How to Stop adults from Complaining About Prom on the Social Bunny App

So, we've all been there. The Social Bunny app seems like an amazing idea in theory. Next thing you know, every adult complains about prom EVERY WEEK in the app.

I'm not from the US, so I don't know what "prom" entails, but it seems like something people in their 30s shouldn't be experiencing at the moment they post.

Thankfuly, the fix is very easy to do! And there's probably a better way to do this, but it works. Also, if there's other post that's bothering you, you should be able to use this post as a starting point to do tweaks to the Social Bunny.

In theory, you should also be able to add new text to the Social Bunny, so people don't post about the same things again. But I don't know how to do that yet. My guess is it has something to do with XML Injector.

Anyway, back to the "tutorial" itself!

Where do we start?

Did you know Lumpinou has an EA Tuning Example Finder? Me neither until she told me herself, just as I was working on a fix for this. It makes finding what TDESCs use what strings so much easier!

So I just put the text I saw in game ("This tag is poking me...the music is loud...these shoes are pinching my feet. I regret coming to Prom, is that bad?!") in the "XML contains..." box. And the searcher found exactly ONE result.

"social_media.social_media_tuning".

The moment I felt overwhelmed

So I go to the TDESC Builder, open that tuning... holy shit. It's A LOT.

Take a deep breath, it's okay! We don't need to figure out what EVERYTHING does. We just need to find the part responsible of making sims post the same over, and over, and over again.

We just need to do Ctrl + F and put part of the text. We'll find where it is right away! See the picture below.

From there, just from CALMLY reading, we can see that buff_Social_Media_Enable_AtProm is being used. TDESC Builder is really handy! If you examine what "context_post" is (or if you simply put your mouse over "context_post"), it'll give you an explanation. Now we know that this is the buff that allows the sim to post that specific thing.

When opening the buff, we can see that the only test it has in place is to check if the Sim doesn't have the buff "buff_Social_Media_Disable_AtProm".

We don't need to know what it does right now. (Let's hope it doesn't bite me back later). We just need to make sure only Teens can get this buff.

Do you know what's cool about buffs? You can add tests to them to control who gets them and who doesnt! We can simply do this by adding more tests, and TDESC Builder is perfect to do this easily.

Below "tests_set", there's a plus icon. When clicking on it, you can put a new test to check whatever you want. Right now, for our purpose, we need to set it to "trait." Why trait, you ask? Because that's how the game knows what age a sim is!

When you set the test to "trait", you'll see an option that says "blacklist_traits". I blacklisted Young Adult, Adult and Elder. You can also whitelist traits! I whitelisted "Teen".

In the end, we should have something that looks a bit like this:

From now on, only Teens can complain about Prom :) It was really easy.

You can probably make it work if you only whitelist Teens, without blacklisting anything else. But I didn't want to take any risks.

_{Note to self: For a moment, it occured to me that this might conflict with TurboDriver's FixSocialBunnyLag. After thinking about it a little longer, it shouldn't, because his script probably works on social_media.social_media_tuning, while this mod edits something completely different.}