Butler Cooking Tweaking

October 26, 2013: Compatible with version 1.63 and Into the Future.

Past Updates:


thejester39 made a thread in the Late Night board about the butler cooking lots of food and asked if there was a mod or one in the works to cut down on hen the butler cooks, so I decided to make one.

By default, the butler will cook a meal every 140 minutes (2 hours and 20 minutes) when any child, teen, young adult, adult, or elder on the lot has hunger that falls below -20. Personally, I think that sounds a little too often.

My mod has 12 different options. First of all, the A versions of the mod doesn't change how much the butler costs, keeping the cost at §1200 a week. If you choose a B version of the mod, the cost of the butler increases to §5000 a week. I found §1200 a week a little cheap for the butler, especially since I have a mod that increases the cost of the maid to §500 a day, and a week of the maid ended up costing more than a week of the butler at that rate.

So anyway, now onto the mod.

In all versions of the mod, the hunger threshold for the butler to start making a meal is when any child or older sim on the lot has hunger that falls below -30. On the hunger bar, that looks like this:



The hungry moodlet shows up when your sim's hunger falls below -35, so with this mod, the butler will start cooking slightly before that.

So, version 1A only changes the hunger threshold to -30. The butler still costs §1200 a week and will cook meals as needed every 140 minutes.

Version 1B changes the hunger threshold to -30 and the butler will cook meals as needed every 140 minutes, and the cost is now §5000 a week.

Version 2 makes it so the butler will cook meals as needed every 180 minutes (3 hours).

Version 3 makes it so the butler will cook meals as needed every 210 minutes (3.5 hours).

Version 4 makes it so the butler will cook meals as needed every 240 minutes (4 hours).

Version 5 makes it so the butler will cook meals as needed every 270 minutes (4.5 hours).

Version 6 makes it so that the butler will cook meals as needed every 300 minutes (5 hours).

Remember, version A of each mod keeps the cost at §1200 per week and version B of each mod increases the cost to §5000 per week.

One thing I didn't change is the butler will put leftovers away after 90 minutes. To me, that sounds good enough because it gives all your sims plenty of time to get some food before he puts it away.

When downloading this mod you can only choose one version. It's a simple XML mod, so it shouldn't conflict with anything.

Added November 3rd:

I remember seeing someone somewhere wanting a mod that makes it so the butler will not cook unless you tell him too. I've added two more mods that pretty much do that. It changes it so that the butler will not start cooking a meal on his own every 9000 hours, or every 375 days. Again, version A keeps the price at §1200 and version B changes it to §5000.

December 29, 2011:

Saying this mod has been updated for patch 1.29 I would call a false truth. I did update something in it, but not because the patch changed anything. What I changed was one thing I forgot about when I was making and testing this mod last year, and shouldn't have had any affect on how the mod worked (at least I'd assume so). But, patch 1.29 changed nothing with this mod, so it wasn't really updated for that patch. If you still have issues with the butler cooking when he shouldn't, leave a comment and let me know which version of the mod you downloaded, if you've got the update I posted today. I have a feeling that the no cooking version just may not work at all, and I might have to play with it to get it to work.

Additional Credits:
Peter Jones for The Sims 3 Package Editor and the tutorial here on MTS that showed me how easy it is to edit an XML file.