How do you narratively justify jobs that in the real world would require extensive travel, where the Sim in question really shouldn't be home every night but should be traveling on multi-day (or longer) trips for work regularly? I'm thinking of jobs like lots of the Intelligence career field, some of the Natural Science field, lots of the Adventurer field, and maybe most dramatically, virtually ALL of the Military field (especially the Astronaut position ) where coming home to your cozy suburban Pleasantview life at 5:00 every evening just isn't how a job like that actually works! What explanations do you use in your games so that Sims with these jobs can still come home and have dinner with the family every night the way it works in-game?

Everything in the sims is an abstraction. Each day is a composite. The sim with the traveling job leaves in the morning, his family experience several days without him compressed into the time he's gone, and he comes back in time for the interesting stuff to happen.

The only thing that really bugs me is the way military families are only ever stationed at one base, and that's because I'm a military brat. I moved six times before I was ten, and the only reasons we didn't move again is that my dad accepted a shift in his job description (he worked on airplanes, but he switched to being a First Sergeant - a sergeant in charge of lower ranks, an administrative position) at the same base as his new posting, then took his next overseas posting without us and my parents got divorced. It's a very rare military family that doesn't uproot and relocate and lose track of everybody they used to know several times. There's simply no good way to represent this in sims.

Astronaut isn't even a position you get to by being promoted through military ranks, lmao. I don't pay a lot of attention to jobs in this game, because most of them don't make much sense.

It's funny, I have the opposite approach. Instead of trying to justify them coming home everyday at 5, I've been looking into ways I can make sims stay away and at work longer! I don't think the mods I've seen would work so I've been thinking about doing things like moving sims out of the household for long periods of time and switching up the types of households I play. Instead of playing legacy style like I'm used to, where the whole family is on the same lot, play households with different make ups. So like in Riverblossom Morty Roth would be absent from the Roth household most of the time--I was thinking about playing him at a base camp and then going on vacations to simulate "adventures." Then when I play the Roths he's always away and only gets summoned on weekends. Same for a military family; maybe Buzz would get played when I play the barracks and the boys would get shipped off to a military board school. Things like that. Reading posts on here makes me think about playing more households where the family doesn't all live in the same house, where roommates or colleagues are living together and yeah, sims can come in and out and not always be present.

I am in the process of replacing some of the careers which do this for that reason. Particularly Adventurer, which I think is stupid XD and I'm merging Nat Sci into Science, as well as merging some of the "Performer" type careers because IMO there are too many similar ones.

I also always hated the way that Gamer and Journalism sound like careers you should be able to do from home, but you go outside to do them. I downloaded the DR for the Gamer one which uses the Game Dev career from Life Stories, because that makes more sense - even though a lot of gaming companies do now have flexi-working, pre covid they were generally office based. Journalism I mostly just pretend they are going out to interview people and cover events.

I have a military base on one of my hoods and sims in the military career get moved (using mods - I was using Chris Hatch's Get Sim In, but a global reset borked it one time so now I just use a teleporter) to that lot and live there so they sleep in a dorm and spend their days training and I pretend their work time is them going for exercises. When they get paid I add money to a money order in their inventory or use it to send money home to their family. When they have built up a few vacation days and have a couple of days off in a row, I send them home for "leave" and mark which weekdays they are out, then they come back to the lot after that last day. This only really works when I sync up all the lots using the lot sync timer and sync all the weekdays as well.

Then when I played an Uber-Megahood I used Strangetown as the military base and plopped a load of square, identical houses at the end of one of the roads and decided anyone living in Strangetown was living near enough the base that they could commute, or living on-base in military housing, whereas anyone in other subhoods had to do the barracks thing.

With my replacements I'm looking at whether a sim can stay at work for more than 24 hours without throwing errors, dying from motive drain and/or looking at the coding for Inge's boarding school mod to see if I can apply that to careers. I need to figure out a solution for pregnancy and illness as well. I haven't got very far in testing yet but I am hopeful that I could find a way to make a career where the sim DOES seem to go off on an adventure/trip and come back a couple of days later.

I always thought Astronaut was a strange jump from Military too, but then I read Chris Hadfield's book and apparently it really does work like that if you're talking about the US or Russian military. (He originally trained in the Canadian military and then transferred).

I do kind of like the way a lot of Maxis careers jump around in an unrealistic way (paramedic to nurse to doctor XD) and that the top level job in a lot of careers is something ridiculous!

The sims is in a different universe to the one we inhabit (in my mind). So I don't question things, it's just the way it works there! I find this suspension of disbelief (or maybe denial of reality? ) works for everything in the Sims universe. Cowplants? Babyq? No problem. Pooping with clothes on, Carpools and free taxis? No problem. It all works. Even magical age transition and genies and fist fighting with your neighbour! The only connection between my Universe and that of my sims is the little wormhole in my office that appears every night when I sleep, which my sims crawl through to cause havoc in my house. They leave biscuit crumbs under my chair and eat all the snacks.

(The denial technique also helps me with real life, I find. Especially when reading things in the news. )

I try not to think too hard on the job descriptions or the jobs in the game because they're actually just a way for pixels to earn money and stay out of the house, which is what humans use jobs for too. Few people actually love or even like their jobs in real life.

The accuracy of those job descriptions are fantasies thought up by game developers and writers who had vivid imaginations but no practical expertise in any of them.

They're just actual placeholders for justifying pixels earning money. Nothing more.

Why do I say that? Look at the salaries and jobs-in any ordinary real human job you don't

1). get promoted without some kind of degree or training. Skills alone won't cut it. One day at work? You got all your skills? You're promoted!
2). As noted, the ridiculousness of the jobs and their 'levels' is unbelievable. You can't become a doctor by one day as being a nurse, etc.
3.) The salaries? Oh, come on! Enough said. We all know they're totally unrealistic, except for one: CEO-that's far underpaid by most ordinary standards.

So no, I don't even think about it. I do wish there was a way for all of the careers to be rewritten (and not default replaced) to actually be realistic and relatable, but if that ever happened, we'd be bored, wouldn't we?

Actually several of you pointed out something else I wonder about with jobs too... If you're having a Sim work towards a specific high-level job (for a lifetime wish or just for your own story purposes) do you actually have Sims go up through that same career field to get there even if it doesn't make as much sense? Or do you have them advance in another field and then switch to the goal career track once they're closer? (I'm thinking things like a Judge spending more of their early career in the Law field and then only later switching to Politics, or an Astronaut in Science for a long time before Military, or a SCIA Director being in Politics first)

It's not the most unrealistic. I know people who completed their nursing training and then went on to become doctors. There are also people who first study as an EMT/paramedic (I think part of the track is at high school level), then work weekends and holidays while studying to become a doctor (or nurse).

A lot of people start out as non-educated assistants, then become "lower-level" educated healthcare professionals, then a nurse or doctor. The most unrealistic is having the careers be tracks on the same ladder of the career leveling, since RL you have to start from scratch in each track.

The nurse to doctor thing is honestly the promotion I hate the most. As a nurse myself I often get asked "why didn't you just become a doctor?" The answer: because I didn't want to be a doctor. It just feels wrong forcing a sim to become a doctor when it might not even be something they wanted to do. Thank goodness for the job stopinator! I'm also currently working on creating a custom nursing career to avoid this problem altogether. All the other silly promotions are fine but this one really sticks in my craw.

Also, my absolute favourite job level is the Multiregional Sim of Some Question in the Adventurer career. I usually end up job stopinating sims when they get there because it makes me giggle every time I look at their job panel.

I like the Sim Salary Bonus Scheme as they will continiue to get raises through the same job level.

I looked into that, but since my sims spend 208 days in the adult stage I thought the accrual would be just a little bit unrealistic.

So true!
The areas of responsibility are very different (and I like more the kind of patient contact you do as a nurse - doctors get too little time per person most of the time). Plus the base education level is quite a bit more for becoming a doctor than a nurse, and if you want anything more on top of that (as a doctor) it's several more years of studying, so no thanks. I'd been studying for way too long already

I think some countries have nurse-to-doctor bridging programs, though. Fairly sure I read about it somewhere, but Google isn't too helpful.

I have had a few pixels go to the very top, but some of them take so long to do it, they're exhausted and don't want to do any other careers..but the idea of switching careers like that is very Sims 1-where you got to the top of the career, you got transferred to another career with some of the requirements filled.

But I would do it if it did not take all of their lives to do it!

If I want a sim to be away for an amount of time, there are ways.
for example in TeaAddicts live stream playing with the ROS war got rolled. The sims were away for two rounds so they were moved into the family bin for 11 days.
In my own play when sims come back from going away on holidays/vacation I use the teleporter mirror to send them to another house for the days they were away.
I have also used the mirror for hospital stays.
I have not bothered for jobs, but the same could be done.

If I create a sim in CAS and I think "This is Dave, he's a science teacher" then I will just cheat him the right career and the right level.

If it's more of a long term thing like a LTW, I usually get them a job using the newspaper/computer and if the job or field makes sense for their ambition then I'd let them take it. Then if it works for them in that moment, I let them work their way up and get the skills for that job, maybe work their way up a bit.

Since sims sometimes lose jobs (chance cards, performance) there is usually a chance to look for another job. Or if they have time, or the level they have got to doesn't seem to fit for them any more, I might have them check the paper/computer again on other days to see if they can find the right track. But also, I feel like not everyone does achieve their life's dream and it's actually quite rare that a sim will get their LTW in my game. So they might work towards it, I might feel they are happy enough without it, lots of different outcomes really.

I don't mind that the jumps are a bit strange or there is no lead-up. People do sometimes skip around IRL as said. I had a sim who in my mind was a classical musician and for all of the rock type levels in the Music track, I just tried to get her promoted ASAP and sort of pretended they didn't really happen. I don't think that it has to be exact - it can be an approximation. For example when I was working as a graphic designer IRL I made my self-sim work in the Architecture track because it was the closest thing. That's why I want to merge some of the more similar tracks.

I have realised that basically all the career tracks in TS2 are aspirational - which is probably why they don't make much sense XD

It is a game?

It's a game for us Simmers, but to our Sims, it's life and death.

The adventurer career is especially silly. Dread Pirate sailing the seven seas! International Sim of Mystery crossing borders! Space Pirate going to outer space...from 3pm-8pm.

I guess you could edit some of the careers to make the hours longer, like the Ecological Guru's overnight gig. Still unrealistic, but slightly more realistic?

Well for a sim one day is a much larger part of their life than it is for us. I always saw studying skills as taking some sort of training.



I'm surprised that the Artist career track doesn't include graphic design.

I guess I can send my business career sims to a hotel in the hood and pretend he is on a business trip? He can network with every sim who turns up, play some pool or something, book in for the night?

I do send my business owners on business lunches together, get them to take their staff out for a dinner once a year and have them meet in the town hall for conferences (mostly one of them practices speech using the podium and afterwards they wine and dine and have some fun).

When I say it is a game, I mean that I am not at all bothered by the lack of realism. I quite enjoy imagining my superhero flying around, perhaps chasing my criminal mastermind through the air

I mean, if aliens can abduct my sim and drop him back in the garden the same night, and the next day he is heavily pregnant with alien twins - who the hell am I to say my sim cannot sail the seven seas or go to space during working hours? (Some of you may have seen me talking about Silke, who has alien twins, 7 other kids, has been hit by lightning, etc. etc. etc - it so happens that he is in the adventurer career. Perhaps he is not accident-prone, perhaps he is just having adventures)?

I think most people here understood that petro There are obviously huge differences between reality and sims reality, but it should still make sense in the framework of their reality to the player. Like a good book or movie the game can feel immersive or the immersion in that world can be broken. It has to feel 'right'.
So I get that people feel exploring space should take longer than 3pm-8pm.That maybe they would like the sim gone for an entire day. Comparing it to other sim jobs, for example Team Mascot is from 3 to 9 pm. I think someone would be exploring space a bit longer than they would be running around in a llama suit. Abduction takes 3 hours but they are just being beamed up and ah... probed.

My justification is the aliens are capable of manipulating time but the Dread Pirate is not

Uhh let me stop you right there - that part is realistic. They just flew really close to a black hole or something like that. It's Simstein's theory of relativity at work!!1!1 Hence the jumping needs - it's days where that Sim is, while in SimCity, it's mere seconds.

It has never even occurred to me to compare the working hours of a space pirate to those of a team mascot

Now that I can see that team mascots work longer - well, too bad for them. Thinking about it for a long number of seconds, and decided: I still don't care

Have there been moments when I thought: This or that does not make a lot of sense? Probably Took me a couple of seconds to get over it.

I enjoy this game tremendously. I loved playing it when I played a 100 % vanilla game without a single mod or fix. Around 5 years, I think, before my hood vanished into space. Now THAT I cared about. I cared so much that I ended up on Mod the Sims (Unintended awesome consequence).