More Awesome Than You!

There are two aspects of the game that, at the moment, make me want to pull my hair out.

1: Autonomous musical-instrument playing.  As if it's bad enough our Sims have to waste several Sim-minutes dropping down a tip jar at HOME and then waste several more Sim minutes inspecting it after they get up, visitor Sims have the gall to come into our homes, plunk down their own jar, and play the nearest handy musical instrument for hours.  Does anyone know of a mod that will simply stop autonomous music-playing altogether?

2: The stupid 'help with birthday' action.  It gets time for a baby to transition into a toddler, so a parent goes to pick the kid up.  You rest your mouse over the action icon - 'help with birthday.'  Okay, great!  So they pick up the baby, and just stand there.  What are they doing, anyway?  Rest your cursor over the mouse and... 'hold youngster.'  It seems the brain-damaged Sim has completely forgotten why they trekked all the way to the baby's room in the first place.  Even worse, the option for 'help with birthday' doesn't appear when you click on the baby, ever.  Is there a mod that either adds this to the baby's menu or one that keeps Sims from dropping the action?

yes and yes - nobuskers is someting you should look into and the second there is a pie menu, its call take so and so to birthday cake, obviously you have to buy a cake...but there is also a no age swarm so look for that too.

I know a birthday cake'll do it, but sometimes I'd just like to bypass the birthday cake altogether.

well unless Pescado has snuck in a mod somewhere, babies still need help and often fail to initialize on their own without a cake.

Drat.  Well, thanks for your help.  :)

actually I think he did mention doing something about, I just dont know what he put it in.

It's in the baby controller.  When you get the "Time to buy a birthday cake" message, have an adult or teen click on the baby controller "eye in the sky" object, and you should see a "Grow up" option.  Click on that, and the Sim will pick up the baby and do the "grow up" without needing a cake.  It might take several attempts, but it should work eventually.

Karen

Never, never, never let the baby get to 18:00 on the day of transition before aging them. The automatic 'Help with Birthday' is hopelessly bugged and rarely works. Age them by any other means, cake, hack, whatever before the game forces the aging.

I believe that the Time Syncer has the Age Baby option as well.

I've always found it strange that my teens never have a problem aging their younger siblings with the automatic 'Help with Birthday' - provided the game calls them to do it - but Adults usually get stuck just holding the kid.

I've noticed that too. Usually I just use the dreaded Insim temporal adjuster to force the adult to transition the kid as soon as the popup shows I can do it (I don't use the baby controller because I've never had any problems with them taking care of the babies, just harrassing them...). It's easier when the baby's needs are all green for it to happen automatically, too.

I use the Insim temporal adjuster to age them up most of the time  *hugs her InSIM*  sometimes I forget a baby is due to age and then wonder why the sim is heading for the babys room *laughs*

I don't use the baby controller either, don't need it with the way I play.

If you don't need help taking care of babies, the Baby Controller can just be left on the default state of "Do Nothing", and used only for its "Grow Up" function. Or you can use the bottle disintegrator to automatically delete dropped junk bottles as if you had gone into buy mode, or whatever.

Yes, yes, yes! I've looked high and low for one with the musical instrument playing major big time annoyance fix. In fact I've quit using all musical instruments at home because of it.However I don't think I would have ever looker under "nobuskers". Duh! Glad Syera posted this. I was going to and just hadn't gotten there yet.

The baby grow up problem is way too annoying also. So will try what y'all have said. I have tried the cake before and they still just stood there like they were in outerspace..or where ever Sims standing there drift off to.

May I also add that after playing this game vanilla up until a couple of weeks ago, you have no idea how much I appreciate all your hacks to fix all those annoyances, etc. Might have been my imagination but after I put in OFB and the Patch2, it seems everything got 3 times worse than it was before. So I went seaching for hacks after I had to fix the video glitch (Driver change due to OFB hated the new drivers). When I get Pets, I hope to have everything redownloaded for that expansion so I can load it up vanilla again and then add back everything updated. No longer can I do without these fixes, etc.

Thanks again to all of you who do these mods. Maxis...EA should hire you to fix their crummy glitches. ;D