Re: Sims eating and drinking quite slowly......

Unfortunately, the game works in this way thanks to EA design. The time devoted to eating is similar to real time in real life. It was probably supposed to be time spent socializing with other sims. Common conversations and so on...
Unfortunately, this is annoying, because the sim to get breakfast before work or school must get up an hour earlier .100 percent of players have the same problem with me including. Well, we have to adapt to it somehow, because probably there is no chance that it would be corrected.

@rusaIochka, while this won't speed up the time spent eating, I have a suggestion: have a Sim eat while watching TV so they get their fun up as well as their hunger! 🥳 And if there is more than one person in the house, have them to the same and make sure they talk while eating and watching TV, so their social goes up as well. And if they watch the Cooking Channel (teen and older) will also learn cooking at the same time! (Not to mention the better relationships they should gain by talking to others!) ❤️ That is 5 areas that can be improved all at the same time! :eahigh_file:  In many of my houses I put a TV in the dining room! 😃

@kreatora, great tip! 😇

My one sim took over three hours to eat while talking to her sister while watching TV. Food is pretty much cold by then.

Also food goes bad too quickly. And why does water go bad?

Also, can they fix hungry sims who grill but don't eat what they grilled, they will then go and cook or get food from the fridge.

Lastly, the computer, chess board and grill loop when you return to your inactive sims needs to stop. If they are asleep and you leave the house you will return to sims energy in the red and they are on the computer. Who wakes up from dead of sleep to use the computer?

Just some tweaking to behaviors and time to do things. 

Either speed up eating or slow down the clock.

@troshalom, in real life water left out will get dust in it 🤒 and eventually will loose some of its oxygen content.  Not to mention water from the tap needs to have a chlorine residual to ensure that no microbes will live if the water lines that bring you your water have a tiny cracks in it.  Eventually that chlorine residual will drop if the water is left out exposed for too long! 🤨  That little bit of chlorine keeps you from getting infected by giardia or cryptosporidia! Trust me, you do not want those infections!!! 😮😢  But, pretty much everything will fall, decay, or spoil ☹️ -- its all part of entropy! 🤓  But even without the technical info, the dust alone will cause water in real life to not be fresh! 😉

But I agree that eating in the Sims can take way too long. 😕   Its one thing for formal meal to be long, but no one in the real world eats a bowl of mac n' cheese over 3 hours! 🤨😃

And one of my pet peeves is also having one Sim leave the house while other Sims are at home... even if you put them on the "take care of needs" option, they rarely actually take care of their needs!  I wish we could queue up all the activities they need to do and while the one Sim is gone they would do those activities and then stay in bed!  😞  I agree with you especially with kids in school on a school night.  Using the computer at 3:00 am when they still need to sleep, eat, and do their homework!?! 😞 It's crazy! 

I agree with @PugLove888, I would really like to queue interactions for Sims staying home on travel. When I first started playing I would queue up interactions for the Sims staying at home, only to find that they are mostly doing stupid stuff unrelated to what I had intended. 

There is a bug with the "care for self" option (bug report here - consider clicking "me too" if it's an issue for you https://answers.ea.com/t5/Bug-Reports/WORKAROUND-Care-for-Self-for-Sims-at-different-lot-not-properly/td-p/6626155) The workaround - click "care for self" after you arrive at the other lot - will work, but only for the lowest need. I read a great explanation of how this all works, I wish I could find the original post to credit. But this is how it works:

When you travel away from the lot, the sims left on their own are not actively "doing" anything, as far as the game programming is concerned. When you click "Care for Self", the game will slowly increase the need bar for whatever was the lowest bar on that Sim. It will continue to fill that bar regardless if other needs fall below it until you click "care for self" again. If you only click "Care for Self" the one time, whatever the need that was lowest will be the only one that is filled. And it will not switch to another need, it will completely fill whatever that one need was and just stop. So, if your Sim was a little bit hungrier than he was sleepy, you could come home to a sim who is dog-tired, needs to pee, is dying of boredom - but definitely not hungry for breakfast. 

The key to working it out is keep an eye on the needs bars of the at-home Sims, and click "Care for Self" again when sleep is the lowest need bar. Every time you click "Care for Self", the program evaluates the lowest need, and that's the one that gets filled. So, it is really a hassle as far as I'm concerned - I end up micro-managing the at-home Sims  trying to maneuver the sleep bar to be the lowest need on anyone that I want to "sleep through the night". If you can manage to get the energy bar to be the lowest need, then click the "Care for Self" option and leave it alone and they will finally fill that energy bar. Just be aware when you return to the lot, they weren't really sleeping - so the game chooses something for them to do as it loads the lot. I don't know why, but for most of my Sims that seems to be trolling teh forums lol.

@BlackjackWidow, thanks for the wonderful explanation of how and why this happens Sims left at home when you follow a Sim to another lot! 🤓❤️ That makes a little bit of sense why they are never actually doing what their lowest bar is when you get back home to them.  I've always wondered why they are taking a bath, on the computer, or dancing when they are about to collapse from exhaustion, pee themselves, and starve to death! 🤨😃  I also wasn't aware that you could click on the "take care of needs" icon more than once and that it would change to the need that is the lowest until you tell it otherwise! 🤨 True, we shouldn't have to micromanage our Sims who are at home, but at least we can get them to change the need that they are taking care of!  Thanks! 😇

You're welcome, @PugLove888  - once I learned that explanation it calmed some of my frustration with the whole thing. Hopefully it makes it easier for others, too.