Tutorial - Let's Make a Loot! (Patreon)

If you haven't, in order to follow this tutorial you need to follow the Let's Make a Buff! tutorial, first.

So we now have our happy little buff just sitting there doing nothing at all...

We're now going to look at how to make a loot to give the buff to sims... making a loot is a lot easier than making a buff, point is though that... you all know what a buff is, but not all of you know what a loot is... this because a buff can be seen in the UI (not all of them) a loot is something that runs stealthy when you play...

So, let's make a litte tour, and I want you to import into the package exactly the buff I'm going to ask, if you don't have JA, import the xml I'm going to provide.

The buff I want you to import is 

Buff_Skeleton

Let's look at the tuning of this buff because... our little happy buff looks really sad compared to this!

Now, this can be overhelming at first, so we're going to collapse this all... and look at this piece by piece...

To collapse things, click on the small - icon you see on the left that will become a + icon whan you collapse...

Let's start from the beginning, so this buff has Loots:

_loot_on addition

_loot_on_instance

_loot_on_removal

we're going to look at them later... next part, this buff has actor mixer:

these are interactions in the category sim_Chat that are exclusive to sims with this buff on, only them will have these interactions in the menù...

On the next part, this buff has appearance modifier:

This is what makes the skeleton look like a skeleton, it modifies the outfit the Sim is wearing.

Next, this buff has a broadcaster:

This is what makes other sims react to the skeleton!

This buff also has game effect modifiers:

Sims with this buff on have the motives decrease in a different way (they don't decrease at all)

This buff has also interactions:

What's this? The Skeleton Idles... if you open the vampires buff or the mermaid buff, you're going to find the same thing.. and you're going to find the growling idle and the sing/coo idle...

Lastly, this buff has a commodity associated that is going to modify the Sim autonomy:

These are just some of the things a buff can do. Now, how do you navigate all of this? This is where you go on the Sims 4 forum and get yourself the Sims 4 TDESC

https://forums.thesims.com/en_US/discussion/968746/1-58-63-tdescs#latest

Download the files the Gurus are providing... what are they? They are the key of knowledge, but they are... unreadable. So, in order to navigate them, we're going to get ourselves Scumbumbo's Tuning Description Browser:

http://modthesims.info/d/618199/ts4-tuning-description-browser-windows-only.html

Follow the instruction on the page to extract the TDESC and when you're done, open the Tuning Browser:

Here you can search everything you want to know about things you don't know...

It's going to tell you what the setting does, it's default value and so on:

It's also going to show you all the other possible settings:

They're not so easy to understand sometimes, but they're an invaluable source of informations.

Now let's go back to our Skeleton buff, and to our Loot we still have to do... :

Our skeleton has 3 loots, as we saw before, a loot on addition, it's an action that is going to run when the buff is added to a Sim.

A loot on instance, is an action that is going to run when a Sim is instanced by the game (Ex: when it's loaded into an active lot)

A loot on removal, is an action that runs when the buff is removed from a Sim.

So basically... when this buff gets added to a sim, something else happens to that sim... something you don't see... same is, if this buff is active when the sim is loaded or when the buff get removed... so what happens?! Let's give it a look... let's import into our package the loot that runs when the buff is added:

And let's look at its tuning:

So basically, when the Buff_skeleton buff is added to a sim, another buff is added to that sim, that makes him immune to the temperature, and also, a commodity gets set to a certain value.

So this logic ( a loot that makes something happen as a consequence of something ) is valid for almost all the things in Sims 4. Now we can select the buff_skeleton and the loot we imported and remove them from our package. We're now going to look to an interaction, and I want you to import one of these:

You can find them by searching "alwaysfail" in the bar... I want one of these because they have a single outcome and are easier to navigate for now, I'm going to provide the xml if you don't have parenthood.

Let's look at the tuning of the interaction we imported and yeah... it's even more overwhelming... and we can spot "loots" all over the place!

Let's just collapse everything...

we're going to look at the interaction once we get to that part, for now, I want you to only expand the <V n="outcome" t="single"> part...

scroll down, until you find a loot list...

and here is the same logic... these are actions that run as a consequence of this interaction... this is the magic that makes your sim lose relationships point with the other sim as a consequence of the interaction. They're loots.

So let's remove the interaction from our package and search for another loot we can use:

I want this one, the loot_buff_serenade_target

Let's open it up and look at it:

What happens when this action run? That the target Sim gets a buff if it's a teen up, and the actor also get a buff

Now the subject of the first buff is the target, meaning the target of the interaction that gives this buff, the one that contains this loot, ACTOR and TARGET (and others) are participant you will find a lot. When nothing is specified as the subject of something, the subject is usually the Actor. This is important because messing up these two is going to call a Unsupported Participant LE (meaning, something is trying to do something with a subject it cannot support)

We'll go back to this in another tutorial, for now, let's scroll down and look at the other buff this loot is going to give:

It has no subject, so this one is going to be added to the actor.

At this point, we can do to this lot the same we did to the buff... change Instance and group on the DATA tab:

Change the name and tuning id:

Change the comment to the reason the game is going to show for the addition of this buff:

Add the comment to the string table and chage the key on the tuning:

And we made this loot OURS! Now there is this small arrow at the bottom of the screen in S4S that just... sits there minding its own business...

Click on it to bring it up...

And it's going to show you the local tuning in the package, already commented. Now let's select the whole string for our Buff... the little happy buff...

Let's copy it, and replace the buff this loot was going to give originally:

and the loot is done.

But I think our buff is still missing something....