I wonder if anyone has this experience. When my sims goes to their business lot, their blader will automatically drops to half. when going to other lots, it is fine though (maintaining the level before they left)... is it a normal gameplay or a glitch?

edit: not just bladder, but social and fun dropped 3/4 !

It's so that the sims will use the different facilities, both playables and non-playables. Make the business some money and all. Sims won't eat at a restaurant if they're not hungry and so forth.

so it is normal? even more strange now is that I noticed the energy level jumped from about 1/4 to full when going to business lot ! :S

I've never seen needs increase when going on a business lot, but I loooong gave up on making sure my sims were happy before going to a business lot, because I knew certain of their needs would drop when they arrived anyway.

I can only say that it's always been like this in my game. For all I know, someone can come forth and tell us that it's caused by a sim virus we both have and that sims are really supposed to do the cha cha, when arriving on community lots or... something. We'll see!

Yes, it is normal. Although my business owners tend to arrive with motives in the same state as they are after a reset, with everything full except bladder at around half and hunger around 3/4 full. Townies arrive with lower fun and social so that they'll do things on the lot, as Thax said.

The strange thing is when going to a community lot not owned by my sims, the need levels are ok, this need level change issue only seems to happen when my sims go to a lot they own ....

Yes, again that is normal. I don't know why it's programmed that way. It just...is.

There are quite some quirky programming decisions in the sims 2, like not being able to skill in community lots. I have to download a mod to get around this problem, I am so forever grateful to the amazing sims 2 modding community

Indeed, a vanilla game would not be nearly as awesome as the one I have, which is custom-modded to my exact specifications. Modders are amazing.

What are your favourite mods, iCad?

I can't play without 1) slow need decay mod, 2) shorter uni mod (oh uni is so unrealistically long compared to other age group ), 3) school no fun decay (yeah children and teenagers are extremely boring to play if their fun drops like crazy at school, and they have to do homework which further reduces their fun)

I've kinda been looking for a mod to make needs decay faster. The game becomes a dance through a field of roses, once the uhm.. lifetime want reward thingies, are all unlocked. My sim can wake up at 7 am and at 11 pm, their energy is only halfway down. I have the opposite problem in Sims 3, where it takes an entire day to fulfill one task, so there is simply no time to fulfill needs. A middle thing would be great.

I am kind of more interested in telling stories with my sims than tending their basic needs so slow decay works fine with me, but I don't want to freeze their needs at max with cheat since I want to see my sims cook

I've never has fun and energy drop when my sims go to their business lot, I would look into that.The only thing that drops to half is bladder, just like it does when you first move a sim into a house.

My game is also modded to within an inch of it's life, but since we are talking 300 or more mods it's a bit hard to pick favourites.

Very true. I have 585 hacks and mods. I barely remember which things are modded and which things are game mechanics.

Like Jo and Thax, I have hundreds of mods. I've broken the 1000 barrier, in fact.

But really, mods are such a personal thing. What one person will find essential, another will totally not want. Like, ACR is one I won't play without, but it's one that Jo up there doesn't want to touch because it doesn't suit how she plays. I won't play without Inteen, but a lot of people don't want to use it because it does tend to conflict with a lot of other mods, so you have to A) be choosy about your other mods and B) Sometimes do the "load order dance" before everything will work right, which can be a pain in the ass. For me, the work is totally worth it, but the same isn't true for everyone. I like aliens and pregnant manpixels in my game, so I like the hacked telescope I have that allows Sims to choose autonomously to be abducted whenever they want plus Boiling Oil's "Alien Experiments" mod, which makes it so that there are all sorts of possible outcomes after an abduction, not just alien pregnancy. Some people like same-sex pregnancy mods so that same-sex couples can have babies that are genetically both partners', but I don't want such a thing because I prefer a bit of realism here and there.

Basically, the thing to do is to decide what features you want (and don't want) in your game for your playing purposes/amusement, and then hunt down mods that suit you, and then you hope to God that they will all play nicely with each other. No one's list is necessarily going to be the same as any other person's.

But, for the sake of discussion...You, jimbbq, have said that you're a storyteller. I'm not, so my wants/needs when it comes to the game are going to be much different than yours. I've also been playing for a long time, so I'm generally looking to make the game harder, not easier. So, I have "Harder jobs," "slower skilling," and "bigger bills" mods. I don't much care about needs decaying, so long as they do decay because my Sims spend a lot of time free-willing. If their needs didn't decay, they'd stand there and do nothing, which isn't very interesting. For me, the things they choose to do autonomously are what defines them as characters.

In any case, the mods I absolutely won't play without are ACR, Inteen, Community Time (which makes it so that Sims don't "relive" time spent on community lots), and the Sim Blender, for messing around with various things in-game, without having to use outside programs like SimPE. Everything else is more negotiable. And, in fact, I'll use different set-ups in different neighborhoods in different user accounts on my computer. Like, in some neighborhoods, I want age-modding, which makes the life stages longer and more realistically-proportioned, but sometimes I want to play a neighborhood that moves faster, so I don't use age-modding in all of them. Basically, I like to do different things in different neighborhoods so that if I get bored with one, I can switch to another that I play entirely differently for a while. Then when I get tired of that one, I move on to another, completely different, one.

Anyway, some mods I like:

The aforementioned hacked telescope + Alien Experiments
Homework sometimes, so kids/teens don't have homework every day
The one that makes it so that kids have varying levels of fun at school, according to their personality. Some come home with a full fun bar, some come home with a totally depleted one and others are somewhere in the middle, all dictated by how playful they are. (The more playful they are, the less they like school.)
Various vampire mods to make them more realistic. Like, they can kill other Sims.
The one that allows any Sim to have any LTW regardless of aspiration. I love it when a Sim's LTW totally conflicts with their personality. It's more challenging that way.
No social worker, so I can have kids that fail out of school (Or, you know PLAY OUTSIDE AND GET HOT/COLD) without fear of them being taken away
Bigger family mods, so that I can play huge polyamorous households. Or huge hippie communes. Or a military barracks with lots of resident grunts. Or a boarding school. Or...Well, 8 Sims on a lot is just sooooooo limiting. :p
Pretty much anything from Simlogical, really. I'm currently in love with the keyed door patch, so that I can make "apartments" that aren't really apartments but rather just rooms/areas of a building that only designated Sims have access to. The school system is also awesome, so that I can run a player-owned school that a neighborhood's children can attend or so I can have families that homeschool, etc.
The one that makes toddlers sleep through the night, and the one that makes elders sleep through the night because otherwise it's just ridiculous.
Many fixes made by Cyjon, which take care of a lot of things that I, personally, find annoying/illogical in the game. Like, being able to dance when there's no music playing. That just shouldn't happen.
Community-lot skilling, since I play such that Sims aren't necessarily allowed/able to skill on their home lots and must visit various community lots to do so.
The Visitor Controller, so I can control what kinds of Sims show up on various lots. Like, if I want to make a gay bar, I can make it so that only homosexual/bisexual Sims will be generated on the lot. Or I can make teen clubs that only teens show up on. Or I can make lots specifically for Sims in specific careers, etc.

And on and on and on.

I decided to check properties on my mod folder... um 1177? O_O Okay so that's just a liiiitle bit over 300. *When did that happen?!*

As iCad says modding is personal to how you play although I'm sure some things are common to us all. I have no ACR, no Inteen, no hacked telescope or alien experiments. I don't have bigger bills but I do have 'halved wages' and certain rules so that probably balances out to be the same. Critcal fixes I won't mention, but they are all there including No Sim Loaded.

Things I place on every lot
Bat Box
Simblender
Day setter
Season setter

Must have sanity fixes
No waking to weather
Coffee cup fix so sims wont walk a mile
Abort bed making
No in the zone sounds
Customers no complaining
Customers respect privacy

Play mods
Community lot time project
Community lot skilling
Visitor controller
Simlogical school system
Homework sometimes
Harder grades (school)
Harder grades (uni)
48 hour Uni
Summer holidays
Slower aspiration gain
Slower skilling
Double Aging
Any LTW
2 day pregnancy with larger households. This was made for me as a request.
More sane social worker
Watch kids enabled on all lots
No townie neighbours
Kids can Cook
Toddler Riders to visit community lots
Elders sleep all night
Elders no age discrimination
Elder bladder

Then there are a few other items I could not live without
Toddler sleep mat
Toddler never ending sippy cup
Chris hatch buyable baby clothes mod
Baby clothes and hair
Business Runs You sign
Business selector
Other simlogical items like security tokens, prison tokens, pay door, cat teleporter and so on and so forth. If it's there I am likely to have it.

*points and laughs at Jo* Glad to know I'm not the only one with 1,000+ At this moment, I have 1,356 files in my "Hacks" folder.

And I forgot a multi-PT mod on my "essentials" list so that my hordes of aliens are not all related to each other.

Haha. All the crazy people please step to the left.

*steps far to the left...Where I usually am....except when I'm not. Ah, the perils of being socially liberal and fiscally conservative*

As for numbers of files....Well, to be fair there are certain mods, like ACR and Inteen and multi-PTs and SimWardrobe's packing stations and a number of others, that include multiple files to make them work. I just counted the ACR files, and there are 28 of them. So, really, those 28 files should be counted as only one mod. So....We might not be as bad as we think, Jo.

But I don't have ACR, so I can't claim those 28 files so yes I think I am that bad. There are some that could be moved. I have body shop sliders in my mods folder and a face fix, those could go under body shop instead. Then again I have the postal system in my post office folder not my mods folder, so yeah...

Well, yeah, I suppose it does depend on what you call "mods." Everything in my "Hacks" folder only changes/fixes game behavior. Mostly. At least, that's the intention. Technically the packing stations don't do that, and they're in my "Hacks" folder when they probably shouldn't be, and those have a bunch of files each. There are also, so I see now that I'm looking at it, some documentation text files in there that shouldn't be in there. And the body hair thing probably shouldn't be in there, and that's 6 or 8 files...

Still, I'm pretty sure that when all is said and done, I'm still over 1,000. *is either pathetic or awesome, depending on your viewpoint*

Since I try to stay away from any NPC that can cause havoc on my lots; particularly since I have ACR and ACR-related mods, the Blender is a must. The Charlatan is dispensed of forthwith. And I also put the blender on vacation lots to nullify any relationship between the tour guide and my Sims, ever since I had a tour guide call my Sim. Granted, he is not one of the really bad, stay 50-fi away from NPCs. but it has never been fully established whether anyone should have anything to do with him. (Note that in the Wikis related to NPCs ... http://sims.wikia.com/wiki/Game_gui...e_to_play_as%3F, for instance, he's not believed by many in the know to be safe. It's not definite,but he's suspicious, and I don't want anything to do with him, just in case.)

Sometimes, I fill all motives on a lot with the Blender because I want those particular Sims to party all night. Despot though I am, I believe that my Sims need a little all-night recreation from time to time. I almost always at least fill the bladder motive. Sims walking off the lot because they need to go potty, or whimpering near the bathrooms is a pain to me. Ditto with hygiene. My Sims use great deodorant ... what can I tell you? (And that eliminates the need for the Sim deodorant modded item.)

I tend to be careful with mods and hacks, because way too often, I'm finding that they modify things I DON'T want modified. And some of the undesirable modifications are pretty strange. I used a kids' sleepover hack for a while, until I found it was affecting my witches' behavior. Another mod also affected witches ... it had to do with witches wearing regular clothes. For some reason,with this mod, my witches refused to EVER wear witch clothes, and they couldn't get them in their wardrobes. So I think that when all is said and done, I have only about 40 - 50 main mods/hacks/modded items (I'm not counting the 28 ACR files separately, so that might be cheating. Boo, me. I suppose if you include all the files in a folder, it might creep about 100 . When I add a new mod/hack/modded item, I back up my game, test in a junk hood, and watch every .... single ... action, particularly those annoying jump bugs or refusals to perform certain actions.

Needless to say, the behavior I'm modifying has to really, really annoy me. Some do, such as toddlers playing in the toilet.

Some other annoyances I've fixed with mods, many echoing what others have already written:

No complaining customers.
No runaway teens.
No flyaway bird. (Stick around, Polly!)
Toddler bed. (Put yourself to sleep, kiddo.)
Simlogical School System (I use my schools as cram schools on weekends.)
And the newest one someone here recommended (thank you, nice person): Simlogical's clothing signs. (This is a fancy-dress restaurant, you sloppy Sim. Get some decent clothes on!)
No age discrimination. (Get to work, Grandma or Grandpa!)

I have 14 files for ACR.
With these 14, I come to a total of 109 files for mod's/hacks.
I only have a few that modded out sim behaviour that got on my nerves at a certain point:
1. Toddlers whining at the top or bottom of the stairs.
That's when Rebeca's stairmod came in, which also includes puppies and kittens.
2. Adults playing in the bathtub
It was fun a couple of times, then I didn't want to see it anymore (No playing in the bathtub mod)
I prefer no one doing it over everyone, and thus also adults and elders, doing it
3. Too often pillow fighting adults and elders
Same here. For now I don't want to see it anymore at all.

Also gathered a couple of fixes about for example congratiolating, toddler playing with toilet, a.o.

Well, somewhat embarrassingly I have you both beaten. I just counted 2035 files in my hacks folder.

*points and laughs at Charity* My God, what all have you got in there?