Hat Plays Sims

Let me get my notes. I don't remember what I did to ACR anymore (the resources were identical; it was just a matter of checking that and swapping them out, but like I said, I dragged my feet on it).

I made all kinds of notes. I wrote myself a couple of essays. Luckily, I think one of them will be of use to you:

What I Have Learned About Aging Mods and ACR (by A. Hat)

Actually, aging mods appear to be fairly simple. There's a minimum value and a maximum value for each age, which should (for ease of everything) be the same until you hit elders. Even the hexadecimal values from the BCON apply to the TRCN automatically. Changes don't apply to existing Sims but do apply to new Sims, or existing Sims on their next age transition. The only odd thing is that you need to type your ages in as one day less than what you actually want them to be, due to transition days.

So really, the aging mods seem to be pretty easy. It's ACR that gets a little bit complicated.

See, InTeen appears to be compatible with most aging mods. It has two target 'ages' it calls eighteen and forty, but these are counted backwards from transition-- eighteen, the point where teens 'graduate' and can get adult jobs (unless you have No Adult Teens installed, which I do, because I don't want to bother with that-- though I also have No Age of Consent because my game is Medieval and if I want Juliet to get married at fourteen, I'll do it) is counted as eight days before adult transition, and forty, the age at which miscarriages become more likely, is counted as five days before elder transition. Now, any aging mod, unless you're running some kind of mayfly mod, is going to have AT-8 and ET-5, that's not a big deal at all.

ACR, on the other hand, has a declining fertility feature that I love and want to keep. It works like so; a female Sim has a chance to autonomously try-for-baby or to become pregnant via risky woohoo each day of her fertile life. Granted, this is just a base chance; other factors like how many children she already has can contribute to raise or lower her overall chance of coming away knocked up.

This chance starts at day 22 of her life and ends on day 65. Not eight days before her adult transition and six days after her elder transition.

So it's ACR, not InTeen, that needs the heavier modding.

Well, actually, no, it's not-- I COULD just manually set everybody's risky woohoo chance to wherever I want it... but the point of modding a game is so that I don't have to do that.

So I have to manually edit everything in SimPE, which is not as easy as it sounds.

The BCON and TCRN were easy, sorta. I had 131 days I wanted accounted for, pushing the start of my teens' autonomous fertility back to age 15 (halfway through the teen years). However, there seems to be a limit of 127 before changing the appropriate hexadecimal value in the BHAV... well, doesn't work. It kept calling to different things, rather than the >=190 I wanted. So I clipped four days from the front of the thing and let my teens have autonomous risky woohoo at age sixteen-- coincidentally right in line with InTeen's age eighteen, at eight days before adulthood.

Now, what that right there means is that my aging mod (which follows gestation as its guideline; if nine months is three days, then one year is four days) is the longest you can make your ACR fertile period without knowing more about editing BHAVs than I do. You can certainly do longer fertile periods, but you have to tell the mod to divide the age-in-days by whatever applicable number. (There is a seasonal aging mod by Awrevell on MATY that treats four seasons (twenty days) as a year; the corrected ACR controller from that was one of my guidelines. Their magic number for division was sixteen. I was tempted just to use that version but my god that's a long, long year.)

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And that's from August 26 of last year, so now I know what a multiplier is but not how to use it.

Here's a bit of one from September that explains more about what, specifically, to change in ACR:

What I Changed

I expanded the Tuning - Casual Romance - Pregnancy BCON and TRCN to allow for 127 autonomously fertile days. This was the highest number I could use and still have the mod work right; you can use higher numbers but there are more BHAVs to edit that way. Start age for me is sixteen, at <=64, and end age is 47 ½, at >=190.

That was easy.

Using this method, there was one BHAV to edit, Sub - Tokens - Calculate Pregnancy Odds, but several lines that needed editing.

The first was easy. If you start with the first line back in your Tuning - Pregnancy Odds BCON, then the third line in your BHAV should automatically change to <=64 (if, you know, that‘s your value of choice).

On the fourth line, I changed 41 to 7E, to reflect the hex value of my max fertile age (that one I did based on the Seasonal Aging Mod by Awrevell from MATY). The fifth line required a change from 2B to 7E, for the same reason, although that was a more obvious change.

The change that wasn’t obvious was the fact ACR tokens have to be uninstalled and re-given to the entire neighborhood (there’s a simple function for that, though) for the changes to take effect.

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So first you do your math homework-- and there's a lot to do. Decide how long each life stage lasts, figure out all your elder bonuses and penalties (THAT was hard; I tried to get an even spread of them), decide if you want Plantsims to live a significantly different length of time than normal Sims... And figure out your fertility arc. You'll need to know how many days you want your Sims to be autonomously fertile, then figure out a fertility value for each day. (This is why I drew a graph. I had semi-scientific values for menarche, peak fertility, late twenties/early thirties, and the onset of menopause. I drew a line to connect those dots and suddenly I had all the information I needed.)

The aging mod is easy. Use mine, all the values are labeled so you can see wtf you're doing.

ACR is the tricky part. If it has enough fertile DAYS for you, all you'll have to do will be edit the labels in the TRCN to match where you start and stop. You can add days easily, just keep labeling them. Your last day should start with If you add any time, you'll have to change those two lines in the BHAV to >=, which means 'greater than or equal to.' That's the day autonomous fertility stops altogether. In your BCON, all you have to do is plop in your base risky woohoo chance for each day.

It's mathy, that's what it is.