So does anyone else's sims have an aversion to sitting at the dining/kitchen table to eat? It drives me nuts how EA set this up and I was wondering if others were having this happen or if I'm just special. So in my one house I have a in kitchen island next to the dining room. A lot of times the sims will sit at that island to eat, which fine makes sense I can see how you would do that instead of always eating in the formal dining room. Sometimes though for no apparent reason they will sit in the dining room or one will sit at the dining room table and the other will sit at the island and they will yell at each other over the half walls instead of both just sitting in the same friggin place.

Now I have another house I built to move their YA daughter into and she has a nice little kitchen eating area, does she ever use it? No. Instead she choices to take her food go downstairs and out into the backyard. Once there instead of using the picnic table she decides the best place to eat is at the poolside juice bar where she can't even sit her plate down. Now is this just the usual bad programming from EA or is there something I did to make this happen with seating or some other stupidness?

It's bad EA programming. The weights for "objects nowhere near here" are not sufficiently heavily penalized, so if an object is of a "preferred" class, even if it's SOMEWHERE ON THE MOON, sims would rather fly to the moon to use THAT THING than use a closer substitute.

AwesomeMod squashes this.

my sims will make dinner...go through kitchen...diningroom....livingroom...out the front door...to sit at a table and chairs...on the front porch...
its insain..

Have you fireflies? Front porches are great if you live where there are fireflies.

Otherwise, I've found that if I really want to force Sims to sit in a certain room, I have to lock doors or hide chairs.

well the sad thing is...the front porch set..is just the cheapest set...the diningroom set...darned near the expensive set...way more comfee...
i should have posted this in this thread.... Those things that Sims do that make you wanna scream "OMG WTF ARE YOU DOING"

In my game, I like to see everything that's going on, so no vertical furniture between the camera and the roadside. I have just the one table, and they all eat at it. A family dining room must be at least five squares by seven, to accommodate a table and six chairs, with units at either side - not between me and the road. I like to see who passes on the sidewalk while they eat. The fridge goes to one side. If they are rich enough, there will be two dishwashers, one either side, to eliminate traffic jams.

You have probably detected that I am a Sims 2 player. I played Sims 3 for all of three days, but I imagine the principles are the same.

I had an issue in a house with no chairs that the sims ALWAYS wanted to eat sitting on the toilet -- even when someone was using it. They would get into a shoo-ing fight with the sim on the potty. Then they would carefully put their plate down on the bathroom floor and walk away. Even worse, they would sometimes then go get another plate -- and go head back to the toilet to go sit down and eat. I ended up having to put a random lawn chair down so that the sims would stop eating in the bathroom. My sims were really broke at the time because I was doing a funky challenge and it was annoying to have to buy a chair just to discourage them from eating on the terlet. I mean... ewww.

I think the only thing that really irritates me right now is that sims will all whip out their laptops on the dining room tables and then leave them there. Then sims will pitch a fit about something being in the way and they can't put their plates down.

NOTHING I've seen in any of the sims gams was annoying as the problem I had with TS1 though. Does anyone remember that the poor sims couldn't push their chairs at all? In one of my first games, I killed Mortimer Goth because I had 2 dining room chairs up against the wall. He sat down in the chair and then my sim dashed off to work while he was doing whatever in the chair. When he stood up, he was trapped between two chairs and the table and couldn't escape. He ran back and forth between the chairs screaming until he wet his pants and then he starved to death. To escape, all he would have had to do is sit down in the chair and get out of it using the other side.

It's like the ones who used to die in the back yard after a party, if the back yard didn't have a gap to escape the lot from. They were programmed not to reenter the house after goodbye time, so they could not walk through the house to get to the street.

This is why it's a good idea to not give sims any choices. If you put a table outside, don't bother putting one inside the house cause they'll never use it. Personally I don't mind it that much, I figure if I had a pool I'd have dinner by the pool every night just like them.

Well to be fair, I did notice it was the ones who had "loves outdoors" trait who would always take their food to sit outside, the others didn't seem to as much.

That still happens if a sim drags a chair out at an angle to sit and drink coffee after a meal. A sim who stands up can get stuck between the chairs, and can die there, if you are feeling savage.

my favorite is when i have a legacy family. usually to keep things tidy, i'll have an in-law suite built somewhere near the back of the lot to stuff the elders, which will have its own kitchen/dining area because i like it when things in my game make realistic sense. this is my folly.

so of course the sims living in the main house will trek all the damn way over to the in-law suite and sit at the cramped breakfast nook, fighting over seating. god help anyone if they have to actually go to work, because they'll spend half an hour having a seizure at whoever's in the chair they want, then they'll sit on the couch and eat, and then bolt all the way across the lot to try to catch the carpool. (spoiler: they don't ever catch the carpool.)

to the effing moon, indeed.

@farfalle your comment made me laugh so hard :P

Doesn't seem too terribly unrealistic to me. When I was growing up, we hardly used our kitchen/dining rooms either. We took our meals to the livingroom and ate in front of the TV.

That reminds me of trying to play apartments in Sims 1, before Inge made the apartment mods. Stupid Sims wandering the halls every morning with a pan in their hands, trying to get to any stove but the one in their unit.

When I build a house with an island counter for the sims dining table, they will refuse to use it. But when I make a house with both an expensive dining area and island counters, sims will prefer the counter.

I think sometimes my loner sim or a sim that's an enemy with another sim already eatting at a table or counter will sit somewhere else. lol. That's the only thing that kind of makes sense with EA's weird coding.

lmao I totally forgot about the sims 1 and the dining room chair incidents. I learned fast putting chairs against a wall was a no no.

These stories are awesome love them. Especially the mother-in-law suite. I like to do that too to make things realistic. It drove me nuts when my sims would go all the way back there to eat or use their restroom. I now set it up with the doors that you can place next to each other and make them look like double doors then I set both up to only be opened by my two sims I actually want to be able to go in there.

I did try to fix my issue by locking the back door so that she couldn't get to the bar back there. She decided to take her food and walk out front to try and get to the bar stool. At that point I was like hahaha that's right you can't get in your backyard from the front nahnahnahbooboo, so she decided to just stand out there in her undies and eat breakfast... I think she did it just to spite me After that I gave in and replaced the chairs in the dining room with fancy ones that take up way more room and now she eats in there sometimes at least.

You could try and put furniture in the garden that sims wouldn't normally use for dining, like replace the table with a coffee or end table, don't put bar stools next to a bar, etc.

I can't stand counters and the high chairs that go with them. I removed them from every bar in town, 'cause sims put their food down and then someone comes along and either stands in an inappropriate place, or sits on the chair to "argue about gnubb" ffs... There was also an issue where a sim would put their food down on a table with chairs, no obstructions, go somewhere else to sit down and then complain that the food wasn't in front of them. Doesn't happen so much now, I don't know why, but I'm glad.

Depends on the family. Growing up my parents insisted that everyone sit at the dinner table during meals and interact together as a family. My husband grew up grabbing his meals and sitting in the living room in front of the TV while they ate. Today, we compromise, the kitchen table isn't too far away from the TV so we can see it while we eat meals. He still prefers not to sit at the table which drives me nuts!!

My family was the same when I was little. After my parents divorced, my mom let us do what we wanted, which was eat in front of the TV. Your solution is similar to what my mom did when we were older, she put a TV on the kitchen counter so we could watch it while sitting at the table. However, we rarely sat down together to eat because by then us kids were all teens, popping in whenever we pleased and we ate on staggered schedules. Even my mom and stepdad seldom ate together, so the sims always eating at different times by themselves rather than at the same time together never seemed unrealistic to me either. Whenever we did eat together sans TV (holidays), my teen sisters would always end up fighting with my mom.

Now if they had made it so whenever a family of sims sat down to dinner together, the teen girl fights with her parents, throws a tantrum, and storms off to her bedroom and slams the door, THAT would be realistic to me!

I used to be annoyed by my "Loved the Outdoors" Sim who always ate outside. Now that household had 3 Sims who love the outdoors. So half the family eats outside and half eat inside.

I have AwseomeMod and it doesn't stop them from eating outside. But at least they get a positive moodlet during mealtimes.