As anyone who has tried to play a mermaid will know, it takes them forever and a year to get anywhere because they're insistent on swimming everywhere. Fair enough, they ARE mermaids, but they're awfully slow.

Anyway, I've been trying to find a solution to this. My first thought was to have a look through the XML files and see if I could;
a. Speed up their swimming
b. Make them prefer boats to swimming, like a normal sim
c. Give them teleportation powers

Unfortunately, I can't find anything of the sort as I'm really very inexperienced with any kind of modding. I would really like to be able to play them, but they are SO inconvenient.

Help?

What I do is I put a boat in their inventory and I click where I want them to go on the ocean, and I select "boat here." It's really a pain when they're travelling from island to island but it's the only solution I got so far.

I do try to do that as much as possible, but when going to work and whatnot, having to multiqueue boat here, go here etc. gets to be an unnecessary PITA. I do hope it can be fixed in some way - I've tried to find the line that makes them prefer swimming over boating for about two hours. I would guess that would be the easiest fix, but alas I've come up short.

Then it's probably something controlled by a script and not by XML.

You can try the Modding Discussion forums in the Create menu if you're interested in modifying scripted behavior. Scripting tuts are in there too.

Has some solution been found for this? I have a large world with a group of islands and I cannot force my mermaids to use a boat when they are not in the active household. So I will quite often find them swimming for a day or so and being close to death when I choose to play with them again

Yeah, it's a bit confusing why EA couldn't given mermaids better powers. The fact they opt them to swim, which is WAY slower when mortal Sims opt for taxi boats, it makes less sense why they would choose to do normally.