To those with the cooking bug...heads up that if you throw a party on your home lot, you need to remove the fridge and the stove before the guests arrive - either move it to the family inventory or into a room behind a door that's locked for all sims. Learn from my fail.
Here's what happened in my game last night:
My sim and his wife to be threw a kegger the night before their wedding. Two full kegs and a fully stocked buffet table, with garnished gourmet dishes of the highest possible quality. (Because who says a kegger can't be classy?)
Anyway...
All 15 guests immediately crowded into the kitchen as soon as they arrived, a huge cluster of sims all trying to get to the fridge and the stove so they could cook, cook, and cook some more, and the keg party was nothing but a 6 (in-game) hour cooking extravaganza while the kegs and buffet table remained completely untouched. I lost count of how many meals were cooked, and not a one of them was eaten.
Here's the thing, though...
I maxed motives for every sim on the lot so that no one was hungry, but that still didn't stop them from cooking. When it comes to parties, it isn't even hunger that triggers the endless cooking. It was the party itself that triggered it. The SECOND the party timer started, every sim on the lot (including my active sims) got the "cook" action in their queues.
I kept canceling the action from my sims' queues, but it kept immediately coming back over and over again no matter how many times I canceled it. There was unfortunately nothing I could do to stop the NPC guests from cooking, so the whole thing was a mess. When I realized there was no stopping it, even for my active sims, I gave up, let my sims join in on the cooking kegger madness, and watched the horror unfold.
Looking back on it, I should have just ended the event immediately (or popped into build mode to remove the fridge and the stove) and spared myself the headache so the keg party could be something OTHER than cooking.
So...it seems keg parties are for cooking now, too, and ONLY cooking. (Funny story...you know how you still get the pop up message and the passive aggressive charisma book after parties you specifically set to NOT be goaled events? Didn't happen this time, so it seems cooking really WAS the goal of the keg party.)
This is the only party I've thrown in the game since the cooking bug began last November, so I can't say if it applies to ALL parties, but keg parties immediately trigger the "cook" action now, for every sim on the lot, regardless of hunger levels, and they will cook repeatedly on a loop, one meal after the next, until the party ends.
Having a fridge or a stove on the lot during a party is a no go, folks.
When the madness was finally over and my poor sims had finished cleaning up the train wreck their bachelor/bachelorette...cooking party...ended up being, I used MC Tuner to run an autonomy scan on the fridge and stove because I had specifically disabled autonomous cooking a while back so I could have my game back again, and I was utterly perplexed as to why this had happened.
Heads up to MC Tuner users...I found duplicate entries for autonomous cooking on the fridge AND the stove that were all enabled, so everything I'd previously disabled had somehow been overridden by duplicate entries and enabled again. Additional autonomous cooking actions appear to have been added since I last disabled them. The ones I'd previously disabled were still disabled, but there were new ones there that were enabled, one newly added enabled "cook" action for every one I'd previously disabled.
No clue how that happened or when they got added, but...they did. Not sure if the override came from an EA patch or if it's a problem with MC itself (and yes, both my game and the mod are up to date...and yes, the cooking bug itself is absolutely an EA thing and NOT mod related). I haven't investigated the duplicated action issue enough to say one way or the other. All I know for sure is that I found duplicate entries where autonomous cooking had been added and enabled again for every action I'd previously disabled.
If there's something in the game's code that's causing autonomous cooking actions to be duplicated (possibly repeatedly), maybe that's the root cause of the cooking bug? Just a thought...
I went through and disabled all of the new duplicate entries for autonomous cooking, and the next morning, my sims got autonomously got leftovers from the fridge when they woke up hungry instead of cooking 20 consecutive breakfasts! Hooray! (Now to see if the autonomous cooking actions get mysteriously duplicated and enabled again.)
So...heads up about that, simmers. If you've disabled autonomous cooking with MC Tuner and the cooking madness starts again, run another autonomy scan and check for dupes just in case whatever happened in my game happened in yours, too.
As always, happy cooking! Oh wait....happy simming. I meant happy simming. 😉
