Of course not. I had to dig through all that shit to find what answers I got; He has to do the same.

I would if I was qualified. As it stands now, however, that would involve digging through a whole lot more crap than I care to.

The only problem with that is that the Awesome Story progression isn't really in the manual. I looked. The only real mention of Awesome Story in the manual is:

I had the same question a while ago and it took several searches to find the answer I was looking for, when really, it should have been as simple as reading the manual and reading how Awesome Story Progression is superior to EA Story Aggression. If there isn't going to be any sort of addendum to the manual regarding how Awesome Story works and why it is superior to the default, then perhaps a stickied thread or something somewhere so that people don't have to dig through piles of crap (namely, posts just like this one) to find the answer they're looking for would be a good idea. AwesomeMod FAQ maybe? I dunno, but it certainly is frustrating when you have a question about something, so you do searches and can't really find anything but the same question being asked by someone else and the asker getting flamed by everyone else.

So, according to the example you just gave, if I wanted to completely do away with the MaxOfficeHolders thing, I could simply delete all instances of that tag and I could, say, have 500 Leaders of The Free World running around in my hood if I wanted to? (you know, of course providing that my neighborhood and computer could support that many sims, let alone that many in Politics, etc, etc.)

Now hat you mention it, I do recall my latest wolf run resulted in an awful lot of my townies having the same freakishly bright red hair that I'd put on one of my Library sims.

Since the general consensus seems to be that if you teach all your toddlers their three toddler skills, I'm wondering if maybe the OP didn't quite finish teaching one of the skills to her toddlers even though she thought she did. Of course with the removal of memories, it's impossible to check (but trust me, I completely understand/agree with getting rid of them).

Funny. for as many evil sims that I've played, and for as many Steal Candy interactions I've done, I've never actually noticed whether it causes a relationship hit or not.

It seems logical that it would, but we all know how the words 'EA' and 'Logic' simply don't belong in the same sentence... nor the same paragraph. I can't think of any evil sims living with toddlers in my game at the moment, so I can't even test this unless I create a new family. However, I can think of one family in which an evil sim, who was the uncle of a toddler, actually had the highest relationship with the toddler than he did with anybody else, and the toddler had the same with him. Of course in that case, the evil uncle ended up being the primary care giver, and the toddler was insane.. so maybe that's not the best example.

I would say that mood seems a logical attribute for deciding whether a toddler grows up well, but really, it's hard to get a toddler 'in the bubble' unless they live on a beautiful vista lot, since I don't think they get comfort moodlets from their cribs, they don't get well fed buffs, and they don't get decorated buffs. I think mood is probably the biggest factor in pregnancy though. Of course, whether average mood throughout the pregnancy or just her mood when the children are born becomes a question.

Honestly, I think the best way to find out what affects growing up well or poorly would probably be to find the data in one of the files. I would be the wrong person to ask on that front though. I barely have a working knowledge of HTML, and anything above that boggles my poor little brain (to include proper comma usage).

VS.


Learn to read, Xebarsis. Obviously there's something more than just learning the basics while a toddler.

I did just think of something though, Kuronue.. how were the toddlers' relationships with their parents? I guess, obviously, since they learned to walk and talk and everything, they must have each had a decent relationship with at least one of their parents, but maybe that has some factor in it?

I would attempt to run some tests, however growing up toddlers is a fairly cumbersome task, and I'm sure what to test.

That's about what I'm thinking.

Honestly, from what I've seen, the good/rough pregnancy thing seems to be completely random. I've had sims who I've taken utmost care with and had a rough pregnancy, and other sims I've ignored during their pregnancy and gotten a good pregnancy. Getting a package deal from the spa seems to help though.

As for toddlers, I thought that as long as they learned their three skills they'd have a good birthday and you'd get to choose their traits. I've actually never not been able to choose a trait for a toddler becoming a child, but then again I always make sure they learn all their toddler skills, and they usually max out either peg box or xylophone or both.

Pescado, you might want to inform my game about that then, because I've had one of my sims revive one twice and had the option to revive it a third time, but I just deleted it because he had already harvested quite enough death flowers for each member of the household. Not that they really needed it or anything though, since you really have to try to get an 'accidental' death, thus making death flowers overall pretty useless.

Actually I have tested whether or not Loves the Outdoors affects gardening skill (this was from reading a book) and it does not. the only upside to loves the outdoors is that they will be in a better mood than other sims while gardening or fishing, which will give them a slight boost to skill gain while they are performing these gardening/fishing actions, but only if their mood is high enough that they are "In the bubble"

Testing with static motives makes it retarded easy to make sure they all have the same mood. it's using static motives and trying to get varying moods that was a problem for me, lol.

I'm wondering if I should just rename this thread and use this thread to post the links to my learnings.

That is something I have not tested yet. I have, however, just completed a test in which sims skilled by reading books at various stages of "Being in the bubble" as well as various stages of mood not being "In the bubble"

Through my tests I have concluded that at all stages of being not in the bubble sims skill at a flat rate, I will call that the base. The max attainable skilling rate that can be acquired at home is double the base skilling rate. This is with a completely full mood bubble. Being in the bubble at any stage in between empty and full will affect your skilling rate at percentages depending on where in the bubble your sim is.

The minimum rate of skilling by reading a book at the library is double the base rate, and is multiplied by your bubble rate. Thus, if a sim skills at the library while at max bubble, they will skill at four times the base rate.

I wish there was a way to use cheats to add on to a sim's book read count so that I could easily test how quickly a sim skills depending on how many book they have read.

ETA: I will be doing more tests to figure out if all skills are affected by mood and the library bonus.. The only problem I foresee is Painting since it cannot be skilled indefinitely, as you must stop and sell or otherwise get rid of the paintings when they are completed. I'm not entirely sure if this can be accomplished at the library.

I did a test once, to find out if skilling bonuses stacked, like bookworm and green thumb green thumb, for example, and found out that yes, mood does affect skilling, and it seems to be granular formulaic.

Most of my data for that test was faulty because I did not realize that mood affected skilling, so my sim with all of the test traits inexplicably skilled better than his siblings because they all had grumpy in place of one of his traits. And one of the grumpy siblings skilled faster than the others because he was in a slightly more comfortable chair.

Mood is one of the things I plan on putting a definite test on, however, using Static Motives, which is the best way to test skilling, causes all test subjects to automatically get a beautifully decorated moodlet, which cannot be removed. I suppose the best way to counteract this would be by having unfinished/messy/smelly rooms for some of the subjects, and chairs of differing comfort.

Editted because I forgot which term was which.

ETA: I'm off to test the effects of mood on skilling now.

ETA: So far my tests seem to conclude that out of bubble skilling results in normal skill rate. 6 hours for first skill, reading a Logic book with no other skill enhancing traits or bonuses. 3 different sims, 3 different mood levels, all the same traits. All the same moodlets, aside from varying levels of comfort.

The three sims who were in bubble, however, all gained skill at different levels depending on how "In the bubble" they were. For instance, the sim who was at the top of his bubble, gained his first skill twice as fast as the sims who were skilling out of bubble. The other two who were skilling in bubble seemed to gain skill at an appropriately proportionate rate as to how in bubble they were.

That was actually part of my test. reading a book at the Library is indeed Superior to reading a book at home. the test subject at the Library was even grumpy, sitting in a 10 mood chair and missing out on a Beautiful Vista Moodlet. He still maximized the test skill, Logic, before his brother at home did, and by quite a margin. 41.5 hours vs. 51.5 hours.

I would be willing to bet that if you had a sim whose grandchild, or perhaps even great grandchild was named after them, the picture would occasionally oscillate between the thumbnails of the younger and the older. Or they might just be leftover remnants in RAM. Maybe if you restarted the game or your computer they would go away. as I recall, when Mortimer in my game turned into a teen, and subsequently into an adult, his picture would often revert back to when he was a child. This stopped the next time I loaded up the game.

Meh, when I'm not testing stuff, I'm playing a Legacy or some other sort of challenge. I was just now drooling over This Mod that I can't have either.

Of course it could also have something to do with the fact that I made motives static with the testing cheats. I doubt it, but it's always possible. And I will be running further tests, mainly to check the effectiveness of the different stances.

No Sense of Humor is, oddly, a good trait to have on a sim, as their fun drains very slowly. With a full fun bar, NSoH sims will keep the "Having a Blast" Moodlet for 14 or 15 hours; twice as long as other sims.

Volume 1: Gym bonus is borked
Volume 2: Library skill gain is overpowered.

In the first test, a sim who worked out at the Gym took twice as long to max his Athletics skill as it did for another sim to maximize his Athletics skill at home. Both test subjects had the Athletic Trait, which seems to be the only trait which affects Athletic Skill gain, aside from Grumpy or any other trait that can boost or lower mood through a trait specific moodlet.

When deciding to cut or smelt or not you also have to take into account the chance to get a gnome back instead of the cut/smelted gem/ore. A gnome can be sold for $1000, which means, even not taking into account the amount of money returned from selling the cut gem or smelted ore, you would need to cut 50 100 emerald cut gems without any gnome returns in order to take a loss, or 25 smelted irons before taking a loss with gnome returns. I have found with one of my sims that gnome returns seem to be rather high.

While collecting, I was under the impression that she needed to get the highest cut available on her gems in order to unlock the next cut, so she was sending in even blue topaz to get the highest available cut and still made a tidy profit from the gnome returns. If I remember correctly, she had $40,000 with which to build a new house once she moved out of her parents' house and within only a few sim weeks, with gem collecting as her only source of income, she had well over $100,000 net worth.

Editted math for emerald cut gems, I thought they were $20, but I was mistaken, they are $10.

What I do, or at least what I did when I still used AwesomeMod (I've moved on to Indie Stone) was to plop downa  few "homeles shelters" which were basically small houses with one big bedroom containing 8 single beds, a kitchen/dining room, and a bathroom. Without even using the wandhere function these houses were worth $11k on the smallest lot and maybe $14k on the biggest lot on Homeless Alley. Using the runstoryaction command worked fine to get them into those houses. I would then freerealestate and move them into a fitting house for their demographic. After that I would typically fund them down to about $5k or so, but most often I didn't bother.

Getting rid of all the homeless bums in my town, and/or making sure there was affordable housing for them made a huge difference in my 1am lag.

That shit pisses me off. One of my sims was getting fairly rich and he rolled up a want to buy a tv costing at least X amount of dollars. So I bought him said TV and what did he do? He sat down in front of the TV, whipped out a book, and started reading. Why in Hell are books so damn appealing to every single sim, regardless of their traits? Bookworms I can see preferring to read over watching TV or whatever, and maybe Athletic sims, but everybody? Even Couch Potatoes and Computer Whizzes? Ridiculous.

Yeah, I have a Computer Whiz (my simself actually) who has a laptop in his inventory at all times. He still seems to prefer whipping out a book and reading.

Yeah, but fish are typically not domesticated. They are simply harvested from their homes and sent to slaughter.

I don't eat fish though.

Also rabbitholes simplify things quite a bit. You can't forget to put a cash register in the store if you don't have the option to build the inside of the store yourself. Granted, it would be nice to be able to, say, have a rabbithole object that you can place inside of a building you build yourself and there you go, custom rabbithole.

Plus now you don't have extraneous amounts of NPC bartenders, servers, chef, cashiers, etc. running around your hood.

Instead you've got all these weird NPCs that I have no idea what function they serve.. like lab technicians and magicians?