Child Sims are virtuosos since birth:

Really geeky Sims 1 fans might know that, for some reason, child Sims have a quirk where they are deliberately born with randomized skill points, anywhere from 0 to 1000. Have you ever noticed how some of them are mini MOZARTS when playing any musical instrument, even though players are not capable of developing their skills!? Well, that's why.

With my mod, though, all child Sims that are asked to prepare foods will be automatically assigned 2 Cooking points — in practice, that means they will by default know how to prepare a decent-ish meal, and the fire summoning risk isn't as high as someone who has zero cooking points, but the risk will always be there anyway. But don't worry: I coded the kids so they will know how to react to the fire they just caused. The plan is to have their newly acquired cooking abilities more-or-less as a gameplay facilitator, but still maintaining the classic TS1 level of challenge. You will find them useful during the early Sim days of gameplay, as they will obviously have more skills than their relatives (if they have ANY relatives, of course!!) but over the long term, you will probably want to have an adult who can grab a book and learn how to cook in a Masterchef level!

"With this mod, can child Sims use a stove and set their house on fire?"

Yes

Toaster Oven Fun Fact:

Did you know Maxis toyed with the concept of allowing child Sims to cook? More precisely: cooking exclusively using a toaster oven? Whew, no knives involved in the process.
I was browsing the base game's cache of leftover/unused animations back in 2020 and I was caught by surprise to see that child Sims had a specific bank of animations exclusively dedicated for the toaster oven object.

c2o-toasteroven-putfood


c2o-toasteroven-foodcheck


c2o-toasteroven-get-food

Importing the animations back to their appropriated contexts wasn't as easy as it should. c2o-toasteroven-get-food, for instance, contains in its programming a whole bunch of event IDs that simply do not match those that are actually listed in the object's scripting trees; we can assume that the child Sims animation files accomodate the toaster oven's script in its early/beta state, where the animation event indexes obviously happen to be very different than the ones used in the final product. As result, forcing child Sims to grab the prepared food off of the (final) toaster oven originally results in a rather buggy routine where they hold the item, but it isn't actually in their hands. Check out...



My mod fixes this tiny oversight, so child Sims can use the toaster oven the way they're intended to, without sacrificing their original animations versus the way the final stack objects event IDs work:



Plans for the future:

> Child Sim-enabled barbecue grills;

Let me know if you encounter any glitches or have suggestions!

Demo video:

Well, THAT makes it a lot more fun to have a kid around! Thank you.

Thank you! I love having kids as family members but their gameplay is so limited compared to adult sims. This is a game changer!

That's a great addition to the game, thank you for that & keep up the good work!

After having conversations and getting feedbacks from people, I was considering to allow players to have some autonomy over the kids' cooking abilities instead of having their cooking skills silently assigned to 2.

Let me know, pals, if you're on board with either of the ideas:

> Assigning skill points (0 to 3) based on school grades

OR

> Assigning skill points from 0 to 3 depending on the child's Neat score.

I like the idea of basing it on school grades. The adult sims READ cookbooks, after all, so it's a studious skill. :-)

Yeah! We can kind of build a little "SimCity Elementary School built new cooking class facilities!" narrative, which would justify their cooking abilities aligning with their grades! Great. I'll bring it to life in the new update, together with giving them barbecue grill access.

I forgot to polish "Wait for Notify" (halt the cooking if the players cancel the interaction last minute) for the kids . That's a problem. I'll take care of it as well!

Is it setting *to* 0-3 or is it incrementing *additional* 0-3 points past any they might randomly have been assigned? *eyes the two child sims I have banished to the ether (put in the Default family. I'm testing something) that have 865 cooking and 208 cooking respectively* (I suppose I could just download and look at the object to know this, huh? )

I'm sorry! Setting to 0-3. The idea is to get kids competent enough to cook decent meals with minimal fire risk—but still maintaining the risk there. Another potentially valid approach would be mapping it so that an 'F' student has zero cooking skill, an 'A+' student has ten, and everything in between follows the same proportion — but maybe it'd make simming unfavorably easy



Lol Each one of the skill points are counted by the 100's in the control panel; so while it might show over 800 points, that’s still "just" eight bars in practice (they still cook better than I do IRL...)! You’ve probably already noticed this since you’re also certainly cracked Edith’s bible at this point!