Welcome to the Question & Answers Page.

The Career Tutorial has been moved to the Sims Wiki found here: Career Modding Guide Link

If you have an questions about the Complete Guide to Career Modding for Beginners!, then please ask away! Im sure someone if not myself can help you find the solution. Also and comments, bugs or suggestions for improvements etc, are always welcome!



(Could an admin please link the tutorial from the wiki to the tutorial page on this site, Thanks)

It really got to try this modding! I hope I don’t miss things up! :D

Holy pickles, thank you so much!

You even added pictures to make it clear to understand. Thank you so much!

Can I just point out you no longer need to open the Grid to export and import dlls? You can right-click on them and use Export DLL and Import DLL . I should have updated the help lol!

Still reading through this, but may I suggest that you write this in the wiki rather than in the forum? You have more formatting options in the wiki, and you can upload your images directly rather than using imageshack (this becomes a problem for the tutorial if imageshack removes the images). You can then just link to the wiki tutorial and have this forum thread for QA (see other tutorials in Modding for examples).

Ok thanks for the comments, I'll have a look at the wiki format + the dll file stuff

Edit:
Yes you are right, you can just right click and import DLL silly me! Ill change the guide.

Pretty.

Thank you for producing this in-depth and user friendly guide and filling in the gap with the MTS tutorials on this topic for the Sims 3. I have an idea for a custom career in the upcoming Showtime expansion pack and this guide will be very helpful in attempting to create that custom career.

Bookmarked.

Update: Moved tutorial to its own Wiki page, changed the guide to include DLL import, and made this post a Q & A page instead.

Thanks Creon for the tutorial, I appreciate the attention to detail! One question I have is in regards to metrics. I have the Late Night expansion pack and was planning on integrating fame/star ratings into my custom career. I was wondering if you knew what the coding would look like for that or how I should go about finding that code?

Nice one. How hard would it be to use a new item that doesn't have the EA careers attached to it?
For example, a religious career would be unlikely to share a career with an existing building.

Ah, fantastic - this is a much-needed tutorial. I'm not sure what your request regarding linking is, though - could you explain?

First of all, thank you so much for this tutorial - it's very concise and easy to follow

I've tried it several times, being as careful as possible to follow the steps exactly but every time my custom career continues to show up as JoinCareer[numbers] even after I've updated the STBL list with the numbers listed. Also, the career works in terms of correct hours/pay etc. but none of the text is showing up. I'm guessing this is a problem with my STBL file... any ideas on what I might be doing wrong?

How exactly do you make a promotion level 10 like Level 10 for the Music Career Rock Branch/Rock Star with no set hours, being able to attend any day and has no metrics so you are able to perform/attend the rabbithole location at any time you wish and perform the career role like perform concerts answering to no one and supporting yourself (see attached image)?

Great tutorial, it's really clear and easy to follow.
I've got a problem. I've followed the instructions to the letter but I can't get my career to show up at all It won't show on any rabbithole at all. Any idea what I might be doing wrong?

I'm presently stuck on the <KEY> Lines section of the tutorial. With the <KEY> Lines section, it's not clear in the tutorial whether you have to HASH anything in that second STBL file or not like you do with the 1st STBL. I looked at the Tennis career and it seems to indicate that you DO NEED to hash some of the lines given that in the Tennis mod, the instance numbers for the English strings (2nd STBL file) are different to the instance numbers under unhashed strings (1st STBL file).

I tried to download the Tennis Career for some reference of what I'm going to do and I put it in my Mods folder but it doesn't work. Is there an explanation for this?

Have you got Twallan's Career mod in your Mods folder? That's needed for the careers to show up
I solved my problem (no idea how, it just started working itself) but now I've got exactly the same issue as LilaLipstick. Does anyone else know what might be going wrong?

For those who are having trouble with the STBL part of the tutorial. I had the same problems a lot of you are having (missing text, numbers still being there, etc.) so I did things a little different and got everything to work properly. This is only if you have no intention of converting to other languages because while you could probably do it this way the other method is faster if you can get your head around it.

First of all go to resource - add in S3pe.

We're going to add a new STBL so set you new resource like this.

Type: STBL 0x220557DA
Group: 0x00000000

Check use resource name and name it something like MyCareerName.STBL and hit FNV64 and your instance should be filled out.

DO NOT hit OK just yet.

Go to your instance in my case was 0xB02D2720ADB57DB9 and chance the first two numbers after the x to match your language code. 00 is English. So 0xB02D2720ADB57DB9 becomes 0x002D2720ADB57DB9.

Now hit OK.

Now right click on your resource and choose edit STBL to bring up the STBL resource editor.

In the little box above where it says add change delete paste your first string from the tutorial. The section called The string resources.

So the firsts line is

<STR>Gameplay/Excel/Careers/CareerList:BLANK</STR> '''- Should be your career tile: e.g. “CareerList:Tennis”'''

You want the part between the <STR></STR> so past Gameplay/Excel/Careers/CareerList:BLANK into the box and replace BLANK with the name of your career and hit add. A new hash will be added on the left and you would type the name of your career on the right. I'd skip over the second string Gameplay/Careers/GetJobInRabbitHole:JoinCareerNoCareer just because you have to change it later on. So skip over that and continue with Gameplay/Excel/Careers/CareerList:BLANKOffer Do this for the rest of the tutorial...

It's pretty self explanatory once you get past the tone and skill part. Just remember this once you reach Gameplay/Excel/Careers/BLANK:BLANK it's pretty much the name of your career followed by the level you're on for example BLANK:BLANK would be MyCareerName:Level

Gameplay/Excel/Careers/BLANK:EntryLevel - BLANK would be MyCareerName the text would be a description of the job at that level.

Gameplay/Excel/Careers/BLANK:EntryLevel_Female - BLANK would be MyCareerName, the text on the left would be the female description of the job at level. This is usually the same as the male description unless you use gender identifiers in the description. Ie Ball Boy, Ball Girl.

Save the STBL by hitting Save and save your package. It's good to do this occasionally anyways just in case you have a power outage or something. It's kinda time consuming either way you make your STBL so it would suck to lose your progress.

Once you write down your numbers from in the game add another string at the end. This is the one we skipped over. If you didn't you can simply delete it by highlight the hash and hitting delete. For this string put
Gameplay/Careers/GetJobInRabbitHole:JoinCareer[YourNumbers] Your Numbers would be the ones you got in the game. Since the STBL editor will make the same hash as FNV Hash when you enter the string it's not necessary to do that part. Your text on the right would be Join MyCareer Career for example Join Tennis Career.

Save Your STBL.

Delete the two other STBL files from the package.

Save your package and your text should now hopefully be correct in the game.

Creon's tutorial isn't overly bad. It's just that one section gets a little confusing for a lot of people. I followed it better than any other career tutorial I've read right up until the STBL. Now I'm only a matter of filling out the job descriptions away from having a fully working career. Another tip for those of you editing the STBL the way I did. If you don't have your job description ready at the time you're editing just put *job name description male* and *job name description female* for those lines so you don't forget what those strings are or get confused.

Hopefully, this will help some of you.

I believe you should then be able to enable your career for other languages by running it through STBL duplicator, though I haven't tested this on careers specifically - you would set the default language to be whichever one you've already made STBLs for, then just drag and drop the file over the duplicator exe.

So right now I'm following the guide here: http://simswiki.info/wiki.php?title=Tutorial:_Complete_Guide_to_Career_Modding_for_Beginners!

And I've gotten stuck on the section for doing string resources. I'm trying to figure out exactly where and how I put the description in. For instance on one line it says to put the first tone title with desciption added and gives the example of "MeetFellowAthletesDescription", so my question is do I put that and then just copy and paste my description in so that it's like "MeetFellowAthletesDesciption: Meet up with fellow athletes to discuss tennis" or what? I'm confused at this point. Please help.

You'd add that during the <KEY> Lines part of the tutorial.

<KEY>Gameplay/Excel/Careers/CareerList:BLANKDescription</KEY> ~ BLANK is MeetFellowAthletes with Desciption on the end MeetFellowAthletesDesciption
<STR>BLANK</STR> ~ BLANK would be the text you want to appear as the description "Meet fellow athletes and talk about tennis" without the quotes.

A lot of people are getting confused in that section. Perhaps something like CAREERTITLE:JOBLEVEL1 would be easier than BLANK this and BLANK that. It might also save a little time when editing in notepad since you could use find and replace to do most of the work since you know CAREERTITLE should always be Tennis so you can replace all occurrences of CAREERTITLE with Tennis instead of doing it one at a time since BLANK will not always equal CAREERTITLE.

Since I've started to understand a little more about how this works I'll try making a career following the tutorial completely later today since I have one that's being difficult and not showing in the game for some reason and I can't determine why exactly since I've followed the changing of the resources part to a t and it never shows up for me to get the numbers for the join career part so I'm not sure if the problem is how I did the STBL, in the XML or if it's just a problem with Showtime in general since the other career was made before installing Showtime and while the STBL was goofy due to confusion with the tutorial at least it did work in game, so if it's the STBL I know how to fix it if it goes screwy again but it shouldn't since I'm starting to grasp what Creon is talking about with all that stuff. I couldn't grasp it when using Twallan's career tutorial either so it's a bit to get your head around.

Edit. I was having the same problem as missyhissy and could not for the life of me figure out what the hell was going wrong and causing it not to show up in the game. I actually woke up this morning at 2am because I was having nightmares about how much the fact that it wasn't working and I had no clue why was pissing me off. If you're having this problem download Error Trap and it should give you a little bit of an idea. Turns out when I made my first career I actually screwed up in just the right place to make it work <TableName> Should be your career title with Offer added: ie: “TennisOffer” should actually just be your career name. My Grocery career I put just Grocery and that's the one that works. When I went to do my Professional Wrestling career I put ProfessionalWrestlingOffer and it would not show up in the game at all. Error Trap told me I had no table name which I know I put so I had a look at the Grocery career to see what I did different and noticed the lack of Offer on the end. What the hell it's not working so let's take Offer off an leave just ProfessionalWrestling tried it in the game and there we go join career long ass number right where it belongs. Now I can go back to bed.

Hopefully this will help some of you who are getting confused. You can use find and replace in Notepad or Notepad++ to do most of your editing on the string lines. Instead of copy and pasting the string resources posted in the tutorial use the following part between the CODE tags.

CAREERNAME = the name of your career "Tennis"
COWORKERTITLE = the name you gave your coworkers "FellowTennisPlayers"
COWORKERMETRIC = what you put as your coworker metric title "TennisPlayers"
TONE1 = your meet coworkers tone "MeetFellowTennisPlayers"
TONE2 = your hang with coworkers tone "HangWithFellowTennisPlayers"
SKILLBOOSTING1 = any custom skill boosting tone you might have added "WorkOnSkill"
SKILLBOOSTING2 = if you added a second skill boosting tone it would go here if you've added no tones you can just delete these lines. I didn't put tone because find and replace will get it with TONE1 and TONE2 so it became a problem.
JOBLEVEL1 = the first level of your career. You can just keep replacing the digit from 1 to A for each level of your career. A would be level 10 because find and replace doesn't distinguish between 1 and 10 so when you do level1 it will replace level10 except for the 0.

Remove the spaces from between the lines otherwise it might not work. It's not posted that way but the code tags seem to have made it space between lines.



Now when you get to your Keys you copy and past each line into FNVHash and get the hash for FNV64 when you calculate your text. That would go in your <KEY></KEY> BLANK for each STR you hash.

When you go to do the Key to tell it which text to display you simply copy and paste the string text from your unhashed keys document.

<KEY>Gameplay/Excel/Careers/CareerList:Tennis</KEY>
<STR>BLANK</STR> ~ the blank would be the text you wish to be displayed instead of Gameplay/Excel/Careers/CareerList:Tennis which would be Tennis.

<KEY>Gameplay/Excel/Careers/CareerList:TennisOffer</KEY>
<STR>BLANK</STR> ~ Blank would be what appears in the newspaper or on the computer when the job comes up "So you think you want a career in Tennis? Well grab you balls and your racket and give it a go!"

PromotionLevel# and PromotionLevel#_Female are the description of the job "Working as a Racket Cleaner may be hard work, etc." You can use the male job description for both in most cases unless you use a gender identifier in the text ie ball boy/ball girl.

Hopefully, that'll clear some of the confusion up a little. Personally, I prefer the way I described for the STBL since I find it faster and have no intention of ever converting to a different language so but the other method does work it's just getting past the confusion of what should be wear. You can actually use the posted template for both methods of doing the STBL file which saves a little more time either way.

Thanks Thomas, but I'm still a little confused on the Strings Resources English part. I'm good with the <KEY> part for the actual job, but still confused about the actual tones I'm supposed to be putting in. Primarily where it says to put <KEY>GameplayBLANK:BLANK<KEY> or stuff like that. Do I just replace the entire line with the hash number (ex. <KEY>0x794447343</KEY>) or do I put something like <KEY>Gameplay0x794447343</KEY> in it's place?

The key in the first part is the hashed version of the text you put in for the string.

<KEY>0xD330291AEDEA5A43</KEY>
<STR>Gameplay/Excel/Careers/CareerList:CAREERNAME</STR>

Where 0xD330291AEDEA5A43 is the FNV64 hash of the text string Gameplay/Excel/Careers/CareerList:CAREERNAME that's what you would save as your Strings [YourCareerTile] UnhashedKeys

When it comes to the second part Strings [YourCareerTitle] English the string in your unhashed keys document becomes the <KEY> in the second document so you would copy over each line replacing <KEY>BLANK</KEY> with the <STR></STR> from the other document. The <STR>BLANK</STR> line would now be what you want the text to display whenever the game brings up Gameplay/Excel/Careers/CareerList:CAREERNAME

<KEY>Gameplay/Excel/Careers/CareerList:CAREERNAME</KEY>
<STR>My Career</STR>

If you leave the <STR> blank it won't show up or will show up as Gameplay/Excel/Careers/CareerList:CAREERNAME and if you leave the BLANK in there it will just say BLANK when it appears in game. It's confusing I know. I've been around and was part of the first attempts to add custom text to the game and I still kinda look at all that STBL stuff and go huh. It's like trying to read Greek upside down and backwards.