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Wildlife and Minor Pet Hunting

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Created by spherefish View Policy / About Me View all Downloads  Tumblr

Uploaded 22nd May 2022 at 12:10 PM · Updated 28th May 2022 at 2:54 AM by spherefish


Are you tired of those annoying birds, rodents and reptiles roaming around in your sims' gardens and tormenting their fingers whenever they dare to go near them? Do you sometimes wish your sims could just make them disappear? Well, now is their chance to take revenge! Hunt those critters and take their meat–and maybe their friends will think twice the next time they are about to chew on your poor sim's finger…

Updates
Version 1.1
Updated on May 28th 2022
  • Added a hunting interaction for deer and raccoons.
  • Added an autonomous hunting interaction for NPC sims with certain traits
  • Fixed an error that would appear when trying to play a hunting reaction for sims that have no suitable traits for reactions.
  • Added some more tuning values to make it possible to turn off minor pet, non-minor pet and autonomous minor pet hunting

Note that even if you are not interested in the new interactions, you should still download the newest version of this mod because it fixes the hunting reaction bug!

What it does
This is a pure scripting mod that adds a “Hunt!” interaction to all deer, raccoons and minor pets (birds, snakes, rodents, etc.) in the game. Sims will walk to the critter and try to “hunt” it. If the hunt is successful, a random amount of meat (usually steak, see below for other drops) will be added to their inventory. Depending on their traits they might react to the hunt in different ways. These reactions can be positive or very negative, a detailed list on which traits trigger which specific reaction is provided below.

I got the idea for this mod when I was playing the Test of Time challenge. One thing that annoyed me was the fact that my stone age sims seemed to be constantly surrounded by wildlife, yet they could only eat fish to get their dose of proteins. This mod provides an alternative way for your sims to get meat without having to buy it at the store, particularly useful if you are playing in a historic setting.

How to hunt
The “Hunt!” interaction is only available for humanoid sims, so it won't show up for cats, dogs or horses. By default it is enabled for the ages child or above, though you can set the kAllowKidsToHunt tuning value to false if you don't want the interaction to show up for children. Note that right now, the mod only affects minor pets–this means that your sims won't be able to hunt deer, raccoons or wild horses. As of version 1.1, your sims can hunt deer and raccoons! The interaction works very similar to minor pet hunting but the animation is different and your sims will get more meat from a successful hunt. Children won't be able to hunt deer but they can still hunt raccoons.

The success of the hunt depends on your sim's WildLifeFriend skill. If the hunt is not successful, the critter will simply run away and your sim might get bitten. Hunting increases the WildLifeFriend skill, so if your sims keep trying, they'll eventually get better at it. If you don't want the skill to increase by hunting, you can change the kSkillPointsGained tuning value to zero.

Version 1.1 adds an autonomous hunting interaction for NPC sims with certain traits. However, they will not get any drops in order to prevent their inventories from getting filled up with meat. They'll also get a cooldown after getting bitten, so townies won't be constantly running around hunting minor pets on your community lots. If you want to turn off autonomous hunting altogether, you can change the kAllowAutonomousMinorPetHunting tuning value to „false“.

Drops
After a successful hunt your sims will usually get 1-2 steaks but there are some exceptions:
  • Hunting a raccoon will double the expected drops, so instead of 1-2 steaks, your sims will get 2-4.
  • Hunting a deer will triple the expected drops, so your sims will get 3-6 steaks.
  • Sims might get a roast drop after hunting a big bird.
  • Vampires will get plasma fruits to simulate the “vegetarian vampire” lifestyle from Twilight.
Also, Werewolves get a multiplier to the drop maximum which is 2 by default. Note that all of these values can be adjusted via tuning.



Hunting reactions
Certain traits may cause your sims to react to a successful hunt in different ways! So while hunting might sound fun to your evil adventurer sim, the same might not apply to his animal-loving vegetarian brother. While I personally think it's more fun to discover the reactions as you play the game, here's a full list for those who'd rather know in advance:



Tuning
The XML file included in the package has a bunch of tuneable values, you can adjust the drop rate, hunting success chance, turn off skill dependency and much more!



Compatibility
This is a pure scripting mod, so it should not cause any major conflicts. However, any mod that messes with the MinorPet classes or the WildLifeFriend skill might cause it to not work properly.

This mod was built and tested with patch version 1.67. Since this is a mod for minor pets, you will need the Pets Expansion Pack for it to work.

Note that this is my first scripting mod, so if there are any problems with it, please let me know!

Future work
Some stuff I'd like to add to this mod if I find the time:
  • Implement a function that makes sims go out and hunt for certain prey automatically
  • Make the strings translatable, since they are hardcoded right now
  • Get a better hunting animation
  • Add special hunting reactions for Werewolves and Vampires
  • Add a special hunting interaction for dogs that works similar to cat hunting (not sure on that one, since it might already exist as a mod somewhere)
  • Maybe create a base game compatible version of this mod that allows Sims to hunt insects for “Tofu” (since there's been some news about insects as a future meat alternative)

Special Thanks

Type: Skilling Additional Functionality

Tags: #hunting, #hunt, #minor pets, #wild life, #script mod, #new interactions