In all my years of playing Sims2 I have never had a servo. At first they simply didn't appeal to me based on look and when I read they were permenant once activated I really wasn't interested. For the most part I just forgot about them all together. Since the other robots didn't really work very well in game I only had a sim take up that craft if they specifically rolled it. This usually only happened when they became Elders for some reason and since the skill took so long to master they usually died before they created a servo.

Now I see there are some interesting default replacements that get me past the visual issue I'm kind of reconsidering having them in game. So, pro's/con's?
I'm really digging the look of Almighty Hat's oak replacments. Anyone else have a favorite replacement?

I never make them. I don't like the looks or permanance.

Personally I love servos. I've always been super interested in sapient AI period, so I find them pretty cool. They can be insanely helpful--even though I have their automatic "do chores" task modded out, I usually have mine pick up the household chores, especially at night when everyone else is asleep. They'll cook meals for everyone to eat the next day, too. It was a huge help to the Centowski family when Julia finished building her first servo June--especially since she gave birth to twins the day after and already had two young children.
I don't so much mind the agelessness. I don't have a lot of servos--in my 'hood all the craft-table bots have to be built by the town's lone roboticist (is that what you'd call it? Who knows.) so there are only two activated ones at the moment...who of course have fallen in love, in true Zane and PIXAL fashion. I imagine that they'll stay with their current "owners" (I use that term loosely--servos are treated as equals in my game so June is seen as more of a daughter to Julia, and Miller a friend to Scott, Julia's apprentice) until they die, then perhaps either start their own little household or continue to live with the children of the one they're in. It all depends, since my 'hood's not in a rush.
I've considered defaults in the past, but personally I like the way they look. It's not my ideal for them, but for a Sims game it's cute enough to stay.

I did play with Servos a loooong while back, but no longer found room for them in my game when I started doing storytelling. I had a lot of fun playing around with them, though.

Pro's: I think they're pretty good for businesses, like Bigfoot. At least that's what I used them for in my 2016 hood, that was before I lost the previous backup (or save) in which I fed them to the cowplant... That's another thing they're good for. LOL.

Con's: They have a bad habit of continuously looking after babies and cleaning the house. Sometimes I just want to play with the Servo but oh no, game pushes it to go clean. I direct the Servo to talk to someone - "Talk to Sim" - Servo arrives at the Sim - An action goes to Servo's queue - "Do Chores" .... Me: Study a Skill, please! Game: Nope. Do Chores.

I like Servos. I have mods that can make them actual people. They can procreate, and sometimes the magical powers that be demand their life as a sacrifice.

I have one activated Servo in my game. His name is Jeeves1000. He belongs to the Goths. He is, in my game, a bit naive. You could call him immature. He has never been in love. He enjoys cleaning and pleasing people. They DO tend to go crazy over babies, which can be a major PitA, particularly when you're trying to get them to do something else.

Jeeves1000 gets mildly taken advantage of by his 'friends', because of his naiveté. For instance, my sim who runs a bar ALWAYS calls Jeeves1000 up to invite him down to the bar, because Jeeves1000 will pay for admission, then do all the cleaning, fix the clogged toilets and busted sinks, and never asks to be paid for it. He doesn't really understand.

Anyway... that's how I play him. He did learn mechanical skills and built himself a toy robot to play with, named Junior v1.2... some of the other Junior models failed to launch properly, or broke down. He dreams of meeting an appliance some day, that he can settle down and spend the rest of his life with... but thus far, while the microwave has occasionally been turned on, it's shown limited interest, and the refrigerator has been a bit, well... frigid.

I had been curious... prior to activation, servos ARE objects, and CAN be set for sale. I wondered what would happen if a YA (in an unmodded-for-college game) purchased a servo and activated it on a dormitory lot. Would that servo become a student? or would it fail to age and be stuck in the dorms forever? It might make the PERFECT housekeeper for the Fraternity I plan on building, should it not age. I'll have to come up with another butler-type name... Winston or Hobson... perhaps Merryweather or Chadwick... Or, i could make it female and call her Fifi or Nicolette... Hmmm... the possibilities...

Anyway, to answer your question... give it a whirl! It's something different. Don't overdo it at first. If you like it, make more. If not... well... have your servo go for a swim or a shower or something. Can't hurt to try 'em out, right?


-gE
>=)

Oh, man. I love servos. They make excellent workers, including workers-who-build-more-Servos. They're also pretty decent babysitters, as long as the parent gets home in time for Servo to get some recharge time (Do not power down unless a teen/adult/elder is on the lot, otherwise, social worker time).

The downside, in my opinion, is that they sometimes roll wants that they cannot have. Such as, Have A Baby. They can't get pregnant. Therefore, this is unfulfillable without some kind of cheat or mod.

My original Servo builder was Luigi Mario. That's because I noticed the game has just the right colors of overalls... but now I have a Servo who can build more. I recommend cheating for the robotics badge because it's a pretty tedious grind otherwise.

I can take or leave them. I have had them in game but not for awhile now.

@StrangeTownChick what mod is that? Being able to mod out 'do chores' would make servo's much better. The main annoyance from them was cooking unwanted meals.

I wood like them if they were more Sim-looking, had some customization to them and were capable of wearing normal clothes.
Sure there some mods that make them look more human, but from all that I've seen they still stay naked, look identical and so forth, so those mods, while awesome, don't give me what I want.

Might be a different one but I know Pescado has one called "noservochores".

Hmm...thanks for the info. @grinevilly so they can be killed? Do they get a tombstone? Are they just trash to be picked up? I honestly thought they lasted forever, never aging with no recourse for getting rid of them if you wanted to. Again, one of the main reasons for my hesitancy to even try them.

Hmm... I don't know that anything "kills" them, per se... Except, maybe the cow plant. Swimming and showering or anything with water will "break" them... they love to play in the water wiggler thing, which busts them. But, it's not the same thing. I don't think they get a tombstone that way, cuz i think they can be fixed, IIRC. But i have no idea if the cow plant "kills" them or leaves a tombstone... would be curious to find out if there can be servo-ghosts... servhosts? Their ghosts, if they have them, ought to spawn after dark and clean everything up. haha.

Anyway, i've never attempted to kill Jeeves1000. I kind of intended him to live forever, cuz in my game, Cassandra moved out and Alexander was about to go to college when Mortimer bought the farm. I didn't want Alexander to lose his inheritance. Mortimer actually adopted a child, then dropped dead, and the social worker came afterwards, then delivered the kid to Alexander. Not a very attentive social worker, eh?

If you have babies, be prepared to have bottles left all over the place. Servos LOVE getting baby bottles.

And if you hate your servo, and can't get it to die, you can always move it into the bin and not play it. Problem solved. It would be kind of amusing if you could have them hauled away as trash, though. =)


-gE
>=)

I'm not grinevilly but yes, they can be killed. A Cowplant can kill them. Other than that I don't think there's another way to kill them.

I did mention in my reply to the thread, I don't think you saw it.

Not yet!

I don't play ghosts, zombies or aliens. And, if I had the necessary EPs, I wouldn't play werewolves, plantsims, Bigfoot, or witches either. But I feel servos are different: sooner or later in Real Life we will surely have some sort of humanoid/android robots, with artificial intelligence giving something like consciousness. Something a bit like servos in fact. And, if they have something like human consciousness, then, ethically, they should be given something like human rights. (This is rather like the way I feel about Sims.) So I won't mind them being permanent, because ethically I couldn't terminate them.

But I'm a long way short of actually having servos in my game. I have just one Sim who makes robots: her name is Gwen Geachie, and she lives in Elswyn, the 'hood I made for Jo's Community Spirit contest. (I like to break stereotypes, so I made my geeky Sim female.) But I haven't played Elswyn all that much, and Gwen is still at the stage of making toy robots. In addition, although lots of people here reassured me, I'm still a bit afraid of a Sim getting killed by a malfunctioning robot; I definitely don't want Gwen to die of electrocution. Or, worse still, a child to be killed playing with a robot she made.

But, if all goes well, I hope there will be servos in my game one day.

I didn't actually interpret that correctly. LOL So I guess if I really end up hating the servo or it just freaks me out all together, which is totally possible, I can always just feed it to a cowplant. I'm not super worried about the baby issues people keep mentioning as I use Pescado's "eye in the sky" baby system. Pretty much makes everyone leave the baby alone unless it actually needs something.

I'm sure with boolprop The Death Creator It's actually [someones name]'s death creator, but I don't remember the name even though I use it A LOT!

I have one currently and plan to have more at some point. My servos use the same mesh as Almighty Hat's, except mine are in brass. I also modded out both the push to Do Chores and the glowing ball in the midsection. I may end up switching out Pescado's no chore mod for Sim Wardrobe's servo controller, as I think the later has the option to more finely tune both what chores the servo is pushed to do and when they're pushed to do them. For right now, though, I use Macrotastics when I want to send the servo on a chore spree.

I also liked the brass look so much, I picked up the matching sim skins, so I might at some point make 'mechanical' sims. Or maybe I'll play with making a servo into a regular sim, so that if I ever want a servo to pass on gracefully they can do so while still sort of looking like themselves (they would gain gendered features since they wouldn't be using the androgynous mesh any longer).

Edit: Though if you end up not liking the servo, you do have the option to power it down. It's not dead, but it won't ever wake up unless you direct a sim to power them up again.

Servos have formal outfits, so it's probably possible to make clothes for them somehow.

I've seen a few mods that give them different eyes or tattoos depending on what kind of servo they are - they can get some of the other supernatural abilities (witch and vampire for sure).

Hahaha... i'm curious.... Why would they freak you out?




Oh, it doesn't matter if your child is well cared for. Servo will STILL step in and hover over your youngins... Half the time, i'm waiting for the baby to explode from being force-fed ANOTHER bottle! And another. And another. And another. And another. It's like, the Hunger Terminator. "It can't be reasoned with. It can't be bargained with. It doesn't feel pity or remorse! And it absolutely WILL...NOT...STOP until your baby is fed, changed, put to bed, taken back out of bed, fed, changed, put back in bed, taken out of bed, fed, changed, and put back in bed again!"

Talk about helicopter parent? They ain't got SHIT on Servo!


-gE
>=)

Sorry, it won't work; the option to activate the Servo appears, but on a college lot, it just makes a dialog box appear saying that Servos aren't allowed at university. Trust me, I've tried it before.

I normally don't use servos in my game, but I resurrected an ancient MegaHood today, and I remembered that I have a servo named Alice Binney who liked PT Smith's son so much she kidnapped him and is keeping him in her house. She's got a want for a family, and she knows she will never have any of her own, so he'll do the trick. However, the Smiths are not happy about this situation and are waiting for the chance to get their child back.
She's modeled from another pixel so she looks human-and without that silly looking middle plumbob in her stomach. She also has human emotions, which makes it rather sad when she knows she can't do anything a human can do. All she can do is take orders.
But she's a great parent!

@AndrewGloria the toy robot when broken doesn't kill your sims, as far as I know none of the robots are lethal.

I've had them work at an orphanage before, due to them never aging, but that plan hit a snag when both servos broke down at the same time.

The Beakers have a servo as a butler in my megahood. He's currently married to their youngest daughter but there isn't much of a relationship being had. Weirdly he has 3 bolts for all 3 Beaker females and I often catch Circe trying to flirt with him but He's usually too busy with chores and it drops from his queue. The storyline originally was that the oldest Beaker daughter, Bunsen created him but when their youngest daughter (I can't remember how to spell her name but I just translated "Burner" into a different language) found herself pregnant as a teenager, and to keep the family 'presentable' they married her off to the butler. He's a good dad to little Cyra but I'm honestly not sure what to do with him now. I kinda want to move the youngest Beaker daughter out with Cyra - but that would probably mean t063 (the servo) will follow? Or will he remain the butler because that's what he was built to do?

You can make Sim-looking servos easily using SimPE. You simply create them as regular Sims and move them into a home, save and exit the game. Then locate their character file and change the Original GUID to 0xD07B9CE9. I've done this with both teens and adults. (Don't try making any servo pets though unless you want your game to crash.) Sim servos' green Plumb-bob only shows a little when they bend somewhat at the waist. I have silver servos and bronze servos (much like 3CP0) as well as Sim-esque looking servos in my game.

If a servo is abducted by aliens, it can come back pregnant but the baby born is all Sim, not a servo. I've had that happen in my game (I tried it on purpose after backing up my hood) but it could have been a manifestation of my abduction mods. I'm not sure how it might work in a "normal" game.

In my hood, I placed two servos on my residential cemetery lot. I figured graveyard custodians would be the perfect job for their neverending lifetimes. Other than that, the other servos were fun for a while due to their novelty, but now they typically remain shut down in a corner of a room in my other lots.

So if your butler is male then you'll give him a butlerish name, but if they're female then you'll name them like a toy poodle? XD

I never liked the servo appearance either. I replaced them with a medieval knight default, but that renders them only able to be used in my Hogwarts. I've never had a robot maker get high enough skill to make one yet, but when someone does then I'll have to think about it.