Testers Wanted: Harder Celebrity Difficulty & More (Late Night)

What does this do?

This is a a mod designed to change the difficulty for sims to become celebrities.

As the same XML file controls the "disgraceful actions" that are applied to celebrities, this mod also has changes for those actions.

Please read the text below carefully regarding the different flavours, and choose the flavour that best suits your play style.

Download one flavour and ONLY one flavour! These files are NOT mix and match - you can only have ONE! You will need to choose which flavour suits you for celebrity threshhold as well as falsely accused chance.

This will not change current celebrity levels! Any existing celebrity sims will retain their celeb levels. This will only change the ease of raising celebrity level in future.

This mod will not affect sims that are not currently being played - only your currently played sims in your active family will be affected by this mod. If there is story progression that is involved in sims changing celeb status without being played, I think that's controlled by some other data. But if you'd like to be able to chat with a celeb without suddenly becoming one yourself too, this will help.

Updated:

You may have noticed this thread missing temporarily. After some more extensive testing and feedback, I've changed the initial celeb level threshhold a bit. This should prevent the widespread celebrity-ism from spreading across your playable sims like a virus.

Nothing was really "wrong" with the previous version besides it not working as well as it needed to to prevent the initial celeb level.

I've also kind of overhauled the thresholds, as the real problem with celebs is becoming one in the first place too easily. Therefore, there are now fewer flavours, but they're better and more logically tuned to increase the difficulty.


Patch Compatability:

This mod should work with any patch version from 1.33-1.38. No updates needed for 1.38.


Celebrity Level Thresholds

The general perception seems to be that it is WAY too easy to become a celebrity! It seems to take very little effort to become a middle-level celebrity (though you may have to work at it to get to 5 stars). Therefore, all the different flavours of this mod increase the time and effort it will take to become a celebrity. There is no "become a celebrity easier" flavour - it's already too easy!

All flavours increase the initial difficulty to become a celebrity, based on the point value for specific actions (becoming friends is 1000, good friends is 500, fiancee is 2000, and so on - these values I haven't changed). This should keep your playable sims from becoming celebs unless you really intend them to be.

Celebrity Level Threshhold Flavours

For these threshholds, it's to max out that level - so if you get all the points for level 0, you get 1 celeb star. If you get all the points for level 5, then you max your star points entirely.

• Default: Difficulty to become a celebrity is unchanged - but you can still get the false accusation options/disgraceful actions stuffs.
  

  0: 100
  1: 1500
  2: 2000
  3: 4000
  4: 6000
  5: 10000

• Low Difficulty: Overall challenge isn't much higher than default, but it should be harder to become a celebrity on accident.
  

  0: 2000
  1: 3000
  2: 4000
  3: 5000
  4: 7000
  5: 10000

• Medium Difficulty: A little bit more difficult, but still nothing too taxing.
  

  0: 3000
  1: 4500
  2: 6000
  3: 8000
  4: 10000
  5: 15000

• High Difficulty: Should be quite challenging to get to a high celeb level - even getting that first star should take being friends with several celebs.
  

  0: 4000
  1: 5500
  2: 7000
  3: 10000
  4: 15000
  5: 20000

• Ultra Difficulty: Very challenging indeed, and will take serious dedication and a buttload of friends/lovers to become a high-level celebrity.
  

  0: 5000
  1: 7000
  2: 10000
  3: 15000
  4: 20000
  5: 25000

Disgraceful Actions

There are certain actions, that, if your sim is caught doing them, are considered "disgraceful" and get your sim a bad moodlet and bad reactions from other sims. By default, the possible disgraceful actions are:

• Fighting in public
• Cheating
• Divorce
• Job setback
• Caught rummaging
• Arrested
• Child out of marriage
• Caught sneaking into club
• Detonating smashing (?)
• Woohoo in public
• Woohoo with occult
• Bite someone in public
• Get repossessed
• Child taken
• Peeing Self
• Passing Out
• Falsely accused

Many have expressed dismay at some of these actions being considered "disgraceful." Especially considering it's not just tabloid reports, but, "No, I know what you did, someone like YOU isn't getting in here!" type stuff from bouncers.

With the games having focused on a rather accepting view of "alternative lifestyles," certain items on the list seem very odd. Therefore, the following "disgraceful actions" have had their "chance" parameter set to 0. This -should- disable these actions as being disgraceful.

Disabled disgraceful actions:

• Divorce
• Child out of marriage
• Woohoo with occult
• Bite someone in public

ALL flavours, regardless of level thresholds (difficulty) have these actions disabled. There is also a version with default difficulty, and these actions disabled, if you're happy with how hard it is to become a celeb, but don't like that these things are considered disgraceful.


Falsely Accused Chance

Additionally, there are flavours of this mod which adjust the chance of being falsely accused - you can either choose the default chance, or lowered chances (it seems to happen really frequently!).

False accusation flavours (and their tuned values) are:

• Default: 1
• Half Default: 0.5
• 20%: 0.2

Conflicts?

As this is an XML tuning mod, it will not conflict with any other mods unless they also modify the Celebrity XML. However, it is possible there are other mods that modify these things, or other parts of the Celebrity XML that I did not change. The following are things changed by the Celebrity XML:

• Celebrity level thresholds
• Disgraceful actions
• Falsely accused chance
• Celebrity discounts and freebies
• Celebrity gifts

So, for example, if you find a mod that increases the chance of celebs getting freebies, it WILL conflict with this mod because it would change the same XML, even though I left those values the default.


Want another version?

It's super easy to modify the values to suit your own tastes! Just open any one of my files in S3PE, select the single XML file inside, and click Edit. Notepad will open with the file, and you can change the values as you want. Save, close Notepad, reload the file in S3PE, and save. Tada - custom modded XML!

Additional Credits:
Thanks to Delphy, Inge, Peter, and your mom.