Hi everyone. I'm doing a feral dog survival challenge in my game. My dog isn't allowed to eat from pet food bowls and instead has to find food. I noticed there are strange limitations on what my dog cannot eat.

I have observed the following.
● Dogs can only eat tomatoes and grapes on the plant they grew on, but cannot eat lettuce, garlic, steak from steak plants, etc.
●They can also eat certain kinds of edible seeds that spawn on the ground, but others don't have the option to eat them.
●Another thing is minor pets. Dogs can eat minor pets that have been caught, but they can't actually catch them. What I would love is if dogs could actually find minor pets when they search for collectibles, but instead of only
digging up metals and gems they have the chance find a chipmunk or bird.
●Dogs can only eat trash that is from the trashcan they knocked over on their home lot. My dog can knock over their neighbor's trashcan and dig through the trash, but not eat it. This makes no sense to me.


How would I go about creating a mod that allows dogs to
eat all varieties of fruit and vegetable on the plants, as well as all varieties of seeds? Could it even be possible for them to find minor pets along with collectible gems? I've never made a Sims mod before, but I would suspect this kind of thing wouldn't be overly complicated since I'm guessing it's enabling interactions with objects (seeds and plants) that they wouldn't normally have, or adding minor pets to the list of findable objects for sleuth dogs, but I could be
totally wrong, that's why I'm asking you guys I'm fairly tech savvy so I suspect I might be able to make this for myself if I knew where to dig into the code. I would appreciate any insight you share into this.

Pinging @echoweaver as I think she would be the most familiar with what is and isn't hard-coded for pets, so hopefully she can share some insight

So, the ability to eat plantables is pretty straightforward. There's a field in the Ingredients.xml that specifies which pets can eat it. That's probably why what they can eat is so random.

You might be able to fix the ability to eat garbage off your home lot with an ITUN, but I'd have to look. It certainly seems like it would be straightforward.

The ability to hunt for minor pets is a much bigger mod. I've wanted to do something like that for my pet mod suite -- living as a stray cat is much easier than living as a stray dog because cats can hunt. They actually get very little hunger improvement from eating their prey in vanilla, though. I have an XML mod to increase the value for eating prey.

At any rate, Hunting (Cat) and Hunting (Dog) are actually two entirely different skills. There are no animations for dog hunting prey, and the cat ones would look really strange on a dog, so it wouldn't be as easy as just converting them. I have rolled some design ideas around in my head, but it'll be some time before I get any space to look at it seriously. I kind of burned myself out trying to get my Warrior Pets (based on the Erin Hunter series but supporting dogs as well as cats) mod out. I'm taking a modding break and playing non-Sims games to get my mojo back

If you or anyone does script modding and would like to write such a mod, I would be glad to be a tester/adviser.

A warrior pets mod would be really awesome, but I understand it would probably be a lot of work to create.
I will look into the Ingredients.xml to see if I can modify it. This is very helpful I completely understand that dogs do not have the hunting animations cats would have. A few years ago I actually used the Nraas Retuner mod to force my dog to have cat hunting skill, which allowed her to go hunting and catch minor pets just like a cat would. The only problem was, as you said, the dog did not have the right animations, so she would look crunched up and deformed as she performed the cat hunting animations lol. But I just wanted to let you know that it's completely possible to use Retuner to make a dog hunt like a cat, but I don't want to do it that way because the animations ruin the illusion, so I was asking if there was a way for a dog to go searching for collectibles as usual, but also have the chance of finding minor pets, not just rocks, gems, etc. You get what I'm saying?
But speaking of dogs hunting like a cat would, I would suspect somebody could create dog hunting animations, code it into a mod, and we would have this cool feature that so many other people have wanted.

I should also mention that this morning I was playing around with Retuner and I discovered a way to make it so dogs can eat trash on the neighbors' lots and not just their own. I was so excited

In case anybody is curious, here is how.
Go to the town hall and click on it.
Nraas > Retuner > Settings > General > By Object > Trashpile > Peteat
From here you need to set two options to True.
Allow for Autonomous non greeted Sims and Allow on community lots.
Make sure both of these are set to true.