What hobbies are your Sims normally destined for?

Currently, nearly every person in the Laney family is either destined for science or sports. I'm still waiting for arts and crafts.

What sun signs and aspirations are they? Most of my sims are either Cancers or Pisces and they tend to have family aspirations: Invariably they have a predisposition for Tinkering. I can't remember when I've naturally gotten someone interested in Literature. There's a hack out there to change the hobby interest.

It depends on combinations of personality traits. Here's the full list:

(I copypasta'd this from the Sims Wiki):
Arts and Crafts: sloppy and nice
Cuisine: lazy and neat
Film and Literature: lazy and shy
Fitness: outgoing and active
Games: playful and grouchy
Music and Dance: outgoing and serious
Nature: sloppy and playful
Science: serious and neat
Sports: active and grouchy
Tinkering: shy and nice

My sims commonly end up with Tinkering, Arts & Crafts, Cuisine most commonly, and Sports, Film & Lit, and Nature least commonly, but I muck with their OTH using the Batbox from MATY to either set it to what I think their individual personality has determined or what they have the most interest points in after the child or teen lifestage. OTH doesn't really matter, though: it's not like having a One True Hobby of Fitness causes the Sim to actually want to do it more or makes them build hobby points faster. There's no gameplay effect, so you only really need to set it to something different if you want added flavor.

I have a ton of tinkering and nature sims. It gets annoying, actually, because there's barely any variety. I use the hobby adjustor from Sim Wardrobe to change.hobbies.

Hobby spread in Prosperity (359 total Sims, living and dead):

Arts & Crafts: 4.74%
Cuisine: 6.69%
Film & Literature: 0.56%
Fitness: 15.32%
Games: 12.81%
Music & Dance: 10.31%
Nature: 5.01%
Science: 14.76%
Sports: 13.93%
Tinkering: 15.04%

The problem is that Fitness and Sports are lumped together in my mind as "oh, darn, the active hobbies," so that looks like a walloping 29% of my Sims. (As opposed to Tinkering, Arts, and Nature, which I consider the useful hobbies, since I like Sims to craft and garden...a lot. Not play solo soccer.)

I think Sports, Film & Literature, and Nature are the hardest hobbies to have to intentionally build (in that order.)

For Sports, the basketball hoop and especially the soccer goal drain energy so quickly that I feel like you can't build hobby points fast enough - although the discovery that the Execuputter career reward is good for sports enthusiasm was a wonderful discovery (thanks again to whoever pointed that out!) and the punching bag will also provide a boost without draining energy quite as quickly as soccer. (Fitness isn't nearly as bad: I usually have my sims treadmill/weightlift to gain Body points when they need them, and some will autonomously jump rope.)

For Film and Literature, I think the challenge is making sure that the TV isn't on the culinary channel, along with the fact that I rarely have my sims read books - the associated fun on "Read Book" isn't nearly as high as something like playing the piano, and you don't get the social boost like there is with the chessboard. Also, unlike Nature, Tinkering, or Culinary, you don't get the boost from studying at the bookcase - I wish studying from the bookcase would build Literature enthusiasm instead of the others.

Nature, again, is problematic because I don't usually send my sims out birdwatching or butterfly-chasing unless they roll the want.

Culinary is easiest by far - just cooking and eating boosts it! Music & Dance is nice because either the stereo or the instruments work for it, and Games is second-easiest after Culinary (and definitely easiest for kids) - although I don't know if that's true for everyone, or if that's just because my playstyle often includes sending a pair of Sims to the chessboard to make friends, especially in a large household where I don't want to have to pay attention to only one Sim - I can leave them alone and they build relationship points instead of having to constantly queue interactions.

We must play very differently. My Sims build enthusiasm in nature and in literature without my trying, I do have to push them a little bit with sports, and with cooking it's easy to build, but then it falls off.

My Sims just can't cook enough to maintain that enthusiasm once they've earned it because my Sim families are just not large enough and there are too many good cooks in each family and too many left-overs to finish up. Of course, they could blog about it or read the paper, but they're usually too busy working on other goals to spend much time on those pursuits.

Nature is one of the easiest hobbies to maintain enthusiasm for my Sims because they build it whenever they rake or smell the flowers. Many of my Sims like to fish and garden too.

@Managaroo: I'm so impressed that you could specify your Sims' hobbies inclinations by percentages for an entire neighborhood!

My Sims all turn on movies and begin building film and literature enthusiasm even when I don't want them too . Sports isn't too difficult if I have them watch a game with others or check out the newspaper now and again, but it does take more thought to maintain in my game than literature or nature.

A few different things about playstyles that strike me from what you've said:

-My sims don't autonomously smell flowers often. Also, I use Perfect Plants, so there's very little watering - that hack is invaluable for mansions. The majority of my normal Sim homes don't have much in the way of landscaping or ponds: the only ones who get ponds are the Sims who live in my more rural shopping district. Everyone else is in cookie-cutter suburbia, where the yards aren't even that large.

-I play with extended families, so my average family size is probably larger. I think the minimum household size is 3, and that's when I'm just starting out in the first generation with two parents and a child (and then they'll always have a pet or two to keep things interesting.) Later on, the minimum is more like 5, and it's not uncommon to have much larger households. (My userstartup.cheat is appropriately modified.) Thus, I need Sims to cook - and if the household has built up extra funds, making and storing leftovers is always useful, particularly for when a house is going to have a lot of children later on.

-I mostly ignore the newspaper, to the point where I didn't know you could increase Sports enthusiasm with it. Mostly it gets made into an airplane or recycled.

That's interesting, though. While One True Hobby percentage would show if you have neat/nice/lazy/playful Sims in your 'hood (if you don't muck with the OTH like I do), actually talking about what sort of hobbies are easiest for you to build could show a lot about playstyle.

I find it interesting to be able to retrieve the OTH data for reports, but where data reporting has really paid off is in aspirations. I randomize all aspirations (except for Elves, who get Knowledge as their primary), and sometimes it feels to me that "all" my Sims are Romance and Pleasure, my least favorite. Turns out Pleasure is the third most common aspiration and Romance is dead last. Bias will always influence perception.

Back to hobbies: It's interesting to see how the activities we favor in the game influence our perception of the hobbies. All of my Sims will naturally pick up a little cuisine and a little music enthusiasm without my intervention. Everything else takes some work...and sometimes the enthusiasm-building options I favor for a given hobby are in direct opposition to the personality algorithm for that hobby. For games, I prefer that my Sims play chess. Know who hates playing chess? Playful Sims. And I don't even know why all of my science enthusiasts whine when I send them to the telescope. Yo, science Sim. There are only three activities in the game that will build your enthusiasm. Do this one because watching you watch ants bores me.

Games and tinkering are the most abundant in my game. I rarely ever get Science

I haven't had FreeTime very long, so not all of my sims even have OTHs. My impression is that the most frequent OTHs are Music and Dance, Sports, and Fitness.

Everybody has at least a little cuisine enthusiasm because everybody eats, everybody shares cooking chores, and I tend to save leftovers (if they're even generated in my large households - the Hawkinses, who need leftovers most often, seldom have any because everybody scarfs down the food as fast as it's made) for emergencies.

Everybody has Music and Dance enthusiasm, and many have quite a bit, without my trying, because in most of my households the stereo is on all the time. This is a holdover from Sims1, where I discovered that if you leave the stereo on all the time, when people drop in, they'll dance with each other and give the active sim time to make them a meal. This is less of a concern in Sims2, but the only downside to leaving it on is if you get fed up of the music, and with all the different stations and my short rotations, plus the ability to add MP3s, this hasn't been a problem. Also, dancing is a common courting want. My couples will classic dance, slow dance, and serenade each other up a storm. Add to this that I put instruments on several of my community lots - Doc Alan's, Sim Center North, Midnight Flows, St. Elvis's Wedding Chapel, and Drama Acres Park - and sims have lots of chances to build musical enthusiasm without any intervention from me.

Most of my core families have high nature enthusiasm because fishing and vegetable gardening are culturally important to them. As a birder myself, I get a kick out of the birdwatching, and I like sending sims on hikes together. I picture them heading up the mountain to the edge of the danger zone where the mines collapsed, and cataloging the new mutations in the flora and fauna due to all that unobtainium in the environment.

Kids often have high fitness enthusiasm because a little quick rope-jumping tends to be the most convenient quick fun boost at home and going swimming in the park after school is the fastest way to fill the fun bar; also, Marco Polo is a social activity. Men often have high fitness enthusiasm because fit male sims are yummy and fat ones are hard to dress well. (Though I hasten to add that my two favorite male sims, Ernest Munny and Harris Hawkins, are pretty fat!) Sims whose SOs have fitness, fatness, or body point turn-ons/offs are encouraged or discouraged in this enthusiasm as appropriate.

The Sim State premade students have a fair amount of art interest implied in their bios, and I kept that even when I changed their actual career goals to align with their LTWs. Allegra and Martin Gorey and Erik Swain have both had kids with Arts and Crafts OTH; this pleases me. I'm actively working on this because there's so many relevant hobby items and I want to see all the pottery, drafting, and sewing projects; also, I like to hang my sims' paintings on the walls rather than buying them out of the catalog. I choose custom paintings as characterization: Erik Swain, with his Capt. Hero ambition and his obsessive family orientation, paints scenes of chivalry and also his wife; self-consciously counterculture Allegra Gorey paints zombie heads, the Elmendorf "chupacabra," and similar fringe subjects.

I deliberately encourage Literature interest because of professional bias, and I've had several sims launch literary careers. It bugs me that writing novels doesn't net you fun. It's the funnest thing in the world IRL! Also, really draining, though. Anyway, I only have one Literature OTH, and she was born into a family that, as a story/subcultural point, didn't get a computer or a bookcase till she was halfway through high school! She'll blossom in college, though. I have yet to get one with a high enough enthusiasm to read while walking, and I really want to see this animation. (It's something I do myself. When I had a day job, I'd read on the stairs and people would tell me I was going to break my neck, but the only times I ever tripped were when I wasn't reading.)

There's a general background level of gaming enthusiasm because I really like using the chess board to build logic and social simultaneously; also, because so many community lots have dart boards and game machines. However, I hypocritically prevent them from playing computer games very often, and the only households that have electronic games are the Greeks.

It seems music and dance, science and sports are the most common in my sim world.
Would love to have a nature loving sim...

It seems that the two children of the latest generation of the Laneys have Sports as their hobby. That sucks.

Typically science over here.

Usually a Sim with Arts and Crafts as their hobby is outgoing and playful (generally). Now I have a born-in-game Sim who's shy and serious...and his hobby? Arts and Crafts. He was born 2 points sloppy, 3 points shy, maxed out on niceness, near maxed out on active, and 2 or 3 points serious.

I've had two Sims, father and son, with the same personality...father's was Film and Literature, son's was Tinkering. I've also had lazy Sims (4 points) whose hobby was Fitness. I guess sometimes it's a toss-up depending on where the personality points are distributed.

Oh, and said Sim's younger brother has a Libra personality. Usually they're Arts and Crafts. Not this one...he's outgoing and really playful...and his preferred hobby? Music. (Typically those are outgoing and serious.) I'm going to assign him the Popularity aspiration when he reaches teen and put him in the Music career track.

Tinkering, science, sports, games and cuisine are all very common hobbies among my sims. Many of my sims paint a lot so I wish I had more Arts and Crafts sims, but I only have a few. More nature sims would also be much appreciated - it´s a lot of fun with a sim garden.

As I mentioned, games is a common OTH, but the problem is that chess is the game I mostly want my sims to play, and since my games sims are so playful they hate it when I send them to play chess (even if they have a want to play chess!). Sports is an okay hobby IMO, I have a hack ( http://www.insimenator.org/index.ph...b&topic=99543.0 ) that makes it so sims lose less energy while playing football or basketball. Both football and basketball are also good activities to build up relationships, and it quickly increases their fun motive. Tinkering is also okay - I really like the model train set, and it´s pretty fun to send them to work on the restorable car. Science can be a bit monotonous (in sims that is, I love science IRL) since there´s not so much activities for them to do there. But at least, since science sims are so serious, they love it when I send them to stargaze. And about cuisine; It´s kind of impossible for my sims not to build up at least some interest for cuisine, so that´s a hobby most of them gladly talk to each other about. When I want two playables to get to know each other I can always chose "talk about hobby... cuisine" and it´s almost always a success.

TInkering is the most common OTH in my hood. Perhaps I need to spice up the personalities?
Music and Dance comes in second.

If I forget to roll the pacifier, I get a Scorpio Sports enthusiast. (Active and mean, yay.)

Otherwise, I have some of every hobby in a fairly even spread because most of my Sims are born-in-game and I usually DO remember to roll the pacifier. Usually. Films & Lit does seem to be the rarest, though I have a few. I guess I do have a slight preponderance of Music & Dance and Tinkering, now that I think about it.

Most of my Sims have a fairly healthy side interest in Nature, but that's because I make everyone garden. They're pulling weeds and spraying bugs three seasons out of the year, so it rises fairly quickly. Also, I found out that if sims sleep outside in tents, they gain nature enthusiasm.

(My sims are always wanting to buy tents, and then they sleep in them instead of the bed. I'd think them odd if I didn't do that myself back in middle/high school...come spring break, and I looked forward to spending the week outside in the backyard, in my tent.)

In my Pleasantview neighborhood: Fitness, Sports, Science, and Cooking are most popular.



I think Film and Literature must be one of the most difficult..it's pretty much the only hobby I have to consciously make sims build., because none of my homes have TVs (godawful noisy things...) and reading is -- in the game -- not an efficient way to have fun. The only Film and Literature people I get are those chronic novelists.

Mangaroo, what program do you use to make those reports? The new and awesome Sim Tracker?

No, it's a SQL-based database I built years ago. Its main function was and continues to be keeping me in sync by letting me know which lots need to be played, but it was also a nice place to store all the info about each Sim. (Don't know why I think leveraging massive amounts of Sim data is the natural thing to do, but I can't imagine playing any other way.) Anyway, if I didn't have this thing completely tailored to my needs, I would have immediately glommed onto the SimTracker.

Meh. They can play catch. It's fun and very social as almost every Sim will throw a ball around.

Because sims eat everyday for their lives, their Culinary points add up quickly than any other hobbies.
This makes me go insane.
Not make sense for sims that actually cannot cook, don't like to learn cook, always eat meals of other sims' cooked, their Culinary points add up a lot more than their actual hobby!

I wish culinary points only trigger to sims that do cooking, watching culinary channels, not eating meals.

Also, the other mainstream hobbies I've found are Music & Dance, Film & Literature, and Tinkering!
What the heck with tinkering?
My sims with shy and nice personalities are mostly bookworm geek, kind of "boy/girl next door" type, don't know anything about mechanical stuff, like tinkering??

My other sims with a bit rude personality and outgoing who like to do heavy mechanical stuff a lot, don't deserve a chance to have this enthusiasm opportunity! sad.