How I made the "Sell to publication increases Entrepreneur skill" mod
So, in retrospective, this mod was very simple to do. But I still struggle a bit to read XML for The Sims 4. And seeing people's process is really useful, so I really wanted to share mine!
TL;DR at the bottom.
The backstory
So I'm currently in the middle of my Sims 4 tracking/100 baby challenge|100 baby challenge, and I decided that the oldest baby, Mistake, should be a Simfluencer who's really into photography! So as soon as he becomes a teen, I make him join the Simfluencer career that came with High School years.
There's just a problem; a task in the career requires him to have the Entrepreneur skill at Level 2. I vaguely remember his mother, Paula, raised her skill by selling her pottery.
So, I thought that just selling his pictures would work to raise that skill! Well...
After reading some posts on Reddit and some articles, I realized that the Entrepreneur skill does NOT include pictures. So I was pretty bummed about it! I thought of making Mistake sell his sculptures... but that doesn't work either. Pottery? Selling paintings? No way, Mistake is not into that kind of art!
I've been trying to learn how to mod this godforsaken game, so I was like "Hell, let's give it a shot."
Failing to read how the Entrepreneur skill works
Something you need to know about me is that I have ADHD and 0 patience to read or follow entire tutorials. Zer0 has tutorials, but I don't like him because of how bigoted he seems to be, and Waffle doesn't have many tutorials in video form either. I do learn better by doing and hitting walls in the process. And by watching people doing the same thing rather than teaching you step by step.
I really tried to follow the tutorials in Creator's Musings, but they didn't feel relevant and I was getting pretty overwhelmed.
So I open the TDESC Browser and look for "skill AND Entrepreneur". I see a lot of different TDESC files and I don't get what any of them do, each of them making me more confused than the last as to how to implement the change I want.
However, the first files I see are "loot_Skill_Entrepreneur_Small" and "loot_Skill_Entrepreneur_Medium." They seem to change some stat that, honestly, at the moment I didn't even check carefully. I, instead, remembered something Waffle said, I think it was in his video "Learn by viewing with the TDESC builder!".
Loots
"Loots are like- It's basically a reward. Whenever your sim gets something, it's a loot. If you do an interaction and it has a result, that result is usually a loop." - Waffle.
Waffle then goes on to show us an example with how the "loot_HadWoohoo" works. My eyes widen as I watch again. That's it! I don't have to change the Entrepreneur skill itself. I just need to tell the game "Hey, if my sim does X (selling pictures), Y happens (their Entrepreneur skill increases)."
Selling pottery does increase the Entrepreneur skill
But we already knew that. So, what goes the "Sell Handmade Ceramic" interaction has, that "Sell to publication" interaction doesn't?
I go to the TDESC browser. I input "pottery AND sell". I see "generic_SellObject_Pottery", so I open it.
I see a lot of things I barely understand, and that I don't need right now. I'm only interested in what happens after you click the interaction and sell your ceramic.
And I see it. Inside the outcome.
Guess how this looks like on "photography_SellToPublication".
Why doesn't the Sell to Publication has the same "outcome" thingy? I don't know!
Eureka! (Or the TL;DR)
All I had to do is add the "loot_Skill_Entrepreneur_Small" to "photography_SellToPublication"! Then selling to publication will make Mistake learn the Entrepreneur skill. Easy-peasy, right?
Uhm...
The next hurdle is that I didn't understand much of what I was seeing on TDESC. But I took a deep breath anyway! We already figured out why it doesn't raise the Entrepreneur skill. Adding it shouldn't be super complicated.
Let's look again into photography_SellToPublication
So there's it's loot_list. And a plus sign right after loot_Fame_SellPhoto.
Let's click on it!
Ok, now we have another action. What do we want to happen?
Well, we want it to work exactly like Sell Handmade Ceramic! So we click "loot_Skill_Entrepreneur_Small". When clicking it, the XML changes and now it looks like this.
Now we save the .package into our mods folder, we clear the cache just in case. We open the game and... it works!!
Now Mistake can follow his true passion without having to side-quests things he's not interested in :)
The important thing is that it works and didn't break my game, haha. So I'm just happy to do this and share with everyone ❤️
You can download the mod in my Patreon! (It's free)
TL;DR
Inside "photography_SellToPublication", add "loot_Skill_Entrepreneur_Small" or "loot_Skill_Entrepreneur_Medium" to the loot_list. That's it, that's the entire mod!
Some words
This was fun and I'll do it again! Also, I'll slowly rework my website to make it more like a digital garden. I already have a bunch of random notes in my Obsidian Vault! Though I haven't found a quick way to convert those notes to HTML.
Would it be easier to find an online converter? Yes!
Will I do that? Hell no! I'm going to code one myself!
- Jim
Last updated: 2025, July 7th.