No Free Quick Meals

Mod Description

Ever been bothered by the fact that quick meals in the game cost no money, no ingredients, and no effort on the sim's part to make? This mod makes it so that each quick meal requires a new custom ingredient so that just like any regular cookable recipe in the game, it will cost money to make a quick meal without its required ingredient. This way, though lazy sims can till get away with just opening the fridge and/or reheating something in the microwave on occasion, they'll have to pay for the meal at the very least.

This mod affects making quick meals by clicking on the fridge and microwave oven. Also with this mod quick meals from the University Life mini fridge will always cost money since that interaction does not use up any ingredients.




New Ingredients

Though it is possible to make a quick meal require an ingredient, none of the in-game ingredients really made sense for them I found. Even when they did, e.g. Juice requiring fruit, doesn't the idea of an apple instantly transforming into a juice box the moment a sim opens the fridge seem a bit too whimsical, even for this game?

So instead, the mod takes each quick meal from the game and repackages it as a new ingredient item of the same name which is then required to prepare the meal. So Cereal will require the "Cereal" ingredient while Juice requires a "Juice" ingredient, etc. with the "logic" being that these "ingredients" are all prepackaged food items that can be bought at the store and "quickly" turned into their corresponding "quick" meal (probably the most inverted commas I've used in a sentence ever). The quick meals that require microwaving can be seen as frozen meals, which is why most of them look exactly the same as their cooked versions.



Like any other ingredient in the game, these new ingredients can be bought at the grocery store or food register (under the General tab) and can be stored in the fridge or your sim's inventory to be used when preparing quick meals. UNlike regular ingredients, you can click on these items to directly serve/eat them as a quick meal (NOTE: a microwave is required if the original quick meal requires one)

All you as the player has left to do is NOT ask questions like

• Why does a bowl of cereal use up one whole box?
• Why are the juice boxes sold with a straw already poked in?
• Why does the "Canned Soup" look decidedly unmetalic?
• What happened to the jam in the "Bread And Jam"?
• If you saw a piece of bread already spread with jam at the supermarket would you actually buy it?

and you'd probably make your simming life much happier, or at least mine
(For disclosure's sake, the answer to most of these would be that I had to use preexisting food models from the base game and became hampered by the lack of things like soup cans and lidded ice cream cartons as well as my inability to mesh anything for this game)

End Notes

Built and tested on patch 1.67

Works with base game only. (NOTE: For quick meals that require specific expansions you won't see them or their corresponding ingredient in your game without the required expansion)

This mod can be used together with all known cooking mods like

• Cook With Any Ingredient
• No Fridge Shopping (NOTE: if you are using No Fridge Shopping, make sure to use the linked updated version from NRaas as the ingredient requirements imposed by this mod will not be recognized by the previous versions)
• Cooking And Ingredients Overhaul (NOTE: When used together with this mod, the bread and yogurt ingredients from the overhaul mod will be used as requirements for the Bread and Jam and Yogurt quick meals respectively instead)
• All other custom ingredient mods (NOTE: This mod does NOT require CCLoader)

Lastly, if any talented and generous soul out there would like to share more sensible meshes for these custom ingredients, that would be very much appreciated.