I have added an OFB-compatible hack since I discovered the first one doesn't play nice with it.

For the moment, I seem to have a fix for this.  When each employee leaves a crafting station, their nID is recorded as an attribute.  When the employee goes back to work, any crafting station which isn't being worked at and still has their nID printed on it will yell out 'Pick me! Pick me!' and bypass the bit which checks for the closest crafting station.

The only downer is that it doesn't work if the employee goes off-lot and then returns.  It only works if they go for a break on the lot.

Well I've tried Paladin's fix but that really just stops them from idling - so they stand at the door and keep trying to get in.

I think that it could be re-written so that an APO check is done before a crafting object will be returned to be used in the interaction.  Which means that by process of elimination, they will go to the nearest station that they're authorised to use.  But I guess I'll have to look at it sometime later.

Dumbassery it may be to have your employees working on different things, it isn't as profitable, but a business that only sells one thing is bloody boring.

Without locking employees out of certain crafting rooms they would happily scrap anything on the closest crafting station unless it matches what they were working on.  Even if they could complete the thing on the table, they will scrap it and start over if it isn't what they were told to do.  That's the reason I'm using the APO panels.  But as I said, that means assignments get dropped.

If it can be done then I'll keep trying to figure out how chances are someone already did the same thing. D'oh.

It seems that for whatever reason, employee Sims on business lots try to use the closest unmanned crafting station when coming back from their break, rather than their previous station or the closest station which isn't blocked by an APO panel.  If they fail to get to the closest unmanned crafting station, their assignment gets canceled.

Is there any way to mod this behaviour so that if they can't route to the closest unmanned crafting station, they will try routing to another one?

You also want to remove them from the directory of the latest expansion, if present.

To put this in perspective, 32767 ticks is just over 18 in-game hours.  If you can keep a Sim skilling that long, they could gain one percent towards that skill or badge.  If you could keep them skilling for 75 in-game days, they would be able to gain the full 100 percent of a skill or badge level.

It holds any Sims or clothes which you made in BodyShop, as far as I know.

Well, one way to approach this is to look at the constants which say how many ticks are required per percent of skill gain (conveniently named Tuning - Ticks per 1% skill gain).  There are three tables of values so I'm guessing that these are for skills, enthusiasm, and badges.

These values are different per skill level, which is why it takes such a short time to get a skill to level 1 from nothing, and such a long time to get it from 9 to 10.

Obviously if you wanted it to be practically impossible to gain new skills or badges you could adjust these numbers upwards.

I have posted a hack on Peasantry just now that may slow skill and badge increases down to a time-dilated crawl.  It's safe enough to use, but hasn't been tested.  It may not actually work.  If it does, then great.  I have tested it for myself and it seems to work as intended.

As I've said in the post there, it won't stop you from getting random increases from chance cards.  Something to keep in mind, though I guess you can cancel those when they come up.

What it does:

Adjusts skill/badge gain time so that it will take 32767 ticks to get one percent of a skill/badge level.

Obviously this isn't for general use, but only for situations where you want to freeze skills/badge levels for some purpose.

This won't prevent you from modding a Sim's skills, nor will it prevent random skill increases from chance cards.

It's a lot easier to have the hiring Sim call the prospective employee to the place of work and hire them on the spot.  This has the advantage that you can do a whole bunch of hires in one go and never look at the ones on the menu.  The disadvantage is that the hiring Sim has to actually know the employee(s) well enough to invite them, or have some kind of teleporter.

Here's the thing.  The education system is obviously made of fail if people start posting on the internet without the faintest clue how to capitalise, punctuate, and spell.  What you perceive as rudeness is actually the rest of the people picking up where your English teacher left off and teaching you the basics that you will need to get what you want.  If they're doing it whether you like it or not, that's too bad.  You can either rebel against this as you have done, or you can make the best of it and actually learn something.

Taking a few extra minutes to observe some simple rules is not a great hardship and makes things a lot better for you and everyone else.

For an example of an object which sims will obsess over, look no further than the bowling alley.  They can by default have maxed out their Fun motive and so long as their other motives are okay they will still autonomously bowl.

Typically if you want sims to obsess less over an object, you put an autonomous check in the Guardian BHAV, and then check the relevant motive.  If the sim is acting autonomously, and their motive is still too high, you then return false which means the interaction is not done.  If the sim is not acting autonomously i.e. their action is a result of the player choosing the interaction, you then go on with the rest of the routine as normal.

Some of these routines actually have the relevant autonomy and motive check already, but the motive check level is set at 100, which means the interaction can be done even when it won't gain the sim very much motive refreshment.

As above though, when you make something unable to be used above a certain motive level, sims tend to find something else to obsess over.  So you really need to fine-tune to find the point where they will use the object in an average day.  Or not.  You can effectively ban autonomous interactions with particular objects, if it helps give sims less things to obsess about.

Don't worry too much though.  If you do get an identical personality you can modify it after the fact.

I've sent a reply to your PM, sorry about the wait.  

Also, I'll have a look at the hackdiff to see what's new in M&G.

Had a look at the hackdiff from EP8p2 to Ep9 and searched for the stuff that in the Change Appearance and Fix hack.  No matches.  So basically, the AL hacks (see sig) should work.*

Have a go and see if it works.

*Assuming that the hackdiff shows there is no difference between AL and M&G as far as this hack is concerned.

I learned recently (the hard way) that lack of protection means one day you will be backing up your data and doing a reformat from orbit.  It's the only way to be sure.

It's a no-brainer choosing between free content which doesn't put your system at risk, and paid content which does.

Usually if Sims are carrying something and can't put it on a preferred surface, they will dump it on the floor.

I can see how that would be annoying.  The only thing I can suggest there is to make sure there's always enough seats and table positions (or bar space and stools) so that NPCs serving food will always put an empty platter back on the counter.  This means that a) your Sim should have a better chance at mooching some food and b) your Sim can't do Grab a Plate, autonomously or otherwise.

Easiest way to find it is to use the Business or OFB collection.  It's a clickthrupagesfest otherwise.

I haven't seen NPC residents head back into their own apartment to eat a grabbed plate.  But then it's not often that I actually let them in anyway, it can be a pain just coaxing them to be sociable.

That makes things a bit clearer.

Thankfully, I didn't have to modify any of those trees.  The reason why Sims would walk far far away after knocking was staring me in the face (top level) the whole time.  Some Eaxian bright spark decided it would be fun to roll a d100 to see whether the Sim wanders about or wanders about, making for a whole lot of unnecessary and annoying code.

Tested with TS2AL

Annoyance Fix

Visitors don't walk all the way back to the mailbox or wander about after ringing the doorbell.  They also idle for a bit longer between ringings. This is especially useful with multi-story apartments because obviously you don't want your Sim to trail all the way down to the ground floor only to find their visitor has started making their way back up.  Gah!


Conflicts

greetwointeract - Non-outgoing visitors could skip knocking the door and barge in.  Had to leave this one disabled for testing, may be okay now.  No conflict, whatever it is happens either because of another hack or some AL oddity, something that messes with the personality test.

The original post links to a required hack, but the file is not found there.  Linky to required hack.

I'm doing what I thought would be a simple mod of visitors.  But I've only really started to get a handle on what the following nest of functions does:

CT - Start Visiting (group 0x7F92C866E, instance 0x1001)
 - [private 0x100A]  Start Visiting - Knock on Door()
 - - [prim 0x001C] Run Tree by Name("CT - Knock On Door")

The thing I'm not sure about is which of the six variants of "CT - Knock On Door" is actually used for visitors that have been invited to the lot (I managed to comprehend that the one that is used depends on the type of object - Sim in this case).  I'm think it could be the one in group 0x7FD0DEBA because the others seem to be specifically for service and scenario NPCs.  But the past six hours reading code and testing the mod tends to suggest that I could be wrong. 

This hack stops espresso bars from automatically summoning an NPC on non-owned community lots.  This makes it slightly easier to Work as Barista since there's no NPC trying to wrest back control of your job.  Not that it's a great job to hold down to begin with.  Nopedostalkers is recommended to stop the endless barrage of Be Greeted and other banal townie interactions which aren't part of being a minimum-wage slave.

Additionally, and this is the part that requires a bit more testing, there's a new option on the pie menu to Spawn in NPC, in case you're visiting a community lot and want to order a coffee.  It seems to work as intended, but it would be great if someone could confirm that it's not explodeware.