Vegetarian Recipe Renamer: Reasonable and Relevant Meals for All Sims!

Ever since Showtime, The Sims 3 has allowed any Sim, regardless of their own traits, to learn and prepare the vegetarian versions of most of the meat dishes in the game. This is, of course, very useful for the friends and loved ones of vegetarian Sims, who have ever since been able to cook for their buddies and fully include them in parties and family meals! However, it also calls to the forefront how much of an afterthought the vegetarian meals must have been when they were added to the game -- every Sim now has recipe menu full of very similar pairs of meals, featuring oxymoronic options like "vegetarian fish". (You might assume, as is probably the intention, that that means "a vegetarian imitation of fish", but that characterizes these recipes as specialized substitutions -- the implication that you're having it because you're not having real fish -- which makes it somewhat odd that every meat-eating sim knows so many of them.) Now, I'm pretty sure there are ways to hide the extra meals (with NRaas, maybe?), but I didn't want that, because I do appreciate giving my Sims the option to cook vegetarian dishes where applicable, and to have more variety in their lives in general. I thought it would be a significant improvement if only the names of the vegetarian dishes were changed to make them more interesting and relevant. So! I learned how to make a string table mod so I could do that!

What This Mod Does
This mod replaces the names of most of the vegetarian alternative dishes in the game to make them describe what each meal actually might be (based on research I did into common vegetarian substitutes for and variants of the original recipes), rather than what it's an imitation of. This makes them more distinct from the meat versions, which also gives an implicit reason why a meat-eating Sim might want to learn and prepare most of these dishes whether or not there are any vegetarians around. It also changes the name of one canon meat dish, Spaghetti, to Spaghetti and Meatballs, in order to make it more clearly a meat dish and distinguish it better from the vegetarian version. The changes I made are as follows:

• Vegetarian Fish and Chips -> Batter-Fried Tofu Fillets and Chips
• Veggi Rolls -> Mushroom and Avocado Rolls
• Spaghetti -> Spaghetti and Meatballs
• Spaghetti with Veggie Sauce -> Spaghetti with Tomato Sauce
• Cheese Tofu Steak -> Cheesy Mushroom Melt
• Vegetarian Grilled Salmon -> Grilled Eggplant Fillets
• Tri-Tip Tofu Steak -> Grilled Portobello Mushrooms in Steak Sauce (I wanted "anchovy-free Worcestershire sauce" but it was too long already -- so imagine whatever type of steak sauce you prefer)
• Vegetarian Dim Sum -> Vegetable Dumplings and Tofu Puffs
• Stuffed Tursoykey -> Seitan Holiday Roast
• Vegetarian Lobster Thermador [sic] -> Heart of Palm in Thermidor Sauce
• Vegetarian Chili -> Four-Bean Chili
• Tofu Dog -> Veggie Dogs (This admittedly goes against my general goal of making the recipes more descriptive, but this was by far the most common name for any example I could find of the type of food in question, whereas I couldn't find "tofu dog" in any context. Besides, it makes sense for such a processed food to be a little more vague about the ingredients.)

I left "Veggie Burger" and "Firecracker Tofu" alone, as veggie burgers are already common and well-known, and "firecracker tofu" is already evocative and descriptive.

My mod also corrects a couple of proofreading errors in the original vegetarian recipes. I fixed the spelling of "Thermidor" in "Heart of Palm in Thermidor Sauce", and made "Veggie Dogs" plural to match "Hot Dogs".

You'll see these changes in every context I could find where the game displayed the original names, including the names of the dishes themselves, the titles of the recipe books, and miscellaneous strings such as the dialogue you get when a vegetarian Sim refuses a challenge to a hot dog eating contest.



What This Mod Does Not Do
This is not an ingredients mod -- the vast majority of the vegetarian substitute recipes use tofu as their primary or only ingredient, and I found that it was a tall order to make the recipes descriptive, distinct, and realistic if I limited myself to the same ingredient for everything. With that in mind, I allowed myself to choose names that don't necessarily match the in-game recipe. The result, though, is that a Sim will need to use tofu in order to make a cheesy mushroom sandwich or a grilled eggplant dish, even though that might not make too much sense. This isn't a problem for me, as I usually just pay for each meal at the fridge, so ingredients don't come into play much, but I can see how it might be annoying or confusing if your play style features ingredients more heavily, so it's something to note! (Something I've thought about, and could still do if anyone is interested, is make a little add-on package to rename "tofu" to something like "vegetable protein" to make it more broadly applicable, although I don't know whether most people would consider this better or worse.)

This mod also does not change the meshes or textures of any of the dishes, so they will also still look like the equivalent meat dish. I tried to describe each dish in a way consistent with its appearance, but there are limitations to this. There's no reason for your fancy heart of palm recipe to be in a fake lobster shell unless it is pretending to be lobster -- so some of these will still visually read as obvious imitations of the equivalent meat dish. I can only hope that I've presented them as interesting, meaningful imitations that will still appeal to your Sims in their own right!

Issues, Interactions and Other Mods
This mod renames recipes from the base game, Showtime, and Supernatural, but it shouldn't be necessary to have either or both of the expansions -- the recipes from packs you're missing just won't show up in the game, so you won't see the renames.

Some of the recipe names in this mod are a little longer than the official ones in the game, which can cause some minor overlapping when a dish is spoiled, as seen below. In my testing, this never caused text to be fully covered or to become illegible, but I can't guarantee that to still be the case if you're using UI mods that change fonts or other formatting.



This mod replaces the English-language strings for the names of the dishes I changed and their recipe skill books, the dialogue for a vegetarian Sim refusing a hot dog eating contest, the level-up text for a vegetarian sim reaching level four in cooking, and the description of the wish for a pregnant sim to eat spaghetti and ice cream, and may conflict with any other mods that replace these strings. I'm not aware of any, but an example would be if you have a mod to correct the spelling of "Vegetarian Lobster Thermador" (which you won't need anymore, since "thermidor" is spelled correctly in my mod.)

(When I was making this mod, I also noticed strings in the game files that appeared to be for vegetarian versions of the World Adventures meat recipes. I updated them just in case they might appear in the game somewhere, but throughout my testing I was unable to find anywhere where these strings appeared in the game. I left the replacements in the mod anyway, in case they might be associated with content some other mod might unlock in the future or some similar edge case.)

Thank you for your interest and I hope you enjoy the mod!