90	$	66, 81 (hit), 123 (best seller)
Non-Fiction	90	$	58, 56, 95 (best seller), 59
Science Fiction	150	$	158
Trashy Novel	190	$	146, 265 (best seller), 169
Drama	305	$$	398
Children's (req. 4 painting)	105	$	265 & 339 (best sellers), 66 (flop)
Humor	345	$$	450
Historical (must be Elder)	345	$$	919 (best seller), 782 (hit)
Mystery	510	$$$	904 (hit)
Romance	675	$$$$	1603
Fantasy	440	$$$	1059, 1028 (best seller)
Satire	350	$$$	1216 (best seller), 1044 (hit)
Vaudeville	1250	$$$$	1155 (flop)
Biography	400	$$	308
Masterpiece	2000	$$$$$	5788

"Average pages" and the § numbers are taken from the Skill Journal; the "actual royalties earned" numbers reflect the weekly royalty my sim received, not the total.  I did not notice that skill level made any difference in royalties; it only seemed to unlock genres.  Most of this data was gained with a YA sim with the Clumsy, Good, Loves the Outdoors, Workaholic, and Vegetarian traits.  Some traits are alleged to give bonuses to related genres, and the traits I chose for this sim were not represented on that list.  Three novels were written by an elder sim with the Bookworm, Genius, Good, Hot-headed, and Workaholic traits: one non-fiction book with a §59 per week royalty, and the historical novels.  The elder sim had a skill level of 6, while the main test sim had maxed the writing skill before I started collecting royalty numbers.

In keeping with the spirit of this thread, I will note that the royalty information could use more data to allow us to make a reasonable average for flops, average sellers, hits, and best sellers.  Additionally, I have no information for the Autobiography.  Please feel free to post additional data, preferably noting the sim's traits and the performance level of the novel.

EDIT:  It would also be good to know if the sim has any lifetime rewards related to writing books.  (Neither of my sims had any.)  With more data, we can figure out how much those perks are really worth.

My Sim at Level 10 writing, with Dislikes Children, Workaholic, Ambitious, Neat, Green Thumb and Charismatic traits:

Masterpiece: §20828 for best-seller, §15420 for hit, §9784 for regular sales.

She's a Vaudeville writer, so I'll start to keep track now but so far I haven't.

Does the sim have any perks related to writing books?

Has anybody bothered testing to see what, if any, effects the library's aura has on novel writing?  It seems to make it faster in my experience, but I'm honestly just going by feeling.  Sims also seemed nigh-guaranteed to crank out hits and best sellers when writing a book in the library, but that could just be dumb luck.

The library does seem to make skilling up faster, so it's worthwhile for that reason if nothing else.  Though I do believe that it does have an impact on profitability of books, I'll have to actually test it 'afore makin' any right-boastful claims.

I'm curious what effect, if any, the genre type has on actually reading the books.  I've never quite understood the value in the very expensive books in the book store.  The books with game effects I understand, but not the ones that only increase Fun.

I wonder if we'll eventually get a SimPE-like took that will let us add additional markers.  Since, for example, you can't write Pregnancy books, there are only 2 in the game, and Sims constantly roll Wishes to read them when having kids, even if they've already read both.

 - Gus

Well, you know, since puddings have no memories it's like a brand new experience for them!  Though obviously there's SOME marker indicating what they've done before (ergo "reread Broken Rubber: A love story"), just no way of going back and seeing what the hell happened.

So all the proposed virtues of having no memories, is it just a readily visible record that helped cause VBTs or existence at all?  Since there are obviously memoryoid toggles somewhere.

Also, would the fun rates of books be something more akin to script or XML?  With all the dandyriffic things extracted from the XML, maybe the answer to "does it fucking matter what book you read?" lies in there.

I love the names of the books that come up :P My sim wrote a Masterpiece last night (after having written nothing but non-fiction novels) she got $7406 for called "101 Reasons Why Frosting Is a Food Group". I almost wish that was a real book, I'd LOVE to read that. :D

My Sim got a "read a masterpiece" moodlet buff after reading a masterpiece.

I haven't yet had the chance to poke around in the actual game files, but I looked at a "Faster Writing" mod on the weekend in order to find out what exactly is tuneable - it seems to include all the relevant keys (although I belive they only actually changed the PPM (pages per minute)). I'm attaching a .txt below -- perhaps it helps to find the relevant entries, or give a quick overview for those who are just curious but don't plan to actually tune stuff themselves.

I re-grouped the entries to make it more easily readable - the list is not XML, just the keys/values and the comments that were in the file.

Example:

kRoyaltySatireMin value="350" - Min Royalty of a Satire novel
kRoyaltySatireMax value="410" - Max Royalty of a Satire novel
kRoyaltyMysteryMin value="325" - Min Royalty of a Mystery novel
kRoyaltyMysteryMax value="340" - Max Royalty of a Mystery novel
kRoyaltyRomanceMin value="600" - Min Royalty of a Romance novel
kRoyaltyRomanceMax value="890" - Max Royalty of a Romance novel
kRoyaltyHistoricalMin value="290" - Min Royalty of a Historical novel
kRoyaltyHistoricalMax value="360" - Max Royalty of a Historical novel

.. that's why people say "Romance is the most profitable genre" - it's tuned like that.

Also:

kMinLevelForHumorGoodSenseOfHumor value="2" - Required writing skill level for Humor if Sim has Good Sense of Humor trait
kMinLevelForRomanceHelplessRomantic value="5" - Required writing skill level for Romance if Sim has Helpess Romantic trait
kMinLevelForSciFiComputerWhiz value="0" - Required writing skill level for SciFi if the Sim is a Computer Whiz

kNumSciFiWrittenForFantasy value="3" - Number of SciFi novels written for Fantasy
kNumHumorWrittenForSatire value="3" - Number of Humor novels written for Satire
kNumEachGenreForVaudeville value="2" - Number of books written in each Drama, SciFi, Humor, Mystery and Romance for Vaudeville
kNumBiographiesWrittenForAutoBiography value="3" - Number of Biographies written for Autobiography
kNumBooksWrittenForMasterpiece value="25" - Number of total books written for Masterpiece
kMinLevelJournalismForArticle value="3" - Required Journalism level for Article

.. in a word, there's no need to test this kind of stuff; it's all defined as nice, simple, human-readable XML.


The mod I was using is by "Gorre" and is called "FasterWritingMoreMoneyV2" - unfortunately I don't remember where I got it from. Again, I have no way of telling what exactly they changed (i.e. which values in my list are still the original ones and which ones are changed) but I *believe* they probably only changed the base PPM since that's all you need to get the desired effect in their case. Do not copy+paste from the attached .txt if you want to tune things yourselves - there were a few typos and gremlins in the file, I believe the game could easily choke on that. Search for the relevant entry in gameplaydata.package instead; I'm only posting this to make it easier to actually find things.
 
(With the txt editor I use I can simply open a .package and look at the XML with no further ado - not sure if everyone's aware of that? This makes it very easy to just take a quick look at something, if you're curious what exact trait/skill/perk influences the XYZ feature - you don't need to install a separate tool or anything. This even works with TextEdit, so should work in Notepad and its ilk, as well.)

"Most profitable" really needs to take into account $ / page, not just raw $.  Assuming that time required to produce a novel is directly related to the page count.  The highest $ / page I'm seeing on Bast's list is Satire, at $3 / page, but that's for a hit.  The Romance listing is $2.4 / page.

I've finally created a full-time writer.  It's much more interesting than a Sim who barely manages to write one or two novels while holding down a regular job.  My royalties are much higher, but he was tuned to be a writer with "Bookworm" and "Artistic" and the "Acclaimed Author" perk, not to mention the bonuses from Specialist and Prolific.  I had fun with the book titles - Children's books such as "Hamster Huey and the Gooey Kablooie" and "The Noodle Incident," or a Romance novel titled "Do Androids Watch Electric Porn?"

Since there are benefits to volume of books, there's some strategy to writing some of the shorter works like Children's and SF.

 - Gus

My partner had fun naming her childrens' books "Mommy and Daddy's Littlest Buzzkill", "Mommy and Daddy Yell Because They Don't Love You", "Why Mommy and Daddy Hang You Upside-Down", and a bunch of others I can't recall.  She just spammed childrens' books to get a 25-book wish.

Since I'm slightly less bored with TS3 right now, I'll try actually testing the library effect.  3x the same genre in home with specialty vs. 3x the same genre in library with specialty should hopefully be enough.

Those are pretty good.  Better than what I was thinking along those lines but didn't do, such as "The Smurfs Are Eaten By Sharks."

 - Gus

My author sim had some rather sardonic children's books:
"Why Didn't Mommy Come Home Last Night?"
"Fun Secrets With Grownups"
"Chris Hansen and Friends"
"Clifford Goes To Sleep"

It did answer a question I had about reading books.

I guess, from the top parsing this data file presented as-is (hopefully close to original values).

*UPDATE* I parsed the original .xml and got a little more info, updated below.  Original questions still stand though.

Speed hidden stuff:
- Reading 50 books caps out your speed bonus, seems to be a very tiny linear speed progression per book read from 0 to 50.
- Writing 20 books caps out another speed bonus in addition to "Prolific Author" bonus.
- Writing skill (0 through 10) grants another small speed bonus.  Bonus is based on partial skill points, full skill points are not needed.  Reaching Level 10 doubles this bonus.

Quality (flop/hit/best-seller) hidden stuff:
- Hidden "Genre Skill" for each genre, goes up with every hit and best-seller, goes down with every flop (capped out at 60% bonus chance), also multiplies royalties.
- Sim can be Genre Novelist in multiple genres, regardless of what text says (confirm?).

Writing payments:
- Sim is paid every 20% of his book he completes.
- Sim is paid .5 simoleans/page completed (seems to be flat rate, though can be tweaked).

Royalties:
- A multiplier is added based on your writing skill. 1x (at level 0) to 4x (at level 10).  Its a smooth transition, doesn't require you have a full skill point.
- Royalties and book sale value are NOT tied at all to # of pages.
- Flops give 35% of the adjusted payment, hits give 125%, best-sellers give 160%.
- Hidden "Genre Skill", gives 10% bonus per previous book in the genre, maxes out at 200%.

Traits:
- "Supporting Traits" for each genre have 2 effects, increases royalties slightly and allows you to write some genres sooner than normal skill allows.
- The multiplier effect for supporting traits are cumulative when increasing royalties if they are applicable to the genre.


Open questions:
- How do you write a biography except through opportunity chance card?  No mentions are made for minimum skill, previous writings, or career level in any field.
- Is there a difference between Life Story, Autobiography, Biography, and Political Memoir? These 4 genres are mentioned separately, with only Autobiography mentioned as having a minimum requirement.

Maaagical Library Aura Test, RE: Writin'
Subject sim: specialist in science fiction, Speed Writer perk.

Procedure: three sci-fi novels at home, three in the library, testing for PPM (time spent writing) and quality.

Results:
Home tests:
Book 1 (04:50-08:50), hit
Book 2 (09:23-13:23), best seller
Book 3 (14:10-18:10), best seller

Library tests:
Book 1 (19:08-23:08), hit
Book 2 (23:25-03:26), hit
Book 3 (03:50-07:50), best seller

Conclusion: hells of disappointing.  I was hoping the library'd at least do something, I guess its effect is either a LIE or is limited to skilling.  I'll test that next.

I'm confused about a few things. I know you need to get an oppertunity to write a Biography, but does that unlock the Biography genre? Or do you need to get three seperate oppertunites before you can write your autobiography?

Also, I see in that file "Life Story" yet there is no mention of how one gains the ability to write that genre? Is that also oppertunity driven or is there somthing else that is needed to write it?

Three tests are hardly conclusive.  I thought I read in one of the XML's that the library gave some percent increase in the chance of hits and best sellers, so I searched through all the GameplayData.package XML's and found this;

In the Book XML it states the library grants a bonus 1 point per minute when reading.
In the Homework XML it states the completion rate modifier from the library is 1.111.
In the BuffPowerStudy XML it states the "working from home" performance (for workaholics) multiplier for the library is 1.5.

Absolutely no mention of any writing bonuses.

The interesting thing is I can't actually find a modifier inside skilling anywhere for the library effect. I can definitely confirm the existence of the homework and work effect, though. It makes "Work from Home" a bit of a misnomer, really.

Workaholic Sims have the option to "Work from home", which allows them to raise their performance outside their work hours on a computer.  

Is skilling modified by the speed at which you read the skill book? I keep wanting to think PPM is Pages Per Minute, when it's Points Per Minute.  Since the Homework skill gets 10 PPM (3 PPM if you copy homework), 1 PPM doesn't seem like much.

Thank you.  I edited my post.

Book Values...
From the Writing XML I calculated the average pages and average unmodified royalties for each book type to find the royalties per page.  Most of the results were obvious, but I like to have hard numbers when picking the best thing to do.  I was a bit shocked at how well Childrens ranked.

Masterpiece - 1.463
Vaudeville - 1.288
Romance - 1.104
Satire - 1.086
Childrens - 0.857
Fantasy - 0.75
Mystery - 0.652
Historical - 0.644
Humor - 0.638
Drama - 0.562
Article - 0.554
SciFi - 0.433
Trashy - 0.416
AutoBiography - 0.406
Biography - 0.406
Fiction - 0.333
NonFiction - 0.333

From a game-balance point of view, it makes a certain amount of sense because Children's requires that you develop an unrelated skill.  Of course, that ignores the fact that Biography and Autobiography, which aren't particularly easy to unlock, are the worst sellers on the list.

I slightly resent that a category that doesn't really exist is so high paying.  A "vaudeville novel" is a contradiction in terms - by its very nature, vaudeville is not something that translates off the stage.  It's fairly low-quality entertainment even when it is on stage, so it's annoying to see it as the penultimate literary form.

No figures for the bottom two categories, Fiction and Non Fiction?  Though from experience they're both low.

 - Gus

Thank you.  I totally missed those two.  For some reason they were much later in the XML and not grouped with the rest.  They both rank the lowest at 0.333.  The list was edited to include them.

Do you have to read 50 different Books or can you just read the same over and over again?

Edit: do books written by yourself also count?

They fulfill reading wishes, so likely yes.

Check your "books read" stat in your writing skill page.  I believe repeated books don't count.  You will see the difference when you go to read a book, it will either be "Read XXX" or "Reread XXX".

Yes, your own books count, but only if you read them after you get them in the mail.

Well, I was honestly hoping more for a bonus in writing speed.  I guess it could just be the RNG and the library actually does give some mysterious invisible bonus to hit/best seller chance, but since most of my experiences with library seemed to make reading, skilling, etc. faster I'd assumed it would have some effect on novel writing rate.

Also, I think rereading books count.  My partner's selfsim regularly got wishes to read many, many books, and rereading books prompted the wishgranting.  Of course my eyes could deceive me, but that's what I recall.

It may grant the wish, but it doesn't up your permanent stat, just checked.  Under your writing skill tab you will see the stat for the amount of "unique" books you have read.  The good news is that every unique book read makes your reading that much fast for the next one.  Also, short books and articles count just fine, my sim can read a children's book in about 30 game minutes or less.  Fiction, non-fiction, and sci-fi novels go down very easy also.

New question...for everyone.

I parsed the heck out of the xmls and found no bonus to writing for having the "Artistic" trait.  The trait's description mentions that they become better writers, but nothing in the xml code backs that up.

Does the "Artistic" Trait have any global effect on writing, or does it just help one or two genres maybe like other traits?

Artistic simply adds a 1.1 multiplier to the speed you learn the Writing skill.  It also multiplies the speed for Guitar by 1.1 and Painting by 1.25.

Wait, so reading moar unique books makes you read faster?  Does this apply to reading skill books too?  Do we have any inkling as to what rate it increasificates at?

How does one gain the ability to write a Childrens novel?

I believe by having a certain level of painting skill - level 4 or possibly 5.

Level 4.  Or by having the childish and/or playful traits.

Children can write novels too - and they seem to get the option for children's books without painting [I think], but I can't confirm it since my sims tend to learn painting first.

My sim got an option to write Political Memoir while she's in the Politics career(9). Problem is, I can't figure out the exact condition to unlock it. When she got an opportunity to write a Political Memoir and bring it to work, I thought it was a one-time thing only available through opportunity like Biography since no one in MATY mentioned 'Political Memoir' except PolecatEZ. Anyway when she got that opportunity she was level 9 in the Politics and reached 10 that day. After finishing writing the memoir she quit the job without completing the opportunity, because completing the opportunity would lose the book forever and I wanted to keep the book in her home. But the option to write Political Memoir is still on her computer. She maximized all of her skills except writing(8-9) and painting(8-9).

Sorry for any grammatical errors, I'm Korean and I'm not good at writing in English.

I'm sorry I don't know the answer to your question - but your English is just fine. More than fine, it's bloody good.  ;D

Does anyone know if reading skill books, recipes/bait, and learning songs adds to the "#Books Read"?

Yes, they do.  I've completed "read X books" wishes with reading recipes and skill books.  I don't know if it works for songs, since learning a song doesn't use the Read interaction.  If you do it properly, anyway, instead of reading the songbook.

 - Gus

I will have to try to get the Vaudville one. Childrens one looks like a good deal though. I didn't realize reading books helped you write either. Or going to write at the library, but makes sense. Does having more logic also help? It seems that helps a lot of things.

And good god does the masterpiece ever take long to write. I just had my sim finish one took FOREVER and that was with constantly using the damned moodlet soother too and with all the bonuses like the speed bonus for making $30k from books. But on the upside it was a best seller and she's getting 6 payments of $15K!!  :o

I'll ask this here too, probably a better place for it than the Awesome Wish Thread :P. So, I want my sims novels to be buyable, and I have tried selling them to the bookstore. They don't show up as buyable books. Do they have to be bestsellers for that or what? They are all in the library. Selling them to the bookstore just made them vanish from my sims house, which is sad.

They never show up in the bookstore, despite hints to the contrary.  They show up in the library, but otherwise the free copies you get for writing them are the only copies in existence.

 - Gus

They can also show up as Book Club books (for bookworm Sims).

I've heard some people talk about stealing from the library but as of yet have been unable to do it. The sim will never put a library book in their inventory and if I have them set it down you can't pick it up on a community lot.

The way I'm working around the "one copy only" thing atm:

- grow copies of the books with the Omniplant
- "trade" the copies to other households by means of plunking them into a sim's inventory, temporarily adding the sim to another household (with ctrl-shift-click), pulling the book into the other household's bookcase, and re-adding the sim to where they came from.

The latter part is a bit crude and tedious, but what can you do .. I'm certainly hoping there will be simpler ways of exchanging things between households in the future.

I don't have any of the EAxian stores or comm lots in my neighbourhood, my sims all trade with each other this way (repairs against fertiliser, books against fish, etc). I'm planning to establish a marketplace where everybody goes on Saturdays so they can do this sort of trade more easily (no scrolling around to the other household), or make a dedicated "courier service" sim who can be temp-added to other households for trading.

I do wish there was some sort of give gift or exchange item menu in the game itself. It's rather irksome it doesn't have that feature. They are probably saving it for an expansion I'd imagine.  ::)

I think so, too. The thing is, i believe the foundations of such a thing must be in the game already -- after all, kleptomaniacs can already put stuff in their inventories that isn't theirs (big things as well -- not just normal "inventorisable" items), and any sim can "Pick Up" plantables on other sims' home lots. I tried all combinations of picking up/putting down stuff on all sorts of lots, and it's really aggravating that nothing works even when it so *obviously* could.

I dunno, I requested this for awesomemod a while ago, perhaps it'll show up as a new feature at some point. *crosses fingers and toes*

Inventory transfer is a feature that is being researched. Positive results may be forthcoming.

Awesome. Now that would be a feature I'd even be willing to install EA patches for!  :-*

Are you also looking into putting "big things" into sim inventories? I'd love if sims could move house and take some furniture with them -- not only when moving the entire household, I mean when one sim moves out it'd be great if they could just take the stuff from their room or whatever.

Growing books! I didn't think of that, lol.

You can make your own bookstore/publishing house that way! =) I'm sure that at some point, we'll be able to make replacement meshes for the omniplant (or clone xerox machines off the omniplant or whatever), so it won't look as stupid as it currently does.

Feature is up.

Not really. In truth, there's really very little point in doing so. Unlike TS2, you're not looking at an annoying rigamarole anytime you want to move with trying to keep the original lot from being shredded, so once a house is furnished, it pretty much stays furnished for life and moving about is a fairly painless experience.

For me it's not about the houses so much, more about the belongings of individual sims, and about trading (of my old couch vs. your tomatos/books/fish). But I believe I can workaround the former by making them temp-kleptomaniacs and having them steal their own stuff from the old house -- it's not like they're moving every day, so that should be feasible. I believe at least some of the stuff re. the kleptomaniac trait is tuneable as well, maybe I can just make everyone kleptomaniac and disable the possible annoyances (like auto stealing .. I wouldn't want everyone to do that)

Thanks for enabling the inventories! Looking forward to try this out on the weekend.


ETA, just wanted to add that I have a current awesome with inventory trading installed now -- this works really nicely, sims can swap books with their friends in a very uncomplicated manner now. The only thing you need to be aware of is that both sims must be on the same lot, and the visitor needs to have been "invited inside" (not just greeted).

I'm sorry for necroing this topic, but I just wanted to point out that there is a third pregnancy book. it's gotten from the medical career as a reading-material-opportunity and is called Gift of Life. The opportunity doesn't say anything about it being pregnancy book, but it has white covers. Noticed when mommy had taken both normal books with her and daddy wanted to prepare for sprog.

Actually, the only two books that will satisfy the Read a Pregnancy Book wish are the two in the bookstore (the code only checks for those two specific titles). That medical book reuses the "prenatal" cover but it won't fulfil the wish.

Could have sworn the wish came through, but oh well, must have been my imagination. Too bad, the name is perfect in the "makes you nauseous" way.

Does anyone know if it's possible to make at least 20,000 simoleons in royalties on one book? My author sim got this as a wish. She has written a ton of best-sellers, has all the trait and perk bonuses. I've gotten very close to, but not quite to 20,000. Masterpiece is the genre, obviously. She also has a wish to write 60 novels, and I'm wondering if I should give up on the 20K and aim for shorter books. She is an elder so I need to prioritize.

It might be possible, but these wishes are procedurally generated wishes, so they wil just inflate to greater and more ridiculous levels.