"How does that work, anyway?" Ask me anything!

Maybe a bit of a technical question but what increases the loading times in the game? I understand that the game needs to load the lot but the amount of lots and sims in the entire save also seems to have an effect?

I really enjoy your explain it all posts - so many interesting details I've never noticed about the game.

I have a couple of questions I hope will count as 'small.'

- How does being added to a group affect the autonomy of non-active sims? (Do they still have any? Doesn't seem like it sometimes.)
- Can a sim with the Tragic Clown role turn up in a non Tragic Clown situation, e.g. as a regular walkby or venue visitor? And is the clown outfit an everyday outfit for them, or is it a situation outfit only for when they are being a Tragic Clown?

Hi, Waffle! :) 

I just remembered an update from a while back where the devs said they made relationship gains from interactions work differently depending on the life stages of the participants. For instance, teens don't get along as well with kids or adults, or something like that. I was wondering if you had the numbers on how that actually works in practice. Is there a conditional multiplier added to every interaction or is it coded on a higher level?  Also, how big of a difference is it? 

Oh, that's a perfect example of the kind of question I was looking to answer. I'll make a post about that one right now.

Tragic Clown isn't a permanent entity- the game basically summons a Sim to be the clown when the situation happens, and when it's over, they go back to being normal or are deleted (not sure specifically in this case). The way the game handles situations like this is expressly designed so that certain NPCs are important and persist- like how it brings a Father Winter back if you remove, kill, move in, etc him- but other NPCs are situational and will basically be there when needed and don't really exist otherwise. The game might re-use the same sim the next time- thanks to hidden information jammed into that sim when they're created or picked- but the sim isn't really "that NPC" when they aren't "on the job"!

If you look at my Venue posts you'll see a good few explanations of similar situational roles that don't really "exist" outside of "when they're happening", or you can think of how a bartender works- the sim isnt really a bartender when not tending the bar, right?

That makes sense. Thanks for explaining!

Just wanted to say thank you for your Patreon list. Reading about the different features of each venue types is definitely going to change the way I play.  I have so much more appreciation for all the little details the Sims team has put in the game. I also appreciate all the research it must have taken for you to figure everything out. God Bless! 🤗❤️

I'm super interested in how Bess Sterling investment calls work. Like in one save she gave my sims back 20 000 simoleons back after a couple of calls and in the other she didn't. Also the invest in legal money making scheme interactions.

I also wanna know every single way to roll back the sims age to the beginning of their current lifespan across all the different packs. I'm thinking of: potion of youth, cowplant essence, all the different potions across packs.

And lastly, every single way to add bonus days to the sims' total lifespan. The active and long lived traits, the cowplant essence and the wishing well. I know that all of these days stack, so if your sim completed the bodybuilder aspiration and drank the cowplant essence, they would have bonus days from the cowplant + the long lived trait. I know this from testing. The bonus days are also bugged on short lifespan

Aging is a cool topic for a full post. Did you know the anti-aging face masks remove one day from your accrued age? If you use them daily, you're immortal.

For Bess, it's pretty simple-

The first call, you donate or don't. If you do, she'll call back later. 

The second call, you're asked for 1k. If you do it, the call gets rescheduled to happen again. It has a few different dialogues so you might not know it but it's the same call over and over.

If you donate to the second call, you get a hidden Relbit with the caller, which triggers ANOTHER possible call- where they say their business is taking off. You'll likely get the second call multiple times before it shows up, though, if it ever does. That final call gives you 25k simoleons but it is very rare.

It's basically just a gamble!

This is awesome! Have you considered making a website (Carl of Carl's Sims 3 disliking the Sims 4 and abandoning it is truly unfortunate when his Sims 3 guides were so great), or adding information to the wiki?

If you don't mind, I have some questions about the following:

• Werewolf temperaments: I remember digging through tuning stuff and finding that the chance to "roll" different temperaments (whether on first acquiring a new temperament or when doing the howl action that re-rolls all temperaments) is given weights related to traits - some traits (including things not listed as traits but treated as a kind of trait under the hood, like Lifestyles) increase the chance of a certain temperament being rolled, while others prevent a certain temperament being rolled entirely - but I lost my own documentation of these links when my computer crashed.
• Also werewolf related - what exactly do the different moon phase bonuses for werewolves do, under the hood? I remember seeing in the coding some kind of fishing related buff not mentioned in the tooltip. Ditto other occults who get moon related buffs/debuffs,  if you feel like it.
• Fishing bait - does the specific kind of bait actually matter? Do different kinds of fish even have real preferences for bait? Are any of them available only certain times per day? Is their any semi-reliable way to guess what kind of fish (and item catches) will appear in a particular fishing spot?
• How does the game handle garden plants and livestock animals (or any object-pet with needs, like cowplants or MFP rodents or the crows from L&D) that live on public lots, like parks? Will they be ok, or will they die/run away/etc?
• Do "bonus traits" (traits that are granted to a sim when choosing its original aspiration in CAS) have any effect on autonomous behaviors?