If you add in custom foods and your sims fish you will get them making a range of foods at grills on community lots. Vegi wraps and stuffed peppers are quite popular food choices in my game.

Spilling food is to do with body skill points. If it's an NPC waiter you can safely make them selectable and give them body skill points.

The faster ordering mod has already been mentioned.

While some annoyances are still here, most have mods or other ways around them if you ask on WCIF.

I have done just about everything in the game and use most of them. Anything I really dislike I have modded out.

Parties - Well, who says one has to throw birthday/ Christmas/ New Year's parties anyway? There are plenty of reasons to have a party - promotions, getting a bonus, feeling like it

Aliens more than welcome. Vampires and werewolves - don't play them. Sims are allowed to remain a witch for a day or two before it becomes essential for them to be cured.

I don't play apartments. I am never going to play apartments (again). I do no like playing apartments. It is not negotiable. I do like the AL social townies, though!. Besides, there is no reason at all why a nice neighbourhood should have apartments - houses, to me, are completely acceptable

I love playing Uni, and will never find it boring, and will always fill up my dorms with playables - because the only thing I really dislike about Uni is the presence of dormies in a dorm.

I have a rule about Sims games: if I hate it the way something is done someone else does too and made a mod to fix it. That's the only way I can play any of these games because so much of what's included by default sophomoric gratuitous garbage. I have Sims showing up on community lots just beating the crap out of other Sims and why? I even checked their personalities, made them nicer (they weren't even mean to begin with), etc. and they still pummel each other when they meet. This kind of garbage reminds me of the family the other day in Disneyland beating each other up. I do not find this amusing behavior. I also can't stand the grand vampires and really hate the witches. I avoid the zombies and werewolves. I think at some point I should get Bigfoot, though.

Pregnancies--the motive drain is too high and compared to the rest of a Sims' life it lasts too long.

I had a Sim couple run a restaurant once and it was great. He did the cooking, she was the hostess, and they hired a waiter. I don't think it made huge amounts of money but it was also fairly early on. Skilling on a community lot mod helps a lot in this if your cook could use some more skills. I tried having one Sim run a bakery and didn't much like it because cooking isn't as easy to set up as making up the other kind of crafting things. There's all the clean-up that has to be done between every two or three things prepared, otherwise the food is going to burn in the dirty oven.

I hate how Sims will autonomously spend money, like for example if I'm out at the park and I don't pay attention, one of my Sims will grill something, costing me money. This is especially bothersome for rags to riches challenges, when money is sacred.

....I thought grilling on community lots was free? Or do I have a mod that makes it so and I just don't remember because it's been so long...?

They said that from the beginning. I had the base game since late 2004. It even says that when you install. They never sent anything for any of them. Of course even if they had you couldn't get it now as the Sims 2 site is gone. I finally bought the Holiday SP last year and you can't even register them anymore.

Why do so many people hate witches? :o They're super fun to play with! And if they can do magivestigium, they're more convenient to play than normal sims. So I'm not really understanding what is annoying with them.

Perhaps the head witch who comes to community lots and brings cockroaches, but that you can mod out.

My fantasy hood relies heavily on witches. Have never found them annoying.

I don't hate witches at all. I love the idea of witches and magic, but I just feel in TS2 they were an after thought and should've been left to an actual magic EP and not shoehorned into Apartment Life. That way they would've been more fleshed out.

IDK why others, I just do not like them. Can I?

They're much more fleshed out in SIms 3, however idea of separate "species" is... em, debatable. At their's best (in regard to all 'un-naturals') they're wasted potential, but usually (not "at worst") just parody of Disney parody with very limited, frustrating mechanics. The worst cases (like werewolves)... uh, just "let it go".

As far as I'm concerned, all of the TS2 supernaturals are underwhelming as they are. If you mod them and/or play them in certain ways, they can be made more interesting, but their "vanilla" versions are just "meh," in my book. I do play with them, modded, and I enjoy what I do with them...but I could also certainly live without them and enjoy the game as a whole just as much.

It's a fact of life that some people are going to hate the things that you love. I'm surprised no one's yelled about boring elders or annoying toddlers yet.

I don't hate them, but I do hate that their spells are so vaguely named. I always have to look them up and I'm too lazy to be bothered most of the time.

For me it's disappointment that magic isn't as fun as in Sims 1 or 2 (in my opinion at least) when compared to their equivalents in Making Magic and Sims 3:Supernaturals Sims 2 witches are so underwhelming...

I really wish we would have gotten Sims 2 Making Magic instead of that buggy Apartment Mess or Rod Humble's hobby zombies.

I'd recommend custom spell mods to make witches more fun! They're a bit more fleshed out in my game.


There's a mod for that too!


*yelling*

No, it's free. I have homeless sims with very little money and grilling on a community lot is done on a daily occurrence. It may cost money if they have placed a fridge-not sure on that.

@akuminari you may want to check your mods or get rid of any fridges.

Yeah, I was also sure grilling at community lots is free seeing as how that's the only food Flat Broke had for days. IIRC it's Sims 3 where your Sim gets charged for grilling--I remember playing dirt poor Sims and waiting on someone else to grill so they could snitch food.

Dates, outings and parties, especially whichever one it is (date?) that has added time for good behaviour.

Cow mascots, drama professors and cheerleaders - thank goodness for the Visitor Controller! Zombies and werewolves, though I think I wouldn't mind zombies if they aged at double the normal speed rather than being immortal. I don't bother with witches because I can't make any sense of them; maybe if I took the time to learn, I'd like them.

Everything about owning a business.

Sims' obsession with pushing complete strangers on swings. They can be right over the far side of the lot and up on the fourth floor, but take your eye off them for half a second and they'll think, "Oh my goodness! There's a person on a swing! Never mind my poor starving toddler; I must drop everything and go over there to push the swing!"

Dogs' and wolves' obsession with chewing couches. Stray dogs wanting to get inside and sleep on a couch would make sense, but chewing a couch? No. (Once they're in there, maybe, but not as their main reason for barking at the door and wanting to be let in.) And wolves just shouldn't have any interest in getting inside at all, except to reach a toddler.

nobogartingswings.zip - Officially Nightlife Compatible
Most sims teen and above will no longer bogart the swings. Certain sadly immature individuals who also seem to enjoy playing Pirate in bathtubs will continue to exhibit this obviously childish behaviour, though.

http://www.moreawesomethanyou.com/ffs/al/hacks/

no autonomous using swing set
http://www.insimenator.org/index.php?topic=8397.0

One can just not have a swing set.

Because there are simply no good reason to have one in sims.

Sims can't gain skills.

There are numerous ways to have more fun (playing catch comes to mind)

It needs too much space for what it is good for

It may look good, because it kind of belongs, in a park, yes, but then, taking toddlers to a park is not vanilla, so if you do use that mod, and you take your toddler to a park, control your sim or remove the swing set

Parks and playgrounds work quite well without a swing set as well.

"Dates, Yay"
Evidence attached.

I guess roommates would be mine---though I really tried to like the feature when I first got the UC. Still just couldn't see the point, other than as something new to do, I guess, with the new AL townies. Like others have mentioned, I also prefer to just play sims in my households. If I want a low-commitment way to get to know a townie sim, I'll just invite them over or out to a lot!

But restaurants, I quite enjoy---running them (you can set the menu, so it's possible to have just a dessert place, for instance) as well as sending my sims. As grinevilly suggests, I always just use Chef's Choice as the ordering option, unless I sent a sim with a specific food craving who doesn't know how to cook whatever it is (and then I send them alone or with just one other sim---no point torturing myself with individual orders by making that a big group).

Chef's Choice guarantees extra points on dates, too, if that's important to you---the points are for your date getting the food they wanted. Those psychic sim chefs!

Also, for me, trying to keep wealth down across my megahood, owned restaurants generally not being as profitable as some other business types is a plus.

@PenelopeT , thanks for pointing out that Squinge mod to make seating (and browsing) faster! Not seen it before, so I'm going to try out the 25% version to start.

Agree that the timed-date thing gets old; so used to it by now I have to make a deliberate effort to stop it being a dream date when I don't want it to be. Though I still really like watching my sims' wants during the date, because I do see variation in those---like, how much they're paying attention to their date (is their focus on something or someone else instead?) and whether the two sims are or aren't in sync (often particularly telling, I think). I also love when a sim with some experience at dating (and who's long since had their first woohoo) seems to be hesitating to roll a woohoo want for their current date. Seems meaningful, and I often end the date on that note. Doesn't even mean the match is no good, just that it may take a little more time, which is okay by me.

Mostly, I just like seeing the differences in how their on-date wants express more or less enthusiasm for one date versus another. (Note: I rarely have sims date from the point of hardly knowing one another at all, so if mine isn't everyone's experience, maybe that is a difference?)

One tip about taking a date to a restaurant that was useful to me, back when I wasn't always able to get every date to Dream Date: do other things rather than Be Seated unless you have at least 3 minutes remaining. You can move the meter a lot faster when not at a table with the date, and once it's up higher, little issues you have while seated won't make such a big dent either. And improving the date score beforehand will give you plenty of time left to dine---which will probably help you enjoy the dine-out experience a lot more.

Because I have come to so enjoy dining out with my sims, I've been loving playing with a jobs ruleset in my game where my playables are required, at higher career levels, to have specific other career fields represented among their friends. For example, success in Business needs at least a couple other playables either in Business also or running an OFB biz; a couple other careers require those, as well as sims who work in Politics, Education, Law, Journalism, Medicine/Science and Military (so for a Politics career sim, those are their constituents and lobbyists; for my Journalism sims, those are their sources for stories). To get all those sims to be friends, I do many, many job-related dinners out (outings just for fun). You'd think I'd dread those, but I think they're fun---the main trick is just getting everyone available to come to the dinner at once.

Thought iCad's advice about running a restaurant was great---actually, all my OFB sims start small, whatever kind of business it is...though admittedly that's because I prefer to play my sims on the not-so-wealthy side.

@grinevilly Pescado's site has mods to stop both the vampire-biting of NPC sims (creaturefixes ) and your sims being forced to watch a fight (No Forced Watch Fight ).


Well said and so often true!

To add to the anti-swingset mods Jo mentioned, I finally gave in and installed Inge's No Adults Swinging (only updated for OFB technically, but still works fine in my UC game) this year; until the swings thing was mentioned here, I didn't realize how much more peaceful it's made community lots, lol. I would never go back, though I might now go through and replace all those unused swingsets with something more useful! (I have a designated playground lot for actual sim kids.)

About chess games on community lots---if I send sims to community lots to play chess, I usually do want to pick their partner myself, whether I brought that sim with me or have a preference among the sims who show up. So until they're both sitting at the chess set, I use Dolphin's Control This Sim on any other sim who tries to join before then; I cancel that sim's Join action and put something else in their queue, such as Sit (on a bench) or just Go Here. (For that last, there's another moreawesomethanyou mod, Manual Navigation--- it makes Go Here a command that no longer auto-cancels if anything else is queued up after it, so sims actually always will go...there before doing what they're gonna do next. Much better than Sit in a diversion situation on a community lot; the AI will leave alone a sim you told to Sit until motive failure or they're randomly queued to leave, but with modded Go Here, the AI will take over smoothly again once they finish walking.)

@akuminari : Community-lot grilling indeed is free throughout vanilla Sims 2...as long as whatever's grilled wasn't taken out of a fridge on that lot, as jo said. If you want to keep your community-lot fridges, there's a mod to at least prevent your sims getting charged by AI-played sims feeding themselves: Inge's No-Autonomy Fridge , FT version, which works for the UC as well (and her lower versions worked in my non-UC games previously). That fridge retains all the normal functionality when you tell your sims to use it; they just will never use it on their own. Side bonuses...if you use it at home, they will never do the totally inefficient Stuff Face either, or only cook for themselves when others are hungry too; and if you use it on a restaurant lot, sims will actually queue to be seated instead of inappropriately trying to feed themselves out of the chef's fridge, lol.

I thought about using Inge's fridge but didn't like the idea--hadn't thought about it for possibly community lots, though. For at home I have a mod that forces left-overs on them if there are any available.

I realized at some point a long time ago to get other Sims on a group outing before attempting to do anything on a community lot with one I can't control. It's kind of a neat feature, actually, like, "Oh hi there! Haven't seen you in a while, wanna grab a bite to eat with me?"

Oh, that just made me think of something! Are there any custom food bars out there anywhere like the ones in BV? I really like those bars but it gets tiresome enough if a Sim is on vacation constantly eating the same food unless they order room service. The right one could fit nicely into a shopping area.

And yeah, for dining on dates I usually get the date meter up to about three hours before having them sit down to eat. Lot and home times aren't synced in TS2 without a mod so I like taking advantage of that feature.

I would probably actually play PlantSims if they included all life stages. I only play PlantSims if they roll the want to become one as an adult, but typically I don't complete those wants.

I've played vampires and didn't completely hate it, but I hate that they're immortal. I also don't like using Elixir of Life.

However, I do play with Aliens a lot. It is Sims so it's not always going to be realistic, but I like some realism in my game.

I don't love playing University, but it depends on the hood. If it's a smaller hood, I'm more likely to play it. For larger hoods with a lot of Sims, it can be too much and a chore. Plus, I haven't figured out what to do about Sims who don't attend college.

Some good news for you! This for the Plantsims and this for the vampires! In fact, Midge's mods have, IMO, made all the supernaturals about 200% better. Those who aren't averse to the idea of them in general but who think they're just "meh" ought to check them out.



What do you mean by "what do about them?" They...age up, move out of their parents' basement, and live their life while their sibling(s) goes on to drudgery in academia? I dunno, I think a lot of people don't like or get bored with Uni simply because they feel a need to send EVERY born-in-game there, so it becomes a repetitive chore. If you don't send everyone there, then when you DO send someone, it's something a little special, something a little different to do that breaks up the routine. At least, that's how it is for me, since my Sims attend Uni only if they meet my player-imposed requirements for attendance, which is fairly hard to do.

Those stupid dreadlocks from either AL or M&G - the ones that have different color bands for each hair color. There's like 4 for each so of course the game picks that hair a lot.
How often it decides someone's everyday outfit should be a business suit or winter coat - or workout clothes. They shouldn't have made those available as everyday wear.

College in the main hood

get a job

Buy and run a business

Bum around doing odd jobs like cafeteria work

Travel

Live in your parent's basement ^ playing video games

Pop out babies

Young adults can do everything that adults can do given a few mods. All my sims become YA for 10 days, those that go away to uni or stay behind.
You do have to keep track on the days, however many your sims have, since they will have a college meter. For those not doing college in the main hood I put down a $0-1 each morning to help me keep count. Pescado's lot syc timer could also possible track the days.