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Lab Assistant
Original Poster
#1 Old 16th Jan 2019 at 7:02 PM Last edited by Anonymouse85 : 18th Jan 2019 at 1:50 PM.
Default Testers wanted: No random desk-cleaning
Hello Everyone

I'm posting this one here for now because I'm not sure if it is a very lucky coincidence or if I really did it.
I searched and searched for years to find a mod that would disable the silly clean_desk interaction that was intended to be used by butlers only.

I've never played with a butler in my game but it kept annoying me that my sims, especially the neat ones, would randomly get up from watching TV or leaving a conversation to clean a stupid desk.
I could not find a mod that would disable that and it is an "all or nothing" situation.

Since I only started modding yesterday, it would be nothing short of amazing if I really did it but to make sure (because I'm afraid it will stop working if I take the files out of my mods folder, no kidding), can someone please test it?

I've tested it with different households and a new game and it seems to be working. I've gotten a butler for one household and he doesn't do it anymore, either.
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#2 Old 17th Jan 2019 at 5:26 AM
Setting the interaction's allow_autonomous to false should be enough to take care of the issue. By changing the constraints you are telling the Sim that they must stand a distance of 0 from the center of the desk in order to clean it from the pie menu and this causes a route failure. Leave the constraint as is and selecting Clean from the pie menu will continue to work.

PS: Congrats on your first mod, other than that one issue that's a great start!
Lab Assistant
Original Poster
#3 Old 17th Jan 2019 at 7:34 AM
Ah, that makes sense. At first, I changed the distances, a lot. Higher, lower, nothing worked. The file for non-butler-sims doesn't have an autonomy line, although I haven't tried adding one.

What I actually did, aside from messing with the distances, was to change the periodic_stat_change in line 70 and that seemed to work, the desks just don't become imaginary dirty anymore so I guess that's all it takes, since the desk-cleaning interaction was actually supposed to be for butlers only (and I have no clue as to why regular sims were so much affected by it) but everytime my sim was in the same room as a desk, which happens a lot, especially in the apartments, they just could not leave it alone.

Getting up to clean the desk after writing one email? Come on. They even did that when it was a desk that hadn't been used and didn't have a PC standing on it and two days ago, I just finally had enough of that.

Selecting it manually in the game was never possible, when I just clicked on a desk, absolutely nothing happened which just added to my being annoyed by it.
It's like the watching toddlers when they go potty, that is another one of my pet-peeves with the Sims 4. Just give the kid some privacy in the bathroom, that really isn't too much to ask, especially if they've otherwise ignored the toddler all day but they go potty and boom, mom drops everything and goes to watch. That's just so weird and also inappropriate.

Oh, got a bit side-tracked Anyway, thank you so much! Your faster-gardening-mod and the working alarm clocks are some of the things I'd never want to miss in my game.
Lab Assistant
Original Poster
#4 Old 17th Jan 2019 at 8:12 AM
Fixed it (I think). For some odd reason, disabling only the autonomy doesn't do it. Oh well. The more I get into it, the less I understand some of the choices some of the programmers made. I guess that's part of being a modder.
Deceased
#5 Old 17th Jan 2019 at 6:51 PM
Quote: Originally posted by Anonymouse85
What I actually did, aside from messing with the distances, was to change the periodic_stat_change in line 70 and that seemed to work, the desks just don't become imaginary dirty anymore so I guess that's all it takes...

This answer got rather long as I kind of was poking around at the files while writing it and kept coming up with a number of WTF is going on here questions The final answer should point you in the right direction, but some of the rambling prior to it may be informative for you so I'm not removing it but rather putting it all into a spoiler.
I hope this all makes at least some sense out of the situation. If you have any other questions about what any of the sections in that are intended to do let me know.
Lab Assistant
Original Poster
#6 Old 17th Jan 2019 at 8:40 PM
Oh wow, thank you for taking the time! Indeed, I now understand a few things that I couldn't figure out before.

Yes, the butler only came with the vintage glamour pack.
Long before I even started thinking about writing my own mods, I tried to find mods for this very problem a lot and I could never find one. Even now, still can't find one. Good thing I don't need to anymore, either Still makes me wonder tho.

Now, more caffeine and then, on to it! Ooooh, I can even offer different flavors of the mod, thanks to you! Wow, I hadn't even thought about that before. Learning new things is so exciting, I love it

Thank you so much.
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