Hello!

I hope this is the correct place to post this. I'm currently trying to figure out how the "Treasure Box" from Fishing works in The Sims 3. Apparently, according to the Wiki and the Fishing XML File, there's supposed to be a "Treasure Box" which has a loot table defined for it.

[IMG][/IMG]

(This one I mean)

There's also a probability for catching "Box" in every Spawner along with other fish. Yet I've never caught one in game in all those years.
Has anyone ever caught one? Or possibly even worked with that mechanic before?
If I get it to work properly, I'd love to make a XML Tuning Mod with a custom loot table, I think it'd be really cool to fish up some random things along with fish. So far I've tried putting the chances for "Box" in Fishing XML for all Spawners to ridiculously high numbers, yet no catches ingame.

I think it could be an outdated mechanic, too, as the default loot table only contains items from base game & world adventures, so it was possibly removed / accidently broke at a later patch?
Just speculation though, I hope someone knows a bit more about this!

Thanks for reading!
-Mio

From a quick look at the FullBuild package, it even looks like there was a unique animation for fishing up the box. I may just be imagining it, but I even feel like I have a distant memory of seeing it.
I believe the object is the fishingChest, which you can find in S3OC. It isn't attached to a script itself, so it would probably take more digging to trace back how that object gets spawned. There's a few references to the box under FishHere, in the gameplay scripts, but my knowledge taps out at this point.

Have you tried removing all other options from a spawner? There might be some more convoluted math involved that is still favoring other fish from the table.

I definitely caught the box early on in the game's life- perhaps it was destroyed in a later patch?

Good idea! Just tried that, but no luck either. Now the Sim fishes for days straight without any catches at all, it disregards the Box completely it seems.



Thanks for confirming! I think remember seeing the animation in very old gameplay videos, too, years ago. So probably something about that box broke / isn't conifgured correctly (anymore) in some patch. I will try to do some more digging, but since I'm just getting started with modding, there's yet not much I can do other than rummaging through xml files.

I've also seen this in the code (spent a lot of time reading the fishing code when building the cat fishing skill) and have never actually seen the box in the game.

I wonder if this is fixable. Hmmm.

So after some digging, it looks like the reason the Box does not appear is because it lacks an entry in the FishData. Whenever you place down a spawner, the game takes the tuning that says what fish types can spawn from it, and filters out any that do not exist in the list of valid FishData (i.e. fish added by an expansion pack that is not installed). The game considers Boxes a type of fish and marks them as eligible to spawn from every spawner, but because there isn't actually a Box entry in the FishData dictionary, it is pruned and thus cannot ever spawn. My guess is that there was a dummy FishData entry for the Box initially, but it was removed in a later patch.

Re-adding an entry for Box to the Fishing XML in GameplayData allows you to catch the Box as expected, but it also seems to break the Collection Journal. I'll need to look into that further.

Oh wow, this is amazing news! I really hope there's a way to get it to work properly!

I remember the old box early on in the game, but you can catch it while using the TS3 Store, Wishing Well.



Not sure if certain traits increase the odds of catching it?

When looking around, I came across this mod from 2011 (All Fish Buyable in Grocery Store, https://modthesims.info/d/420672/al...atch-6-2-4.html) that contains a modified version of the old fishing xml, which indeed had an entry for Box (assuming the original one as the mod only made fish buyable, so probably the last "canbuyfromstore"-line was added / modified only if anything) under Fish - copy pasted from there:

<Fish>
<Hex>Box</Hex>
<WaterTypes>7</WaterTypes>
<Level>3</Level>
<MinWeight>1</MinWeight>
<MaxWeight>10</MaxWeight>
<OverMax>False</OverMax>
<SkillPoints>160</SkillPoints>
<MedatorName>fishingChest</MedatorName>
<EffectSize>Small</EffectSize>
<CanBuyFromStore>True</CanBuyFromStore>
</Fish>

Adding this (tried both with and without the canbuyfromstore argument) had the same effect as your experiment did - box is catchable with correct loot table, animation and all, but the Fishing tab under collection journal is empty now. Hope there's a way to fix that ... tried looking for anything journal-related in gameplay.data, but no luck (yet).