More Fridge Rights for Kids! [Translators Wanted!]

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• 2023-11-16:
  (1) Emergency re-upload as I accidentally forgot to include the textures and the mesh of the Life Stories fridge, making it both invisible and useless unless you already had the LS bundle package. Sorry! Please re-download if you’re affected.
  While I was at it, I also reduced its ridiculous price of §9,000 to §1,950. Not sure if it was like that in LS, but it’s not really justifiable in the main game.
  (2) I finally figured out how to check for all custom mini-fridges at once, instead of having to edit the mod for each new mini-fridge you suggest. As such, please download the base mod and Mac base mod once more, I promise this will be the last change required for the sake of fridge compatibility.
  (3) Added support for the Surfaco Mini Fridge by DeeDee. I also upped its capacity from 80 to 160 food units and fixed an issue with the food slot that I discovered while testing. See the newly uploaded image for details. Thanks to Izenvy for the suggestion.
• 2023-11-15:
  (1) Baby bottles will now cost 3 food units just like it is for adults, instead of 4 food units like meals.
  (2) Added a Spanish translation. ¡Muchas gracias, bothersomecryptid!
  (3) Added a tutorial so any SimPE user can make the changes to their own custom fridges if the creator’s Terms do not allow me to upload them ready-to-use.
  (4) Added a Russian translation. ??????? ???????, Izenvy!
  (5) Added support for the Life Stories fridge in separate files. Thanks to Izenvy for the suggestion.

LimeyYoshi presents the solution to yet another problem he encountered in live gameplay!

Not long ago, my fiancée was playing a family with two children, one toddler and one baby, when suddenly, the father died of a kitchen fire, and the mother died of starvation cause the fridge was now gone. On the same evening! This left the children – the oldest being eleven at the time – all alone at home and in need of fending for themselves. Normally, this would lead to the Social Worker coming to pick them up as orphaned kids, but I got some mods to prevent just that from happening.

I just feel like… come on, let drama happen when it happens.

This led to a new problem though. While children CAN hire nannies to take care of toddlers and babies, and butlers to make them some decent food, sometimes it doesn’t feel right to get help from outside just because EAxis never considered such a scenario to happen in the first place. Be it that the household is poor, or you simply don’t see fit for bringing out the “big shots”.

However, if there is no butler or nanny, then:

• The most children can eat is pizza, Chinese food, and snacks. Boring!
• Toddlers have to resort to dry and yucky pet food.
• Babies can’t be fed at all.

What this implies is: lots of crying and even more drama on top of all that had already happened.

So with that, I first went to see if someone had already had the same idea as me. And it was so, indeed.

Why other mods don’t quite cut it…

LazyDuchess allowed children to take cereal from fridges.

BoilingOil allowed children to take baby bottles from fridges.

And MidgeTheTree enabled anyone (except children) to grab baby bottles from a mini-fridge.

However, all of them have flaws, I have found:

• Mod #1 does allow children to get cereal, but that’s it. It’s a start, but still kinda boring and even in the notes you can find people asking for more meals for children. Plus, their mod conflicts with the game itself and with Lord Darcy’s SP Objects Fix, because K&B Stuff got fixed in later EP’s and any Overrides content overrides mods in Downloads, and other fridges are also missing interactions from later games, mostly FreeTime’s “Serve Platter”.
• Mod #2 does allow children to get baby bottles, but it doesn’t care about animations at all. Children that take baby bottles out will use the adult animations, which looks… floaty. Plus, it doesn’t include the mini-fridge from University.
• Mod #3 does allow teens and older to get baby bottles from the mini-fridge… but it doesn’t include children. Plus, Maxis never intended for Sims to get baby bottles from the mini-fridge, and as such, animations were taken from the standard-size fridge instead, making them look… borked.

Plus, what’s worse, all three mods conflicted with one another. Something had to be done!

And thus, I went to work and whipped this mod up, based on the groundwork of these three modders, but going beyond what they did.

The scope of this mod

My mod, once it’s placed into your Downloads folder, will give children the freedom to do more food things than they can by default. And it will look as if it had always been a part of the game!

Children can get prepared meals

Children can now – even autonomously – get some proper meals, not just your usual crisps, cookies or juice. I had a look at all meals that are available and chose only those that are plausible to be cold foods in real life. Child Sims can’t cook or prepare food, after all!

Most of the dishes I found are dessert dishes, but thankfully there’s some more nutritious options available, too.

List of foods that this mod includes:

• Instant Meals
• Gelatin
• Cereal
• Lunch Meat Sandwiches
• Layer Cake
• Chef Salad
• Berry Pie (OFB required)
• Cheesecake (OFB required)

Children can get baby bottles

Children can now – even autonomously – help to maintain a better and yummier diet for toddlers by providing them with freshly cooled infant milk. Unlike teens and older Sims, children can’t hand the bottle directly to the toddler, so they will drop it on a free space nearby instead. Toddlers can then crawl or walk to grab and drink it.

Babies are excluded! Babies can’t crawl to grab a bottle, so they have to be held to be fed. However, children can’t hold babies, so unless a versatile modder can change this, that’s as far as I can go.

Children will not float… and adults won’t grab the air

No matter whether standard or small fridge: children can always grab their meals and their baby bottles. And it will always look natural.

As an added bonus, I also went and fixed the baby bottle animations for teens and older Sims on the mini-fridge.

Added custom fridge support

I have done extra versions for a few custom fridges, and I am open for suggestions as to which fridges to update with these new features as well. Just shoot me a comment with your favourite fridge, and based on the Terms of Use of the creator, I’ll see what I can do.

List of supported fridge CC:

• The SupaFridge by Targa. I used the updated version by Lord Darcy as a base. It’s essentially a mini-fridge with all the functionality of large fridges, so I couldn’t overlook it! I included both flavours of this fridge: the one with a capacity of 80 food units (like the normal mini-fridge), and the one with a capacity of 300 (Mac version) / 400 (FreeTime version) units.
• The somewhat obscure Coca-Cola Fridge which was released onto the Sims 2 Store in Finland only. I used the updated version by Lord Darcy as a base.
• The extracted reward fridge from Life Stories, which was extracted and updated to FreeTime by Argon.
  If you have the combined ls-buy.bundle.package, then please make my file load after this bundle, as it includes the fridge too.
• The Surfaco Mini Fridge by DeeDee, which takes all recolours for the Surfaco counters from K&B Stuff. While I was at it, I also fixed a slot issue so then drinks and baby bottles will appear properly in a child’s hand, and upped its food capacity from 80 to 160 to make up for the much higher price compared to the Maxis mini-fridge.

If your fridge is not included in this, don’t give up hope though! If you know your way around SimPE, you can update custom fridges (but not mini-fridges) yourself! I have uploaded one file that includes the needed resources and a tutorial on how to do it.

Translations

If you know your way around SimPE and would like to translate into your own language, feel free to contribute! You shall be given due credit.

All relevant text strings are found in the TTAs “Pie Menu Strings” resources, these are used in the pie menu when you direct a child to grab a meal or a baby bottle, so you’ll see these texts often. Since they are all the same, you only need to translate one and send me the exported language .txt file – I’ll then add your translation to all fridges!

Requirements

Depends on which parts of the mod you get, so here is a table with the overview on which version requires which EP’s and SP’s.

The minimum required EP’s to be able to use the functions of my mod are University and Seasons, for which you will want to get the “Mac” labelled flavours of my mod.

The standard version is the flavour labelled as “base mod” in this table, which additionally requires FreeTime.

Open For Business is only required if you want your child to get cheesecake and berry pies from fridges. If you don’t have this EP, these interactions simply won’t show up.

Overrides

Any custom fridge add-ons contain no overrides of the game structure, but if you have already used these fridges up to this point, you have to replace the .package files.

New resources

The base mod and the Mac base mod contain a plethora of new resources, all of which are found in the FridgeGlobals, group 0x7F9A5330:

If any other mod also contains BHAVs with those instances, it will automatically conflict, so watch out!

Conflicts

Anything that also modifies the above resources will conflict with my mods.

• Inge Jones’ No Autonomy Fridges Patch technically is compatible, but it does not affect the new interactions my mod adds. Keep that in mind.
• The functionality of Lord Darcy’s SP Objects Fix is included in my mod. Just make sure my override loads after his override.
• Food/Fridge/Leftovers-related mods that I can confirm to be safe to use alongside my mod, because I use them myself:
  – Nopke’s Food Already Available Fix and all other mods on the same page, too
  – dizzy’s leftover-hack2
  – MogHughson’s Simply Leftovers
  – simler90’s Fridge Play Fix
  – BoilingOil’s Food Dish Autonomy
  – whoward69’s Autonomously Eat Leftovers
  – whoward69’s Closest Fridge For Leftovers Fix

Please let me know if there are any other conflicts with mods you use, and I will see if something can be done about them by load order or through plug-ins.

Notes

• All meals have only the base quality. Layer Cake, for example, restores 63 Hunger to a child. If it was baked properly, it would also possess an additional “bonus quality”, which is added if a food is cooked and doesn’t burn or spoil, and a “good quality” which depends on the way the food is cooked (baking, simmering, flambé…) and is also only added if not burnt or spoiled. Thus, the Layer Cake portions straight from the fridge are “smaller” than they would be if freshly baked, where they would instead restore 63 + 3 + 25 = 91 Hunger.
• Each meal costs 4 food units, and each baby bottle costs 3 food units. This is the standard “food unit” price that other meals in the game have, too. If not enough are available, then fresh food units are subtracted instead. If the fridge is empty, then the interaction won’t be available.
• The new child interactions – both for meals and baby bottles – only show up if the fridge has enough food units available.
  In an otherwise unmodded game, children can’t order groceries, but mods such as Monique’s Hacked Computer – which I personally would consider an essential mod to have – do allow an express delivery of groceries, and children can put away groceries by themselves, so I decided to leave this behaviour as-is.

Credits

Maxis and EA for creating Sims 2 in the first place

The Creators of SimPE, and whoward69 for further facilitating its usage with his Instruction Wizards

My fiancée for being so patient with me while I pulled night shifts to get this mod working…

LazyDuchess for their “Children Can Get Cereal From Fridge” mod – finding it was the occasion that made me get started

BoilingOil for his groundwork to enable children to get baby bottles from fridges

MidgeTheTree for their groundwork to enable getting baby bottles from mini-fridges

bothersomecryptid for the Spanish translation

Izenvy for the Russian translation

Disclaimer

Using LD’s coding work is permitted as per their Terms of Use.

Using BO’s coding work is permitted as per his Terms of Use.

Using Targa and Lord Darcy’s coding work is permitted as per their Terms of Use, available on their profile pages.

I could not locate Terms of Use for MidgeTheTree, but I assume their work to be fair use because their work got used in CC before.

DeeDee allowed usage and editing of her mesh and textures for the Mini Fridge as per her Terms of Use.

Have fun and happy Simming!

~ LimeyYoshi

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(Published on: 2023-11-15 12:00:00)