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simgaroopI swear I've spent more time figuring out which hacks are causing a mess with my game than actually playing. It is a bit irritating, because this is the first time I've had an EP as soon as it came out. When Seasons came out, I waited three months to install it because it wasn't sold anywhere (I installed it on May and I started my legacy soon afterwards. Yeah, I was waiting for Seasons to start the Brokes), so by then everything was updated, including SimPe and a patch from Maxis. With BV... well... I never got it.
But for Free Time, between the zillion bugs people keep reporting and a couple of annoyances I've seen in my game, I really can't tell for now what's caused by a hack or not. I just fixed an incredibly annoying bug that prevented my sims from going to community lots and everything is pointing to Macrostatics, which have always been a problem in my game for some odd reason. I try to install it every time an EP comes out, and I get a million jump bugs and oddities.
I guess my computer is not "awesome" enough to handle some MATY's hacks :).
Anyway, I've been dying to try Free Time with the Brokes, so this is a series of pictures of what I did as soon as I loaded them for the first time in weeks. I just wanted to show you how I upgraded my sims with the help of the FFSLot Debugger and gave them a "Predestined Hobby" that matched their interests according to my story.
I hope this sort of tutorial is useful for those who are playing their legacies/neighborhood/challenges following a storyline.
The loading screen. DUN DUN DUN!
At this point I was pleading to the game to not kill my legacy.
I wasn't sure if it'd be FUBAR'ed after installing Free Time.
The good news is that everything was all right.
They even kept their old LTW and Wanda and Puck still were permaplat (for now, I didn't play for long because it was late).
Hey there, Buck!
Are you ready to be my Guinea Pig?
(As much as I like Buck, I decided to "risk" him with the LotDebugger first rather than messing up my other Brokes).
To upgrade a Pre-Free Time Sim, you need MATY's FFS Lot Debugger, located here.
It is a black box with a batman logo that you get in Buy Mod/Misc/Misc. It has a lot of options, including the "Randomize Sim Generator" (that has allowed me to have different looking siblings instead of the "clone syndrome"), so I recommend you to read the manual to learn about them.
I actually just use the Randomize and the Upgrade Sim options, though.
This is really important. As soon as you load the lot you must PAUSE the game.
Why? Because if you have free will on and your sim does something that will "activate" their "Predestined Hobby", there's no way to change it later.
As you can see in this screenshot, Buck still has no obvious "One True Hobby", because its still dormant.
Anyway, place the black box in your lot and click on it.
Then, select "Info".
There are several options, including figuring out how smart your sim is (most of my sims have an IQ of 100, aka normal) and their current temperature, but we are going to choose the "One True Hobby" option.
As you can see, the "Science" hobby is gray, for this is Buck's current "One True Hobby".
It seems like the OTH's are not assigned randomly: The game considers the sim's personality and interests.
It sort of makes sense to have Science as Buck's default OTH, for he's a very serious and not very active sim, but I haven't checked his interests yet.
I wonder if the pre-made Maxis sims like Buck are always assigned the same OTH. Ripp Grunt's default OTH is Arts and Crafts, by the way.
Anyway, according to my storyline, it doesn't make sense to have Buck follow the science hobby. He's been interested in cuisine since he was a teen and is following the culinary career. Because I didn't want to be spammed with a million "Science" wants and idle animations (which I tend to follow in my legacy), I selected the "Cuisine" hobby for Buck.
What's next? Well, I now had to "wake up" his new OTH to make it permanent.
So, I sent him to eat some chips. I think it's cute how neat sims eat their snacks.
Success!
As you can see, the cuisine hobby is now highlighted in Buck's panel.
He can still follow all the other hobbies, of course, but he'll prefer the ones related to cooking.
I can't wait to send him to a cooking contest :D.
I selected a OTH for my other sims: Rosie got "Music and Dance" (she had "Arts and Crafts"), Tim got "Film and Literature" (he had sports), Wanda got "Games" of course (she had "Fitness", oddly enough because she's obsessed with videogames) and Puck got "Film and Literature" (because of his "Shakespeare" background, and he had "Tinkering").
For Cody and Lyla, I let them keep their default OTH ^_^. You'll learn what they are in future updates.
So now it's time to "upgrade" my sims.
Pre-Free Time sims are granted a default number of Lifetime Aspiration Points regarthless of how many milestones they had reached earlier.
That's not fair, right?
So, I clicked again on the black box and selected "Upgrade Sim".
There are two options: Pre-Uni, for those sims that didn't go to college (so you can assign them a major and they get the extra want slots and locks and the chance to get the Uni careers without actually going to college) and Pre-Freetime.
Of course, I selected Pre-Freetime.
Buck got a Life Time Aspiration point for each of the milestones he had reached in the time I've been playing with him.
Here's the list from MATY:
I. LTA Milestones
You receive an LTA point for achieving each of the following milestones:
0x01: Have/Adopt Child
0x02: Best Friend
0x03: Marry/Join
0x04: First Kiss
0x05: First WooHoo
0x06: Housebroken
0x07: Walked
0x08: Talked
0x09: ?? Appears Unused ??
0x0A: Become Adult
0x0B: Graduate
0x0C: Max Career
0x0D: Max Enthusiasm
0x0E: LTW
0x0F: ?? Appears Unused ??
0x10: Max Business
0x11: Wish Peace
Yup, according to the screenshot, Buck indeed has had a kid, a best friend (the first one is Rose Mary), gotten married, had a first kiss, had a first woo hoo, potty-trained, learned to walk, learned to talk, became an adult and "graduated from college" (because I used the Pre-Uni upgrade first: In the storyline, Buck and Rosie have been taking courses to make up for their lost college years).
So now Buck has eight LTA points, which I spent in both the family aspiration rewards (except for the twins one) and unlocked a second aspiration for him, but I won't tell you what it is for now :).
I did the same for the rest of the Brokes.
And that's it! It took less than five minutes and now my legacy sims are ready.
I'll finish taking the pictures for this update later, so I hope to have the first part of Gen 5.0 ready tonight.
See you later! :)
P.S. Random memory I found in Buck’s panel. Cute, right?
But for Free Time, between the zillion bugs people keep reporting and a couple of annoyances I've seen in my game, I really can't tell for now what's caused by a hack or not. I just fixed an incredibly annoying bug that prevented my sims from going to community lots and everything is pointing to Macrostatics, which have always been a problem in my game for some odd reason. I try to install it every time an EP comes out, and I get a million jump bugs and oddities.
I guess my computer is not "awesome" enough to handle some MATY's hacks :).
Anyway, I've been dying to try Free Time with the Brokes, so this is a series of pictures of what I did as soon as I loaded them for the first time in weeks. I just wanted to show you how I upgraded my sims with the help of the FFSLot Debugger and gave them a "Predestined Hobby" that matched their interests according to my story.
I hope this sort of tutorial is useful for those who are playing their legacies/neighborhood/challenges following a storyline.
The loading screen. DUN DUN DUN!
At this point I was pleading to the game to not kill my legacy.
I wasn't sure if it'd be FUBAR'ed after installing Free Time.
The good news is that everything was all right.
They even kept their old LTW and Wanda and Puck still were permaplat (for now, I didn't play for long because it was late).
Hey there, Buck!
Are you ready to be my Guinea Pig?
(As much as I like Buck, I decided to "risk" him with the LotDebugger first rather than messing up my other Brokes).
To upgrade a Pre-Free Time Sim, you need MATY's FFS Lot Debugger, located here.
It is a black box with a batman logo that you get in Buy Mod/Misc/Misc. It has a lot of options, including the "Randomize Sim Generator" (that has allowed me to have different looking siblings instead of the "clone syndrome"), so I recommend you to read the manual to learn about them.
I actually just use the Randomize and the Upgrade Sim options, though.
This is really important. As soon as you load the lot you must PAUSE the game.
Why? Because if you have free will on and your sim does something that will "activate" their "Predestined Hobby", there's no way to change it later.
As you can see in this screenshot, Buck still has no obvious "One True Hobby", because its still dormant.
Anyway, place the black box in your lot and click on it.
Then, select "Info".
There are several options, including figuring out how smart your sim is (most of my sims have an IQ of 100, aka normal) and their current temperature, but we are going to choose the "One True Hobby" option.
As you can see, the "Science" hobby is gray, for this is Buck's current "One True Hobby".
It seems like the OTH's are not assigned randomly: The game considers the sim's personality and interests.
It sort of makes sense to have Science as Buck's default OTH, for he's a very serious and not very active sim, but I haven't checked his interests yet.
I wonder if the pre-made Maxis sims like Buck are always assigned the same OTH. Ripp Grunt's default OTH is Arts and Crafts, by the way.
Anyway, according to my storyline, it doesn't make sense to have Buck follow the science hobby. He's been interested in cuisine since he was a teen and is following the culinary career. Because I didn't want to be spammed with a million "Science" wants and idle animations (which I tend to follow in my legacy), I selected the "Cuisine" hobby for Buck.
What's next? Well, I now had to "wake up" his new OTH to make it permanent.
So, I sent him to eat some chips. I think it's cute how neat sims eat their snacks.
Success!
As you can see, the cuisine hobby is now highlighted in Buck's panel.
He can still follow all the other hobbies, of course, but he'll prefer the ones related to cooking.
I can't wait to send him to a cooking contest :D.
I selected a OTH for my other sims: Rosie got "Music and Dance" (she had "Arts and Crafts"), Tim got "Film and Literature" (he had sports), Wanda got "Games" of course (she had "Fitness", oddly enough because she's obsessed with videogames) and Puck got "Film and Literature" (because of his "Shakespeare" background, and he had "Tinkering").
For Cody and Lyla, I let them keep their default OTH ^_^. You'll learn what they are in future updates.
So now it's time to "upgrade" my sims.
Pre-Free Time sims are granted a default number of Lifetime Aspiration Points regarthless of how many milestones they had reached earlier.
That's not fair, right?
So, I clicked again on the black box and selected "Upgrade Sim".
There are two options: Pre-Uni, for those sims that didn't go to college (so you can assign them a major and they get the extra want slots and locks and the chance to get the Uni careers without actually going to college) and Pre-Freetime.
Of course, I selected Pre-Freetime.
Buck got a Life Time Aspiration point for each of the milestones he had reached in the time I've been playing with him.
Here's the list from MATY:
I. LTA Milestones
You receive an LTA point for achieving each of the following milestones:
0x01: Have/Adopt Child
0x02: Best Friend
0x03: Marry/Join
0x04: First Kiss
0x05: First WooHoo
0x06: Housebroken
0x07: Walked
0x08: Talked
0x09: ?? Appears Unused ??
0x0A: Become Adult
0x0B: Graduate
0x0C: Max Career
0x0D: Max Enthusiasm
0x0E: LTW
0x0F: ?? Appears Unused ??
0x10: Max Business
0x11: Wish Peace
Yup, according to the screenshot, Buck indeed has had a kid, a best friend (the first one is Rose Mary), gotten married, had a first kiss, had a first woo hoo, potty-trained, learned to walk, learned to talk, became an adult and "graduated from college" (because I used the Pre-Uni upgrade first: In the storyline, Buck and Rosie have been taking courses to make up for their lost college years).
So now Buck has eight LTA points, which I spent in both the family aspiration rewards (except for the twins one) and unlocked a second aspiration for him, but I won't tell you what it is for now :).
I did the same for the rest of the Brokes.
And that's it! It took less than five minutes and now my legacy sims are ready.
I'll finish taking the pictures for this update later, so I hope to have the first part of Gen 5.0 ready tonight.
See you later! :)
P.S. Random memory I found in Buck’s panel. Cute, right?