Rotation 2, Beaker Household
Just so you know, Nervous Subject (now Nicholas Specter) have moved in with his biological mother, Olive. But the sudden lost of a member was not for long as Narcisca Beaker is born to the world.
Surprisingly, Loki and Circe are great parents to Narcisca, taking turn of taking care of her.
Having both the love of Loki and Circe, Narcisca grew to be a happy child. Both of her parents taught her how to use the potty (though ultimately, Circe got the memory despite both putting in much efforts), Loki taught her how to walk while Circe taught her how to talk.
Even the babysitter is smitten by her, look at them dancing together :D
Overall, the second rotation for the Beaker Household went on smoothly.
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Owned Restaurant Profit Increase
Two versions to download:
-Double profit: SFS / GD
-Triple profit: SFS / GD
Choose only one version!
We all know how hard it is to maintain a restaurant business in The Sims 2, right? You barely make any money and, if you have some employees to get paid hourly, there's a good chance you'll even end up losing money. Well, once again I've been digging through the files for a while until I've found something to fix this issue. I have to say, this is not the ideal solution at all, but it still makes the business actually profitable, so I thought it might be worth sharing anyways. This tiny mod edits just one single BCON value, and it's super easy to tune to your liking! A lot of technical details, a tutorial on how to tune it, and a big testing research under the cut (bear with me please, I promise it's worth reading).
So the way an unmodded game moves money in a restaurant business goes like this: the moment your waiter puts the dish on the customer table, you get a small percentage of the price of the food deducted. Then, once the customer finishes eating, they pay you the full price of that food (based on how expensive or cheap you set your business). Simple enough, right? Ideally, the best solution would be increasing the price of the food, but no matter how hard I tried, I just couldn't find those values anywhere. So what's left on the equation? Yup, that small percentage you get deducted first. I was lucky enough to find that one, so changing it to a negative value means you actually get extra paid first. And that money comes from nowhere, the customer doesn't pay extra, they only pay the price of the actual food. That works for me!
As a quick example, in a new business with 0 stars, if you keep the default price on average, you always gain 28 simoleons for serving a bowl of Mac N Cheese. However, you also get deducted 4 simoleons first, so it's actually 24 simoleons per customer. That's just sad. The Double version of my mod makes it so you get 22 simoleons first, and then the customer pays those 28 simoleons. That's a total of 50 simoleons per customer. More than double the profit, not bad! The Triple version gives you a total of 71, pretty self explanatory. The numbers don’t match exactly with double or triple profits, but I didn’t want to spend that much time finding the exact value to make it exactly double or triple, you know, especially considering there might be other factors that affect your business income. I’m not that good at maths to be honest... orz
So how do you tune this? All you need is SimPe. Open the package, click on the BCON file and edit line number 14, on the Dec box. The default Maxis value was 20. I changed it to -100 to get roughly double the profit, and -200 to get triple profit. If you want to increase the profit even more, make sure you keep it negative when changing the value! Then just click Commit and Save. Done!
One extra note before I continue. The extra money you get with the mod does count for the balance you see on the UI menu for the business on the top right. So if you like to keep track of your income, the mod will take effect on those bars. However, it won’t count for things like the First Simoleon prize thingy. So for now I’m not really sure if this extra money would count for other things such as Lifetime Wants related to gaining money. I haven’t tested it that much.
Okay, now you know almost everything you need to know about this mod. If you want to read some ramblings on how I tested this, keep reading. Otherwise, you’re good to go!
So, let’s talk testing, because that’s something I actually enjoy doing. I built a simple restaurant lot, with about 5 tables available. The conditions were:
-3 Sims from my household to work as host, waiter and chef. No external employees, so I don’t need to keep track of extra salaries to pay.
-Schedule is roughly 15:00 - 22:00.
-New business level 0. Prices were kept at the default average.
-I didn’t use the Basic Sell interaction. If the customer didn’t want to eat at my restaurant, then so be it.
-The chef had 10 points of cooking skill, so I could add any food to the menu. However, I only chose one food to cook to keep the profit numbers as consistent as possible.
For the first case, I chose cooking only Mac N Cheese, a very cheap food that makes almost no money at all. It doesn’t require any cooking skill points.
Mac N Cheese gives you 28 simoleons when the Sim pays.
-In an unmodded game, you also lose 4 simoleons, so it’s 24 simoleons per customer. After running the business for the set schedule, I got 240 simoleons of profit. Pretty disappointing! If I had employees to pay, I would only have a few simoleons to spare, if any at all.
-With my Double version of the mod, you get an extra 22 simoleons, making a total of 50 simoleons per customer. After running the business with the mod in, I got 400 simoleons. Not much, but hey, it’s something.
For the second case, I chose Filet Mignon. This food is pretty fancy, and it requires max cooking skill.
Filet Mignon gives you 83 simoleons when the Sim pays. I also noticed the customers take way less time to eat it compared to the Mac N Cheese, so that’s an extra bonus to make the business run faster.
-In an unmodded game, you also lose 13, so it’s 70 simoleons per customer. After running the business, I got 630 simoleons of profit. Not bad, but considering you need to max out the cooking skill, it’s almost insulting spending so many hours just to get that…
-With my Double version of the mod, you get an extra 65 simoleons, making a total of 148 (!) simoleons per customer. After running the business with the mod in, I got 1036 simoleons. Okay, nooow we’re talking! That's the fancy restaurant status I like to see.
You might be wondering why these numbers are so inconsistent. Well, sometimes my lovely waiter decided to drop the tray on the customers, poor guy. That added to the randomness of how customers decide to enter the restaurant or not, and if the game sits more than one customer on the table or just one of them, if someone gets stuck for a while losing time… all of that can end up making the results a bit inconsistent. That being said, I had better luck when I was running the business without the mod in, yet I still got quite a lot more money with the mod in. I didn’t keep track of the numbers for the Triple version, but as you can probably guess, that one would be even more profitable.
One last case I wanted to test and compare: a completely different type of business, a games and entertainment one using the Bandatron ticket machine. In that scenario, I got 21 simoleons per customer, each hour. So after that schedule of 15:00 - 22:00, I got a total of 789 simoleons! All my sim did during those hours was bartending. That shows how easy it is to run a business with a ticket machine, and the biggest advantage is that you don’t have to pay employees if you don’t need them, and you don’t need any skills at all. Just plop down that machine, put some objects, relax and let the money flow by itself.
So yeah, in conclusion, Eaxis really messed up programming the restaurant businesses, there’s no doubt about it. Hopefully my mod helps balance things out. And if you think it's still too low on the incomes department, you can always tune it to your liking! As far as I know, this should not conflict with anything, but if you run into any issues, let me know and I’ll try my best to fix it asap.
Special thanks to EddySims for their fantastic HQ Icon Pack I used to make the preview pic! <3
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i've been asked if i could write a tutorial about how i edit my pics so here i am sharing with you my editing process.
let begin! :>
what do we need:
photoshop (for this one i particularly use cs6 version)
topaz clean 3
some psds of your choice. here's mine if you want to use.
step 1:
choose screenshot you want to edit. for todays occasion i've chosen this particular pic of bailey that you've might seen already:
step 2:
open your editing program and drag that pic to edit. it should look like this:
step 3:
as you can see my screenshot has some notifications in the background and is definitely too big to post, so i need to use crop tool to crop and resize this screenshot. i used to post pics where their height and width was 540x300px but since i've changed my theme on tumblr i switched to 600x350px
step 4:
select where you want to crop your screenshot. it should look like this
step 5:
if you're done with selecting how you want to crop your screenshot hit that "✔" button and you're ready for the next step.
step 6:
in this part which is optional you've gonna be using topaz clean 3. to do that you need to click filter > topaz labs > topaz clean 3. then a new window will open and it should look like this:
you can play with the setting however you like. this is my setting for those are interested:
step 7:
if you did what you had to do with the settings you can now click okay and the final result should look like this for now:
step 8:
now to the fun part. you've might downloaded some psds to brighten your screenshots so it's time to use them. all you need to do is select them and drag to your screenshot and that's it.
here's the final product:
and you're done!
so that's all for now, if you have any questions feel free to ask ;>
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