No one orders drinks when my sim ’tends bar’

You mean if my active sim is tending the bar at a ‘bar venue’? I don’t know, needs to be tested. 

Do you mean that the only venue that sims are supposed to autonomously order drinks? This seems a bit odd, if you have a bar and want to raise the mixology skill. 

@crinrict  I can contribute with what I saw a few months ago when I tried to have my sim tend bar at the bar in Sulani.

First off, you have to do the jump through hoops thing to be able to get your sim to tend bar by distracting the bartender and being fast to click the tend bar option. Once I managed to accomplish that I ran into no NPC sims ordering drinks. They tended to stand just behind the bar stools, although if one did sit, the sim didn't stay seated for long and still didn't order a drink.

I managed to sort of work around it by having the sim I had tending bar order a "drink for" one of the NPC sims. After that, one NPC ordered a drink and that was it. I tried again with the same result. To get an NPC sim to autonomously order a drink I had to order "drink for" first. It ended up being an expensive proposition for my sim to tend bar so I haven't tried again in several months.

I haven't filed a bug report but I'll just mention to you for now that I think some change to tending bars has been made. It's useless to hire a mixologist for a wedding at San Myshuno Meadows. They don't mix any drinks for the guests. To fill the have drinks portion, I had to have my sims order drinks for themselves or guests. I haven't done a bug report because I haven't yet tried hiring a mixologist for a wedding at any other venue to see if it holds true everywhere.

@lizafideli95 NPC sims are only meant to order drinks from a bar at community lots.  They don't do so autonomously on a home lot, leastwise to my knowledge.

@crinrict  I had the chance to have another sim tend bar in a different, older save from the one mentioned in my prior post. The venue on my second attempt is a user made nightclub that I have in Oasis Springs. Nothing I tried to distract the bartender worked but the game decided to do a shift change for bartenders so I had the sim use the tend bar option after the game's bartender left his post.

At first the sim just stood there and then suddenly, quickly mixed 3 drinks in a row. NPC sims then started leaving the bar stools to stand behind them but he got an occasional drink order. Leastwise, he went in spurts of making multiple drinks and setting them on the bar. This time, however, he got absolutely no tips for serving drinks. I've now seen 2 outcomes in 2 different saves. The outcome as posted before with no autonomous drink ordering without having to use order "drink for", which would result in 1 autonomous drink order with a tip given and as I've just described with sims ordering drinks but no tips awarded to the sim. BTW, the sim I just used isn't in the culinary career, he was just at a venue where I could try tending bar. I don't recall that career, or the mixology branch specifically, being a requirement to receive tips but maybe I'm wrong? In the past I've only really tried to use tend bar at a venue by a mixologist I'm playing.

At any rate, should you find the time to try in your own game, I'll be interested to hear what your experience is since I didn't get an identical result on a second attempt. Thanks for the link to the other thread, too.