Quick question about bakeries.

[labellavienna]

Hello, I have this issue that I've tried to google but it wasn't available...I've recently bought Open for Business, installed the Blue Water Village...and today had my sim visited a bakery shop. I tried to click on the display cases with the cakes inside them but they're un-clickable. I just wanted to know if this is normal? What is the point of having an entire bakery lot if your sim can't go there and buy a cake?

Either I am having a conflicting hack or something...what do you think?

[lazzybum]

The cakes are unclickable? I think they become unclickable after you set the price for them, but hovering over it should show its cost. If your trying to click on the case itself, I don't think they're clickable. Bakeries work fine for OFB, customers do buy cakes from the displays.

[labellavienna]

I don't know...I have no clue how OFB actually works, total noob here. Do you mean I should click on the individual cakes inside the glass display cases? I don't know about setting prices, I am just visiting a bakery for the first time, this is not my business but just a default community lot that came with the game.

Edit: clicking on a cake brings up the "there are no actions available screen" ....I took a picture of it: http://i38.photobucket.com/albums/e142/prahadise/Untitled-1-5-4.jpg?t=1337229739

[lazzybum]

The prices are probably not set for them. You should go to the owner's house and have them go to the bakery. There are buttons on the upper right for business owners and there's one to set prices. Then just click on the display for all the stuff inside to become set, it will turn yellow in that mode (you could also choose cheap, very cheap, expensive, etc) It should be buyable now after the owners go back/save. Or you could stick with the owners and learn how to run the business.

[Alijah]

The bakery that ships with the game is bugged. You will have to actually visit the lot as the owners (The Jacquets or whatever they are called) and remove/delete ALL the cakes! They are spoiled/unusable. Then you'll have to have them make a whole new fresh batch of cakes and place them in the display cases and make sure that you set them for sale. Once you put a new batch of cakes up for sale, it should be fine.

However, you may want to get a few mods for OFB (I think you've said you don't use a lot of mods?). Namely, no reassign, I forget who made it but I'll look through my folders. Your sims will autonomously reassign their employees when you go to the lot as a visitor... which means they may reassign the cashier to go clean up or something, and then your playable sim will be standing at the register for ages.

Edit: No reassign by pescado, found here: http://www.moreawesomethanyou.com/smf/index.php/topic,3881.0.html

Good luck with OFB :) It's my favorite expansion by far.

[joandsarah77]

The Jacquet bakery is bugged and also has a terrible set up. Don't play it as a bakery unless you want to pull your hair out. I play OFB a lot, but I don't think I've ever taken a playable to a bakery to buy a cake. I'm not even sure that you can. I tend to play the bakery and playables visit and I sell to them then.

If you want to play the bakery you will want to do an overall of the set up. As Alija said the cakes are spoiled and need to be chucked out. Make sure you have no chillier shelves next to the till (unless you keep them empty of sellable goods) as browsers will block the till as they tend to stand on a diagonal when looking at baked goods. The kitchen is misleading because you don't need a chefs stove you need regular oven/s and lots of fridges if you want to bake. Get rid of all the individual serves as sims won't sit and eat them and to get more serves you need to have your playable serve the whole thing, stop them eating and place it in the owners inventory. May as well poke your eye out with a fork. The easiest way is to use buyable cakes in the chillier shelves and add baked goods as whole cakes when you have a sim who can cook them- that Jacquet woman can't even bake everything in the displays.

Not sure if it ever got fixed, but celebration cakes can't be placed in the chillier shelves without a fix. http://www.modthesims.info/download.php?t=264660

The easiest way to start playing a bakery is to use buyable cakes and jello. Sims will buy that as happily as they buy Baked Alaska. When you want to bake or just pull out a large quantity of jello use the 'make many' option on the fridge.

[Alijah]

There are fixes that will take care of most of the annoyances of running the bakery (and other stores). I've played the Jacquet's lot a bunch of times and Lucy Burb has set up her own bakery. They're actually fairly easy once you get past the learning curve.

A few things about the bakery: as joandsarah pointed out, the customers will often block the cash register while browsing for the cakes. If they stand in line too long, they will throw down their items and storm out of the store, losing customer loyalty. This can be fixed by rearranging the store, or by a mod that allows the customers to line up anywhere in the event that their way is blocked. I have it in my game, but again, I'll have to search around for it. I'll get back to you on that one.

It is a pain in the butt to try and get the single slices of cake/pie in the displays (once again, I think there is a mod for that, too), so I just got rid of all the single slices and now my bakeries only sell full cakes. It doesn't matter anyways because as mentioned, they won't sit down and eat it there, so may as well sell the whole pie.

It's important to note though that if you play a business, the customers will actually spend money. That is, if your playables come and spend 1000 simoleans at your store, they will be -1000 simoleans once you load their lot. You can sell buy-mode items back for some of your money (you won't get the percentage markup for profit back, though). But items like cakes you can't sell, so you're just out that cash. You can use mods (again, I'm starting to feel like Apple--there's an app for that!), such as playables don't go broke from paladin's place or the customer selector at MATY to make sure that your clientele are townies only.

If you're really new to OFB, Malcolm Landgrabb is a great place to learn the ins and outs of business. His electronic store is a really great place to learn since all of his items are from the buy mode and I think he starts with some badges and employees.

[labellavienna]

Ugh it seems that there is a lot more to OFB than I had imagined...guess I will have to play around with it for a bit.

Btw this is the J'Adore Bakery that came with the OFB expansion.

[Alijah]

The bakery should have been run by the Jacquets... your Bluewater Village isn't populated? o.O

[lazzybum]

I haven't touched premades in years so I wasn't aware that one was bugged. Good to know! Jacquets is the family of an elder and her adult son with black hair.

[labellavienna]

No...the reason might be because this neighborhood is a custom neighborhood I created a long time ago on a clean template...AKA...no townies no NPC's etc. I create my own Sims through CAS and turn them into townies via the teleporter shrub. This is probably the reason why the BlueWater village is voided of residents.

Edit...I was right...the clean template thing made it so every one of my attached subhoods had no residents. This is why there are no Jacquets in BlueWater...lol.

[Alijah]

Ahhh that explains it then. Yeah, in order to visit the various shops and bakeries and whatnot, a playable sim has to buy the lot and then run the business. You'd have to actually have an owner go to the lot and hire employees, set the items for sale, etc. before the lot is an actual shop.

And yeah, Bluewater actually ships with a few families and their businesses. A bakery, toy store, flower shop, and some other various shops.

Edit: The Jacquets themselves aren't bugged really, just their cakes XD The first time I played that lot, the environment score for all the sims was critical and everyone kept complaining to Denise. It took me a while to realize that all the food in the display cases was spoiled haha :lol:

[labellavienna]

That is hilarious haha, thank you and everyone on this thread for the help. Where would I be without MTS....<3

[joandsarah77]

If you don't have Denise Jacquet you aren't missing much. Apart from not having enough cooking points and bad genetics she likes to go around tossing black stars at other businesses.
I believe that she may be slightly bugged as I've seen it said the game still sees her as married even though she is a widow. Also her son with the black hair is actually blond but his hair is dyed.

[BloodyScholastic]

Ahhh that explains it then. Yeah, in order to visit the various shops and bakeries and whatnot, a playable sim has to buy the lot and then run the business. You'd have to actually have an owner go to the lot and hire employees, set the items for sale, etc. before the lot is an actual shop.

And yeah, Bluewater actually ships with a few families and their businesses. A bakery, toy store, flower shop, and some other various shops.

Edit: The Jacquets themselves aren't bugged really, just their cakes XD The first time I played that lot, the environment score for all the sims was critical and everyone kept complaining to Denise. It took me a while to realize that all the food in the display cases was spoiled haha :lol:

That explains everything. I find the Jacquet family very likeable, I like their stories, dramas, bakery shop but ruined with error / glitch / bad OFB updated code in the game. I've tried any way to make environmental bar up, but it always failed!! I added some expensive decorations, lamps to brighten the area, changed the chairs, tables, divided the room by walls. Environmental bar stuck red. Their customers kept complaining. And finished cooked foods on their counter are spoiled. Ha. :|

[sushigal007]

Ah, I always wondered why my sims couldn't buy food there. Guess I know who's next on my playlist.

[gazania]

I've made my own bakeries, and they've done pretty well (actually, I often make my own shopping districts ... I HOPE there aren't any tombstones in Bluewater!), but haven't played the Jacquets. Perhaps I shall now ... thank you!

[Sunbee]

The Jacquets are pretty fun for me--Denise wants Gilbert to get married and make grandbabies and he, being a romance sim, wants anything but!
I like to give Denise a secondary of family and let the bakery sell grandma's comfort soup to sims who can't make it themselves, and since I have the hack to let them gain skill points on community lots, she can get her cooking maxed and make her $100,000 while Gilbert *meet someone new +1000* over and over. Mostly I don't have them sell deserts: you can't serve deserts to the headmaster. So they sell the very high cooking point foods to my fortune sims who normally grab a juice between shifts and have no or few cooking points. J'Adore sells more seafood than anything else, but also kitchen knicknacks. I hire Lilith Pleasant to manage it. I figure she's just the sort of girl Denise would like Gilbert to settle down with once she gets her degree.
Then Gilbert can go home and date all the women he's met while Denise stomps around thinking they aren't good enough for him. But, get one pregnant and she is the most over involved grandma.

[AlexandraSpears]

I give Gilbert a secondary of Family myself and marry him off (after I adjust genetics in SimPE and make his hair naturally black).

Denise has that constant fear of Catch Yves (her husband) Cheating, yet he's dead. One time I thought I'd fixed her memories in SimPE but when she kissed another elder she got a Had an Affair memory. After that I said, forget it and left it alone. She's just around for the story--she pressures Gilbert into marrying and giving her a grandchild before she dies.

I also find it absurd that a Sim could be halfway to elder and not have any skills. What, did his mom do everything for him?

[joandsarah77]

Just more sloppiness on EA's part. Heh, well the guy does live with his mother...

[Peni Griffin]

I've known middle-aged guys who couldn't do a thing for themselves...I expect it wasn't sloppiness, but EA's way of signalling "spoiled rotten mama's boy."

[Sunbee]

Denise is active and neat and Gilbert is not. He leaves the toilet dirty and she's there to clean it before he gets out of the bathroom.
You can use the lot debugger to fix dead marriages.

[Alijah]

My impression of the family was that Denise was an overbearing perfectionist homemaker who probably did everything herself because she didn't trust her son and husband to do the dishes the proper way. And Gilbert is probably very spoiled, as evidenced by the fact that he sleeps upstairs in the nice, airy loft with a balcony and his mother has a tiny room in the back of the house.

I've never married him off because it seems like he would be hard pressed to find a woman who would put up with him like his mom did, lol

[Peni Griffin]

That's actually a classic storyline, though, Alijah - he sleeps around until he finds the woman who can take him in hand and lick him into shape, and also go toe-to-toe with his mother. What she wants him for is never quite clear to me in this sort of story, though...Possibly he has to learn to work in order to even get her interested. I'm thinking, Fortune sim, high active, low nice.