My first ever Sims 4 mod - Don't stop drinking water!
The backstory
So, it must not be anyone's surprise to discover I LOVE The Sims. I think The Sims 2 and 3 are GREAT, and The Sims 4 is a buggy mess that's held together by thoughts, prayers and modders.
I've been playing for a while and, yesterday night, my current 2 sims got divorced without my input (in fact, I was trying to fix their relationship). So, that was REALLY fun!
Today, my sim Jolene had a buff named "A mediocre life", and for some reason it had... +2 Fine? I thought that was odd, and I was like "Shouldn't that be depressing?", so I decided to set off and figure out how to make it depressing to suit my gameplay.
So, I head to ChatGPT (DO NOT DO THIS!!) to get pointers on how to start and it suggested me to look for the Tuning Package of "Mediocre Life".
I quickly realised that the buff wasn't in the game's tuning files, so I went to look through my discord servers to see where I could ask where to find it. I asked on MCCC and then I was redirected to Creator's Musings.
Before I joined Creator's Musings, I had a light-bulb moment. MCCC can log stuff! So I logged the buffs my sim had and I immediately noticed the "MissyHissy_SimFulfillment_Buff_MediocreLife" - Is Visible: True". So, it turned out that the thing I wanted to change was from another mod, not the game itself!
And before asking exactly how to make the changes I needed to make, I decided to look through the tutorials set on their section "Beginner tutorials".
The tutorial
So I start reading through Sims 4: Mods 101 - How to Make a Mod. Tatiana does a good job explaining what they're trying to accomplish and why! The mod's purpose is to stop sims from auto drinking from the Fridge and the Cooler.
While I was trying to reproduce the steps, I realised that Windows, for some reason, could NOT find any file with "GrabDrink" in the name. In fact, it couldn't find anything. So, Windows' search function sucks, yayyy! What now? Do I manually find the file? Hell no!
Instead, I remembered I have dnGrep/dnGrep: Graphical GREP tool for Windows installed, and I used that to find the files I needed. The problem now was that it'll give me EVERY file that has "GetDrink" IN it, not just the title. There's probably filters, but I don't know how to use them.
So I finally find the file I needed, "fridge_GrabDrinkAutonomously". Cool. Now my sims won't drink from the fridge by themselves. But I can't really see that, and I want to make sure that what I'm making actually works, so... How?
How to test that it was working
I decided that, instead of making my sims NEVER drink water, I wanted them to drink water ALL the time. For testing purposes. So I changed the values in <T n="amount"> <\T> and <T n="base_chance"> <\T> to 100, remove ALL my mods but MCCC, load the game and...
Nothing.
Nothing? Maybe I need to make that value bigger? Alright, I set it to 1000 and... nothing again. Ok, so, what's wrong?
I went to ask at Creator's Musings, and Limpinou's question, "What Stat are you trying to affect?" made me realise I had to look into something else. I looked into many files that referenced grabbing a drink, and realised all of them referenced <T n="stat">10020<!--commodity_Motive_Thirst--></T>``. So, I slowly understand that thirst, apparently, is a hidden need. As I was figuring it out, Waffle jumped to the rescue and explained to me that what I'm doing is making my sims more likely to drink from the fridge WHEN they're thirsty.
So, if I really want my sims to drink water non-stop, I need to make sure they're thirsty first. How?
Turns out, Zero has a tutorial explaining what Commodities are and what some values do. Now, Zero is an individual whose believes make me VERY uncomfortable. At the moment of writing this, his Patreon banner says "Cry me a gender-fluid river", he has a mod that deletes pride flags, among other comments he has done before... But he has the clearest tutorial I found about Commodities. And I'll NEVER give him my money, so.
I look up "commodity_Motive_Trist.StatisticTuning.xml", import it to my package, make the changes. IT WORKS. BAM! My sim now won't stop drinking water and going to the restroom because he's drinking too much water. I feel like God, invincible, untouchable, and making my silly little pixel people bend to my will.
Just look at how many glasses there are in the table. Before that, I think he drank like another 3 in a short period of time.
Download below
Now, I don't know WHY you would want this, but I think this deserves to be shared with the world because I'm SO proud of myself!
You can download it for free in my Patreon
-Jim
Published on December 10th, 2024