Better Playdates (Sims 3 Playdates)

Why this mod

We were chatting on Discord about cute features from TS4 Toddler Stuff Pack, that we wish existed in TS3. "Play dates" came to mind. Renlyna surprised us all when she said:



The above scenario never ever happened in my game. (It turns out it's a feature that came along one of the Generations EP patches.)

I was curious to see if something could be tweaked to trigger the play dates more. When I looked up the game's code, I found the tuning file related to play dates. I made changes and tested the new tuning files for 3 sim weeks. The testing was successful, so here goes - enjoy the mod.

What the mod changes:

Description	EA Default	Better Playdates Mod
Minimum relationship between the active parent and the townie parent	15	5
Minimum relationship between the active child and the townie child	15	5
Playdate days	Saturday & Sunday	Same - cannot be changed via tuning.
Playdate hours	Noon (12pm) to 5pm	10am to 7pm
Percentage of chance for playdates	25% (value: 0,25)	100% (value: 1)

I tuned the minimum relationship down to "5" to account for the natural relationship decrease between two sims over time. So if your active parent and child start as aquaintances to townies at "20", then overtime, they will still get the playdate requests on week-ends, even if the relationship is way down to "5".

Play dates Insights

While testing the mod I could gather the following insights:

• The play date feature seems to only affect child-aged sims. I looked up closely and no toddlers are mentioned in the play dates code. If the townie parent comes along with toddlers to your sims' play date, great! But it is not by design. It would likely require script modding to intentionally include toddlers in the play date scenario.
• If after accepting the play date, the townie parent shows up alone sans his/her children, do not panic (like I did)! Townie children enrolled in a school with week-end hours will not show up. Indeed, the custom schools provided by the "Schools" module of Nraas Careers require kids to attend classes on Saturday and Sunday by default. You will need to enroll townie children in EA's default school or tune the days of custom schools, to get these townie children to show up at your play dates.
• I had no problems getting townies to request play dates on Saturday, often in the morning. To trigger play date requests on Sundays however, I had to quit the game on Saturday evening or Sunday morning. When I'd restart the game after that, I'd systematically get a play date request on the Sunday afternoon. In the play dates code, there is a line called "clear statistics", and I can only assume that somehow, it takes reloading the game to clear data generated by the Saturday play date, so that a townie play date request can be renewed on Sunday.

Mod Gameplay

A big + special thank you to the awesome Aurora for reviewing this mod! (Laughed so hard when Aurora's active child dumps water on her play date friend ).



Mod Requirements

This mod was built and tested with game version 1.67.
You need Generations EP for this mod to work, and your game must be patched up to the most recent patch (1.67/1.69).

Mod Conflicts

This mod will conflict with other mods that modify the following ITUN file:

PlayDateManager_0xd2d45d6351131184

TOU

Please respect my work on this mod:

- Do not monetize (no paysites, no adfly, etc.)
- Do not claim as your own.
- Do not re-upload: rather, link to this page.

Credits

Special thanks to:

- @MissyHissy for her awesome Job Centre Discord Server (where this mod idea was born)
- @Renlyna, for proving that it was possible to have playdates in TS3
- @Tsahai, for confirming appropriate, parents-friendly play date hours
- @C-Dark for sharing with me her beautiful daycare family + lot featured in the images (I modified the family but kept the lot intact)


Additional Credits:
Inge Jones for S3PE