I cannot say for sure that this will work without the hospital mod, but I'm pretty sure that it does. Chris Hatch altered John Brehaut's deco heart monitor to be able to diagnose patients (and give them diseases; don't let your finger slip or Zack might end up with an STD XD).

I cba searching through Chris' stuff to see if this is even apart from the hospital mod and he doesn't mind people reuploading his stuff, so here.

http://www.simfileshare.net/download/5408719/

He's better!!

At about 8:30 a.m. the game gave me the diagnosis I was looking for:


He took a bubble bath (as simsample recommended). Then we fed him on nice warm breakfast pancakes, fresh from the oven. He tried to keep away from other family members. After breakfast he went back upstairs and relaxed on his bed again, while reading an interesting book. We must have been doing something right, because at 10:35 a.m. we got this message:



I think we'll still keep him home from work. (He's not supposed to start until 2 p.m.) I reckon he deserves some convalescent leave. The Fandom Sims Wiki says Sims coming home from work or school have a 1% chance of getting a cold, but I find that hard to believe: Zack is the very first Sim I've seen with a cold.

Not the first time. I remember when the whole Moltke house was sick.

Well, unless you have a mod, bubble baths and relaxing in bed don't help with sickness at all, and can actually make it worse.

Why would it make it worse? I thought you were just supposed to keep them off their feet.

The game just checks if they are sitting or sleeping. Neither taking a bath nor relaxing on a bed count as sitting or sleeping, so it's exactly the same as if they were standing, as far as the disease is concerned. However, it's also extremely hard to die to disease without any disease mods, so you probably wouldn't notice the effect.

Bubble baths increase comfort, I recommended them for those times when a sim has a coughing fit and the comfort drops.

Sitting down also increases comfort unless you bought the cheapest possible chairs, and bubble baths in particular take ages and ages to complete, all the while you are not getting the comfort bonus of having finished the bubble bath and are also getting the not sitting malus applied.

I know, but @AndrewGloria , like myself and countless others, enjoy telling stories with our sims, and having them do activities which we enjoy ourselves. If I am feeling unwell, a bubble bath helps me, and so I treat my sims to a bubble bath on such occasions, too. 'Have your sim sit in a chair' is not nearly as nice as 'have your sims take a nice bubble bath'. If it was just down to data and code and figures, then I would just mod my game to max out everyting and my sims would never get sick in the first place. But that's NO FUN AT ALL, you can't appreciate light without darkness and you can't have love without pain. It's a life sim, not an efficiency game.

Sure, but you're saying you recommend it as a matter of strategy, not for enhanced roleplaying, or whatever. Personally, I would say that if you want that kind of behavior with the disease system and don't care much about the fact that it's incredibly hard to die of diseases, I would install simler's disease mod, which focuses strongly on rewarding you for maintaining good motives and high aspiration. It is also incredibly easy to beat, though, so it's not great if you actually want some challenge to diseases.

I have the realistic sickness mod and I've been using relaxing in bed to keep sick sims off their feet. I must be lucky that noone died.

What? I don't remember saying anything like that. I just said bubble baths can raise comfort!

*waits for long tedious 10 page semantic argument with kestrellyn about how I did, IN FACT, say that, ad nauseam ad nauseam*

I would recommend also the @Blueybre Antibodies mod to stop them from immediately getting sick again. I had one apartment lot where someone brought in flu from outside and neigbours kept re-infecting each other until I installed this.

If you are using that mod, then it would be, yes. You can see when they are gaining and losing points with the info option on the batbox, and you can see that relaxing on the bed causes them to lose points.

I've been using the batbox for years and I never knew that it had that option. TIL.

Edit: Ah, I think I've figured out why resting cures my sims. I only send them to do it if they're too high energy to sleep and Pescado's Plague study says:

+4 if the sim's comfort/energy (each) is >= 50 (75%)

It would be nice if there was a mod to make resting and bathing actually help sick sims though.

I have that too. I literally installed it out of desperation. I had a household of five adults who kept making each other sick. I think each of them was saved from the reaper at least 2-3 times before I installed the antibodies mod. Talk about panic, it was one of the four founding households for my BACC hood. If they'd all died that would've been half my founders all at once!

Is there someplace in the game or SimPE to keep track of how many dance contests a Sim has won?

I have Lamare's 50 LTWs mod and Julius Caesar filled his original LTW to get to the top of the Adventurer career and now has a LTW to win 30 dance contests. I think he has won 4 but I'm curious if there is a easy way to keep track of it.

I made an object specifically for tracking Lamare's LTWs: https://modthesims.info/showthread.php?t=676275 At some point I need to actually finish testing everything.

No need to do that for the resting (relaxing) path. While relaxing in bed, Sims are considered to be "sitting", which in an unmodded game removes 6 disease points per hour (sleeping removes 8). The +4 per hour only applies if the Sim is neither sleeping nor sitting, so for all intents and purposes, a Sim relaxing, sitting on a sofa, or sleeping is always better than them just having high motives.


I can take care of the bathing part with a quick mod though! Watch this space.

I have the mod, I just wasn't able to find the competitions option before I posted the question.

Try this @Charity - quick and dirty, so I didn't do much testing (I'd have to actually get a Sim sick first and then have them bathe and keep track of their disease token at the same time...).

This small mod will add the following behaviour when either Bathing or Bubble Bathing:
- The game will keep track of the Sim's Hygiene before they enter the first "bathing loop" (where they wash their arms or legs).
- When the Sim is told to stop bathing, or reaches max Hygiene, the game will run a calculation based on how much Hygiene the Sim gained while bathing.

If the Sim gains at least 150 Hygiene (e.g. by starting with stinky clouds and finishing at full hygiene), their "average care" increases by +10.
If the Sim gains 100 to 149 Hygiene (so at least from "middle" to full), their "average care" increases by +6.
If the Sim gains 60 to 99 Hygiene (could be an autonomous Bubble Bath, for example), their "average care" increases by +4.
If the Sim gains 20 to 59 Hygiene (e.g. if you interrupt them early, or they didn't really need a bath to begin with), their "average care" increases by +2.
If the Sim gains less than 20 Hygiene, no gain is achieved. No "bath scumming" for you!

- The game will then apply this "average care" change to their disease token. "Average care" is the amount by which the disease's severity will decrease (if positive) or increase (if negative) when the Disease Controller runs its cycle. While I could also decrease the severity directly, it's only at the "average care updates" that a Sim is actually cured, and I don't want a Sim's disease to be stuck with a negative severity value until the next update.

The mod is compatible with whatever disease mods you might use, as it modifies the bathing routine rather than the disease routine.
Since it modifies a semi-global, it will work with both Maxis and custom bathtubs and shower-tubs.

Please let me know if there are any conflicts. I didn't find any with a quick search, but I don't have a view of every mod in the world.

@Blueybre That's interesting to know and are you saying bubble baths do not count as the sim relaxing? I always thought that counted and had my sims take them when sick.

"keep track of their disease token at the same time"
I would love to test this, how do I do this ^ I don't use any disease mods.

Has a coughing fit over @simsample post.

I mean "relaxing" as in the "Relax" interaction on beds. Taking a bath is not relaxing. It just gains Hygiene and Comfort while the Sim is bathing. For bubble baths, it's less Hygiene and more Comfort than for a normal bath.

In an unmodded game, only Energy and Comfort matter, and only if the Sim is neither sleeping nor sitting, so Sims would be perfectly fine never taking a bath.


You'll probably want to use the Batbox to Show Plague Info. That shows the raw info of every property that the disease token has. The text box doesn't update automatically, so if you want an overview of the Sim's disease progression, you'll have to click the option again every time you want to check.

Does relaxing actually count as sitting? I'm pretty sure things like relaxing on the bed or lounging on the couch don't set that flag, since they are not in the sitting position.

I looked in the code for Interaction - Relax (objects.package from M&G) and yes, relaxing on the bed does set the Sitting flag. The excerpt is above.