Sim only creates "poor" quality things regardless of skill level

@crinrict  Mainly base-game traits, but the mod ones I'm using have never had this effect before, and I've used them for at least a year at this point without trouble. I also had a look at his hidden traits but found nothing out of the ordinary or anything that could be the reason for this happening.

I created him myself. I have a clean save of him in my gallery, and have pasted it many times without this problem, so it seems to be this particular paste of him. But this switch started happening only maybe a month ago (real-life time). Back when he used to live with his family and also at university he didn't have this problem.

@phoenixjklin Hello!  I downloaded Jakob for testing.  (Really cute guy btw :-)  The gallery version of him has rather low skill levels.  However, I had him make eggs and toast at that level 3 cooking and it was "excellent".  He had no painting skill at all and had one "poor" painting first but got "normal" paintings by level 3.  I had him play video games a lot and, by level 10, he placed second in a novice tournament.

I wondered if you would mind sharing your current version of him to the gallery.  I'd just like to see if there's any difference.

@JonaO703 Hi! Oh, the one in my public gallery isn't the latest version of him. I uploaded the latest one a moment ago.

Thanks for experimenting, haha 🙂

I made a new save of my existing Legacy save and saved him to my gallery from there, I tried out placing the gallery one and trying out making drinks and paintings, and both things turned out "excellent" in quality.

I went back to my Legacy save to play around with removing buffs and anything that could contribute, and found that removing buffs that when I removed a buff that made him sad, putting him in a confident mood instead upped the quality of a drink to "excellent", while just before removing that particular buff he had made one with the quality "poor". I've had passing thoughts about it maybe being the mood buffs messing things up, but I had just assumed that the things he makes surely wouldn't be so consistently bad if that was the case. Now that I've confirmed that he is indeed capable of making other quality stuff than just "poor" and "masterpiece" (while painting ofc) I do feel it must be tied to some buffs. I guess I just have to be kinder to him, haha.

I'm sure there have been times where his most dominant mood buff isn't a negative one but he's still produced "poor" quality things, but do the points of negative buffs stack up even if they're not dominant? I'm wondering if there are underlying negative buffs (when I play there's usually A LOT of buffs in general) and if having enough of them together might result in bad outcomes when a sim is crafting or creating stuff. I've also had the problem only with Mixology that his skill bar stopped moving, no matter if he's practicing it or reading a skillbook, but now in his confident mood it's moving again.

My best bet right now is that it's the mood buffs active while he's doing things. I didn't know they could play THAT huge of a role.

@phoenixjklin Oh!  I didn't even think about a moodlet affecting the quality.  That's a great observation!  I will try to test a bit more and look out for the moods but I'm also betting that is the root cause.