Yes! I already have that mod enabled. My issue is that I don't know how long it takes in base game to level up from level 1 to level 10 without interruptions. I'd like for the total time it takes to be about 10-15 real-life hours at 3x speed, so 30-45 real-life hours in total, I think, but I don't know how long it usually takes, so I'm not sure what multiplier to apply. (Don't know what scaling factor to use.)
I did some weak preliminary testing with the writing skill specifically (took me an hour to get this data). I did this by making a sim happy and giving them no traits related to skill gains (I think? I made them a loner, straight edge, and loyal. I don't think these affect skill gains, and I disabled the confident boost (from being loyal) whenever it appeared. I also disabled need deterioration and removed the Writer's Block moodlet whenever it appeared. Numbers are accurate to nearest hour, but may vary by up to 30 minutes in either direction.
Hours listed are in-game hours, directly convertible to minutes.
Practicing Writing:
Level 1 --> 2
1: 3 hours
2: 3 hours
Level 9 --> 10
1: 28 hours
2: 28 hours
Writing Mystery Novels:
Level 9 --> 10
1: 19 hours
2: 19 hours
Writing Children's Novels:
Level 9 --> 10
1: 19 hours
This is all of the information I had the patience to collect. I don't know if it's generalizable to all skills, but it seems to indicate that
1) There is no difference in speed between 'actual' activities (writing a specific novel), but there is a difference with generic practice.
2) It takes about 20 in-game hours (20 real-life minutes) of constant training (using 'actual' activities) to go from level 9 to level 10 in the writing skill. This is probably about the same for all other major skills too.
If it takes about 20 in-game hours of constant practice when feeling happy (maybe plus a few hours, but I'm just looking at the ballpark here), then that's about an hour of real-life time, assuming you have the sim practice for about 6-8 minutes per day due to need fulfillment/other activities taking up the rest of the ~14 minutes. At 3x speed, that turns it back into about 20 minutes in total of real-life time again.
One issue is that I don't know how long it takes to level up from 4 to 5 though. If I assume it's a linear increase (1 to 2 is about 2 hours if we imagine that we're writing children's books, 9 to 10 is about 20 hours), then we can loosely assume that it takes about 2*(1 + 2 + 3... + 10) in-game hours to level from level 1 to level 10, or 55 hours total, which is about 5.5 hours of real-life time. Interspersed with needs and working, that turns into about 15 hours of gameplay, and then back into 5 hours at 3x speed. (Yes, rough estimations, should be within 30% of actual values though.)
I think, on average, a sim without bonuses to a specific skill will reach level 10 in about 10 hours of real-life gaming just based on how people normally play. This mostly aligns with my experiences of taking a day or two for specialized sims and a little bit longer for unspecialized sims.
Anyway, to summarize what I just said, basically, in order to make the leveling from 1 --> 10 take about 40-ish real-life hours, I should probably set skill gain to about 1/3rd of its normal speed.
Documenting this just in case someone else has a similar question!
I would love to see others' notes and thoughts, especially with skills other than writing.
We'll see how I feel at 1/3rd speed.
Thank you for your reply.
