Wildlife and Minor Pet Hunting

Are you tired of those annoying birds, rodents and reptiles roaming around in your sims' gardens and tormenting their fingers whenever they dare to go near them? Do you sometimes wish your sims could just make them disappear? Well, now is their chance to take revenge! Hunt those critters and take their meat–and maybe their friends will think twice the next time they are about to chew on your poor sim's finger…

Updates
Version 1.2.4
Updated on November 5th 2022

• Added Finnish translation by Sazandora123

Version 1.2.3
Updated on October 16th 2022

• Fixed a localization error that caused the wrong interaction string to be displayed for minor pets

Version 1.2.2
Updated on October 14th 2022

• Added Russian translation by Bast

Version 1.2.1
Updated on October 11th 2022

• Fixed a bug that would cause Werewolfs to be able to get infinite amounts of drops from hunting
• Added proper localization to the strings
• Added German translation

What it does
This is a pure scripting mod that adds a “Hunt!” interaction to all deer, raccoons and minor pets (birds, snakes, rodents, etc.) in the game. Sims will walk to the critter and try to “hunt” it. If the hunt is successful, a random amount of meat (usually steak, see below for other drops) will be added to their inventory. Depending on their traits they might react to the hunt in different ways. These reactions can be positive or very negative, a detailed list on which traits trigger which specific reaction is provided below.

Version 1.2 also adds a “Hunt and Gather...” Terrain interaction that makes your sims hunt multiple pets of the selected type in a row. This interaction will show up for sims child or above when you click on any Terrain that is located outside.

I got the idea for this mod when I was playing the Test of Time challenge. One thing that annoyed me was the fact that my stone age sims seemed to be constantly surrounded by wildlife, yet they could only eat fish to get their dose of proteins. This mod provides an alternative way for your sims to get meat without having to buy it at the store, particularly useful if you are playing in a historic setting.

How to hunt
The “Hunt!” interaction is only available for humanoid sims, so it won't show up for cats, dogs or horses. By default it is enabled for the ages child or above, though you can set the kAllowKidsToHunt tuning value to false if you don't want the interaction to show up for children. Note that right now, the mod only affects minor pets–this means that your sims won't be able to hunt deer, raccoons or wild horses. As of version 1.1, your sims can hunt deer and raccoons! The interaction works very similar to minor pet hunting but the animation is different and your sims will get more meat from a successful hunt. Children won't be able to hunt deer but they can still hunt raccoons.

The success of the hunt depends on your sim's WildLifeFriend skill. If the hunt is not successful, the critter will simply run away and your sim might get bitten. Hunting increases the WildLifeFriend skill, so if your sims keep trying, they'll eventually get better at it. If you don't want the skill to increase by hunting, you can change the kSkillPointsGained tuning value to zero.

Version 1.1 adds an autonomous hunting interaction for NPC sims with certain traits. However, they will not get any drops in order to prevent their inventories from getting filled up with meat. They'll also get a cooldown after getting bitten, so townies won't be constantly running around hunting minor pets on your community lots. If you want to turn off autonomous hunting altogether, you can change the kAllowAutonomousMinorPetHunting tuning value to „false“.

Drops
After a successful hunt your sims will get 1-2 ingredient drops which are usually steak, though certain pet species may produce different drops:

• Hunting a raccoon will double the expected drops, so instead of 1-2 drops, your sims will get 2-4.
• Hunting a deer will triple the expected drops, so your sims will get 3-6 drops. Deer can drop steak, links and patties
• Rodents will drop steak, cheese and lettuce
• Birds will drop steak and eggs
• Sims might get a roast drop after hunting a big bird.
• Vampires will get plasma fruits to simulate the “vegetarian vampire” lifestyle from Twilight.

Also, transformed Werewolves get a multiplier to the drop maximum which is 2 by default. Note that all of these values (including the ingredients as of version 1.2) can be adjusted via tuning.



Hunting reactions
Certain traits may cause your sims to react to a successful hunt in different ways! So while hunting might sound fun to your evil adventurer sim, the same might not apply to his animal-loving vegetarian brother. While I personally think it's more fun to discover the reactions as you play the game, here's a full list for those who'd rather know in advance:



Tuning
The XML file included in the package has a bunch of tuneable values, you can adjust the drop rate, hunting success chance, turn off skill dependency and much more!



Compatibility
This is a pure scripting mod, so it should not cause any major conflicts. However, any mod that messes with the MinorPet classes or the WildLifeFriend skill might cause it to not work properly.

This mod was built and tested with patch version 1.67. Since this is a mod for minor pets, you will need the Pets Expansion Pack for it to work.

Note that this is my first scripting mod, so if there are any problems with it, please let me know!

Future work
Some stuff I'd like to add to this mod if I find the time:

• Implement a function that makes sims go out and hunt for certain prey automatically Done!
• Make the strings translatable, since they are hardcoded right now Done!
• Get a better hunting animation
• Add special hunting reactions for Werewolves and Vampires
• Add a special hunting interaction for dogs that works similar to cat hunting (not sure on that one, since it might already exist as a mod somewhere)
• Maybe create a base game compatible version of this mod that allows Sims to hunt insects for “Tofu” (since there's been some news about insects as a future meat alternative)

Special Thanks

• To PuddingFace for this amazing video tutorial which really inspired me to try out modding again
• To the Nraas team for ErrorTrap and MasterController
• And to the creators of S3PE!