This is the pinnacle of my long-promised pets mods, a mod designed around Erin Hunter's Warriors book series. I was inspired to write Pets mods by watching my kid play the TS3 Warrior Cats Challenge. It was dismaying how little user-directed pets could do to take care of themselves or, really, have any kind of interesting gameplay.

This mod is almost feature-complete, but some stuff is still pretty rough. For one thing, there are no skill journals to speak of for the two custom skills. I'll try to make it clear in this post what the various levels of the Medicine skill do.

This mod is intended to be played with my other pets mods:

Cat Fishing Skill: https://modthesims.info/d/656115/cat-fishing-skill.html
Pet Fighting Skill: https://modthesims.info/d/666801/pe...ting-skill.html
Pet Diseases: https://modthesims.info/d/677117/pet-diseases.html

This is a fairly big mod, and there are so many things that might go wrong even with the testing I've tried to do. Play at your own risk. Of particular note: If you want to uninstall a custom skill mod, always remove the skill from all sims in the save using NRaas MasterController or something similar.
What this mod has:

1. A Medicine Pet skill that allows a pet to cure fleas and wounds/diseases from my other mods using University herbs.
2. An Herb Lore skill that is basically pet gardening, allowing pets to gather and grow the ingredients needed by the Medicine Pet. You learn the first level of this skill by an Inspect Plant option. You can't even pick up seeds until then. Other basic gardening skills are achieved by leveling up, but plant difficulty levels are ignored. Watering plants involves physically going back and forth from a pond. Let's face it -- gardening is HARD for animals.
3. A master-apprentice system that allows a pet to take on another pet as apprentice and mentor them in skills. A mentored apprentice learns skills at a significantly higher rate than normal. With a new household, any adult or elder dog or cat may take any kitten/puppy or adult pet as an apprentice. A pet that has been taken as an apprentice may not take one unless they are graduated by their mentor.

What it doesn't have:

1. Much in the way of skill journals for the new skills, including info on what each level of the skill actually does. I'll try to get the relevant info about the Medicine
2. A way for a pet to gain the first level of the Medicine Pet skill without apprenticing to a pet who already has the skill. I kind of thought that maybe a new clan would pray to Star Clan for a pet to be chosen as the very first Medicine Pet. This might be too ambitious. Right now, you have to cheat a pet to the first level of the skill, but it can gain skill from there by treating other pets.
3. Full dog support. In theory, everything that a cat can do can be done by a dog except Fishing. In reality, I have done very little testing with dogs, Dog Hunting can't be mentored yet, and not all mentoring animations have dog versions.
4. STBLs. Strings are hard-coded in English.

Known issue: The mentoring interactions consist of the two pets talking about the skill, then one pet demonstrating while the other watches, then talk again, then the other pet demonstrates. This runs 5 cycles. When it is switching between demonstration and socialize, sometimes one pet or the other does not have a current interaction icon. I have some guesses as to why this, and I'm working on it.

In case of emergency: The package has a tuning resource Echoweaver.Sims3Game.WarriorCats.Config
If your mentors and apprentices get borked up in some way, you can change the kPetWarriorDebug to TRUE. This will give you a ton of debugging notifications that won't all make sense, but it ALSO will unlock an interaction on pets called "Clear Apprentice State". This should erase all the mentor apprentice info associated with the sim and enable them to become apprentice or mentor again.

Guide to Pet Medicine skill:

Level 1 - Fleas: any RODENT
Level 2 - Disease, nausea (any cause): SWEETGRASS
Level 3 - Wounds, reduce by one level: GREENLEAF, Garlic
Level 4 - Disease, Germy (whitecough): GENSING
Level 5 - Disease, Pneumonia (Greencough): PEPPERMINT
Level 6 - Disease, Pestilence: LAVENDER, Mandrake Root
Level 8 - Wound, remove completely: Same as above

Treat a sim by clicking the herb in inventory.

Your chance of treatment success should also go up as your skill goes up.

As soon as I get a chance I'm gonna test this out!

I've done a little bit of playtesting of the mod- not a ton, but I tried out some of the stuff with the new skills and the apprentice mechanics and so far I love it! I recorded my playtesting in a showcase, here.

Your video is awesome. Five minutes in, you already brainstormed a problem I need to fix -- yes, indeed, if a mentor dies, I think the poor apprentice is stuck. Good catch! Now I have to figure out what to do about it.

STBL is just the package resource used in translations. You can't currently translate anything to other languages because the strings are hard-coded in English. I'll fix that before I release, but it's a real pain to change the text on strings when you've set up the STBL resources, so I usually do that as the last thing.

I have looked and looked for a way to add an indicator on the relationship pane for master-apprentice, but I haven't been able to figure anything out yet. There should be more ways to see who is apprenticed to whom.

I think the skill gain rate for mentoring is too fast. It's really hard to get that stuff right!

I notice that you have your headline effects turned off. There are speech and thought bubbles associated with building these skills. It's interesting to see your video without them.

I'm concerned about the bit where you showed one pet inspecting a plant while another pet gained the Herb Lore skill. I don't think that interaction is autonomous. It looked very much like the skill gain was being applied to the wrong sim. I have no idea how that would happen, but I'll investigate.

(Agh, sorry about the above. Had an unexpected health issue shortly after offering assistance with the mod and thought I'd quietly retract it until I knew I'd be back active posting and able to follow through on the offer, little did I know t'would immortalise it in stone )

That aside, I am cheering on the progress of this from the sidelines!
Playing pretend WC in TS2 was a significant part of my childhood, expanding on it for real in TS3 is a lovely endeavour. And if I can get Pets (and University Life I assume?) set up for testing, as well as getting my own mortal body to cooperate with me, I shall return with the offer in the future

Oh! I'm sorry to hear that. I'd actually read your comment but hadn't replied yet, so I was surprised to see it deleted. Thanks for letting me know why. Yeah, I don't think this software lets you quietly retract anything



Whenever someone gets interested in this project, I get excited. It's been such a long, deep rabbithole. I burn out and come back to it. I put it up for alpha testing because a few Warrior Cats Challenge players expressed interest, but now I have to face how rough it still is.

At any rate, I'd love to have you involved, and the project will probably still need feedback when you're feeling better. I hope that's soon.

So I've been testing this mod a little bit, I have set my cat's skills in Medicine Cat and Herb Lore to lvl 10 with NRaas, but when I click an herb in that cat's inventory it does nothing for the wound he has. Is the feature not implemented or is my game bugging out? Or maybe I misread your instructions... xD But I tried looking at the script in S3PE and making sense of things to see how this all worked but I couldn't. Still an awesome mod.

Edit: After clearing my caches the interaction shows up! But it's greyed out and says that there's no sim affected by the condition...

Thank you for testing! This helps a lot.

Interesting. It sounds like you're doing the right thing.

Is the cat treating its OWN wound? It suddenly occurs to me that I might not have handled that case....

After some more testing, it seems to work when the cat treats other cat's wounds (although with fleas, it won't let me treat it if the medicine cat hasn't caught the rodent because "you can't present prey you didn't catch", but that's just a sims 3 thing). But if the cat tries to treat his own wounds or fleas the option to treat is greyed out because (not exact wording because I don't remember) "There is no sick cats nearby." So it does work, but it doesn't seem to detect the treating cat itself as an ill cat, even when that cat has the moodlet.

OK, yes, I'm pretty sure that the inability to treat yourself is an easy fix.

I'm surprised about the presenting prey you didn't catch. I thought I tested with rodents dragged into inventory. But the truth is that there was so much prey running around on my test lot that my cats were filling their inventory autonomously while I was doing other things.

This gives me some stuff to focus on. I admit that I've been a bit burned out, and I'm having trouble getting this to release. Not because I don't love it. Just that I've been working on the project for so long. Feedback REALLY helps!

hi!!

i made an account just so i could share my thoughts and experiences with the mod. i used to play "sims 3 warrior cats" as a kid and i wanted to return to it now just for a bit of fun in my holidays, and i was pleasantly surprised to find this and your other mods.

I've been playing for many hours at this point and have some things to bring up if you're still working on the mod.
- It's very hard to take care of fleas as a medicine cat because they have to hunt their own rodents. I find I let it go unresolved and wait for them to sort themselves out because I'm fighting rng when it comes to what my medicine cat catches, which is rarely a rodent. It is also unfortunate because it means i have to have my medicine cat hunt when they could be taking care of herbs.
- The mentor/apprentice status between cats reset between loads. This might be unavoidable which is okay it's not a big deal!
- I've been having a lot of trouble with plants and gardening them specifically. I've used debug to place some of the plants needed around my lot and they're initially un-interactable for my medicine cat, but my sim can interact with them just fine. It changes after some time, I think after I close the game and reopen it again is when they become interactable. I have a similar problem with after harvesting sometimes where i have to restart the game to let my cat use the herb to cure another cat. I've specifically had issues with lavender recently, but i'm pretty certain it applies to all plants i just use lavender the most.
- i ended up turning off story progression in the settings because my neighbouring clans kept getting sick and they're unable to heal themselves and they die because of it ): it would be nice if they didn't get sick or were able to heal each other

Somethings I wish were features in the mod:
- Spawning in rogue cats that come to your lot and threaten your clan so we can get more use of the fighting skill in your other mod!
- I have been using nraas's master controller and 'go here' mods to force all my clans to go to a 'gathering' and the half-moon medicine cat meetings at community lots, but it would be cool if this was a feature or if there was a reminder (specifically for the half moon!) because sometimes i forget ;-;

I might have more thoughts later, but i've been enjoying it so far!! it's been adding some much needed depth to the cat gameplay, and i get real stressed when my clan gets sick in winter when all my plants are dormant (which is good :D) If you need footage or anything else i can also supply it. Thanks for uploading, I hope you see this and maybe you feel a bit more motivation to continue!

Hi! Thank you so much for for the feedback!

I had to take a break from this mod due to burnout, but I'm setting myself a goal of getting it released this year.



A medicine cat shouldn't need to do the hunting or take care of the herbs. Have you tried dragging a rodent out of the inventory of another cat and into the inventory of the medicine cat? That's not elegant, but I'd expect it to work.



Eeek. Definitely a bug.



So if you click the plant with the cat as active, there are no interactions at all? If a cat has no Herb Lore skill, the only thing they should be able to do is "Examine Plant" (or something close to that). After they investigate for a while, they get their first level of the skill.



So if the herb is in the medicine cat's inventory and you click it, you get no options?



Urgh. Turning off story progression won't fix that. It's all in my mod. I wasn't sure what would happen with the inactive pets because you have to wait a long time to test it.

I wanted inactive pets to be able to pass the illness on to active pets, but I need to rethink how this is done. You're right -- if the inactives are catching illness the same way the actives are, lethal illnesses are just going to kill them because there's no way they can be autonomously cured.

Let me think about what's in there.... Germy is not lethal, but it can turn into Pneumonia, which can be lethal. Petstilence is always lethal, but it can only be passed by fighting and woohoo, though. I believe it's also possible to catch it from fleas. Food Poisoning/Stomach Flu should not be lethal.

How quickly are your inactives dying?



I'll keep these in mind. I'm afraid to add new features at this point for fear of never finishing it.



This is the best kind of motivation you can give me. Thanks so much.

firstly:

sorry for lack of clarity! I'll provide some footage and a follow up:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NuPyFvzT8EQ
(there are timestamps in the description, they, and this post, help with the context of what i'm doing feel free to ask questions though!)

- when i go to click on the herb or the herb in the cats inventory no options to interact appear on the picked herb or the plant itself. The footage shows me putting the plant down from debug and being unable to interact, but after a reload i can, after the herb was in my inventory worked as normal, i'll see if i can recreate the problem where it wasn't working at some point but for now the main thing is not working when placed straight from debug.

- okay, in the footage i obtain some rodents in a few different ways and the mod interacts with them in these different ways
1. finding rodents specifically on the map and hunting them down works for the transfer from the hunter to the medicine cat
2. rodents that were hunted via "stalk for prey" did not work when transferred*
3. a quit to desktop and reload fixes the rodents that were caught via "stalk for prey"
*the "stalk for prey" rodent that occurred RIGHT AFTER i rebooted the game worked. i don't know why ):

- So far one cat died, and another one has... gone missing. I cannot confirm what happened to the second, i assume they died. The death rate is not super quick, I cant confirm how long i played for but 1 in game year has passed. there's around 20~ cats so 2 deaths is not bad! However, at one point after they died, I sent my personal medicine cat around to cure the other clans pestilence during the winter. I had open air dens so many cats caught it and more likely would've died if I left them alone.

- I also included some footage of the mentor and apprentice status disappearing after i do a QUIT not a return to main menu and reload


Secondly:

burnout is okay and understandable!! it happens to everyone, what you've made is already a playable and enjoyable achievement, be happy with that ^-^
also new features aren't a big deal, they were just things i thought about while playing
let me know if you need anything else!!

Buh, ok, it's now obvious to me why this is happening. The good news is that it should be an easy fix.


OK, this is a big surprise to me. I would not have expected rodents hunted via different interactions to behave differently, and I definitely did not test that. Actually, I dumped a bunch of prey spawners on my test lot, and they produced far more prey than I was expecting. Most of the stuff I tested with were caught autonomously.

If reloading fixes it, then the stuff I check for at startup is working in those cases, but the check for a new item added to inventory during gameplay is not. That's very useful to know. It sorta sound like clicking a specific prey creature to catch it and using "Stalk for Prey" are firing off different events. I don't know why I'm surprised.


OK, this is good to know. It's definitely a problem, but if the inactives were dying rapidly, that would point to a bigger bug than just normal disease rates.


In retrospect, I probably did this on purpose and forgot about it. When you're testing a big mod that puts data in the save file, it's easy to corrupt your test save over and over again, so I tend to test a lot of stuff one-off and add the save part when I'm confident in it.


Thanks so much. I'm not kidding that talking to someone who wants to play with my mod is the best cure for burnout.

I'm really proud of this mod suite, but it was a lot to take on. I badly want to get it released.

i'm glad i could help provide a little more insight, and thanks for actually giving me a little insight into the mod as well.

i also found the different ways to catch rodents amusing to figure out in real time! i haven't had much luck with them actually spawning on my lot, so to start recording just to find that all the cure fleas prompts were working normally was funny and i felt so confused.

looking forward to future updates whenever you're able to pump them out! i can do more tests then too :D