Hello! I'm new here, so please forgive me if I'm posting in the wrong place or any other wrong thing.

Now that my first blush of excitement over getting to play Sims 1 again (for the first time in over a decade) has eased up, I find myself looking for help to balance the game. I already have the "lessdecaytry plant", which has helped the terrifying motive drain in a way that doesn't feel too cheaty. What I'm hoping for now is a way to reduce/change/remove the friends requirement for careers. Career Creator 3 would've been just the thing, since I'd also be able to tweak how the careers work in more detail, but it's not working with Legacy, so I was wondering if you guys know if there are any other ways to achieve my goals?

Thanks for any responses.

IffPencil can handle the career file (I'm not sure other iff editors can--I just tried Codex and it wouldn't open the parts of the file you'd need to be able to manipulate), which in later games at least, is Work.iff. (Earlier games might use Careers.iff in GameData but I'm not sure about that.)

Work.iff can be extracted from the .far file in ExpansionShared (with something like FarOut or FarEdit) and opened in IffPencil. Then you can find the CARR resource inside the iff and click that (these aren't labeled but they SHOULD correspond to the order of the STR# (text) resources' order). It should show you a dialog box that should be fairly easy to understand, with information about the job (how much it pays, when it starts and ends, how many skills and friends are required, how it affects your motives to be at work, plus the uniform the Sim wears for the job). Then you can find the career level you want to change the friend requirement for, change the requirement, and save the file.

Then you can put Work.iff in the ExpansionShared folder. It doesn't have to go back in the .far file. Just being in the folder where the .far it came from is should be enough. Not putting it in the .far file again also makes it easy to revert if something got messed up, or if you want to have the original file back--you just delete the copy you extracted from the folder and the one inside the .far will be the one that loads again!

I THINK what CC3 did was streamline changing BOTH the job characteristics (the CARR in the iff) AND the job text (the STR# in the iff); I haven't used it in so long I don't remember if there was anything else it did.

Someone who goes by the name IAmTheRad on Reddit made a "No Friends Needed for Careers" mod, if you want that: https://www.reddit.com/r/sims1/comm...ed_for_careers/.

Thank you for the detailed reply, purplewowies, I'll be sure to take a closer look when I'm feeling more brainy. I'm not very tech-minded, you see. I'll let you know how I get on.

And thanks to Corylea as well for the quick and dirty idea

Thanks again, purplewowies, I got IFFPencil 2 and managed to put it in a place that accessed the work.iff file (it still gave an error about not finding the behaviour.iff file, but I'm not looking at that so a problem for another time, maybe). I went through all the careers and painstakingly tweaked all values (including Friends required) to what I felt was realistic for the job. Now I've got the bug a bit and want to further tweak - do you know how to change the flavour text of the jobs? Should I start a new thread?

It depends on what flavor text you're looking to change. The description of the career and its level is in the Strings files inside Work.iff.

Chance cards and promotion text are in CarPortal.iff, which is in GameData\Objects\objects.far. Just as with work.iff, car portal.iff can be extracted and edited, then put into GameData\Objects, where it will override the one that's inside the .far file.

I wish I could remember what makes IffPencil not find Behavior.iff... (unless it's likely that it's because it's Legacy edition so the problem is it can't use the registry to find where The Sims is installed--actually, that's probably what the problem is, I'd bet your game's GameData still has the file, but it's likely that IffPencil needs the registry key (which Legacy doesn't create) in order to find where your Sims installation is).

Behavior.iff (needs to be American spelling) contains a lot of text that was used by stuff like Edith (a Maxis internal program for editing things like objects). I think most of what IffPencil does with it is use it to make stuff like BHAVs human-readable information (instead of just a bunch of numbers). You might not run into issues with that file not being found if you're not editing resources in IffPencil that use that file to make themselves understandable.

@Corylea Can IFFPencil 2 edit all iff files? I don't want to make an entirely new career, just change certain jobs that I feel don't fit with the career, for example, the top of the Animal Care is is a TV magician...

Yes, it can!

Small caveat that IffPencil refuses to open (and cannot understand if coaxed to open, i.e. by changing the file header) version 1.0 iff files (as in the iff file is an older version of the format)... though you're unlikely to come across those unless you're handling data from the beta specifically--the final game uses version 2.0 and/or 2.5 iffs and IffPencil specifically does work with those! (It also works with iffs that are a different file extension but still an iff on the inside, like walls or floors or .fam files. Not that IffPencil is usually the cleanest, fastest way to edit those particular file types...)