Any jobs- rabbit hole careers, OFB jobs, home businesses

Sims with career-based LTW are pretty straight forward, if limiting. For people who have LTW that aren't career-based, then what? How do you choose? Do you try to reach the top of their career, or just let them settle comfortably? Do you have rules on limiting career levels?

There are so many aspiration calculators out there based on personality and interests and there's only 6 options. But there's 25 careers to choose from! How do you pick between Scientist, Natural Scientist and Oceanography, or between joining the Artist career, selling paintings from the easel, or opening an art gallery?

I'm likely to allow Sims to settle at a specific level unless they roll a want to get a promotion or the new one has better hours (especially for the parents). Sims Salary Bonus Scheme gives them a bonus for sticking at a specific level, and ask-before-promotion lets them pick whether or not to accept a promotion.

No specific rules about limiting career levels, I just prefer to go with what feels best (e.g. not having a dozen mayors).

Oh I always forget LTWs exist! I haven't used one to pick a job in at least 15 years.

Obviously pre-mades can provides some inspiration. For example, Angela Pleasant goes into oceanography since she wants to be a fishing boat captain. When there is less inspiration I take into account their skills, interests, and personality.

For sims I made myself it usually comes down to whether they're an adult or younger.

If they are an adult I probably made them with a concept in mind which might include a career, but might otherwise just fit with it. This is especially true for home businesses because they take far more effort. Heck one of my current families runs a home flower shop and I planned them around that.

If they are younger, eventually they will go to college. I know the majors are nonsensical, but I usually pick one with skills that make sense for them and then later choose a career based on that major. Occasionally I'll have a job already in mind though. For example, Alexander Goth is continuing his family line of scientists. I picked it over natural science because he's a fortune sim so he'll want to be at the top of the career track, but I also can't see him being happy running around in a fig leaf.

For artist vs selling from easel it comes down to whether or not I want a starving artist. If not, artist career for them because selling from the easel doesn't make as much.

Hang on missed the reach the top vs settling part. It depends on the sim. Some are ambitious and need to rise to the top. Others are happy to contribute as say a nurse or just get by as a record store clerk so this varies a lot.

There are so many ways I pick jobs. Sometimes they signal what job they're interested in as teens, and if that's the case, I'll usually give them the same LTW so I can remember it. If they go to university and pick a major, I may use that to determine what career they're preparing for. Sometimes their wants or behavior tell me what career they want. Aldric Davis is always obsessed with pianos when I play him, so I always have him go into the music career and/or play the piano for tips. Sometimes it's clear they are following in a parent's footsteps. If I don't have a good idea of what job they want based on any of this, or they don't have a career-related LTW, sometimes I'll decide that means they want to do something else, like be an artist or a stay-at-home parent or open a business. Finally, if they want or need a job and I don't know what, I'll just have them look on the computer and pick the one that seems most suitable for their personality and education.

I usually choose their LTW myself, but that's what I believe that's the dream they aspire to. Not many Sims achieve their LTW in my game. For some of them, they get to a certain point in their career or age and it's clear that they're settled where they are. They stop rolling wants for skills or to get promoted, or they get very interested in a hobby instead. Not everyone has to get to the top of the ladder! I do have the mod that limits their promotions based on how much education they got as well, because I think that's realistic.

Depends on the job. Not all jobs require a degree.

Now one of the most used method is looking their LTW. (But after I got Simblender I had rerolled couple of them... It just not make sense if young sim is passionate about sport but dreams being famous chef.) Or I look what kind of jobs they want. Sometimes I look their whole personality. (Like family sim would work on education.)

Sims with other (than career) LTW's will make their career work for them too. When they reach higher levels, they all roll the want to reach the top of the career.

I like to have some freelancers and a lot of business owners, so they have those jobs.

When I first had a sim back in the days (and just started playing the game) who wanted 20 best friends and an easel, I decided that she would be an artist (that was before the career existed). I made the poor thing paint for 8 hours a day, and she sold quite a number of masterpieces, but she never made 20 best friends, so I guess in that case, she may have been better off wanting to be a chef

Since all my pixels go to college (except the founders of a neighborhood) they graduate and then roll job wants. I usually grant them if they're specific. If they're not I look at the "LTW" and see if it has a hint.

Otherwise they go look for a job and get what they seem apt for.

If they strike out on all counts, they go collect welfare until they get sick of it.

OK. I guess I should have specified that it feels realistic *to me* in that the mod serves as a convenient check because I don't want all my Sims reaching the tops of their careers. That feels realistic *for my game* and how I want to play it.

I made a mod that can help you there Doctors Need Degrees (Apologies for showing off my own mod - exactly that frustration lead me to make it).

This is my vague list of how to choose a job:

1. Does the sim have a job-related LTW? If so, go with that.
2. They usually roll the want for a few jobs when they first move in/ grow up/ graduate from uni. Are any of those interesting/ suit their interests or personality?
3. What level of education do they have? If they went to uni, which subject did they study?
4. Do they have to get a job at all, or can they get by without?

A few examples: Dina Caliente doesn't have a job-related LTW (she wants to earn lots of money, which can be done with many careers), but on her first day she wanted a job in Law. She's outgoing and somewhat interested in politics, so it seemed a good fit. It does need a degree, and she doesn't have one - but only because she was created before University existed, and she seems like the kind of person to go (Fortune sims almost always want to in my experience). So I gave her a degree and she got the job.

David Gibson (former teenage townie) has a family-related LTW (can't remember right now), but needs a job for a regular income to support his wife and children until their farm pays back their hard work. He doesn't have a degree, so he needs a job that either doesn't care about degrees or that a degree only helps a bit. His hobby is art and craft, so I got him a job in the Artist career.

Amanda Thanasia (Nervous Subject's alien daughter) doesn't have a job right now and is a Grilled Cheese sim, so doesn't really want one. As the family has plenty of money she doesn't really need a job. But her police officer father is about to go missing, and she'll be the one who really goes on pushing to find out what happened to him. So she'll probably get a job in Law Enforcement (or maybe Law) to support that. She doesn't have a degree, so will be limited in how far she can go, but might well get one as an adult (time for more mods...) if the story makes sense.

Yeah, same. I use the job stopinator for that.



Thanks. I have a mod by Phaenoh that makes you have a degree to get certain jobs (Architecture, Business, Education, Intelligence, Law, Medicine, Natural Science, Oceanography, and Science), but it doesn't have the job level limiting addition.

I have hundreds of custom careers - i go by LTW if its a maxis one. Then i go by their traits and interests to pick a custom one. So for example if a sim has a strong interest in weather then i will probably pick meteorology for them especially if they also love the heat or cold.

It varies quite a lot in my game. Due to the (very) slow pace of my game, when I am assigning careers to Sims, I'm nearly always dealing with Sims straight out of CAS. (The oldest born-in-game Sims in my game are still at Primary/Elementary School.) I tend to give my new CAS Sims a bit of money with the FamilyFunds. But once they're in the game, I seldom use money cheats. They feel, well, cheaty!!

So quite often the deciding factor in getting their first job is what jobs are advertised in the paper on their first day. Or, more often, their second day, as the first day can be entirely taken up feeding and entertaining their Welcome Wagon visitors! If money is really tight they can often end up just taking highest paid job advertised in the paper that day. Cash-strapped Sims seldom have access to a computer, but, if they do, they can look there too. Sometimes I use the LTW as a guide, if it's a career one. This can mean that a Sim, having got a job, continues to check in the paper (or on the computer) till the job she/he is really looking for comes up. Sometimes this can mean a cut in income, so it can be a test of how much they really want that LTW career. I recall Manuela Moltke (Julian's mum) serving for several days in the army, before switching to the police so as to make the attainment of her LTW at least a possibility. (After eleven real years, she's still nowhere near it, and neither is her husband Martin, although he's a grade ahead of her.)

Another little quirk in my game. I won't call it a rule, because neither my Sims or I like rules, so let's just call it a convention: when a Sim is in a custom career, and they have a career-related LTW, I take it to mean they really, really want to reach the top of the custom career. If and when they reach the top of that career, I'll manually make them permaplat -- because I reckon they've earned it! You won't be surprised to learn that it hasn't happened yet!

I have never felt the need to restrict Sims' promotion prospects with the Job Stopinator; in over eleven years of playing only two Sims have reached the top of their adult careers, and they were both several years ago. Consort Capp reached the top of the Business Career, and now is permaplat and goes to work in a helicopter. But, since he's at level 9 at the start of the game, that not really much of an achievement. More impressive was CAS Romance Sim Tom Cornton, who worked his way up to the top of the Slacker career while seducing just about everything on two legs that came through his front door. Eventually he reformed his wicked ways, and married Downtownie Audrey Tsang, who was already a Professional Party Guest. Now the two of them go together to work at the weekends, in the back of a stretch limo! There are few Fortune Sims in my game, and most of the rest stop pushing hard for promotions when they have enough to live comfortably. Maybe they're just following my bad example; I've never had much interest in money as long as I have enough to pay for the essentials and a few little luxuries (like my computer to play The Sims on).

As my main game is Veronaville, and as I understand it to be a historic "wool town", that has turned into a centre of textile manufacture, and more recently into a centre of exotic (not to say erotic! ) fashion. For this reason I have a number of custom careers in the fields of textile manufacture, fashion and modelling. Textile manufacture has been declining in recent years (perhaps not helped by the fact that the fashions promoted by the Veronaville fashion houses clearly require very little actual textiles to make them!). Nonetheless there are still plenty of (not very well paid) jobs in the textile mills, and many young Sims come to Veronaville seeking a glamorous life in the fashion trade. Many of the better looking ones (boys as well as girls) see themselves as prospective models. Veronaville certainly has openings for would-be models and fashion designers. And, if some of them, who once envisaged themselves as glamorous models, instead find themselves spending their days tending a carding machine, at least at the weekend they can let their hair down at the famous downtown nightclubs. Some of the really good-looking ones I earmark for modelling careers when they're still in CAS. And there are some other Sims (like church priests/pastors) whom I have made with a specific career in mind. For these Sims, if the required career doesn't come up in the paper (or the computer) within a reasonable time-frame, I'll sends them to a community lot where I have one or more of MogHughson's Job Seeking Noticeboards. Or failing that, I can give them the job with the Sim Manipulator, or, as a very last resort, I can use SimPE.

Seven plus years after I bought and installed University, I still haven't got a single Sim who has graduated. Most of my students in fact are still in their First Semester. So it really doesn't make any sense to me to exclude non-graduates from some careers. I don't even think in real life that a university degree is as much a benefit as is usually claimed. In real life it is possible to reach the very top of the business ladder without a degree. If Bill Gates hadn't dropped out of university and started Microsoft when he did, he'd have "missed the boat". By the time he had finished his degree, somebody else would have written an operating system, for the emergent new Personal Computers. With a bit of luck he might have got a job as a programmer in somebody else's software business. Most of us would never have heard of him. So I won't arbitrarily restrict my Sims' prospects with rules I don't even believe in! Actually I think medicine may be the only discipline in which a degree is really essential.

By the way, base game medics at the level of Intern and above do have degrees. It says so in the pop-ups that appear:
At level 2 (Paramedic) it says: "You're attending medical school and working part time as a paramedic. You'll need to avoid fatigue while allowing time for study and riding in an ambulance on the night shift. To keep your vehicle and equipment maintained, work on your mechanical skill as much as you can."
At level 4 (Intern) it says: "There's an 'M.D.' after your name, but it seems you spend more time doing paperwork and changing bandages than saving lives. Pay special care to develop your mechanical and logic skills; doctors must be multi-talented. The hours are steady, though, so you're earning more."
So Dr. Lothario in Pleasantview does have a medical degree. He has the right to call himself "Doctor Lothario". Maybe even, having studied part-time, and done all those "sub-medical" jobs while he was learning, he might even be a better doctor than some rich kid who has gone to Sim State University, gone to all-night toga parties every other night, and scraped through his final medical exam with a bare pass on his second resit. Anyway, if I'm ever taken seriously ill in Pleasantview, I'll be happy to trust him with my life. If I were female, I might be a little more diffident about saying that, but, in the end of the day, when we'*re seriously ill, we have to trust the doctors, and generally we don't know anything about their private lives. In the case of Dr. Lothario, though, I fear we really know maybe a little bit more about his private life than you'd really want to know as his patient.

I'm trying to figure out how to diversify my hood's careers instead of falling into the same ones over and over. I used Job Stopinator for education levels but I've started using it because sometimes Freelance Photographer is more fitting than Professional Party Guest, or to stop sims with toddlers from getting 10-7 hours and never seeing their children. Usually in cases where they already have the skills to advance but I don't want them to.

I'm trying to come up with a calculator-type thing to determine jobs for my sims based on their aspirations, personality, hobbies and interests, but it's in the very beginning stages.

I like the randomness of the computer/newspaper jobs so I use that. If I have a sim looking for a job, I consider their degree subject (or lack of), their personality, hobbies, their LTW if it's career-related, whether the hours work for them (for example, if they have to consider childcare) and just whatever I think about them to pick from the 3/5 options offered.

I also have Lamare's (Or is it LazyDuchess?) hack that gives a random chance of being rejected for a job. This adds another level of randomness, which I enjoy. So if they get rejected for the job they wanted, then I might try their second favourite, but I won't make them apply for something that I don't think suits them at all.

Sometimes when I create a sim, I already have a job in mind for them. In this case, I'll give it to them manually using the sim blender.

I don't always shoot for a sim's LTW career, but I do try to have them move in that general direction and I might have them change later on, when they have picked up some "experience" (even though the game doesn't care about this at all!) and skills. At this point I try to swap them via the computer so they get the benefit of that and don't have to start at the bottom rung. I tend to see a LTW as a sort of "lifelong dream" which is not necessarily going to be achieved. After all, aren't there people IRL who work every day in an office and then pretend to be a celebrity chef at home in their kitchen? With this in mind I do sometimes find that later an opportunity presents itself where they can go for that dream.

In some hoods, I have MogHughson's job noticeboard, and an accompanying RandomStuff file which lets sims have another shot at 1-5 jobs that day. In order to do this, they have to travel to a community lot to use it and I only let them roll once per day.

I like the idea of the Doctors Need Degrees hack but I haven't installed it, because I just prefer to be a bit more individual in my approach to this - I use the Job Stopinator instead. Though honestly, I have not yet found a situation that I have wanted to use it. However, I really like the idea of there being a small chance of being promoted so I might change my mind and put it into the game. I have another mod which changes which jobs need degrees, but sims can still get promoted into the adult career from the teen career.

What I tend to find is that most sims want to get promoted or build the correct skills when they are at lower levels of their career, and then getting into the higher levels, they have other life pulls, the promotions aren't so easy to get without trying and so they stagnate at a point anyway. I like this because it feels realistic and it means not everyone is constantly barrelling towards level 10.

I don't like having too many career tracks, so I don't use extra custom careers. However, I am in the process of replacing a lot of the Maxis careers so that they span a wider range, as I think there is too much concentration currently in performer type careers (music, entertainment, dance AND showbiz?) and science type careers (Oceanography, natural science AND Science) and there are some I never use because I find them too silly (Adventurer, Intelligence). I also find it frustrating how there are degrees which don't seem to have any natural career links (like history). I could use my imagination to say that for example a scientist is a biologist or a chemist or a geologist or whatever. After all, we have the business career and a business could sell anything from cars to perfume to toilet paper. What my aim is eventually is to have each career kind of represent an interest area or a type of industry, and so sims meeting colleagues are meeting colleagues in their field, rather than literal co-workers.

It is hard for some of my poorer sims, especially single parents, if they get fired or demoted and can't find a suitable job. I do sometimes use the "self employment" type things like being a bartender/barista/personal trainer, or painting or writing or crafting/gardening at home, either as a side gig or as their main form of security.

These are cool! I hadn't seen them before.

This is what I tend to do too. Several of my sims end up switching careers a few times because they need money, but their LTW job (or higher paying career) isn't available for a while. So they have to work a few crappy jobs first! Just like me.

If my sims go to Uni and get a degree, I let them go to the job center and choose a career from Mog's Job notice boards:
https://modthesims.info/d/304689

Don is a doctor? XD I've never looked at his career.

Medicine did come out with the base game, so that was before they could go to University. I'd personally imagine that now it requires a degree. I do agree with Business. I removed that from the 'requires a degree' list.

You don't have a lot of the careers that I have flagged as needing a degree, because they come in later expansion packs (Architecture, Education, Intelligence, Law, Natural Science, Oceanography).