Age-Weighted/Individual Interests

Intro:

In Freetime and later, sims frequently seem to have almost identical interests. Plus, interests change dramatically at age transitions, which makes interests basically useless.

This happens because of the interaction of a feature added in Freetime where certain interests are "restricted" (very strictly) for various age ranges, and an attempt to balance sim interests so that sims have some low, some high and some medium interests.

Equinoxts2 made a popular mod to fix this, where they removed the age restrictions so that interests can be random for all ages. However, it removes the age change feature altogether, and I liked the idea of the age change, just not the implementation.

My mod keeps the age transition interest shift, making it more nuanced, while allowing for variety in interest allocation.

💡 Tip! Try taking sims' interests into account when choosing their career, aspiration, or other decisions - like whether or not to get a pet, how to decorate their bedroom, or which traits to give them if using the traits mod. It can really bring your characters and their conversations to life.

Versions

I offer two flavours of the "main" part of the mod.

With the Age Weighted Interests version, sims' interests are always weighted by age, meaning sims are less likely to be interested in things which are "restricted" for their age group, whether you've just created them in CAS, they are born in game, and after age transitions.

The restriction isn't strict - it's more of a weighting (hence the name). Where you have a restricted interest (e.g. Toys for adults, Politics for children) sims will usually have a low or neutral interest level. High interest is still possible, just less likely (around 10%). Unrestricted interests get a random value from 0-10.

At age transition, interests which change from a restricted to unrestricted category (or vice versa) get the chance (individually, per interest) to gain or lose up to 4 points respectively. There is also a chance the interest will remain unchanged. This results in a much more nuanced, individual shift, rather than a total interest avalanche.

Individual Interests - this is a more subtle version intended for people who don't want much weighting at all - you probably won't notice any weighting in gameplay. New sims (born in game or CAS) are created with completely random, unrestricted interests, ignoring the age restriction BCON. Age changes come with a smaller chance of interests gaining or losing up to 4 points per affected interest. With my tuning file (around 5 interest changes per age transition) I found that usually sims would see a shift in 1-2 of their interests, which might be a tiny shift or a bigger change. Allows interests to remain more static across the lifespan.

Optional files:

AgeRestrictionTuning - RECOMMENDED - this is the BCON which changes which interests are restricted at which age group. Highly recommended because the vanilla age restrictions are very strange. Includes customisation options - you don't have to use them

BiggerInterestCap - optional - increases the cap after which the game starts taking away points from other interests. If you prefer no cap, get NoInterestLoss from MATY. Warning - no/higher cap means interest levels can become unbalanced (many high interests).

Highly recommended addition: TunaIsAFish's Enthusiasm Overhaul from MATY will prevent Hobby activities from changing sims' interests so easily as well.



Compatibility:

EquinoxTS2's Interest Ages Mod: Conflicts with tuning file. Not game breaking, but doesn't make sense to use both at once - Equinox's mod completely negates any age related interest change.
lilbabydilljr's "Teen Age Transition Interest Change is Random" mod: not compatible. We did a similar thing, but in different ways.

Note: I made this for The Sims 2 Ultimate Collection and/or disk editions. It should be compatible with the Legacy Collection, but I can't make any guarantees.

Do not use with games previous to Free Time.

Known issues:

- Does not change interests of already-created sims. Will only affect newly created sims.
- When randomising interests using a modded object such as the Sim Blender, some of these objects call their own native BHAV rather than the one in the PersonGlobals. That means that the object may give you the original code. The best workaround for this is to go into that modded object in SimPE, find the "Age May Have High Interest" BCON and change every value to 0x000F, which unrestricts it for all ages.

Update notes 12 Feb 2025: Completely re-wrote description and reuploaded files with easier to understand structure. No need to redownload if you had the previous version. NB - old version had the Tuning file included within the MAIN download, so you may wish to replace with this version if you can't get the tuning override to work.

Thanks to
Everyone who has written mods before me - I have mercilessly cut up and studied your code.
ADHD medication - I can finally focus enough to code/keep track of what I've done. Amazing. SimPE creators, BHAV modding tutorial writers. Extremely helpful.
Many, many discussions in many places over the years about how interests work.
My husband for pretending to be enthusiastic when I was super excited about this XD