Hi there!
I'm looking for a mod that allows the game to spawn a playable Sim to work as clerk/barista instead of townies. I guess it can be done if the lot is owned by another Sim, but I'm not a fan of OfB...
Does anybod know if anything like this exist?
Thank you in advance!

There is no mod that will do it. The standard way to go about doing that would be to have a playable own the business and then hire another playable as the clerk/barista, as you said.

However, if you don't want to play an owned business, what you can do is a have a townie (temporarily made playable) purchase the business instead. The way I do it is:

1) Set up the community lot business-to-be exactly as you want it to be, if it's not already as you want it to be, first, before anyone purchases it. Making any changes after a townie purchases it is somewhat of a pain.

2) Pick the townie you want to own the business and teleport him/her into one of your playable households with whatever modded object you have that will accomplish the task. I use the Sim Blender. With the Sim Blender (or a similar modded object like the Insimenator or the Sim Manipulator), use its Family --> Move In... function to make the townie temporarily part of the household.

3) Add money to the family's funds using the familyfunds cheat, enough to purchase the community lot. (I usually find out how much it'll cost to buy it by making the "Purchase Community Lot" phone call and looking, then hanging up and adding exactly the right amount to the family's funds, then making the purchasing phone call again.)

4) Have the townie buy the community lot.

5) Send the townie to the community lot. Once there, use the Sim Blender (or whatever) to teleport in the playable you want as an employee. Use the standard game functions to hire the playable and then assign them to whatever task you want them to do. Repeat for however many playable employees you want.

6) Send the townie owner back to the lot you moved him/her into. Once there, use the Sim Blender again, this time its Family --> Make Me a Townie function, to make the owner a townie again. This will remove them from the playable household, but they will retain ownership of the lot even as a townie.

7) Turn on moveobjects and delete the re-townified townie from the lot.

From then on, whenever you visit that community lot, its townie owner will be there and so will any playable employees, doing the jobs they've been assigned, but you will never have to play the community lot as an owned business. Unless you eventually move/marry-in that townie as a playable, in which case you could sell the business and have another townie buy it. However, a couple warnings:

1) Should you ever want to make a change to the lot, you'll have to go through moving its owner back into a playable household and sending them to the lot to do it. This is why I advise making the lot exactly as you want it in the first place.

2) Any playables hired will have the "Employee" "career" when you play their home lot, and this will replace any career they may have already had. That career is not very lucrative and doesn't offer promotions and chance cards and whatnot. They will not be able to have a "regular job" and be an employee at the same time because if you give them a regular job, they will no longer be an employee of the business.

Wow iCad, that's great! It requires a bit of work but it looks like it's worth it!
Now all my teens are ready to go to college, but I will try with the next generation (and I might also try it in my test hood).
Thank you so much for the detailed guide, it was very kind of you.

I've tested the method quite a bit both in a testing hood and in one neighborhood that I play and haven't run into any problems. In that one neighborhood, which is downtown-based, pretty much all the community lots that sell stuff or offer services are owned by townies, precisely so that I can have playable employees in low-paying jobs. I also do non-hidden "hobby lots" that are owned by townies. (Or, rather, by ex-hobby-leaders since, unfortunately, making a hobby leader playable enough to buy a lot strips them of their hobby leader status and interactions, but to me that's a small loss. )

EDIT: And you're welcome, no problem at all. My hand was cramping from painting hair alphas, and typing is a good way to un-cramp the fingers.

This is intriguing - the kind of thing I like to play with. What's the advantage of having the owner be a townie rather than a playable? Sometimes I have a playable on the lot, but then just never go to the lot as the playable.

One problem with this is, as the business is permanently stuck at level 0, only three visitors can be on the lot at any one time (although you can exceed this if you bring four or more people yourself). This means there won't be a ton of people for your playables to interact with if the lot is supposed to be, say, a bar or a nightclub.

This is an issue if you care about how busy the lot is when you visit it, yes. For my own game...In some cases, I care about that; in some cases, I don't. For those lots where I care, I've played the lot for a while, with the townie owner visiting the lot, and used this object to quickly jack up the loyalty of each customer Sim who appears on the lot, before returning the townie owner to his/her "home" lot and retownifying them. Maxing each visitor's loyalty increases the business's level very quickly, takes maybe 10 minutes to reach level 10. I have, unfortunately, found no other way to increase an owned business's level, even screwing around in SimPE. That said, there will likely always be fewer customers on an owned business lot, even at Level 10, than there would be on an identical unowned community lot, even if you use mods and tweak your config settings to allow more lot visitors. But, this it true for "normal" real-playable-owned lots, too. The limits appear to be hard-coded. I tried this mod, even, but while it worked as advertised on unowned lots, it didn't appear to affect owned businesses, at least not in my game; perhaps I have something that conflicts with it in some way, although the HCDU detected no conflicts.



No real "advantage." For me, a playable owning a business without ever visiting/playing it would be against my own personal rules. But, yeah, the same thing could be accomplished by having a bunch of Sims you create, that are technically playables, but that you never actually play. I do this sometimes, too. For instance, in all my neighborhoods, I have an "undertaker" Sim, a Sim I've created in CAS, whose only function is to collect graves from residential lots once ghosts have spawned and then transport them to a community-lot cemetery that he/she owns. I do this because using the game's native "Move this grave" mechanism will strip ghosts of their "cause of death color," turning them all into transparent-white "died of old age" ghosts. I don't like that, so...undertaker Sim. She/he "lives" on a tiny empty lot on the edge of town, gets teleported onto lots where there are graves ready to be collected (They go into his/her inventory), and then gets "played" only long enough to send him/her to the cemetery lot to place the collected graves where I want them. I could do the same thing to create one or a bunch of pseudo-playable business owners and toss them all on an empty "home" lot, but in the case of that one neighborhood, that's a lot of "useless" Sims. Townies already exist -- unless you don't have townies in a neighborhood, of course -- so I use them instead.

One possible advantage, though, is if you were to use "real" playables -- those you do actually play -- as "dummy" business owners, then... Well, say such a Sim owns a clothing shop. You send one of your other playables there, and they're there for several hours. While you're there, the owner restocks all of the clothing racks, which is fairly expensive and owner-Sims, when not controllable, are pretty zealous about restocking. All of that money spent to restock is subtracted from the owner-Sim's household funds. If you visit that lot often enough, you may find that, when you get to playing that "dummy" owner's lot, they'll be bankrupt. Also once they reach zero household funds, they can no longer restock, which can be a problem. Having townie owners circumvents this because townies have no set household funds; for the purpose here, they have infinite household funds. Creating business owner pseudo-playables and giving near-infinite household funds would also work, but using townies is what I prefer to do.

You can also cheat things, motherload them 5 times and set the business at rank 10 and give all employees badges then forget about them all. If you are going to fake it might as well fake it well. ;P

I love your undertaker. I almost never think of the money aspects of the game, so didn't think of this at all. That's a great advantage. I usually have a playable own the lot, and s/he goes there to fix it up or arrange things or whatever, but I don't like all the hands on management when the owner is selectable and the business is open, so I mostly visit as other sims. The NPCs are better at running things than I am.

In fact, I've just built a bowling alley with an office upstairs over it (one of those windows looking down at the business where managers can sit and see everything). The player can see the office through the windows but it can't be reached by sims. I had the idea to put a restaurant podium up there positioned so that the NPC will stand looking out the window and answering the phone every now and then. Now, I'm going to SimSurgery the NPC to look like one of my minor pre-made playables and give him a "career" as a Manager. It will look like he's managing but downstairs NPCs do all the actual work.

Just a matter of play style, yes. I personally really like running businesses, so I don't mind the hands-on stuff. Cemeteries are an exception because I don't see them as a "business," but given that the game doesn't save unowned community lots, making them owned lots just make things easier all around. (And I usually jack up their level so that the cemetery has more visitors.) But generally, me NOT wanting to do the hands-on stuff is more of a special case, one dictated by a particular rule set I'm playing. In the case of the 'hood with lots of townie-owned business, my goal is to make it so that Sims must buy most things at community lots rather than out of the catalog. So, there are lots of small townie-owned stores. I don't want to run THAT many businesses in one neighborhood, though, so townie-owned ones is the way to go there. That's not the way I usually do it, though.



That'll work. It's kinda what you'll have to do to get your "manager" appear in the right place on the lot, given that the area's not Sim-accessible. My only thought is that it might result in some stomping, if visitors think the lot has a restaurant and they want to try to be seated. But maybe that would happen if you don't have all the other restaurant stuff on the lot like the NPC stove. Or, if it does happen, perhaps you can make a clone of the podium and disable that function, although I wouldn't be surprised if that functions is controlled by BHAVs rather than the object's settings. Or maybe you could use a hotel podium rather than a restaurant one, but that'd generate a bellhop-looking guy. Not sure if you could change his outfit and all that. Not sure if the podium will generate a bellhop on a non-hotel lot, either.

Hm, you're right, that would be a consideration. I only tried it briefly, but I'll test some more. For this, it's a remake of Speedy's. It had that upper story for no apparent reason, so I made one. The podium is quite a distance from the sims and there is an actual podium on the floor by the front entrance where they can be seated and eat. There are deco-only doors going upstairs so no one pays it any attention, but I can see how this would be an issue if I try it in other lots. There's a few links to pics if anyone's interested. Thanks for bringing this up *_Drew~, it's fun to hear other people's ideas on how to handle the employees.

If you haven't experienced any stomping yet, you might be OK. I'm actually surprised that that TV in the inaccessible office isn't generating stomping, but maybe between the inaccessibility and the fact that it's on a different floor is muting it. Well, whatever, if you don't notice issues, then you don't have to worry about it. If it ain't broke and all that.

OMG how creative, LOVE IT! :lovestruc

I find if things are on another floor they are ignored... but when I think of things like that, I usually can't remember if it's Sims 1, 2, 3 or 4 so I just try not to think of it... this has gotten me exactly nowhere.

I was really pleased to get that idea. The doors to that floor are deco only, so it's not only on another floor, there's no access. I didn't test, but I thought the fact that there's no portal might be why they don't react to it.