The Box Of Seeds

updates
2014-03-15 - Compatible with game version 1.67. No changes.


compatibility
Supported for game version 1.67. Should work with game versions from 1.31 upwards, though.

scope of this mod
Whenever sims do anything that consumes ingredients, like cooking or nectar making, the best ingredients will always be used first. That's fine most of the times, but not if you have a sim who is gardening. Then it becomes a real pain in the backside. You always need to preserve some of the best ingredients to plant them later if you don't want to restart with normal quality ingredients all the time. It's especially annoying for ingredients like life fruits etc.

Well, that is all in the past now. 2BTech presents you the Box of Seeds! Oompa Leastas (sort of like Oompa Loompas but without the singing and fancy clothing and positive attitude ... and without labor union memberships) handcrafted these little chests of the best discarded cardboard boxes with a minimum of delicate rotten fish fragrance.

usage
After you successfully installed the package to your mods folder, the Box of Seeds will be available in the buymode catalog in the Miscellaneous section of the Storage category (If you have WA: That's where the nectar shelves can be found). The price is 100§.

The Box of Seeds has multiple interactions available, and you can drag&drop it in live mode. You can drag&drop ingredients on it, too. Most interactions are context-sensitive, e.g. the Remove All Seeds interaction won't show up if the box doesn't actually contain any ingredients. The interactions in detail:

- Put In Inventory
Your active sim will route to the box, pick it up and put it in his/her inventory. You don't actually need this interaction, since you can drag&drop the box in live mode.

- Open
This is same as for every object with an inventory, e.g. bookshelves, fridges etc.

- Remove All Seeds
Removes all ingredients from the box and adds them to your active sim's inventory. You will have to do that before you plant the ingredients. It's not possible to directly plant them from the box's inventory.

- Store Best Seeds
Removes the best ingredients from your active sim's inventory and stores them in the box. The amount of ingredients stored depends on the preservation threshold. If the box already has ingredients stored, it will move them to the active sim's inventory before picking out the best. BTW: Only ingredients which are at least nice quality or aren't freely available at the grocery will be preserved.

- Set Preservation Threshold
Lets you change the amount of ingredients that should be preserved in the box. The default value is 5 and you can change it to everything in the range of 1 to 99.

- Retrieve Seeds From Household Inventory
When you sell a Box of Seeds while it still has ingredients in it, these ingredients will be moved to your household inventory which is available in buy mode. It's a real pain to get them out of there, because you have to do it one by one and and can't drag&drop them on a sim. This interaction will pull all ingredients out of the household inventory and add them to the box's inventory.

- Activate/Deactivate Auto-Sheltering Of Best Seeds
This interaction is only available if the box is in a sim's inventory, and it only works if the box is NOT set to allow everything to be added to its inventory. When you activate the Auto-Sheltering the box will pick the best ingredients from the sim's inventory every time the sim harvests a plant or picks up a seed. The logic is the same as in the manual Store Best Seeds interaction.

There's a delay of 6 seconds after the actual harvesting before the code becomes active. After that period of time, the initial harvesting action is finished, and the code can detect if any additional harvesting actions are in order. The purpose is to run the sheltering code only once for every harvesting session. However, if you save in these 6 seconds and end the game, the code will not catch up after reloading the savegame.
- Set Allowed Objects In Box...
All Autonomously Consumed Ingredients - All ingredients that are in danger of being autonomously being consumed, e.g. by cooking, can be added to the box.
All Plantable Objects - All objects that can be planted can be added to the box.
Everything - Every object that is inherently able to be added to an inventory, can be added to the box.

- Give Name to Box Of Seeds
This allows you to give the box an individual name. Might come in handy if you use multiple boxes for different stuff. Works exactly the same as for the stuffed animal.

known issues
When the box is set to allow plantable objects in its inventory, it will appear, e.g. when dragging object on the box, like every object can be added to its inventory. Actually, that is the case, but the objects will be removed from the box instantly after being added. Since there is no way to recover where the object has been before, it will be added to the active sim's inventory. There was no other way to implement this, because actually the object "decides" first if it can be added to this kind of inventory. Disabling the objects' checks, also disables the box's checks.

translation
This mod is fully localizable. If you are willing to support a translation, please read the instructions.
Currently supported languages: English, German, Spanish, Mexican, Brazilian, Dutch, Portuguese, Swedish, French, Polish, Czech, Italian, Japanese, Korean


possible conflicts
This is a scripting mod and as such the possibility for conflicts with other mods, no matter what kind, is next to non-existant. I can't think of any kind of mod which could possibly interfere with this mod.

installation
There's an "Install Instructions" tab at the top of this post, right between the "Download" and the "Comments" tab. If you don't know how to install mods, then click on it and follow the lead to the very detailed Wiki article. Honestly, I can't explain it any better!

You followed the instructions and it still doesn't work? Sorry to tell you this, but if the mod doesn't work for you, you probably did not follow the instructions. If the box appears in the buymode catalog (Storage->Miscellaneous), but when you hover with your mouse pointer over the box in live mode it says "No interactions available." then you certainly did not follow the instructions.

deinstallation
It basically goes like this: Remove the package from your mods folder. However, I would suggest to sell all Box of Seeds objects before you do so. If you don't do that, it probably won't break anything, but all stored seeds will be lost.

support
Please respect that I support my mods but not mods or even custom content in general, not in my upload threads anyway and certainly not if you ask me by PM. I will always try to find and squish bugs, therefore I appreciate bug reports. If one of my mods isn't working for you, please at least try to ensure that it's a failure of my mod before you ask for help. I am a compassionate guy, but please understand that I can only muster so much endurance to address issues completely unrelated to my mods.

credits
Thanks to Sims MX, Shykary, mosterd300987, GTNS, SoStrange, SuperBlondasse, mysecka, drionwx, Mirygow, Kaizers, ZP556RQ2 and biont for translating.

Thanks to babele44 for using the box in ways I didn't anticipate and much valuable feedback as a result.
disclaimer
Might lead to a serious case of squished brain. Your game should be safe, though.