Hired Service People Help

The nanny service isn’t a regular scheduled thing like in old games. I think you call them over when you want to play as the toddlers while the parents are at work. If there are no adults on the lot, the kids are automatically sent to free daycare, so the nanny is just a way for you to keep the kids active at home with adult supervision.

So I’d have my toddlers building skills and stuff and playing and then getting the nanny to give them food or help them potty. I don’t think it’s worth doing for babies - just let them go to daycare.

When the parents come home, I usually keep the nanny around while I take care of the parents needs and the nanny can attend to the kids. Then I dismiss them until I need them again.

For gardeners, since the update gardening has been really easy - plants rarely need watering in my game because of all the rain. It’s mainly just weeds that pop up occasionally and bugs if the plants are high quality. I leave the gardener to take care of those, but my sims tend to love autonomous gardening for some reason, so I have to keep a lookout to make sure they leave stuff for the gardener to do.

Generally, a gardener is useful if you have a lot of plants hat need maintenance. If it seems like your sims are taking care of stuff OK on their own, maybe you don’t need one?

Patchy always has done a fine job on my gardens, but the downside is he doesn't always come out and go to work every day. On the other hand, the garden can survive a day without care. Really your call.

Gardeners have some glitches, I've read, if your plants are spread rather than all together in one spot. No idea if this is true, I have not seen the glitch in my game despite having one house with flower beds in front and a garden along the side plus some potted plants on the front porch. Even with that spread, the total distance between the nearest plant in each area was not too much, so maybe that's why I never saw the glitch I read about.

Nannies not leaving...yah, that's definitely what happens in my game too. Last time I hired a nanny I forgot to dismiss them and sent all my sims off to bed. Only realized they were still around when I started panning around the house (and changing floors) to find what non-active sim was preventing super-speed from kicking in. LOL I don't recall him charging all that much when I finally found him and dismissed him though.

@Stormkeep yeah, he didn't charge for two days like I had feared he would. On the second day my mom sim asked him to hang out after she got home from work and he only charged for that day. That's a huge relief.

My garden is directly in the backyard in a greenhouse so I don't have to wait through all of the cold weather for them to wake up or worry about them being planted in the wrong season(s).
As for autonomy, I have freewill off so I can control what they do.

My nanny hung around, cooked food and read books. Worthless for caring for the toddler - she had to ask him twice to get him to give her a bath. I got much better results when I let my toddler go to day care.

I never hire nannies nowadays. Useless and broken I am afraid. The only really time I hire them is in San Myshino if the parent(s) want to spend time in the festivals that appear outside in their own area (no zoning required to attend). Then I like to have some adult with the babies and totts while the parents have their fun. I really don't like to take the toddlers to the festivals except the ones that are during the daytime and not even then because there is literally nothing for them to do except to dance and be underfoot.

I know that I can safely leave the the littlests in the apartments while the parents are downstairs in the streets but I really don't feel right about it so the nannies in this instance, are useable.

The gardeners in my game, do come but if nothing needs doing (I sometimes have my gardener Sims wake up early and do some gardening for skill-ups), the sceduled gardeners will tell my Sims that nothing needs to be done (with a notification) and leave without taking any fee.

the nannies seem to work both ways, and there is no way to know exactly how its ging to work for each family. i have had families where the anny comes, stays a few hours and leaves as usual. i have other families where the nanny comes and never leaves. i try to encourage that in my vampire household since the nanny is delicious and doesnt seem to have a cooldown. so its annoying when she DOES leave lol. but i still havent figured out how/what is making them leave or stay

it's the butler that's driving me nuts.. for a day or two they will work, then suddenly all they do is read... like constantly, they get up and read, sit by the pool and read, stand and read, sit at the kitchen table and read, and ignore everything else. i've tried dismissing and re-hiring with the same results after a day or two. probably doesn't help it's a really limited pool of sims that do it.