TUTORIAL - Rabitt-Hole Interactions (Patreon)

And interactions added to the phone in general.

I'm still knackered by the Ars Goetia Mod, but this is going to be a simple Tutorial on how to make a simple rabitt-hole interaction, before getting into something more complicated like doing custom activities similar to the volunteer events. 

For the purpose of this tutorial we're going to import into an empty package the simplest form of a rabitt-hole interaction, that is the celebrity cleanse one:

So, go under tools - extract tuning and search for "cleanse" to make it show up.

There aren't many things we need to change in this first interaction at all, so let's take a look at it:

We may want to change the category where our interaction will show, this one, right now, shows under household.  To change it, I usually just import into the package the category I want to use to get the ID for it:

Adding them to my package (I'll delete them later) and bringing up the arrow at the bottom gives me the ID I need to change it:

I'll put it under "social"

We really need to change the display name (and key for it) to a new one (and, later, make a new STBL for our mod):

The same way, we want to change (or fully remove) the display tooltip:

What we REALLY need to change, though, is in the outcome of this interaction. It's a continuation. This means that performing this interaction from the phone pushes another interaction to run as a result... and that's the REAL rabbit-hole interaction:

So, we'll need to import this interaction in our mod, too, and change it. For now, let's continue looking at what other we may need to change in this first interaction (I'm going to call it "pusher" from now on). Another really important thing we need to look at is the test_global:

The sim_info part and test_set_reference parts are good to go, they're pretty standard for phone interactions, but we need to remove all the buffs part, because, right now, this interaction is available only to sims with these buffs on, and we want it to be open to everyone.

Other optional things we may need to change, the duration of this interaction in the basic_content... right now, sims will browse the phone for minimum 8 minutes before fecking off... 

You don't really need to touch it, but you may want to reduce the time.

Don't forget to give our pusher a new name and ID:

Let's now import into the mod the real rabitt-hole interaction our pusher has as  continuation:

In here, too, we may want to change the time our sims will be fecking off, into the basic_content:

As for the pusher, we need to change the display_name:

But what we really need to change is in the outcome, because right now, this interaction does a couple of things related to celebrity cleanse:

Specifically, it resets all the perks, runs two actions related to celebrity, and make the sim pay 275 simoleons for it. I really want to remove the perk resetting, so the whole do_command part:

I think, for this specific interaction, I'm fine with making them pay 275 simoleons to feck off... but I'll remove the loot_list too:

You may want to replace one or both the loots with your custom one, you can, for exmple, make this interaction give a buff at the end. Please refer to Let's Make a Buff and Let's Make a Loot tutorials to see how to deal with these.

I just removed it all. Now, let's give a quick look at the global_test in here too... in this interaction, we don't need to touch it, but, as a rule, always look at the global_test. If, when loading the mod, the interaction is not there or doesn't work, 90% of the time the problem is in the global_test.

Done that, let's change the name and ID of our rabitt-hole interaction:

And let's go back to our pusher outcome:

We need to change the continuation affordance to the one we just made:

Lastly, let's ADD a snippet tuning resource for the XML Injector to put our interaction in game:

The injector has a specific function to add interactions to the phone, you can find it all in the modding resources that come with it.

We only need to inject the pusher affordance, it will deal with making the other one run, too:

Let's also ADD a StringTable resource for our new display names and tooltip:

and put all the strings and keys for them in there:

Change the local to EN_US

And remember to copy the strings to all languages:

(With the STBL selected, go under tool - modding - copy string tables to all languages)

Done.