Modding Sucks And Is Hard

REV UP THOSE CRIERS BECAUSE I AM ONE ANGRY-

This was going to be paired with a mod update post but the mod is not getting updated at the moment because of all the stuff I'm about to complain about so get ready

I have a mod. It is called "Death by Flies". It is pretty simple all things considered. Every single Sim is checking every 2 hours for trash.

They check to see if there are >25 items on the lot. Those 25 items have to have certain "tags" in them, that the game uses to tell what they do, how to handle them, etc. Tags like trash pile, dirty dish, dust pile, ash pile, manure, etc.

If 25+ of those items are on the lot when the check happens, your Sim has a chance- dependent on sheer luck and on traits and stuff- to get a buff warning them that there's pestilence coming and they better prepare for it.

Then, 2 hours later, it checks again. If your lot is still dirty, your Sim might get the buff again. If the lot is cleaned up a little, and the number of tagged items is <15, they get the buff removed instead. If the buff is not removed, there's a chance they will be swarmed by flies. The various chances and multipliers on chances based on traits and such make sure this isn't happening to every Sim on the lot at all times. Some will get swarmed, some won't, some will get all this the first two checks, some will take a few extra hours, and you have time to clean up if you see an encroaching threat.

EASY. SIMPLE. NOT EASY ACTUALLY OR SIMPLE BUT FOR WHAT IT IS, PRETTY LOGICALLY PUT TOGETHER.

Well, recently I noticed that I'd see the buff for this pop into my Sim's panel, and disappear immediately. My lot was littered with dishes, so it must be trying to trigger. Something was definitely wrong, but I wasn't sure what. Everything in the tuning is mostly correct. A couple oddities but they wouldn't impact actual functionality necessarily, in theory.

I got some help from LittleMissSam who found some oddities and changed them up alongside me changing my own things. Mine didn't work, so I copied her changes directly into the file...and it still didn't work.

Here's a summary of bullshit:

- Hers worked...with trash piles. My testing was with dishes. Why were trash piles working but not dishes?

- Her changes worked...but when I copied hers exactly, they didn't work for me. Turns out, after several back and forth checks of other crap, I had removed Core Library from my testing folder, because I was "trying to test with this mod exclusively 100% by itself" to be sure nothing was interfering. This mod requires core library to function.

- At one point I realized that I had opened the mod by searching for it with the app Everything, which quickly searches all your files. On all hard drives. I had opened a backup, on the wrong hard drive, that the game was not reading. Not a SINGLE change I had made was to a file the game was reading.

- k, so things should work now that I got all that sorted, right? No! The trash piles were causing the buff, the dishes were not. Why was that happening?

- Honestly at this point so much has gone wrong i don't even think i can properly recap all the problems that happened but it turned out that the test for how many items were on the lot was working when checking some ways, but not others. Adding the buff? Sure! That works. REMOVING the buff? It was happening immediately, presumably because while the game acknowledged all these tagged items when counting >25, it didn't acknowledge all of them when checking if there were <15. So >25 and <15 both passed at the same time, adding and removing the buff. I think. I'm so mad and confused lol

-It wasn't actually the dishes or trash piles, it was the removal part that was broken. It would remove 100% of the time regardless of what items were on the lot or how many. But it would totally add with just dishes or just trash, if I deleted the part that removed the buff completely.

-But the buff removed if the item count is correct is required for the mod to work. So instead I set it so that the check waits longer, and the buff disappears shortly before the next check. When a buff is removed, you can tell teh game to do something. I told it, when this buff is removed, add it back again, if the number of items on the lot is right. Then, when the check happens, if the sim still has the buff, they'll get the chance to die. And that worked!

-Except there were additional contingencies for being on a landfill or grody lot, that, apparently, were simply allowing the buff to add regardless of literally anything. So none of it mattered. Except it did, because the buff, again, wasnt adding when there were >25 dishes, but was adding when there were >25 trash piles. Or so I thought.

-Actually you know what? I feel like im having a medical episode because I literally don't remember. I don't know what was and wasn't wrong and when and why. I'm lost.

Just know that over 3 and a half hours of work on figuring out what was happening here has either boiled down to "This entire test that the mod relies on outright doesn't work anymore, and is the result of an EA bug" and the few times it was "working", it wasn't ACTUALLY working, it was just doing everything regardless of any other factors, so the reality was if you loaded up a brand new clean lot, everyone would eventually die. Oh yeah, and the moodlet popping into the panel and immediately disappearing apparently just happened all the time I guess. I dont know. I didn't check. who cares

I'm pretty sure that's it at this point because the core concept is so frickin' simple, but I just spent 3 and a half hours hacking this mod into pieces trying different things to the point I literally have no idea what if anything I can do to salvage it. There are no apparent alternatives to handle this aside from "count how many of these types of items are on the lot".

The worst part is even if there were issues in the mod at one point, IT DID WORK AT ONE POINT. It worked after the HOURS of testing I did when I MADE IT THE FIRST TIME.

And at some point something on EA's end busted and the mod busted and you won't notice unless you're on a dirty lot wondering why you're not seeing a risk of death, which I did the other day and spurred me to check what was wrong.

I am so beyond mad and I just need people to understand modding sucks lmao

TIE ME TO A B I T C H I N G P O S T BECAUSE I AM AN UPSET WHORSE