Skills-Badges-Cooking-Cleaning-Repairing-Gardening Mods

Gardening Trim Shrub Faster Mod: In an unmodded game, a sim takes 4 loops plus however many days a shrub has remained overgrown in order to fully trim shrubs. This minimum requirement of 4 loops makes sims spend too much time trimming shrubs. This mod sets the minimum loop requirement to 1 loop, which makes more sense.

Cooking Food Prepare Failure Fix: In an unmodded game, if a sim's interaction is cancelled while they are preparing a meal, the game forces the sim to throw a route failure tantrum as if they don't have a place to prepare the meal. This mod fixes this issue. Sims won't throw a route failure tantrum if their interaction was cancelled.

Gardening Route Mod: In an unmodded game, the game makes sims throw a route failure tantrum and prevents them from watering flowers and trimming bushes which the game considers to be unreachable. The game considers half-tile flowers and also bushes which are surrounded by a fence unreachable, too. This mod fixes this issue and allows sims to successfully interact with these objects even if the object is unreachable. Sims will route as close as possible to water flowers and trim bushes. However, if the object is totally unreachable, then they will still go ahead and water/trim.
UPDATE 1: This update adds this mod's features to the Pull Weeds interaction.
UPDATE 2: I found out that shrubs and weeds push NPCs to continue gardening, which should not be allowed, because they have their own code which takes care of gardening. This update fixes that.

Gardening Rake Leaf Pile Mod: Normally, when a sim rakes leaves on the ground, the game is supposed to push the sim to continue gardening. Maxis disabled this feature in Apartment Life, most likely to resolve any conflicts with butler's NPC AI. This mod re-enables this feature and allows sims to continue gardening after raking leaves, but adds a check to see if the sim is an active service NPC, and if so, prevents the sim from continuing to garden so that this doesn't conflict with their AI.

Cooking Grill Community Fix: I came across a ridiculous oversight. There are two separate grill interactions in the game. The first one requires a fridge to be present on the lot, and forces sims to take food out of the fridge. This particular interaction is properly coded, charges your sims if they are on a non-liveable lot, and takes fish out of the sim/lot inventory if the sim is grilling caught fish. However, there is also a second interaction which is called "Community Grilling". This interaction doesn't require a fridge, and is only enabled if there is no fridge, or if all the fridges are in use. This is the interaction that you will see sims initiating on most community lots, because obviously most Maxis community lots don't have a fridge. Unfortunately, this interaction is completely free for everyone. If your sims are starving at home because they have no money, you can just take them to a community lot without a fridge, and grill all day long without spending any money at all. In addition, if your sims are grilling caught fish, the game doesn't remove the fish from the sim/lot inventory, meaning that if you catch one fish, you can grill the fish endless times on a community lot without losing the fish. This mod fixes all of these issues. The game now properly charges your sims, and if they are cooking caught fish, it properly removes the caught fish from the sim/lot inventory.

Cooking Oven Microwave NPC Mod: This mod makes it so that when an NPC starts cooking a meal in the oven/microwave, the game doesn't allow the NPC to wander away from the oven/microwave. You may as well consider this a fix, because when the game pushes an NPC to do chores, the game sets the NPC's priority to user-driven. This prevents the oven from properly pushing the NPC back to the oven/microwave to get the food out. This almost always leads to fires. Butlers are always affected by this, because they are tasked with cooking.

Cooking Takes Longer For Group Meals: This mod makes it so that it takes longer for sims to prepare and cook group meals than single servings.
UPDATE 1: Before this update, it took sims three times longer to prepare and cook group meals. Now it takes them twice as long to prepare and cook group meals.

Repair Dorm Mod: I found out that Maxis prevents objects from breaking on dorm lots, which doesn't make any sense. This causes certain issues such as when you tinker with a shower or bath, and the object breaks, the game initiates the broken effects on the object, but doesn't actually consider the object to be broken. This mod fixes this issue and allows objects to break down on dorm lots, too.

Repair Failure Motives Mod: This mod makes it so that whenever a sim fails repairing an object, the sim's comfort and fun motives will be decreased, so that you can't really spam the Repair interaction any more.

Cooking Faster Skilling: This separate mod doubles the rate of skill gain from actually preparing and cooking meals. The rate of skill gain from preparing and cooking meals is very low in an unmodded game. Combining this mod with Slower Skill Gain From Books Mod is a good idea.

Badge Speed Mod: This is just like the Skill Speed Mod, but for badges.
- It takes twice as long for Zombies to increase badges.
- Aliens increase badges 50% faster than everyone else. Sims are considered as aliens if they have alien skin or alien eyes or both.
- If the sim has learned any toddler skills (walking, talking, potty and nursery rhyme), for each learned skill, the rate of badge gain is increased a bit at all ages, so the effect is permanent.

Skill Speed Mod: This new, separate mod adds unique rules to the formula the game uses to calculate the rate at which sims increase their skills:
- It takes twice as long for Zombies to increase skills.
- Aliens increase skills 50% faster than everyone else. Sims are considered as aliens if they have alien skin or alien eyes or both.
- If the sim has learned any toddler skills (walking, talking, potty and nursery rhyme), for each learned skill, the rate of skill gain is increased a bit at all ages, so the effect is permanent.
Skill Speed Mod - UPDATE 1: Witches who currently have their cat familiar on the lot increase their skills 25% faster, but they need to be Best Friends with their familiar.
Skill Speed Mod - UPDATE 2: Witches don't increase regular skills faster for having a spectral cat any more. Instead, this mod now slightly decreases the rate at which witches increase their witch skill, but if a witch has their spectral cat on the lot and if the cat has a Mine relationship with the witch, then the witch increases their witch skill faster.

Slower Skill Gain From Books Mod: This new mod heavily reduces the rate of skill gain from reading regular books. This mod does not affect the rate of skill gain from reading Education career reward books.

ORIGINAL DESCRIPTION

Sims learn skills and badges extremely quickly in this game which I dislike. In addition, sims clean and repair objects very quickly, which makes the Cleaning skill irrelevant. It also makes the Mechanical skill irrelevant if the object can't electrocute the sim, because you can simply queue up multiple Repair interactions, and even if your sim fails, they can continue and finish repairing the object pretty quickly.

This mod halves the rate at which sims learn skills, badges, and the rate at which they clean and repair objects. This makes the Lifetime aspiration reward Eureka! more relevant when sims learn skills. It also makes the Mechanical and Cleaning skills, and also Neat personality have a much higher effect on gameplay. Sims who have 500 or higher Neat receive a bonus to the rate at which they clean, if the sim has 1000 Neat, they receive an even higher bonus. So, sims who have high Neat and high Cleaning skill can clean objects very quickly.

You need the latest version of 7zip or WinRAR to get this mod.

Requirements: Base game.

Resources:
Tuning - Ticks per 1% skill gain/0x7FB9261E/0x00001001
Tuning - Ticks per 1% skill gain/0x7F8C9C15/0x00001001
Bade Tuning/0x7F9D77CB/0x00001006
Tuning - Sales Badge/0x7F53EAC7/0x00001008
Tuning - Sales Badge/0x7F582072/0x00001006
Tuning - Sales Badge/0x7F862133/0x00001006
Tuning - Sales Badge/0x7FAFBCC0/0x00001006
Tuning - Sales Badge/0x7FF1DF47/0x00001006
Tuning - Other/0x7F9D38DE/0x00001002
Tuning - Other/0x7F1E64D3/0x00001002