Tutorial - Let's Troubleshot our Mod (Patreon)

Last time, I put my mod in game and I was having some funny results. This is going to be fast.

So, first, my Confident buff was sort of a mix of a Confident and Happy buff... what did I do?

Well, when something like this happens, the UI telling one thing and the simulation telling another, you can point straight to a mis-match between a SimData file:

And a tuning file:

What I did was not changing the mood in the SimData file for this buff, so the game was not sure about the nature of that buff, and, in doubt, he decided it was both. Now, this can cause problems, Maxis says, it can go from a mis-matched information in the UI to a game crash. To be honest, I never managed to break The Sims 4 so much with only this, usually it does a pretty good job a cleaning up stuff if you just remove the offending mod. I did manage to cause the game to crash, but only when mis-matching a statistic. Most of the time, the problem is just this, like in the buff I made for this mod.

The second problem I had, was the buff not getting applied to Alexander, that is... a child:

In my loot, I had a condition I decided to ignore, that tells this buff gets applied on the TargetSim only if Teen up... why? Because the original buff in here, was a flirty one. Now, we can add the child age into the test, but we don't really need to, we don't need this test at all in here, so we can just collapse and remove it:

Another thing that can happen is... the interaction not being there at all. In that case, the first step is run the test interaction for the XML Injector and check that it's working, the second step is checking the Snipped you made, if all of this is alright, your next suspect is the test globals:

If I put this mod in the game now, and try to test it like the last time, I'll not see my interaction, because I removed the possibility to have it to anyone but Elders from the test globals. So Elders would be able to run the interaction toward everyone, but only them would have the interaction.

Now, this mod is nice but doesn't do much gameplay wise... 

Well next time, we'll be using this steps to make a social interaction to ask this dick to stop playing the violin:

And it will be a social interaction that will give him an hidden buff to modify his autonomy, hopefully making him stop to play this thing for about 24 hours at least. 

The way we'll do it is exactly the same.