Tutorial - Let's add options to our Buff! (Patreon)

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

At the end of the previous part i said that our buff is missing something... let's look at it...

It has a name, a mood, a weight, an icon, a description... what's missing?

Well... it doesn't have a duration... why is that so?!

In order to investigate this we're going to jump in game and look at another buff that we all know, and that doesn't have a duration... this one:

It doesn't have a duration because this buff is managed by a statistic, one we all can see... this one:

So basically, this buff only appears when this statistic in a certain range, and disappear when the statistic exit that range... is this the case of the original buff we cloned?!

We're going now to do a little investigation... so, the original buff I cloned was

buff_CoreSocial_Happy_Outgoing

Now I have all the tunings for Sims 4 extracted in my PC and you should have them too...

So once again, we're going to ask Scumbumbo's help and download the XML Extractor:

http://modthesims.info/d/563256/xml-extractor-for-the-sims-4.html

Follow the instructions to install and extract the current XML for the game on your PC. It will take a while, but be patient, once you're done, we'll search for the buff we originally cloned:

Yes... just a Windows search inside the folder you extracted the XMLs into...

Now, let's open up the xml for this buff... ( I  use Notepad++ )

Let's grab and copy the Tuning Id for this buff and do another search...

And this brought up all the XMLs where this buff is referenced... so this buff is referenced into the XML for the Outgoing trait... Let's open it...

Here is our buff... It's a buff replacement for this trait... what's a buff replacement? Let's ask the TDESC:

Alright, so basically, when an Outgoing sim get a buff this buff is replaced by the one we cloned, so our next indagate is the buff our buff is meant to replace, the one tuned as a key in the XML for the Outgoing trait:

So let's do what we did for the CoreSocial_Happy_Outgoing with the CoreSocial_Happy to see where it's coming from...

And, mind you, we found a Statistic, the commodity_Buff_Social_HappyConversation

And here is our buff referenced HERE:

So, remember the Hungry buff? This one works the same, only, that the statistic that controlls it cannot be seen in game!

Now this is how you can search how things work, but beware that doesn't always work, because if I were to going a search with the Tuning Id of the Outgoing trait, this is the ammount of XMLs I would find:

This because personality traits are referenced in all the social interactions. But it's indeed a method you can use. 

Now what we really need to find, though, is a buff that it's not managed by a Statistic, but has it's own duration... we can look for it in the Buff's Folder, but we still have the reference of a buff in the loot we cloned before, so let's look at this... maybe we're lucky... let's import this buff in our package...

And... we are! This buff has a duration...

Unlike our buff, and you can compare the two, this buff has a _temporary_commodity_info enabled... let's once again use the TDESC:

So it tells us, that this buff manages it's own life and that this option is disabled by default... since our buff doesn't have it enabled, it defauts to disabled.

You can go on, and read the description of the other options as well if you want...

But what we really need to do is take this line, and put it on our buff...

Now I want you to collapse it:

And select it:

This way S4S will select everything between the opening tag and the closing tag:

Copy it. Go back to our buff and place yourself at the end of the very first line:

Press ENTER:

Space twice, and PASTE:

We need to change the categories, 'cause the other one was a Confident buff and ours is Happy:

If you're unsure if this tag exists, look for a Maxis reference in the xmls:

This part is done, our buff will now last 240 Sims Minutes: