How "Apothecary is Fun" works

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When I got Enchanted by Nature, I decided that one of my Sims would be dedicated to maxing the career.

So one day, my sim, Carrie Murphy, gets home from school and her entire family has some kind of ailment. I edited her likes and dislikes in CAS to make her like Apothecary, and sent her to study apothecary cures.

But her Fun isn't going up. In fact, it's going down! To the point Carrie starts whining and complaining about how stressed she is. Shouldn't you be having fun? You're doing one of your hobbies!

Whether this is an oversight, a bug, or intentional, we never know with EA and The Sims Team. Nothing ever works as it's supposed to, and is up to us to fix it.

The Goal

I wanted Carrie (or anyone, really) to get Fun from studying Apothecary Cures, because she likes Apothecary. It just makes sense! Additionally, I want Sims who like the skill to do it autonomously.

What do I need to change?

At first, I thought I had to change the tuning of the object I wanted to make it possible to use autonomously. In this case, object_ApothecaryCraftTable. I made this mod months ago, so I have no idea what exactly I changed, I enabled autonomy or something. This made my game crash!

My first game crash! I was so proud 💖. But that didn't solve my issue.

So I decided to look into the "Study Apothecary Cures" interaction itself. The first step was figuring out what to look for in the TDESC Browser.

Thankfully, we have Lumpinou's Sim Info Manager to help us! I especially use the "View Running & Queued Interactions" option when my Sim is studying.

So now we know that under the hood, "Study Apothecary Cures" is si_Apothecary_Career_Naturopath_StudyApothecaryCures.

How do we go from "Interaction doesn't do this" to "Interaction does this"

Now that we know what to look up in the TDESC Browser, we can open it there, and...

Yeah, at first glance, this looks extra-complicated and doesn't give us too much information. That's fine!

The next step I took was look into an activity that does give fun. So I sent a Sim of mine to watch TV. I click on her and select Sim Info Toolbox.

Sim Info Toolbox -> View SimName -> View Running & Queued interactions.

I see she's running the interaction "Watch Civic Public Access", which appears as tv_watch_PublicAccess, so I go to the TDESC Builder and open that tuning up. It's a lot of text, but we don't need to know what the entire interaction does. We just need to know why it gives fun. So I scrolled down until I saw this:

THIS is what makes sims fill up their Fun need when/while they're watching THAT specific channel.

Here's a graph showing how periodic_stat_change works. Click or tap on it to see it in full resolution.

Also, if you want your sims to get even more fun when watching this channel, this is where you'd change the values.

Anyway, now that I know what makes sims get fun when watching TV, I can just do that on si_Apothecary_Career_Naturopath_StudyApothecaryCures, and test if the sim Likes Apothecary or not. If it does, they get fun when Studying Apothecary Cures. If not... Well, nothing should happen.

I tried to make the interaction autonomous too, by toggling "allow_autonomous" to "True" in TDESC Builder. I've only seen my Sims performing this interaction by themselves ONCE. If you want the mod and want to make sure your sims can NEVER Study Apothecary Cures by themselves, just open the .package in TDESC Builder and toggle "allow_autonomous" so it says "False" instead of "True".

And... that's it! That's how the mod works! If you have any questions, please contact me! I love helping people.