I haven't got any quite as long as that. About the longest male hair I have is that worn by Desmond Dickson-Leggat (nee Leggat) the co-founder of New Desconia (founded by Desmond Leggat and Cony Dickson).

Starting last night, I've been considering a purchase of FreeTime. New careers are always nice. However, I'm scared of the hobby system. It sounds like a huge pain in the butt. I remember the annoying pet wants in Pets, but I at least have a mod to get rid of the puppy/kitten want spam.

You'll definitely want nohobbyspam from MATY to stop the constant messages about every sim gaining or losing hobby enthusiasm - they're always gaining some enthusiasm or other, and nobody can avoid some level of cuisine enthusiasm! I actually rather like the hobbies. Some families ignore them, and some focus heavily on a hobby, which may not be their destined one. It gives retired or loner sims another option for keeping their lives interesting.

Ok so I just have to say: FreeTime is my favourite ep. I love it. I love the hobby system. I know a lot of people hate it, but I love it. For me, it's a way to further personalize each sim, because every sim has their own One True Hobby. Every thing a sim can have, from TOs to secondary aspiration increases the way that sim is unique, and OTH is one more thing. For example...if sim Alice and sim Bob both have the exact same personality and are both Knowledge sims, they're essentially the same at the start of the game. But adding a secondary Fortune aspiration to Alice and a secondary Pleasure aspiration to Bob immediately makes them extremely different from one another, even with the same personality and the same primary aspiration. And then, ok, due to them both having the same personality, the game probably went ahead and gave them both the exact same OTH, but you can change that (I nearly always do). Either reroll it with the sim blender (which takes interests into account and delivers more diverse results than game's automatic OTH assignment) or just pick one on the batbox. If Alice's OTH is Tinkering and Bob's OTH is Nature, that's another way they're immediately very different from each other. Alice the Knowledge/Fortune sim with Tinkering OTH is now set up to start a car-restoration or robotics business and Bob, being Knowledge/Pleasure with Nature OTH might set his sights on catching a golden trout. On the flip-side of that, two sims who are wildly different in every other way might end up bonding over a shared hobby. :lovestruc

Now I'll admit that the little popup messages about hobbies are annoying. I'm sure I've had most of them modded out for years but I remember a few "oh no! your sim is losing enthusiasm in that hobby you never cared about in the first place!!" messages and them setting my teeth on edge. Some hobbies certainly are a bit too easy in which to build enthusiasm. Everyone has to eat, after all, and then suddenly a sim who has no reason to care about "cuisine" beyond "yeah, I like food" wants to win a food contest. But what I find is that if I focus on just one or two hobbies for each sim, their OTH and then a possibly secondary hobby, and just ignore the rest if and when they pop up, it's quite manageable and even fun. Like I said, this is my favourite EP. I just...idk, there's so much stuff with FT: the cooking contests alone can keep me entertained for hours, just seeing who will win and which random moron will enter a bowl of cereal or a platter of burned hot dogs.

The gaming competitions are garbage, but I recently picked up a mod from Midge the Tree that's supposed to help and I'll have to try that out in game to see how it works. Apparently EAxis set gaming competitions to advertise to sims with high literacy skill so that's why no one ever joins the damn things. Anyway, Midge set it to advertise to playful sims. As it should!

And to be fair, the hobby system is unbalanced. Not all hobbies are created equal; some get all the love by the devs and some get none. (And sometimes there's logic that will leave you scratching your head, like studying Cleaning increasing enthusiasm in Nature of all things.) But every hobby can be fun and I make sure I've got a decent balance in a hood between all the available hobbies. Sometimes it can be fun to sort of make a hobby "run in a family" so a mother passes her love of sports on to her son or a father passes his love of science onto his daughter. Just kinda gives me a warm feeling. :lovestruc

I would recommend looking into what mods are available for FT and specifically hobbies. I've been doing that recently with OFB (my least fave EP), having just installed it after years of refusing to touch it. Lots of cool mods out there for sure, lots of talented modders working to fix the things they and others find annoying.

Oh, I think FT is a great EP, even with the hobby spam! Definitely one of the better TS2 EPs, anyway; it's in my top 3 with AL and NL (Pets is my least favorite/the worst, imo. It's the only one that I wouldn't have any qualms about uninstalling). The new careers are ok. It added Dance, Oceanography, Entertainment, Architecture, and Intelligence, right? Oceanography is one of the top paying careers, and Architecture is great for family sims. I use those the most. But what I love most about the EP is the new objects and interactions.

Yes, hobby wants can take over a sim's want panel, but not only does that happen with every EP, but you can also mod those wants to reduce or eliminate them. Now, some hobbies are better than others (and there's a great thread on that topic), but overall, I quite like the hobby stuff. It was an EP that finally gave sims more stuff to do and I think because of that it integrates well with your existing game. Unlike other EPs where a whole new subhood is introduced, like Uni or BV, FT is great because the new objects and interactions can be used in everyday sim life and some old objects and interactions are incorporated into the hobby system relatively well. It gave sims more dimension, I think, while giving them more stuff to do. We even got a few more alternative ways to make money, what with tinkering, pottery and sewing, cooking contests, giving financial advice and restaurant guides. Come to think of it, it also introduced secondary aspirations, the LTA bar, and aspiration benefits--all of which I like a lot. I think it's nice that sims can become platinum without fulfilling their LTW and most of the benefits are pretty good, from Grandma's Comfort Soup to Smooth Talk, to Plead with Boss, etc. Ironically, though FT is one of my favorite EPs, I haven't really played Desiderata Valley at all, though, so I can't say anything about the quality of that hood. Still, I think you'll enjoy it. Play vanilla for a while, then come back and tell us what you don't like and we'll point you to the right mods.

I completely agree with Phanomknight about FT.

There is nothing about FT I personally do not like. I love the pottery, the tinkering, the cooking contests and the hobby clubs. I love that sims can go jogging, talk to other sims about their hobbies, blog about their hobbies on a computer an share hobby tips.And all the things already mentioned by Phantomknight.

And the Garden Club, which is worth a pretty award if a sim is allowed to join after the garden has been judged

Desiderata Valley is about the only maxis hood I play now and then, because I also prefer to play my own hood - but I don't think it is essential, it could be helpful to poke around in it for a while.

There are several things that can be modded out, but I would also advise to play it without any mods first - we know by know that if player A dislikes something, player B may love it.

I don't like that Cuisine can be increased by just eating. Eating is not equal to wanting to learn to cook. XD Come to think of it though, I've never actually looked for a hack that stops that.

I just wish that there were more activities. I'd love something like tennis, or volleyball like in Sims 1. Or more swimming styles or boating.

tunaisafish's "Food Enthusiasm Fix" rebalances things in a way that seems to work out pretty well in my game. It doesn't remove all enthusiasm gain from eating, but it makes food "quality" really matter. Eating spoiled or burnt food will actually lower enthusiasm. I've used it for quite a while and I've got more sims with unwanted Games and Nature enthusiasm creeping in than I do Cuisine.

I blame Almighty Hat and her hair dumps for a lot of my hair. XD

I still find my statistics amusing sometimes... I actually cited it for one of my grad courses as an example of observable trends in statistical analysis, and the same thing I saw with my Christmas lot approaching Christmas then I'm seeing now with my Downton Abbey lot now that the Downton Abbey movie is out.

What was it you saw/are seeing?

Noticeable increases in the number of people downloading a lot, right around the time something in the real world would prompt more people to be thinking of whatever thing defines that lot...

I never knew that! My Sims cook up storms, though, like I do once in a while in RL

Why is downloading defaults so soothing... mods in general really. It’s bizzarely immensely calming I love it.

I enjoy downloading stuff for the sims. I think it's a bit like shopping, only it's free.

It's also increased if they fall asleep in their food.

I try to download as little as possible. Some things are necessary though, like PetAway, NoPetObsession, No Belching Or Farting, Elders Sleep Through The Night, and No Reacting to Rain or Snow.

I tell ya, nothing grinds my gears quite like a Sim's sleep being interrupted, or having a random stray digging holes and peeing all over the yard.

Huzzah! I figured out a decent way of making a CC-free church bell carillon for my cathedral!

One thing playing TS4 has trained into me is to delete those darn cache files every time I quit the game!

I feel like I should apologize to my downloaders... the majority of my current projects are huge lots...

But my old computer couldn't do them! So I had all these ideas that I couldn't actually do anything with until recently!

I just discovered that if you have both Lamare's YA maternity mod and ACR installed, while YAs generally do not autonomously try for baby on their own they can get pregnant through ACR's risky woohoo feature. Haha, whoops.

Sort of maybe accidentally installed a "pregnant sims wear any outfit" mod... That's not exactly what the mod description said, but what it's been doing in game is forcing my pregnant sim into her everyday clothes. Which didn't have a pregnancy morph. I tried planning her outfit at the dresser, but she didn't have a single everyday outfit with a pregnancy morph. I guess none of the Maxis outfits do? So she had to go shopping, and tbh shopping as a pregnant sim is annoying!!! Over the years I've downloaded a lot of CC clothes that say they include pregnancy morphs, but I've never actually had to use them before. I'm not a big fan of the Maxis maternity wear, but I've lived with it. I think I like the idea of having to shop for "maternity clothes" as it's somewhat realistic (most people irl who get pregnant don't fit into their regular clothes either!) and also adds a little bit of extra challenge with the costs of buying the new clothes ($200 a piece can add up!). I'm just kinda lost, tho, not sure what's going to have a preg morph and what won't, and she's now even allowed to try on everyday clothes to see if they do, even tho she can try on gym clothes that don't.

Attached a pic of her doing her pregnant walk in her no-bump formal dress due to "Outfit Sense" making her show up on a community lot in it, a pic of her in her maternity wear while shopping, and a pic of her in the new outfit she got. It looks a little weird around the belt, but it's still less weird than doing that walk without a bump.

Sounds like you might need these? http://modthesims.info/d/237740

OMG. I was wondering if there was such a thing as a pregnant morph default replacement set for Maxis clothing. But gosh that is a lot of info and a lot of stuff to download! I'm not sure how I feel about "new" preg morph and how it would compare with existing CC preg morph clothing, but I guess anything would be better than pregnant sims wandering around with flat tummies.

I never knew that you'd still get the walk even if you didn't have an outfit with a preg morph.