Beginning of Month Update: June 2021

Hello everyone! Thank you for your support last month. If you're new, welcome! If you've been here, thanks for sticking around! And if you just joined for the SS update -- I totally get it. I hope you enjoy it!

Now, here's a bit of what I've been working on:

Storytelling Socials

As stated in the early update for it, Confess Love for Best Friend is now treated as a life moment.

I kind of want a music sting to play here, but I don't want one that is used somewhere else. For example, music plays when becoming best friends or proposing -- currently, nothing plays. I have no ideas thus far.

New interactions are still limited to the two mentioned in that early update. Couples arguing about fame and venting about your relationship to a friend. It gives the friend a sad buff and so autonomy is off for it.

On the dark addon: it was causing LEs, so I'm cleaning it up a bit. It'll probably be out this month, but I can't promise it will be. I've added two new interactions: one is Neg, which is exactly what it sounds like. Basically, Sims can passive-aggressively insult their partner.

The other one is "compliment maturity" if you play with MCCC's setting that enables teens to flirt with adults. Someone in the current story I'm playing out is going to do this and I hate his guts already.

Easy Sentiment Cheats

Nothing on this yet. I've made some QOL improvements to my workflow, though, so when I get to working on it, it won't take me very long to finish.

Better Autonomy

This is one I haven't talked about yet. Basically, this mod tries to balance out the autonomy a bit and make it so that instead of flocking to fun-building objects and actions, Sims are more balanced. Autonomy is a massive pain to work with, so I can't guarantee that it'll be out anytime soon.

Just for example, here's an example from recent playtesting: my granddaughter, Juliette, was a child. She had a dollhouse in her room. Before the mod, she would flock to the goddamn thing. Every time I left her alone for more than 5 minutes, Play Dolls/Play Dolls With was queued. 

After the mod, she almost never played dolls. Instead, she talked to her family. She hugged her moms lovingly, cracked jokes, etc. and only played dolls if both were busy. Until then, I thought the mod didn't work at all, but it was working even better than I'd hoped.

My goal is this: instead of turning autonomy off for everything—such as watching TV, playing dolls, etc.—Sims will be much more balanced and prefer to talk to their family and friends first, only resorting to time-wasting activities when they have nothing else to do.

The TV is a pain in the ass, though. I haven't yet figured out what exactly makes them want to watch TV so goddamn bad, but when I do, it'll be relegated to "very low" priority as far as autonomy is concerned. 

In other words, currently, even WITH my changes in place, the first thing they do when I turn autonomy on for it is watch the damned TV. Infuriating. I'll figure it out, I hope.

Small Mods

Not a whole lot of small mods I'm testing right now.

• No "Smell Good" Reaction: this reaction drives me up the wall. As soon as good food is fixed, Sims sniff it every 30 seconds. I figured out a way to disable it, but it needs more playtesting.
• No Route Fail Animation: this works. The only problem is as soon as they RouteFail, the action cancels out and they don't do anything. That's what I want personally, but I still want the balloon to show above their heads so that players know the issue.

That's all for now. Thanks for your support!